Book. Serge Gruzinski, 2002, The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.
Kaledescope: a review of what happens to a given cultural process, during a pandemic or colonization of the body, space, mind can reveal some bright and dark aspects of the ways and moods being followed; consequences. Love, sex, hate, whatever!
Bartolomé de las Casas reached heavens when observing the “innocence” of the Tainos, and then, was in shock when the Tainos drowned Diego Salazar. Unwilling to accept that the Tainos had begun a war, and drowning the man was part of it, de las Casas -colonizer’s defenses at work- justified the action by saying that the Tainos did it, to demonstrate that the Spaniards were gods; Salazar would not die. Really!. He did. And war took place. The “Cronista de Yndias” had to defend his previous conception of the noble savage. The rest is history, and not all from the colonizer’s convenience narrative: Yuisa, a Taino woman, leader of her village in the same area where today there is a town called Loiza, accompanied by her jutía, fought against the Spaniards; a “güiro” waiting for a “mariyandá”, reclining on a table in my apartment in Santurce; a possible descendant of the first Taino-Spaniard love relationship, Guanina and Sotomayor, is currently a sitting judge in the USA Supreme Court.
Kaledescope: a review of what happens to a given cultural process, during a pandemic or colonization of the body, space, mind can reveal some bright and dark aspects of the ways and moods being followed; consequences. Love, sex, hate, whatever!
Bartolomé de las Casas reached heavens when observing the “innocence” of the Tainos, and then, was in shock when the Tainos drowned Diego Salazar. Unwilling to accept that the Tainos had begun a war, and drowning the man was part of it, de las Casas -colonizer’s defenses at work- justified the action by saying that the Tainos did it, to demonstrate that the Spaniards were gods; Salazar would not die. Really!. He did. And war took place. The “Cronista de Yndias” had to defend his previous conception of the noble savage. The rest is history, and not all from the colonizer’s convenience narrative: Yuisa, a Taino woman, leader of her village in the same area where today there is a town called Loiza, accompanied by her jutía, fought against the Spaniards; a “güiro” waiting for a “mariyandá”, reclining on a table in my apartment in Santurce; a possible descendant of the first Taino-Spaniard love relationship, Guanina and Sotomayor, is currently a sitting judge in the USA Supreme Court.
Poster and movie: Mestizo (1966) Original Italian 39x55 Movie Poster, Miguel de la Riva, Film Directed by Julio Buchs.
Ever present evidence: the “mestizaje” that surrounds us everywhere, as the Bible says in Spanish, “del polvo venimos” (in Spanish, “polvo” refers to both dust and to having sex), or the archeological bone samplers' search for evidence on the birth and evolution of the self and the other, sexual intercourse between the Neanderthals and whoever came their way, or Mayan corn, Egyptian suns and their interactions with water, wind or nowhere and everywhere “a lo Eastern mystic”.
Wonder experienced: when seeing the dynamics, codes, languages, bodies, poems or raps, narratives or expressions absent of meaning, pants or skirts, that result from or take place when multicultural, gender, sizes, distinct forces, narratives are in action. By “appropriating” (thanks bro!) African visual languages, Picasso made us aware of some perceptual values and forms, while dismantling euro-centric concepts of beauty, movement, density, peoples. Palés Matos triggered similar reactions in the literary world, with his poems written in Caribbean Spanish: “Calabó y bambū, bambú y calabó”.
Fiction. 1988. A village on the Venezuelan coast, a place of fishermen and big haciendas. Aquiles Vargas, a white aristocrat in somewhat reduced circumstances, fights with Cruz Guaregua, a humble black fisherwoman, and mother of his only son, a half-caste 'mestizo'. Vargas takes the Mestizo away to raise him as a white, with his Aunt Milita as foster-mother. As an adolescent, the 'mestizo' Jose Ramon is propelled by his bohemian Uncle Ramon towards poetry, but Aquiles takes him to be 'civilized' in the local courthouse. There he is taken into a perverse relationship with the judge's wife, while the judge watches. Jose Ramon escapes, horrified, but in his naivety finds himself in love with the judge's wife. But the social and sexual conflicts, power, culture and the Law, and above all the impossible relationship between the Mestizo and his parents, finally drive him from his village.
Fact: trying to stop mestizaje is not going to achieve anything. It will certainly show the need of the Supremacist movements to kill themselves as they face their own blends -fusion cuisine, Joey Pastrana and Pink Floyd included- history. To base the discussion on opposite poles is to enter into shaking grounds, controlled by a rigid but fluid concept (race), squared into an inability to perceive the nuances and complexities filtered by mestizajes: sexual, visual, narratives, gestures, and most complex of all, the expansive and evolving perception of self and groups and lines and forms and colors and love.
Book. The Human Face of Globalization: From Multicultural to Mestizaje, 2004, Jac Jacques Audinet. A word from the past, charged with nostalgia for some (suffice it to mention the success of films or novels romanticizing ‘colonial’ times), the word mestizo at first calls up a lost world , the world of Europe colonizing the planes and discovering the color of far-off populations. This vision includes eye-catching colors, pleasures, but also a cynical game that shamelessly covers up the violence of colonization. Colonial literature portrayed the mestizo as an intermediary, sufficiently close to be trusted, yet ready to betray, and sufficiently distant to be abandoned without qualms, rejected without regrets. An exotic word that inherits all of the ambiguity contained in the situation of the person engendered....
Dance: 1950s, Upper crust economic classes in Europe and the Americas dance mambos, tangos, driven away from pre-war dances, too stuffy or too decadent, to be indulged by the new modernism, exotic, romantic, edgy, stylish, dangerous world so far and, yet, so near. “El Cumbanchero” and “Volver”: Learning and practicing the new dances at home, sipping fashionable cocktails, requiring a different use and movement of body, hands, feet, how to look at the partner, arm and face move to seduce; and dream; perhaps visit the relatives who escaped the war and now live in Paraguay, adapting themselves to the lives of different peoples, including dark, dangerous, wild mestizos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqlhl9xQ2I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dVMA-pt5ZY
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