Meditation on Personal Connectivity II

My cousin has drafted the latest chapter of her massive, three-volume, genealogical record of the Mexican heritage in our family on my mother's side, and her essay, a sort of summation, exemplifies the issues we run into when we try to analyze non-linear processes with linear paradigms. After the meticulous and intrepidly-researched (she has been known to haunt dusty church basement archives from Cuatros Cienagas, Mexico to Toledo, Spain) volumes of genealogical records were set down and published for us, my cousin set out to discover just what "kind" of people we are, or in her words, "What kind of 'label'" we can put on our heritage: are we, or were our ancestors, mestizos, that product of the colonial encounter from which emerges the culture of Mexico, with all its paradoxes and pertubations, or are we still children of criollos, "pure" spanish, as the old-fashioned genealogists, who talked about "bloodlines" and such, would have it? The records of our ancestors are necessarily objects embedded in a cultural milieu, and the colonial project that was the Mexican Conquest privileged the Spanish oppressors; my cousin, leery of taking the baptismal certificates at their word and on the prowl for more interesting ancestors such as crytpo-jews or Aztec princesses, puts the problem succinctly:

"Genetic studies are the only way that most questions of racial origin will be fully answered. they are not compromised by prejudice, marital infidelity, or priests who accommodated families by indicating more desirable racial epithets in birth, marriage, or death records."

When my cousin puts together the DNA tests she has run on selected members of our family with the records available on the web of DNA results with other families related to us according to her research, she finds some interesting things. Results of Y-DNA, the stuff that is passed from father to son only, have identified a distant ancestor who possibly was a Jew, a member of the Coronado Expedition of 1540 named Villareal. Results of the Mt-DNA, the mitochondrial stuff that passes from mother to daughter (actually, mother to everyone but only the daughters pass it along to their offspring) are even more interesting; it shows us in "Haplogroup B", a native American identifier that originated in Asia and came to North America possibly aroun 10-13,000 years ago (late: other haplogroups may have arrived 20-30,000 years ago). Of course, because my cousin and I are both modern mestizos, the children of Mexican mothers and (presumably) white American fathers, her decision to follow the Mexican lineage and my fascination with it are cultural, personal, decisions, but these decisions eerily mimic the mitochondrial matrix in which we embedded--and present us with paradoxes when we consider the patriarchal roots of our immediate ancestors, genetically speaking. More about that later.
(Mestizo drawing scanned by my cousin; DNA pics by the .gov people at The Human Genome Project)