Rhizomatic Genealogy: Meditations on Connectivity III
The frontera between our Patrimony and its cultural, colonial reality becomes even more twisted, and nebulous when we look at the way men and women characterize(d) their racial origins and appliy(ed) labels to themselves in the historic Mexico and in our present-day genealogical meanderings. Observe how one can create a Spaniard out of mestizo root stock:
Here we have the beginnings of La Nueva Raza. A spanish guy, origin and genetic stock unknown, marries a Native American woman and fathers a mestizo daughter. You can tell he's a Spaniard by the kewl moustache.
The fun begins when the intermarriages (we call them intermarriages when we want to racialize whole groups of people so we can colonize them) need to be socially accepted--the colonizers devise a rape scheme that essentially recolonizes the children of decolonial intermarriages by labeling them as rewhitened. Notice the progression in Sr Don Pedro's descriptions, from Espanol to Meztizo to Castizo to Espanol, a process my cousin notes ends up with a group of people "sufficiently white to be accepted at higher levels of local society.
You can tell the little girl is Espanola by her spiffy hairdo.
However, My cousin has doggedly followed the daddies back to the Roots of Spain, to the fifteenth century, and if we are to believe the yDNA of my first cousin Beto, who springs from the tamale of my uncle Juan, we are european on our male, colonizer side: the haplogroup of that DNA is definitely honkie Nordic-L1a, (M253+) (like I know what that means but I trust the science when its proves what I want), so the idea is, that no matter who the mothers have been in our Mexican genealogy, the fathers all have been Old World, which means not really Mexican. Like Mr. Heston here, we have all been Mexican on the outside but Royally Spanish on the inside all along--but that was just a movie.
So I don't know what to make of all this, except to say that I don't share my cousin's hope that a "genealogical paper trail" will in time, "give us the answer" but I am optimistically sure that I do have an answer: We may all just only be walk-ons in a world-spanning movie set, but we are as John Muir says, "hitched to everything else", including Mexicans, Europeans, Nordic l1a, trees, rocks, natives, colonists, and most assuredly to those we love.
And if that is only just a good movie, that's enough for me.
Here we have the beginnings of La Nueva Raza. A spanish guy, origin and genetic stock unknown, marries a Native American woman and fathers a mestizo daughter. You can tell he's a Spaniard by the kewl moustache.
The fun begins when the intermarriages (we call them intermarriages when we want to racialize whole groups of people so we can colonize them) need to be socially accepted--the colonizers devise a rape scheme that essentially recolonizes the children of decolonial intermarriages by labeling them as rewhitened. Notice the progression in Sr Don Pedro's descriptions, from Espanol to Meztizo to Castizo to Espanol, a process my cousin notes ends up with a group of people "sufficiently white to be accepted at higher levels of local society.
You can tell the little girl is Espanola by her spiffy hairdo.
However, My cousin has doggedly followed the daddies back to the Roots of Spain, to the fifteenth century, and if we are to believe the yDNA of my first cousin Beto, who springs from the tamale of my uncle Juan, we are european on our male, colonizer side: the haplogroup of that DNA is definitely honkie Nordic-L1a, (M253+) (like I know what that means but I trust the science when its proves what I want), so the idea is, that no matter who the mothers have been in our Mexican genealogy, the fathers all have been Old World, which means not really Mexican. Like Mr. Heston here, we have all been Mexican on the outside but Royally Spanish on the inside all along--but that was just a movie.
So I don't know what to make of all this, except to say that I don't share my cousin's hope that a "genealogical paper trail" will in time, "give us the answer" but I am optimistically sure that I do have an answer: We may all just only be walk-ons in a world-spanning movie set, but we are as John Muir says, "hitched to everything else", including Mexicans, Europeans, Nordic l1a, trees, rocks, natives, colonists, and most assuredly to those we love.
And if that is only just a good movie, that's enough for me.
posted by The authors at 8:47 PM
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