“E aqí, pues, dos razas distintas”. Racial paradigms in Chile (XVIIIth-XXIth century): meanings and conceptual demarcations

Abstract

In this paper we differentiate the racial paradigms that have operated in the Reino and later República de Chile. Our aims are to propose a historical definition of the race concept (an unstable, relational, multifunctional and located concept), to organize and synthesize part of the plentiful literature about the topic, and finally, to define the two principal racial paradigms that have operated and actually operate, as emergent substrates, in what we now name Chile. We ponder about the mestizaje ideologies which, in this South American republic, still circulates and works with some ambitions of pluralistic integration, an so, they are used by a huge spectrum of people, including State agents, native population, Chilean nationalists and critics of the nationalism. We propose in this paper that the race idea has served to nominate and to produce the human differences, that the racisms generally has had politic motivations, and that the racial paradigms that we define in this paper are present, as substratum, in the way that Chilean people think the human differences.