Blacks of the Rosary. Memory and History in Minas Gerais, Brazil

Abstract

155 creation of a problematic ' myth of racial democracy ' in Brazil through his celebrations of Bahia ' s mestiçagem. Chapter Five concerns two foundational examples from Ecuador: writer Jorge Icaza ' s novel El chulla Romero y Flores (1958) and painter Oswaldo Guayasamín ' s unfi nished installation ' La capilla del hombre ' (2002). Miller offers illuminating analysis of both works. Finally, an ' Epilogue ' considers how mestizaje has been taken up to describe the experience of globalisation, examining the works of Guillermo Gómez Peña. Miller focuses particularly on two fascinating issues: one, how mestizaje has been integrated into US ideas of cultural and racial mixture, where ' mes-tizaje becomes a kind of dangerous, edgy version of a melting pot in which certain elements refuse to dissolve or adhere ' (p. 147); and two, how it has been extended into the realm of virtual reality in order to describe the effects of cybertechnology. The sum of these short, readable chapters will be very useful to those with little previous exposure to mestizaje from a scholarly perspective. It should also be quite informative for those who have addressed the question only in broad conceptual terms, or through the experience of a single country. I know of no study that covers as much geographical ground as Miller ' s. Those who come to it from a more sustained engagement with the discourse of mestizaje may wish that Miller had pushed her own arguments further. She frames her intervention vis-à-vis two distinct and opposed approaches to mestizaje : against those who see the reality of mestizaje as the monolithic ground of a common Latin American experience, she shows the tremendous variety of the discourses that defi ne it; against those who dismiss pro-mestizaje discourse for its false inclusiveness and racist ' dark side ' , she shows its contemporary vitality. Yet this approach seems to inhibit her from engaging with the challenges posed by the two camps. If her own study undermines the possibility of a pan-Latin American phenomenon, then one is tempted to ask, what of latinoamericanismo itself? If the discourse of mestizaje is indeed a socially exclusionary one that continues to actualise a colonial legacy, then how can one be neutral about its vitality? However, the questions raised here only testify to the diffi culty of introducing readers to an object of study-the discourse of mestizaje-that is thoroughly unstable because it remains an object of such intense political disagreement.