Land of the Cosmic Race Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico

"This is an outstanding ethnography of race in Mexico. Christina Sue understands the beauty and depth of everyday Mexican identity and cultural life. She adds to that a profound grasp of the country's unique racial history and social structure. The result is a definitive study that reinterprets mestizaje, that recognizes the blackness that has been hidden for so long, and that reveals the poetic and emotional soul of Mexican society today. Very well-written and accessible, Land of the Cosmic Race is both a triumph of scholarship and an indispensable text for course use. Highly recommended!"--Howard Winant, University of California, Santa Barbara"In Mexico, the official ideology of mestizaje has provided a master narrative in which the mixture of Indians and Spaniards functioned as a powerful antidote to racism. In her innovative study of race and skin color, Christina Sue combines ethnography and discourse analysis to explore how people of different classes negotiate the contradictions between the mestizaje ideology and their everyday experiences. While avoiding the use of the term race, most of her informants express a 'non-racist common sense, ' accepting the social value of light skin but minimizing its significance as a factor of negative discrimination. Sue dexterously argues that such common sense reflects the national ideal of unity and fairness, but also hinders the effective critique of crucial aspects of Mexico's social inequalities."-Guillermo de la Pena, Professor of Anthropology, CIESAS, Mexico "The Land of the Cosmic Race exposes the popular underbelly of Mexico's racial ideology, which stresses racial mixture while denying racism and blackness. Based on the port city of Veracruz, where at least 200,000 Africans had disembarked as slaves, Christina Sue's ethnography vividly explores how ordinary Mexicans make sense of race, racism, color and nation. At the same time, this book reveals how personal experiences interact with pow