The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

Vasconcelos and Freyre were thus pioneers of the twentieth-century anti-racist national counterorthodoxies that replaced the nineteenth-century racist state orthodoxies that had, for example, justified the oppression of Indians within the Porfirian state-building project in Mexico, which, in turn, fueled the massive uprising of indigenous peoples in the Mexican Revolution. [...] far, Lund's story follows established scholarship, such as the landmark collection The Idea of Race and Culture in Latin America, 1870-1940, edited by Richard Graham (1990), which also makes clear that the new and defiant twentieth-century celebration of mestizaje that has come to be identified as uniquely Latin American is really the antithesis to a prior thesis - the nineteenth-century assertion of racial and cultural "purity," that is, European scientific racism.