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B.R. Ambedkar, Barack Obama, caste, Gloria Anzaldúa, identity, José Vasconcelos, Mexico, race, United States
Unlike “progressive” Americans who embrace race, the caste reformer B.R. Ambedkar envisioned a world where race/caste distinctions were annihilated – and specifically by mixing, by intermarriage. The view of racial purity shared by the mainstream American left and right – where Barack Obama’s white ancestry counts for nothing – makes that annihilation more difficult. But not everyone in the Americas – or even in the United States – shares that view.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an eccentric book now often considered a classic of Chicana (Mexican-American) literature. It mixes essays and poetry, English and Spanish – perhaps appropriate for someone whose ethnic identity is itself mixed, the mestiza of the subtitle, as indeed are most Mexicans. In striking contrast to the life story Ibram X. Kendi tells, which struck me as generally comfortable and middle-class, Anzaldúa lived in a more clearly oppressed world, of the migrant workers of South Texas; the poetry paints a poverty-stricken picture of rapes, of lice, of cleaning shit from toilets, in the face of a racist Border Patrol. So she does often speak of her people in contrast to “the whites”, falling sometimes into the oppressed/oppressor binaries of standpoint theory on which she was an influence. Yet she also acknowledges and praises mixing in a serious way that moves beyond the binaries.
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