Mestizaje as National Prosthesis

Mestizaje as National Prosthesis:Corporeal Metaphors in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier Julie Avril Minich (bio) This essay explores links between mestizaje theory and disability theory in order to consider how bodily metaphors inform the construction of national identity. The relationship between body and nation is a central concern in Héctor Tobar’s 1998 novel The Tattooed Soldier, set in Guatemala and the United States, which demonstrates two contradictory uses of mestizaje. In the portions of the novel taking place in Guatemala, mestizaje functions as a national prosthesis, which I articulate as a political trope depicting a nation as a whole, unified, symmetrical body. In those set in the United States, mestizaje serves as a counterdiscourse disrupting US deployments of a different national prosthesis: the enduring myth that the United States has, since the Civil Rights Movement, achieved racial equality and functioned as a paradigmatic multicultural society. By capturing this dual function of mestizaje, The Tattooed Soldier reveals mestizaje theory to be a site of political possibility and political disenfranchisement, just as mestizaje itself is both a powerful oppositional discourse and a concept haunted by oppressive biological rhetoric. Furthermore, the novel’s use of hygiene, contamination, and disease as central metaphors reveals how critical interrogations of mestizaje require reassessing ableist configurations of the body politic. In other words, the novel demonstrates the potential of mestizaje theory to, as Rafael Pérez-Torres writes, illuminate “the embodiedness of power, [End Page 211] the incarnation of colonial histories, the ways bodies are disciplined, formed and deformed by ideology” (xiv). The Tattooed Soldier thus provides a useful opportunity to consider how corporeal metaphors structure understandings of political belonging. Although scholars in Latina/o and Latin American studies have observed what Marilyn Grace Miller calls “the links between the cult of mestizaje and earlier forms of colonial domination” (4), mestizaje continues to spark critical debate in both fields. The last decade has seen the publication of numerous scholarly books taking mestizaje as their object of analysis, including Miller’s Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race: The Cult of Mestizaje in Latin America, Pérez-Torres’s Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture, and Alicia Arrizón’s Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance. Meanwhile, the work of Chicana mestizaje theorist Gloria Anzaldúa has been taken up in disability studies.1 Despite the fact that mestizaje is linked to outmoded notions of race as an intractable bodily essence, the concept retains value because it also, as Arrizón observes, epitomizes the in-betweenness of identities produced by the impact of colonial/cultural encounters and their intimate relation to social processes. (1) The relationship between bodies, identities and social processes is also a concern of disability scholars, who contest cultural narratives that present disability as a sign of national disintegration. As Tobin Siebers notes, disability often functions as “the symbolism by which populations and individuals are portrayed as needing help, as being inferior” and “has a long history of being placed in the service of discrimination, inequality, and violence” (22). Nowhere is Siebers’ claim more evident than in racist injunctions against miscegenation, which mobilize tropes of degeneracy, weakness and illness; this leads to the political disenfranchisement of people with disabilities and people of color. Theories of mestizaje challenge these tropes, but can capitulate to the very eugenicist impulse they repudiate when they merely redefine mestizaje as a form of racial “progress.” In what follows, I will elaborate my conceptualization of the term national prosthesis and explore its relationship to mestizaje theory. My focus on the critical deployment of mestizaje in The Tattooed Soldier (through its critique of both anti-indigenous racism in Guatemala and nativist anti-Latina/o racism in the United States) leads to a discussion of its metaphors of hygiene and disease—metaphors that serve to critique efforts to establish a healthy, nondisabled body as the national paradigm. In this way, racialized warfare in Guatemala is linked to racial inequality in the United States: literary metaphors of cleanliness buttress military dominance in Guatemala and rationalize state violence in the United States while literal microbes in contaminated drinking and bathing water serve as covert weapons against the racialized...

Aesthetics · Art · Body politic · Colonialism · Identity (music) · Incarnation · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rhetoric · Sociology · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American Literature Studies · Law · Philosophy · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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