Latin American Culture

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Latin America's rich and puzzling political history is a reaction to its social conventions and racial formations, which acquit "conventional" discriminatory practices of racism by legitimizing their intrinsic cultural appeal. The author points out that, in Latin America, there is no clear line between cultural and physical elements or between social and biological hereditary. The paper stresses that, in Latin America, far from being opposites, blackness and indigenousness have been inextricably entangled throughout history; however, indigenous people do not represent "slavery" as the embodiment of blackness but rather blackness is fused with images of self-liberation.

From the Paper:

"Although the opposition of self-identifying with racial hierarchies is what motivates the culturalist definition of race in Latin America, the deceptively dominant anti-racist sentiment is directly correlated with the discriminatory attitudes dealing with mestizaje-racial mixing. Metizaje is historically viewed as the impure consequence of rape or female sexual deviance. It resulted in coining an individual from mixed races "cholo" in which he/she represented a moral, not biological, degeneration that stirred the original racial order through an inappropriate cultural environment."

More papers on Latin American Culture:

• Term Paper # 139586 : "Globalization and Latin American Culture"
• Analytical Essay # 45895 : "Latin American Culture in America"
• Analytical Essay # 139662 : "Globalization and Latin American Cultures"
• Research Paper # 53848 : "The Latin American Recording Industry"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: