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Thursday, November 6th, 2003
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11:39p - De erroris sapientia
"What was the [ethnic] background of Garcilaso de la Vega?" asked my professor.
"He was a mestizo." I responded.
"That's right. He was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess," he said while trying to write "mestizo" on the board. Spoken words crossed mental paths with intended writing, as they often do, and instead he wrote "mestizador." What a word! "Conquistador" is a noun of action derived from Spanish conquistar "to conquer." A "mestizador" would be an agent of the verb mestizar "to mingle together."
Like the term "mestizo" itself, which, like all other current racial terms, first acquired meaning through sixteenth and seventeenth century colonial structures of power which tended to accord and deny privilege based on a gradient of ancestry (the whiter the better), the term "mestizador" is caught up in a painful history. Sometimes, the "mestizador" was a rapist, a sexual conquistador whose despicable crimes were part of the wider pattern of domination and exploitation that characterized the conquest of America. More often, he was the vastly more privileged partner in an unequal relationship — though Garcilaso de la Vega's mother was the niece of the Inca Huayna Capac, she was only his father's concubine. His father later married a Spanish noblewoman only four years his son's senior; his mother was considered worthy of marrying "only" a commoner. Perhaps the vast majority of European-Amerindian marriages were of this type — between two partners both marginalized by power structures in society.
Thus it is a term that can be reclaimed as positive, for just as children are not responsible for their father's crimes, people who are conscious of the particular racial mixing which resulted in the construction of their own identity, culture, and place in society, can be proud of all branches, especially since, more often than not, and more often now than ever, mixing has occurred outside of (sometimes even in rebellion against) power structures rather than in cooperation with it. "Mestizador" and "mestizadora" can be made positive terms in a way "conquistador" never could be, because its agency can be dual, its purpose can be deconstruction.
My new icon could be considered a combination of both types. Cortés never could have succeeded in conquering Mexico without the help of his translator and lover Malintzin. While the conquest of Mexico is hardly a positive episode in history, their relationship, at least initially, can be interpreted as one of equals. Their son, Martín, is often celebrated as "the first Mexican."
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