In Latin America, as across the world, difference defines the processes by which power is exercised and contested, as lines of difference are alternatively rejected and accepted. With a history based upon the mixing of European, Indigenous and African destinies and founded on economic inequalities of colonial magnitude, Latin America offers a productive platform from which to examine the ways in which notions of difference are asserted and destabilized within various exercises and modes of power. The region is full of such examples, as personal experience may attest: A mestiza women, of modest means and living in the rural outskirts of the bustling capital, speaks to the populist idealism of “Bolivarian Socialism” as she tugs at her waves of long black hair, showing it as testament to her genealogical descendent and implied solidarity with Afro-Venezuelans, as her phenotypic pride points to an erasure of centuries of racial exclusion. A young woman of European descent extols recent genetic tests that she says prove, contrary to popular belief, that the lighter-skinned and uniquely middle-class Costa Rican majority are nearly all related to the nation’s native, poorer and darker-skinned minority. In signs protesting hostile laws and sentiments, Chicano activists display their self-identification with La Raza, embracing the idea of racial difference and its notion of a bi-national, empowered and legitimately unified people. Across Latin America, difference is uniquely contested and embraced, in different settings and in different ways, outlining the ways that power operates and circulates.
latin america
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