Latina/o Mestizaje/Mulatez: Vexed Histories, Ambivalent Symbolisms, and Radical Revisions

Abstract

In the previous two chapters, I argued that Black women’s writings are informed by an intersubjective dialogics that draws upon narratives of rememory to contest hegemonic histories. While both womanism and the tradition of feminist mestizaje/mulatez cultivate a perspectival discourse that allows Black and Latina women writers to take their congealed experiences and translate them into developed knowledge, I argue in this chapter that feminists working within the mestizaje/mulatez traditions draw more centrally on the concepts of space and place as a lens through which to interpret their lived experiences. I use the term ‘place’ to indicate an analytical construct that challenges the notion of space as univocal in meaning, conditioned by merely physical parameters. From the lens of Human Geography, a subfield of Geography that draws upon and merges the philosophical camps of phenomenology and hermeneutics, the notion of place makes explicit the social construction of space by the people who inhabit it, and, who, through their lived experiences, endow it with meaning and value (Peet 1998, 48). Place is both a product of the often contentious and politicized concerns and interests of diverse people inhabiting a given space, and a mnemonics—encapsulated in folk traditions, narratives, and other cultural forms of expression (Mesa-Bains 2003, 306–08).