Conquest and Mestizaje: On the Groundless Foundations of a Myth

Explaining the Mexican “psyche” was once a favorite intellectual pastime. The most famous and celebrated of all who delved in such an endeavor was surely Octavio Paz, whose Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) is still read—by some—as a serious attempt to make sense of Mexican idiosyncrasy. According to Paz, the Spanish “conquest” was the ultimate cause of Mexicans’ illegitimacy trauma—their fathers being somehow linked to the Spanish soldiers-entrepreneurs who raped the indigenous women their mothers descended from. It is a bit surprising that such an “argument” has still some currency among Mexicans and Mexicanists—surprising yet revealing of the ways in which mestizaje continues to be seen as connected to the wars and political arrangements that led to the creation of New Spain in the sixteenth century. A number of recent studies, though, have shown that colonial mestizaje was at best a demographic curiosity; to use Gustavo González Flores’s apt phrase (2016), that miscegenation was indeed no more than “mestizaje de papel.” What does the modern study of colonial mestizaje tell us about the conventional narrative of the Spanish “conquest”? This paper explores some of the answers to that question: among other things, it shows that understanding the “conquest” as a trauma has little to do with the actual history of sixteenth-century Mesoamerica but rather with the symbolic construction of the Mexican nation.