Abstract
As the literature on the social, cultural, and intellectual consequences of the new genetics for understandings of “race” and racism has grown in size and sophistication, the limitations of an analysis developed solely from a U.S. or European perspective have become increasingly evident. Genetic science may be a global undertaking, but it has a variety of local articulations and implications. Hence, this excellent book about genomics in Latin America makes a major contribution by, first, offering a fascinating insight into that variety and, second, in the process telling us much about the emerging biopolitics of race and science that is of general relevance.
While the United States has a history of segregation and overt delineation of naturalized groupings, racialization in Latin America has operated through subtler gradations of appearance, descent, and culture, often obscured by assertions that the population as a whole results from the mixing of Amerindian, European, and African ancestors. It is unsurprising therefore that Latin American race science has focused on admixture. Mestizo Genomics takes as its theme the ways in which this preoccupation with Mestizaje (Spanish) or Mestiçagem (Portuguese) is now expressed through a genetic idiom.
Mestizo Genomics is the product of a major international, interdisciplinary research project, funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council, examining the work and impact of geneticists in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. The book presents its case studies twice over: Part I places genetic science within the distinctive history and sociopolitical context of each country, and Part II discusses findings from ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork with scientists in each setting. The cumulative effect of this country-by-country approach is both to showcase the regional distinctiveness of Latin American race science and to highlight important national differences. Moreover, in each case the analysis shows how the nation itself provides a frame for scientific activity, acting as what the editors term a “new imagined genetic community.”
In Brazil, geneticists have promoted a vision of a hybrid population that echoes previous idealizations of nation as a racial democracy; controversially, some of these scientists have challenged government affirmative action policies on the basis that social distinctions of race have no clear biological underpinning. Colombian scientists are inspired by the idea that their population is defined by its unique molecular diversity and have set about mapping, explaining, and preserving that diversity in ways that associate different areas of the country with different racial mixes. In Mexico, the public funding of an Institute of Genomic Medicine to research the genetic makeup of the “Mestizo” is portrayed as a source of national pride and sovereignty.
Given that it is the work of 12 authors, Mestizo Genomics maintains an admirable overall clarity and coherence. Detailed case study material is balanced with substantial introductory and concluding overviews. Through these two elements we gain an appreciation of the contradictions underlying any discussion of genetic diversity in terms of mixture: Apparently benign celebrations of the human melting pot rest on racialized simplifications of origins and are no easy solution to problems of discrimination and inequality. Latin America also illustrates the part played by gender in intersections between genomics, race, and nation: Scientific techniques for tracing ancestry along maternal and paternal lineages reify the foundational mythology that the Mestizo is a product of European masculinity and Amerindian or African femininity.
Another recurring theme of Mestizo Genomics is the ambiguity and flexibility of the categories fundamental to any discussion of group difference and group mixture. Race is often an absent presence in these discussions, coded in terms of region, population, or geographic ancestry. As the editors write (p. 3), categories used by scientists are neither neutral nor purely genetic: They are “natural-cultural objects” coproduced with diverse expert and nonexpert actors that “circulate through both scientific and non-scientific realms, blurring the boundaries between these realms, acquiring many different meanings and being subject to different readings.”
Racialized science is, therefore, inseparable from the racialized social formations in which it takes place. More than this, Mestizo Genomics focuses on scientists who seek to make interventions in national debates about identity and policy. These examples also show how the novelty and complexity of scientific results can be lost in translation when communicated to audiences outside the laboratory or beyond the Latin American context. The editors themselves acknowledge that their project’s selection of these case studies and “methodological nationalism” may have overemphasized the significance of geneticists as public intellectuals. It would have been helpful to learn how this public engagement relates to the more mundane work of geneticists in health, forensics, and paternity testing. Despite this one reservation, I highly recommend this book.