CONSERVATISM, HISPANIDAD, AND INDIGENISMO: IDEOLOGICAL DISPUTES OVER THE NATION, MESTIZAJE, AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
Conservatism, hispanidad, and indigenismo: ideological disputes over the nation, mestizaje, and indigenous peoples.
This panel proposes to analyze the historical, political, and cultural relations between conservatism and indigenismo in the Hispanic American world, with particular attention to the cases of Spain and Mexico. The starting point is the consideration of conservatism as a decisive ideological matrix in the construction of national projects, social hierarchies, and collective identities throughout the twentieth century and part of the twenty-first. From this perspective, the panel is interested in studying how certain conservative formulations elaborated discourses of national integration that, under the exaltation of mestizaje, hispanidad, or tradition, may have concealed more or less explicit forms of exclusion, cultural racism, or the subordination of indigenous peoples.
The panel proposes a historical and intellectual survey that allows for an examination of the formation of the idea of hispanidad in authors such as Miguel de Unamuno, Zacarías de Vizcarra, and Ramiro de Maeztu. Particular attention will be paid to the ecumenical dimension of this thought, understood as an attempt to construct a transatlantic imagined community made up of Spaniards, criollos, Afro-descendants, and indigenous peoples. This vision, however, appears linked to a “rosy legend” of the Spanish Empire, aimed at softening the social, cultural, and political effects of conquest and colonization.
In the Mexican case, the panel will address the reception and reworking of these imaginaries through conservative discourses that exalted mestizaje with a predominance of the Spanish element, vindicated the colonial era, and formulated founding myths of the nation from anti-indigenist and anti-communist positions. Figures such as José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Junco, Manuel Gómez Morín, José Elguero, Jesús Guisa y Acevedo, Manuel Romero de Terreros, and Vito Alessio Robles allow us to study the articulation between historical thought, cultural politics, academic institutions, and partisan projects, especially around the PAN, the Mexican Academy of History, and UNAM.
The proposal also seeks to open the debate toward the present, marked by the resurgence of neo-revisionist discourses that, from social networks, media spaces, and forums opposed to Latin American progressivism, reactivate the opposition between indigenismo and conservatism. This shift, from major thinkers to contemporary propagandists, invites reflection on the new forms of circulation of historical imaginaries and identity disputes.
Finally, the panel aims to bring together research from intellectual history, cultural anthropology, political history, and studies on nation, memory, and identity. Particular value will be placed on work on normative systems, customary practices, indigenous cosmovisions, religiosities, indigenist policies, indianismo, autonomy, and the crisis of state indigenismo. The overall objective is to discuss how the categories of hispanidad, mestizaje, indigenismo, and conservatism have served both to integrate and to exclude, both to imagine national communities and to dispute the political and symbolic place of indigenous peoples in Latin America.
