Introduction: Race science in the Latin world

Introduction

Like many scientists and intellectuals around the world, the Mexican philosopher and politician José Vasconcelos saw the end of the Second World War as an opportunity to rethink science’s fraught relationship with race. In the prologue to the 1948 edition of his acclaimed book La Raza Cósmica, originally published twenty-three years before, Vasconcelos mused that international conditions were now, finally, favorable for the rise of a new human type: the “Cosmic Race.” When La Raza Cósmica was first published in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the prologue explained, his optimistic assessment of race-mixture or mestizaje differed starkly from international currents of racial thought. Back then, he claimed, “the Darwinist doctrine of natural selection,” perverted by the work of French naturalist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, had disastrously given rise to the “pure Aryan theory” that was later “supported by the English and carried to an aberrant imposition by Nazism.” ¹

Yet, due to the “futility of the last great war, which left everybody disgusted,” the world was now seeing a new “current of more humane doctrines” circulating the globe, whose origins Vasconcelos attributed to the work of Latin scientists. ² As examples of this humane turn, he noted the work of French biologists from the 1930s – namely Albert Mathieu Leclerc du Sablon and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy – who he described as offering new, spiritual, and possibly non-Darwinian interpretations of evolution. ³ As further evidence that this “Latinized” version of evolution was gaining international traction, Vasconcelos stated that even “distinguished Darwinists” and “old supporters of Spencerianism” who “disdained the dark and mestizo races” were now part of international organizations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that “proclaim the need to abolish all racial discrimination and to educate all men in equality.” ⁴ Brimming with self-importance, the philosopher thus framed the postwar “retreat of scientific racism” as the international triumph of his version of mestizaje as an organizing racial principle.

Idiosyncratic as it may seem to historians of race in the United States or northern Europe, Vasconcelos’ interpretation of the postwar era reflects currents of racial thought that were common among scientific elites in many so-called “Latin” countries well before the end of the Second World War. Indeed, his appeal to mestizaje suggests that from the vantage point of race scientists in the “Latin” world the ascendant racial liberalism and cultural relativism of international organizations and scientific institutions in the 1950s did not constitute a stark rupture with prior racial thought. Rather, for self-proclaimed “Latin” scientists, this postwar shift to antiracism could be seen as the vindication of a cultural and intellectual tradition of celebrating racial mixture whose roots stretched as far back as the sixteenth-century Iberian conquest of the Americas.

The goal of this special section is to evaluate the historiographic significance of the “Latin” as a category in global studies of race science. The essays in this section were first presented in a panel at the 2015 History of Science Society meeting in San Francisco that critically examined the history of race science in the so-called Latin world. The goals of the panel were three-fold. First, we wanted to know whether the “Latin” described in transnational studies of “Latin eugenics” could serve as more than a nominal actors’ category. Second, we wanted to evaluate whether this “Latin” point-of-view is a useful category for provincializing the work of scientists and historical actors in North America and northern Europe. Finally, we hoped to investigate what happens when a concept with strong footing in the history of eugenics is more widely applied to the human and social sciences during the same period and beyond.

As such, the issues and questions raised by the essays are indebted to the work of Nancy Stepan. Through her pathbreaking work on eugenics in Central and South America, Stepan introduced scholars to the term “Latin eugenics” as an important actors’ category that provincialized the historiography of eugenics in the 1980s and 1990s, which had primarily focused on North America and Europe. By examining the formation of eugenic societies in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina during the interwar period, Stepan identified a distinctive “Latin” strain of eugenics characterized by neo-Lamarckian conceptions of evolution and heredity, an enthusiasm for race-mixing as a nation-building strategy, and a rejection of hardline Mendelian eugenics popular in North America and Northern Europe. ⁵ Stepan’s work emphasized how Central and South American eugenicists consciously adopted the “Latin” label in order to differentiate their work from that of their “Nordic” colleagues. Stepan’s work thus argued for the Latin as an indispensable category of analysis to reveal how eugenic knowledge was situated in regional contexts. ⁶

Following in Stepan’s footsteps, historians Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette have expanded her formulation of Latin eugenics to include Mediterranean Europe. ⁷ As evidence that Latin eugenics was in fact a trans-Atlantic phenomenon, Turda and Gillette highlight the influence of French and Italian methods in anthropology, biology, and criminology on Central and South American eugenics and document an intense traffic in scientific ideas, people, and practices between South American countries and Southern Europe during the interwar period. The formation of these trans-Atlantic scientific networks at this time, they suggest, also solidified South American and Southern European elites’ belief in a shared “Latin” identity that harkened back to an imagined primordial origin in ancient Rome. From this trans-Atlantic perspective, Latin eugenics involves a purposeful embrace of Latinity (i.e. Latinidad or Latinité) as a professional and cultural identity opposed to the values and methods of “Nordic” and “Anglo-Saxon” forms of eugenics, which were generally characterized by “Latin” scholars as driven almost exclusively by biological determinism and cruelty. ⁸

By drawing on illustrative examples from several countries and regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this special section critically examines the “Latin” as a unit of analysis within global histories of race science. As Turda and Gillette’s work highlights, Latinity is a category that defies simple categorization and yet has been used by historical actors to denote spiritual, linguistic, cultural, and even racial specificity. Given the role it played in the formation of transnational scientific networks spanning the Caribbean, Central, and South America, as well as Mediterranean Europe, Latinity has also been a highly portable category covering diverse geographies. By observing where supposedly Latin conceptions of race have travelled, the essays in this section reveal unexpected trajectories of thought and practice that unsettle familiar linguistic and imperial historiographies.

This special section also explores the temporal and disciplinary limits of Latinity. As noted above, eugenic scholars have emphasized the Latin in order to de-center Anglo-American and North Atlantic histories of eugenics by demonstrating the sheer variety of social hygiene or engineering projects that fell under the ‘eugenics’ label. ⁹ Yet historians of the human sciences have not examined whether this distinctive Latin approach to race and human diversity left its mark beyond the domain of interwar eugenics. Following in Stepan’s footsteps, then, this special section explores whether the category of the “Latin” extended beyond eugenics and whether conceptions of race in the Latin world reflect those in the Global South more broadly.

It should also be noted that our interest in Latin race science and mestizaje does not mean to absolve Latin intellectual trends as comparatively less racist than those of Nordic or Anglo persuasion. In fact, Stepan’s work emphasizes that male elites like Vasconcelos often used Latinity and mestizaje to assert an alternative to Anglo or Nordic modernity that retained colonial racial hierarchies from the Iberian empire. Vasconcelos’ work thus reminds us that the comparative optics at play in assertions of Latinity had a dark side that couched critiques of Anglo and Nordic claims to racial supremacy in a nostalgic look back that obscured the genocidal realities of French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese imperial expansion. ¹⁰ Similarly, it did not disrupt the overwhelming belief that racial homogeneity was essential for national progress and social harmony.

Global history and the “science” of race

By focusing on the Latin world, this special section builds on an emerging body of scholarship that places the history of race science in a global context. This shift toward a more expansive framing of race science is a response to the largely North Atlantic focus of the conventional historiography. Canonical histories have typically narrated the rise and fall of scientific racism as a story of shifting conceptions and practices within the fields of comparative anatomy, physical anthropology, and human genetics in England, France, Germany, and the United States. ¹¹

More recent histories, on the other hand, have expanded the North Atlantic focus of conventional accounts and have begun documenting the multiple ways in which race has been studied elsewhere. Much of this geographic reassessment has been driven by historians of Latin America who have shown that racial ideologies and concepts there rarely fit standard North Atlantic narratives. In fact, since Stepan’s pioneering work on Latin American eugenics, scholarship on scientific racial thought in the region has grown immensely. Histories of race science in Latin America have extended their reach beyond the more traditional sites of study such as Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina to show how scientific conceptions of race have shaped educational systems, public health campaigns, and recent genomic studies in countries such as Cuba, Colombia, and Chile. ¹² Additionally, more recent studies have demonstrated that racial plasticity and mestizaje were not as central to all racial idioms emerging in Latin America. For example, scholarship focusing on the Andean region (Peru and Bolivia in particular) has identified currents of racial thought influenced by the indigenismo movement of the interwar period that rejected the celebration of race-mixing and sought to valorize the biological and cultural specificity of Andean indigenous groups. ¹³

In fact, prompted by conversations with Brazilian scholars in Rio de Janeiro, Warwick Anderson has advanced the hypothesis that the emphasis on racial plasticity and race-mixing habitually associated with Latin America is in fact a defining feature of racial thought throughout the Global South more broadly. Struck by the similarities between the projects of racial mixture and indigenous absorption in Anglo settler societies such as New Zealand and Australia and the ideologies of mestizaje in Latin America, Anderson has argued that there is compelling evidence for a southern racial distinctiveness oriented toward environmental adaptation and racial blending. Though he notes that there are certainly exceptions (parts of Australia and South Africa) to this emphasis on the blurring of racial boundaries, Anderson suggests that mestizaje-style racial projects can be observed in Hawaii, parts of the South Pacific and South Asia, and, especially suggestive for this special section, in many former Portuguese colonies in Asia and Africa. ¹⁴ At stake in Anderson’s project is an attempt to reframe the history of race science in the twentieth century by attending to the distinctive theories and epistemologies of the southern hemisphere. ¹⁵ Accordingly, Anderson proposes the Global South not as a precise geographic region but rather a useful heuristic for dislodging the assumed centrality of the North Atlantic in standard historiographies. By invoking this antipodean viewpoint, the rigid typologies and policies of racial segregation associated with North Atlantic race science can thus be shown to be exceptional rather than normative.

Latinity and global history

If racial plasticity is indeed a defining feature of nearly all racial conceptions in the Global South, does this reduce the significance of the “Latin” as a unit of analysis? One argument for retaining Latin distinctiveness comes from historians of Latin America who have noted an uncomfortable fit between Latin American and global history, offering some of the latter’s most potent critiques. Though one might expect these two fields to be intimately interconnected, the relationship is notable for its divergences. According to historian Matthew Brown, Latin America has too often been rendered peripheral by global history and its emphasis on networks and connections that often read as histories of “globalization writ backwards.” ¹⁶ Brown attributes this marginalization of Latin American history to the Anglocentric nature of global history, which has predominantly focused on the British world and on East-West relations. Accordingly, Brown notes, Latin American historians have approached global history with trepidation and expressed concern at the potential loss of cultural and historical specificity within global approaches. Jeremy Adelman has provocatively echoed similar sentiments and noted that despite the embrace of global history in North America and Europe, history departments remain overwhelmingly Western in their outlook as evidenced by the meager numbers in appointed faculty who specialize in the non-Western world. ¹⁷

Historians of science have made compelling arguments for the importance of Latin America within global histories. For instance, Stuart McCook argues that histories of science in Latin America show that “it is possible to write global histories that do systematically address the issue of power and inequality.” ¹⁸ As such, Latin American history offers important lessons for histories that celebrate globalization while overlooking uneven distributions of power. ¹⁹ For McCook, this is particularly true of histories focusing on the nation-building period in Latin America and the Caribbean, roughly 1810 to 1950, when new forms of commodity exchange introduced a series of new diseases including cholera, bubonic plague, and malaria to human populations and agricultural crops. Because these diseases were shared by other regions in the Global South that also privileged intense monocultural farming, these “commodity diseases” gave rise to thick south–south scientific networks. As an example, McCook cites Leida Fernández Prieto’s research on the sustained scientific exchanges between sugar producers in Cuba and Java who sought common solutions to agricultural problems that they shared due to similarities in climate and geopolitical circumstances. ²⁰ For McCook, Latin American and Caribbean histories of science thus offer the promise of global histories that are actively engaged in tracking the formation and contestation of socioeconomic inequalities at local, regional, and transnational scales.

McCook and Anderson offer compelling reasons for situating Latin American histories of science within a southern hemispheric framework that decenters the Anglocentrism of standard global histories. By contrast, histories of Latinity highlight how this concept has advanced the interests of Latin American elites operating within a trans-Atlantic geography that extended across the northern and southern hemispheres. This literature examines how “Latin” identity was an actors’ category deployed by scientific and medical elites who aspired to a form of racial modernity and national progress often equated with the inherently racist concept of bolstering cultural whiteness. For instance, Stepan showed how a sense of Latinity informed the creation of groups such as the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Societies founded in 1935, which defined the Latin eugenics community as encompassing practitioners in “Italy, France, and Belgium as well as Latin American countries.” ²¹ The creation of an international professional organization premised on a “special sense of Latinity” offered a way for Latin American countries to assert their modern scientific credentials and whiteness alongside their European counterparts. ²² For nations such as Brazil and Mexico, where non-European and mixed race populations predominated, inclusion in these kinds of international coalitions also legitimated race-mixing as a nation-building strategy in the face of increasing white supremacy on the international stage over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further, the formation of these kinds of transnational coalitions premised on Latinity opportunistically sought to position both southern European and Latin American eugenicists as embracing a softer and more benign form of eugenics that avoided the ethically questionable emphasis on racial segregation and coerced sterilization found in the United States, Germany, and parts of the British Commonwealth, while those softer forms still sought to intervene into the private lives of citizens characterized as racially dubious. ²³

In addition to serving as a convenient category that allowed for the consolidation of transnational scientific networks, Latinity also served to pathologize Latin America’s social problems as racially based and to be fixed through social engineering and hereditary improvement. In most places, the kinds of interventions proposed involved public campaigns that drew from neo-Lamarckian perspectives and sought to improve the perceived racial degeneracy of the region’s Afro-descendent, indigenous, and mestizo populations through environmental reforms. ²⁴ Among the measures adopted by Latin eugenicists were campaigns to teach scientific child-rearing methods (puericulture), physical education programs, nutritional campaigns, and prenuptial blood tests. ²⁵ Perhaps especially surprising, in some cases Latin eugenicists also embraced “negative” eugenic discourses shaped by Mendelian and Darwinian perspectives that stressed the need to prevent ostensibly unfit groups from reproducing, which even led to the introduction of coercive sterilization laws in some cases. ²⁶ In other words, as an actors’ category, Latinity has encompassed a broad range of perspectives, which include the more austere measures typically associated with eugenics in North America and Northern Europe. Also, even in its “softer,” neo-Lamarckian form, Latin eugenics provided a platform that was just as interventionist as the kinds of eugenics policies that were put in place in countries where hardline approaches were common. Preserving and improving an imagined Latin race was thus at the core of Latin eugenic practices and Latinity offered a suitably polyvalent discourse that could be tailored to local circumstances.

The malleable nature of Latinity is part of the reason why it has increasingly been the subject of scholarly study in a variety of geographic locations. More recently, Turda and Gillette expanded the world Stepan’s monograph defined by more thoroughly examining how European intellectual elites understood their Latin identity. In addition to the countries Stepan mentioned in her own work as belonging to the Latin world, they add Spain and Portugal (surprisingly absent from Stepan’s definition) as well as Romania and Romance-speaking Switzerland to their conception of that world. ²⁷ They do this with a more robust reckoning of what constituted Latinity, arguing, “As [Latin eugenicists] understood it, the culture of Latin countries was based on a synthesis of ancient Roman civilization, linguistic and cultural commonality, and Roman Catholicism (in the Romanian case, Christian Orthodoxy).” ²⁸ In this light, what defined belonging in the Latin world was a set of shared ideas and practices emphasizing cultural commonality as opposed to phenotypic race.

Whereas the historiography of Latin eugenics points to the ways in which the “Latin” offered an alluring category for the creation of transnational scientific networks in the twentieth century, histories of the idea of “Latin” America point toward a colonial politics with a longue durée. Although these studies agree that the idea of Latin America is a nineteenth-century invention shaped by the French imperial agenda, they differ with respect to the degree to which this romantic ideal of Latinity is implicated in European colonialism. For instance, from the decolonial standpoint of Walter D. Mignolo, the emergence of a distinct “Latin” America in the nineteenth century represents the second phase of a world historical process that began in the fifteenth century with the European colonization of the new world. Mignolo argues that the idea of “America” was invented by European colonizers hailing from the Iberian Peninsula amidst “the genocide of Indians and African slaves” and proved crucial in the establishment of the modern world and its enduring colonial matrix of power – what Mignolo calls “coloniality.” ²⁹

In the nineteenth century, after the revolutions of independence, the idea of “America” was refashioned and divided into Anglo (North) and Latin (Central and South) components. The result of this, at least in North America, was a growing belief in the idea that “Latin” America was “dependent on and inferior to the United States.” ³⁰ Yet Central and South America’s “Latin” character was not only created by those in North America. In this same period, France sought to extend its influence in the Americas in response to the expansion of British colonization to India, Australia, and parts of Africa. The power vacuum left by the ousting of the Spanish through independence wars represented an opportunity for France to step in. This led French intellectuals to develop the idea of “Latinité”, which heavily relied on the centrality of Catholicism as a cultural link between these various nations. In Central and South America, argues Mignolo, “Latinidad” thus became an identity that was asserted by the French and adopted by Creole elites to define themselves in a way that functioned to rank them “below Anglo Americans and, yet, to erase and demote the identities of Indians and Afro-South Americans.” ³¹

Though convincing, Mignolo’s is not the only approach to understanding the creation of “Latin” America. Historian Michel Gobat asserts that the term “Latin America” was adopted by Central and South Americans in the nineteenth century as a form of protesting the United States’ efforts to expand their control into the southern hemisphere. Although Gobat also acknowledges that the idea of a distinct Latin race originated in the romantic nationalism of French imperial thought, he argues that this concept was appropriated by postcolonial elites for anti-imperialist ends – thus giving rise to a new and enduring geopolitical entity as well as subject position. ³² A similar claim is made by Lina del Castillo, who demonstrates how postcolonial scientific elites in Spanish America forcefully rejected the North American experiment to build an industrialized republic on the backs of slave labor and sought to position New Granada at the vanguard of world republicanism. ³³

In a similar vein, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo notes that although the military alliance among the “Latin” nations of Europe failed, “the racial, cultural, and political assumptions that were embodied in the term Latin did not.” ³⁴ Indeed, the assumptions embodied in the term “Latin” thrived in Central and South America. Where it became increasingly opposed to the “Anglo-Saxon” yet also “implied antimodernism, which in turn implied strong authority, distrust of full liberty, spirit over matter, subjectivity over objectivity, and distrust of individualism (corporate and spiritual goals over individual passions and interests).” ³⁵ In other words, whereas Gobat detects an emancipatory and even postcolonial aspiration at play when using the term “Latin” America or “Latin” race, Tenorio-Trillo detects conservative and authoritarian overtones. In the face of these various approaches and interpretations, it becomes clear that a common feature of both the historiography of Latin eugenics and Latinity is that the notion of a “Latin” sensibility has primarily functioned as an oppositional category through which cultural and scientific elites have sought to assert colonial and postcolonial identities and epistemologies in response to a variously defined “north.”

It is precisely this ambivalent, contradictory, and imperially tinged terrain that this special section seeks to examine. In a historiographic context in which South American and Southern European scientific traditions have been neglected, focusing on self-identified Latin scientists is a way of recovering these lost traditions. However, as Mignolo reminds us, the “Latin” worldview overlooks, and indeed was designed to actively erase, historical actors of indigenous and African descent. ³⁶ To these groups we would add those of Asian descent, who Mignolo does not mention, but who have been equally marginalized from narratives regarding Latinity despite growing scholarly attention to their circulation throughout the Latin world as migrants, laborers, and citizens. ³⁷ The emphasis actors and scholars place on Catholicism as a defining trait of Latinity also overlooks the contributions of Jewish and Muslim members of these communities in particular, who have often been studied as marginalized communities who had little ability to access the multivalent “Latin” identity, along with those who did not practice Judeo-Christian religions at all. ³⁸

Final thoughts

A Latin scientific worldview should not be mistaken for a monolithic one. Nor should scholars assume that a Latin perspective avoids the pitfalls of racism and elitism inherent in any number of intellectual history frameworks. Additionally, the ideas expressed here do not replace the value of local and national level studies. Rather, we hope that these essays encourage a new set of ideas about how racial concepts are developed and operationalized outside North America and northern Europe. A Latin view is but one option. In fact, we hope that offering a Latin perspective on race science will help to reveal that racial concepts focusing on hierarchy, hereditarianism, and purity championed in the North Atlantic, which have come to dominate the scholarly literature, were the truly aberrant and “alternative” aspects of race thinking in the twentieth century and more palatable forms of racial differentiation characterized southern racial paradigms.