The Day of the Race

The Day of the Race or, better, Day of the People, is a pretty silly moniker for a concept both superficial and alarmingly deep.

It was October 12, 1492 that Columbus and his crew made landfall in the Bahamas. In the US this commemoration has become Columbus Day, one of those push-it-to-the-nearest-Monday holidays beloved of those people who need so much love: bankers. While the Italian-American community has appropriated the day as a celebration of national heritage, and the Hispanic-American community regards it as an appropriate closure for Hispanic Heritage Month, some US  states have renamed the day "Native American Day," or let it be called both names.

In Brazil the date is widely ignored, since, as famed singer / songwriter Caetano Veloso elaborates in his memoir Tropical Truth (translated by Isabel de Sena):

"As children we learned that Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral on April 22, 1500. All other American nations consider it enough to have been discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492" (3).

Veloso highlights this fact as the beginning of a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism, and develops it to accommodate conflicting geographies of Brazil as island, continent, and nation. The slight has also to do with frontier finagling prior to the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the rejection of Columbus's financing needs by the Portuguese king João II, whom the admiral had visited before soliciting Fernando e Isabel in Spain.

But in the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, whose conquest and colonization were most directly linked to Columbus's meanderings financed by the Spanish monarchs, the day has taken on a polyvalence encompassing touchy subjects like nationhood, ethnicity, and race. In Mexico, especially, the day is linked to the masterfully succinct wording on this plaque at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, itself a site of incredibly mixed messages due to the 1968 massacre of Tlatelolco:

EL 13 DE AGOSTO DE 1521 / HEROICAMENTE DEFENDIDO POR CUAUHTEMOC / CAYO TLATELOLCO EN PODER DE HERNAN CORTES // NO FUE TRIUNFO NI DERROTA / FUE EL DOLOROSO NACIMIENTO DEL PUEBLO MESTIZO / QUE ES EL MEXICO DE HOY

Post-revolutionary Mexico's take on re-evaluating and promoting its indigenous heritage retains its strong link to the writings of José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), philosopher, politician, and education reformer whose 1925 essay La raza cósmica exalts mestizaje, or ethnic mixing, as a Latin American essential quality with the potential to redeem the other, less mixed "races." Fraught with difficulties, imprecisions and aporiae, and even having been interpreted as inherently racist itself, the concept of the "cosmic race" nonetheless continues to affect thinking about what it means to be Latino, Latin American, Hispanic, etc. vis-a-vis the wider world; witness the name of The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), "the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States."

Curiously, though, even in Mexican official discourse the celebratory idea of the "raza" is not always mestizo. The Monumento a la Raza, on the Avenida Insurgentes not far from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in northern Mexico City, recasts the Mesoamerican pyramid and crowns it with the cactus-perched eagle--the "sign" that the Mexica sought in order to found Tenochtitlan.

MONUMENTO A LA RAZA, AVENIDA INSURGENTES, CIUDAD DE MEXICO

In this iconic imagery, "raza" would appear to be exclusively indigenous. The monument's construction was completed in 1940, during the heyday of indigenous re-imaginings by artists such as Rivera, Kahlo, Siqueiros, Orozco, and Tamayo.

Perhaps the best name would be "Mutual Discovery Week," with days for Africans, Native Americans, Southern Europeans,  Polynesians, Northern Europeans ("Leif Erikson Day," already October 9)... But no more "bank holidays," please!