ABSTRACT

However, all these texts and the cultural milieus they described were themselves often fundamen­ tally racist. Celebrations of hybrid cultural iden­ tities did not interrupt the practice of racism (see

race), even within these writings. Early proponents of Latin American hybridity often assumed or declared openly that whitening was an integral goal of miscegenation. Although his 1940 Contra - p u n te o cubano de tabaco y a zu ca r (Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar) is far more sophisticated in its views on race, the earlier work of Fernando Ortiz (the first to coin the term transculturation (see cultural theory)) associated blackness with criminality and deviance, very much in line with racial theories predominant in Europe at the time.