ABSTRACT
Probably one of the most convoluted and divergent issues in the Americas is the construction of identity, which historically has posed particular challenges to Latin America. The Western historical understanding of the creation of “identities” in a Latin American context is aligned with the history of the New World encounter and the “discovery” of (an) other species of humans and the subsequent migration of yet another. In their varied voyages into the new territories, European explorers devise a rubric for distinguishing themselves from the encountered and/or imported “other.” Often formulated in a manner to render European socio-cultural superiority based on valuing and devaluing observed and practiced normality, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch, to name a few, were to establish criteria for identifying the encountered indigenous populations, the imported African populations, and the miscegenated progeny of interracial/interethnic mixing. It is a part of the public intellectual discourse that European explorers of the New World hegemonically instituted a system of classifi cation that distinguished “them” from the encountered and hybridized “other.” This process created a Western system of identity construction that has been wrought with post-colonial vestiges relating to power, resistance, race, ethnicity, and gender social positioning. However, the aforementioned is not an attempt to essentialize the process of identity formation in the Americas. It serves to complicate the issue with respect to how one is defi ned and redefi ned as presented in the four chapters that comprise this fi nal section of the volume.
