Mestizo as travelling concept

Basic data for this project

Description

Colonial legal categorizations had significant impacts on those categorized, as they determined their rights and obligations in society. At the same time, they reveal much about the worldview and the notions of order of the colonizers. To some extent, they persist to this day. The category of Mestizo existed in many, but not all, European colonial empires. It referred to the descendants of Europeans and Indigenous people, i.e., colonizers and colonized. This category and term existed in the Spanish (mestizo), Portuguese (mestiço), French (métis), Italian (meticcio), Dutch (mestizo/mesties), and Belgian (métis/mesties) colonial empires, as well as in most of the resulting post-colonial nation-states, but not in other colonial empires such as the German or British, where terms such as "mixed race" were common. The project inquires into the emergence, adoption, and distribution of the terms Mestizo and Mestizaje in (post)colonial societies in Africa, Asia, America, and, intentionally also in Europe.