UC San Diego

The U.S. third world women's movement proposes the Chicana new mestiza identity as a methodology of (post) modern social movements. García Canclini differentiates modern national identities from transnational citizens' identifications emerging from hybrid cultures' (post) modern consumption of cultural products. Drawing on the contributions and limitations of these two proposals, the dissertation examines the contrast between a masculinist and a womanist articulation of politics of mestiza community making in the Americas. This strategy bears relevance to the meaning of women's agency within the relationships between production and (re) production while providing visibility to the significance of sexuality politics if one wants to qualitatively change the notion and the practice of democracy. In the first part of this dissertation I examine the Mexican Revolution's politics of mestizaje through the study of anthropologist Manuel Gamio's inscription of the new Mexico. I introduce the Mexican Revolution politics of mestizaje as historical references both of Sandoval and García Canclini's mestizaje and hybridity frameworks, which these authors see as the methodological instruments of/for (post) modern social movements. In the second part of the dissertation, I conceive the framework that bridges the mestizaje that the Mexican Revolution consolidated and that the U.S. led. Pan-American project supported. I examine mestizaje politics as a common feature of Latin American politics of community making. At the middle of the twentieth century, when indigenist Pan-Americanism was projected to the entire continent, Venezuela consolidated the modern institutionalization of its state and the oil production character of the nation. Mestizaje is again the center of this process of community making and is deeply related to the land that produces the resources of the nation state. After providing this historical and conceptual information about Venezuela, the third and last part of the dissertation focuses on the Venezuelan Wayuu Indigenous Women's movement. The study of this concrete social movement introduces new questions and answers on contemporary ethnic and women's politics in the Americas. These questions and answers re-introduce the importance of evaluating the political and epistemological consequences of sexuality and racial politics within social movements which become concrete revolutionary political projects. By studying the Wayuu indigenous women social movement within the Bolivarian Revolution's domestic as well as sub- continental community re-making efforts, the dissertation's objective is to provide evidence of the importance of sexuality politics within contemporary neo- decolonizing hemispheric political efforts