The central objective of this project is to chart the relationship between early-modern notions of race that developed in the Iberian-Atlantic world and systems of colonial racialization that emerged in the Americas in relation to mestizaje. By analyzing three case-studies from Latin American's early-colonial period, I show that as anxieties about racial mixture got intertwined with the Iberian notion of purity of blood, spatial segregation and the curtailment of interracial sex became two of the main issues around which early-colonial discourses on mestizaje were articulated. In chapter one, I justify the use of the term race for analyzing this period by drawing from current scholarship whose aim is to historicize this notion as a means to better theorize it. Moreover, I explain the specific elements that inform the theory of race that I develop throughout this project, including Bernasconi's formulation of race as a border concept, JanMohamed's notion of racialized sexuality, and Foucault's account of how biopower can help us theorize the interconnections between race and reproductive sex. In the second chapter, I examine Vasco de Quiroga's decisive influence in the formation of the Dual Republic model of spatial segregation in Mexico, and I show how the racialization of space during this period led to a dualistic conception of society that by definition left no place for the liminal figure of the mestizo. In chapter three, I examine a policy adapted by the Portuguese Crown during the sixteenth century whereby white Portuguese women were taken to Brazil in an effort to reduce interracial sex and miscegenation. Lastly, in chapter four I analyze Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's abject characterization of mestizos in Peru, and I demonstrate that two of the key issues around which he organized his demand for colonial reforms were spatial segregation and the curtailment of interracial sex. By examining these three cases-studies comparatively, and further incorporating a transatlantic perspective that situates them within broader developments that were taking place during the early-modern period, I emphasize the importance that the study of colonial Latin America has for current efforts to historicize the notion of race.

abstract: Globalization has brought a renewed interest in the discourses of the past and national/ethnic identities that has been reflected in the cultural production and the social sciences around the globe. Historical novel (and their sequel telenovelas), a literary field closely linked to historiography, reflects, and has contributed to (re)shape the discourses of the past and identity in Latin America. Since the first decades of the 19th century until nowadays, Colombian novelists have explored Colombian identity through historical novels. Their plots and characters are highly influenced by new historiographical trends. During the19th and the first half of the 20th century, Romantic and Realist novels were generally constructed over historicist assumption of the past: the belief that it is possible to acquire a completely “objective” knowledge of the past. However, some outstanding Colombian historical novels, such as La Marquesa de Yolombó (1928), challenged this notion of the past. Since the last decades of the 20th century, Colombian historical novels share an attitude toward the past that Linda Hutcheon has defined as Historiographical Metafiction. This approach to history challenges the idea of an objective total history, and emphasizes the importance of the personal experiences, the subjectivity, of their characters and of the narrative voices. Donde no te Conozcan (2007), Trí¬ptico de la Infamia (2016), and Mancha de la Tierra (2014) are three Colombian historical novels written in the 21st century that share this attitude towards history. They question the nineteenth-century interpretations of Colombian history, especially those related to the role of Jews, Moors, Indigenous, Africans, and mestizos in the colonial social dynamics, and, therefore, in Colombian culture. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation International Letters and Cultures 2018