The Smile of the Slave: Synthesis and Protest in Alfonso Reyes

Abstract

In this essay,  the author traces the rise of "mestizaje", first as it emerges historically as a political category harnessed to nation-building in late-nineteenth-century Mexico, and then insofar as it informs the work of the essayist Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), one of the most influential theorists  of Mexican and Latin American cultural identity of the past century.