INTRODUCTION: Genomics, Race Mixture, and Nation in Latin America

Abstract

This book presents findings from an interdisciplinary project involving three research teams working in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Collaborating closely, the teams carried out indepth research in a small number of genetics laboratories in these countries, while also drawing on local histories of physical anthropological and biomedical research into human biological diversity. Laboratories in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have been mapping the genomes of local populations, with the objectives of locating the genetic basis of diseases and of tracing population histories. Geneticists are frequently concerned to calculate the European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry of these populations or to compare them to samples of European or Amerindian populations. In the process, scientists sometimes link their findings explicitly to questions of national identity, racialethnic or population difference, and (anti)racism, stimulating public debate and sometimes engaging in the definition of public policies. The chapters in this book explore how the concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into these scientific endeavors and whether these concepts are reproduced, challenged, or reformulated in the process. Our work links current research in genetics to recent changes in the three countries, which in the last two decades have moved toward official multiculturalism, as have many countries in Latin America. The way genetics creates new imagined genetic communities, which may take forms that, to observers outside the genetic field including experts from other areas (anthropologists, sociologists, historians, etc.) and laypeople, might appear to have racialized and national dimensions, has implications not only for changing conceptions of race, ethnicity, and nation, but also for citizenship and social inclusion and exclusion. The growing literature on race, identity, and genomics focuses mainly on the United States and Europe. Latin America, with its national identities based on mestizaje or mestiçagem (roughly translatable as “race mixture” in Spanish and Portuguese, respectively), presents a fascinating but littleexplored