La influencia del darwinismo sobre los conceptos raciales en México

Abstract

It has been repeatedly pointed out that Vicente Riva Palacio and Andres Molina Enriquez were influenced by Darwin’s ideas to develop their own racial concepts regarding the Mexican half-blood. However, after analysing said ideas both in their original biological context as in the social context they were transferred to, it is concluded that this affirmation can only be accepted sensu lato. Their thesis about the superiority of the half-blood is more strongly based on lineal conceptions of evolution and their own alterations than in the Darwinist model of natural selection. It is important to know the influence of Darwinism outside its original context as it helps to understand how the complex and unavoidable exchanges among science, society and politics occurred. Their appropriation of the Darwinist ideas may not be conceptually or methodologically accurate, but it contributed to the ideological construction of the half-blood as an advanced race in terms of evolution. This thesis contrasts with the most prevailing one in other Latin American countries, where the half-bloods were perceived as the personification of a racial degeneration.