Miscegenation: Culture- and Region-Forming Processes

While contained urban space, as reviewed in the first section of the book, suggests series of binaries deriving from the original dichotomy city/nature, a geographic expansion favors the commingling of composite or opposite principles. The second section of the book analyzes ways in which elective or imposed coexistence of diverse agents on a geographic field kindle a process that evolves from juxtaposition to reciprocal permeation and eventually miscegenation, both in culture- and region-forming. This chapter describes apparently unrelated phenomena as concurrent manifestations of miscegenation: (1) the auto-reformulation of Josephine Baker’s self-agency, unfolding in the sequential transformations of her celebrated banana skirt resonating in artistic expressions of the early-twentieth-century primitivist modernism; (2) the formation of open space ensembles in the colonial cities of Nueva España from the fusion of the Mesoamerican and Mediterranean ideas of place-making; (3) the implementation of the monumental metropolitan boulevard of Reforma in Mexico City, linking the colonial historical center to the pre-Hispanic hill of Chapultepec and its venerated forest. These productions of urban and metropolitan beauty stand in sheer contrast with the violent transformations of the territorial land patterns of the hinterlands of Mexico, displaced derivatives of the land expropriations of the French revolutionary period that shape the dreary face of the new nation through the transition from colonia to estado nacional. The text draws parallels between the cultural and spatial implications of the colonizing action brought forth by conquering over conquered groups in a territory.