Milton Loayza
CUNY
Email: mil54@yahoo.com

The Immaculate Constitution of the Perceptible Mestizo in Monti's Asuncion

The question of origin appears already loaded with the institution of a destiny. For example, the essentialist definition of a Latin American "nature," wherefore our origin and/or our nature have made us what we are. These categories [of origin, nature, destiny and identity] seem to form a cluster that expresses a certain anxiety about the materiality of our own bodies The category of the mestizo race (in conjunction with that of "criollo," and "mulatto") has dominated the notion of a Latin American identity, and is often seen as a trope of Latin American destiny, one that must incorporate both Spanish and Indian genetic input in the new breed of American population as well as the Spanish colonization of the Indian culture. One may ask then how the notion of mestizo came to be constituted--through what kind of perceptible negotiation, during the early colonial years, while considering the bodies of "Spanish," and "black" blood, entering the American continent already populated by "Indians." I will not try to answer these questions historically, in this paper, but look at the metatheatrical staging of these issues in Monti's play Asunción. Asunción plays with the notions of engendering and generation to deconstruct the racial and "Latin American" constitution of the mestizo identity. The scandal of the spectacle of two suffering female bodies-their excessive materiality-is absorbed by a Christian ideology of salvation embodied in Blanca's melodramatic narrative. The narrative, presented in the metatheatrical frame, conceived by Monti, reduces the presence of Asunción to a "listening" body, receiver of the symbolic violence of a text that robs meaning to her materiality. The issue of this violence is the constituted materiality of the mestizo race, carrier of the destiny of a continent.