Events & Calendars "Culture, Race and Religion: On the Construction of the Logic of Mestizaje in Latin America"

The arrival of Europeans to the Americas brought about a complex process of ethnocultural and racialized intermixture, which has come to be known as mestizaje. This session explores the intersection of racial, cultural and religious markers as contributing factors to the formation of colonial societies. It explores how these three markers helped create and shape the racialized ideology and logic of mestizaje as a divinely inspired foundational mechanism for the whitening of the population of these societies.

Dr. Néstor Medina is a Guatemalan-Canadian Scholar and assistant professor of religious ethics and culture at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. from University of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. He was the recipient of a First Book Grant for Minority Scholars (2014) and a Project Grant for Researchers (2018) from the Louisville Institute. He studies the intersection between people’s cultures, histories, ethnoracial relations and forms of knowledge. Among his numerous articles and publications, he is the author of Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping "Race," Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Orbis, 2009), a booklet On the Doctrine of Discovery (CCC, 2017) and his recent Christianity, Empire and the Spirit (Brill 2018).

The public is welcome!