During the two centuries, the hybridity or mestizaje has been a central theme in the Latin American cultural studies which constitutes a historically configured field in the Latin American critical tradition. The central objective of this study is to consider the various ways in which different discourses of cultural hybridity have functioned as strategies for constructing, deconstructing, and reconfiguring trans/national imaginaries.
After a brief discussion of official discourses of hybridity or mestizaje that stress assimilation, Europeanization and whitening, as well as of the influential concept of 'our mestizo America' developed by the Cuban intellectual José Martí in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this study will concentrate on the ways in which some major Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century worked or reconstructed the paradigm. Finally this study will consider some academic works that examine cultural hybridity as strategies of empowerment and at times opposition and resistance within marginalized sectors of society.
Actually the discourse of hybridity has a ambiguous status. While it has often been associated with nation-building, more recently it has also been applied to emerging cultural forms and minority discourse. As suggests Amaryll Chanady, this study will conclude that, whereas the term 'hybridity' stresses a postmodern and postcolonial interest in difference, deconstruction of traditional identity, the hybridity has frequently implied an emphasis on the viability of the national community as a whole in societies driven by conflict and social injustice and lagging increasingly behind in the global economy.