Cuerpos Manchados: Rethinking Racial Difference Through the Grotesque Birthmark

Author

Paloma Rodrigo Gonzales, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

John Collins

Committee Members

Marc Edelman

Karen Strassler

Paula Saravia

Subject Categories

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Race, semiotics, Peru, Latin America, kinship, grotesquerie

Abstract

This work is about a birthmark known in Peru as mancha mongólica or the Mongolian spot. It is a purple, bluish, sometimes greenish mark that appears on the sacral area and buttocks of newborn babies and fades gradually during the first years of life. In Peru and Latin America, it is interpreted as a sign of race, a visible mark that points to indigenous or black origins.

The Mongolian spot is conceived as phenotypical, and yet it is not easily classifiable. It has produced since the late-19th century diverse and contradictory hypotheses about its true meaning. It is a visible dark mark on the skin, that is yet ephemeral, that fades away and ultimately disappears. It is widespread, and yet enigmatic and often hidden due to its location on the body. This work argues that in Peru, the Mongolian spot is read as a mark of race, not despite these contradictions, but precisely because it is unclassifiable, ambiguous and ephemeral. The Mongolian spot has persevered as a meaningful sign of race since colonial times to our days, because its tainted-ness and material comportment, and the feelings it provokes, are similar to the qualities that shape the experience of race and racism in Peru. It is an ephemeral present/absent, visible/invisible stain, that is often concealed, and yet pervasive. It is a sign on the body that interpellates families in their most intimate spaces. It is a mark that simultaneously expresses biological and sociocultural ideas of race. As the experience of race itself, this mancha (stain) is temporary, recurrent, downplayed, hidden, relational, and omnipresent.

This work seeks to first, account for forms of racism that are pervasive but often denied or disguised as culturalist forms of discrimination that are supposedly “not about race.” I propose the notion of cuerpos manchados (stained bodies, bodies marked with the Mongolian spot) as a means to first, recenter the role of the phenotypical body in experiences of race, while recognizing that race is always about more than just racialized bodies. Second, cuerpos manchados offers as a path towards thinking about race relations without reifying the racial labels and categories that we have inherited from colonialism and scientific racism. Through a longue durée and semiotic approach to the Mongolian spot, this research reveals the grids that underwrite and organize Peruvian race relations. I engage Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body image to account for the haunting power of the Mongolian spot, a bodily mark that lingers beyond its visibility, that is always corporeal, and that blurs the boundaries between past and present, the inside and outside of the body, the self and the other.

Recommended Citation

Rodrigo Gonzales, Paloma, "Cuerpos Manchados: Rethinking Racial Difference Through the Grotesque Birthmark" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6015