Mestizaje in the Age of Fascism: German and Qeqchi Maya Interracial Unions in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala
In contemporary Guatemala, Q’eqchi’ Mayas of German descent are reclaiming identities as ‘the improved race’ (la raza mejorada), which allows them claim both tradition and authenticity as well as racial whiteness and modernity. While surprising to contemporary observers, these identities have longer histories, rooted in the interwar period, when Guatemalan urban intellectuals and statesmen looked to German-Maya sexual unions as the racial solution to Guatemala’s failure to forge a modern and homogenous nation. Like national racial mixing (mestizaje) projects found in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Guatemalan intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s argued that racial mixing with Anglo-Saxons led not to racial degeneration, but—potentially—to new and more vital races. While long ignored by historical scholarship, hybrid Q’eqchi’-Germans, however, unravel a priori assumptions of German diasporic political and social insularity. By examining the potent symbolic and cultural dimensions Guatemala’s unique mestizaje project had for the formation of both German and Guatemalan nationalist projects during the rise of German National Socialism and Guatemala’s own populist dictatorship under President Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), this article argues for an understanding of German diasporas in Latin America that places them squarely in the transnational space between competing nationalisms and political agendas. By further examining the important material and social dimensions of mixed-race families, this article reveals the crucial ties Germans forged in Latin America and how who counted as German and by what measure was a subject of considerable debate with important political consequences.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/2/214?rss=1
The Adenauer Governments Pensions Reform of 1957–a Question of Justice
The pensions reform of 1957 marked a turning point in the history of the German welfare state, ushering in a root-and-branch reorganization of the old-age pension system in order to ‘secure living standards’. The present article seeks to identify the key values underpinning this reconfiguration and finds that norms of social justice were of central importance. The normative backbone of the Adenauer government’s pensions reform was the notion of performance-based justice, in which the principle of equivalence of contributions and pensions benefits converged with the central theme of maintaining citizens’ social status in retirement. Closely bound up with this was the principle of equality between the generations, which found expression in the linkage of pensions to income development. We can only adequately explain the key role of the issue of justice, and the vigorous affirmation of the performance principle, in light of the erosion of social hierarchies by two world wars and two periods of severe inflation. These wiped out most of the assets that the middle classes in particular had set aside for old age, assets on which they had built their hopes of maintaining their social position in retirement. More than anything else, the pensions reform of 1957 was intended to reconstruct a system of social inequality that had perished in the first half of the twentieth century, one intended to ensure that all senior citizens occupied the position attained during their working lives.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/2/237?rss=1