Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics

Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. [peter.wade@manchester.ac.uk]). Vivette García Deister is Associate Professor at the Social Studies of Science Laboratory, in the Faculty of Sciences, National Autonomous University of Mexico (Av. Universidad 3000, Circuito Exterior S/N, Delegación Coyoacán, C.P. 04510 Ciudad Universitaria, México D.F., México). Michael Kent is an Honorary Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom). María Fernanda Olarte Sierra is Assistant Professor at the Department of Design, University of the Andes (Cra 1 Nº 18A- 12, Bogotá, Colombia). Adriana Díaz del Castillo Hernández is an independent researcher with the consultancy firm CESTA (Carrera 6 No. 48 A 77, Bogotá, Colombia). Abstract Recent work on genomics and race makes the argument that concepts and categories of race are subtly reproduced in the practice of genomic science, despite the explicit rejection of race as meaningful biological reality by many geneticists. Our argument in this paper is that racialized meanings in genomics, rather than standing alone, are very often wrapped up in ideas about nation. This seems to us a rather neglected aspect in the literature about genomics and race. More specifically, we characterize race as an absent presence in Latin American and argue that genomics in the region finds a particular expression of race through concepts of nation, because this vehicle suits the deep-rooted ambiguity of race in the region. To make this argument we use data from an ethnographic project with genetics labs in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics Link to Supplement item 1(a) about here. Link to Supplement item 1 (b) here. The citation itself can be linked. In the footnote a link can be made to Supplement item 2(c) Link to Supplement item 2 (a). The citation can be linked. Link to Supplement item 2 (b) about here. You could insert the following “(see for example, Pena et al. 2009)”, and add a link to that. Full reference for the bibliography: Pena, S.D.J., L. Bastos-Rodrigues, J.R. Pimenta, et al. 2009. DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research 42(10):870-876. Link to Supplement item 3(a). Citation itself can be linked. This article draws on a collaborative project “Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparative approach” funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of the United Kingdom (grant RES-062-23-1914) and the Leverhulme Foundation (grant RPG-044). It was directed by Peter Wade, with co-directors Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo and Ricardo Ventura Santos; Research Associates, Vivette García Deister, Michael Kent, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra and Sandra González; and Research Assistants, Adriana Díaz del Castillo H., Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, Mariana Rios Sandoval and Roosbelinda Cárdenas. See HYPERLINK "http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/research/rgm/" http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/research/rgm/. The ideas expressed here are indebted to the conversations and exchanges of ideas with project team members. Ethnographic research was conducted in several labs, including ones located in the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Universidade Federal do Pará in Belém, the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín and the Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica in Mexico City. This article draws on these ethnographic data and on the scientists’ published papers. Introduction Much recent work on genomics and race makes the argument that concepts and categories of race are subtly reproduced in the practice of genomic science, despite the explicit rejection of race as a meaningful biological reality by many geneticists. Often this conclusion emerges from studies done in the United States, where standardised social categories of race are already part of public discourse, policy and research practice in medicine, including medical genomics. For overviews, see Abu El-Haj ADDIN EN.CITE (2007), Duster ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Duster</Author><Year>2003</Year><RecNum>1766</RecNum><DisplayText>(Duster 2003)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>1766</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">1766</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Duster, Troy</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Backdoor to eugenics</title></titles><edition>2nd</edition><dates><year>2003</year></dates><pub-location>London</pub-location><publisher>Routledge</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(Duster 2003), Kahn ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Kahn</Author><Year>2013</Year><RecNum>3492</RecNum><DisplayText>(2013)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3492</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3492</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Kahn, Jonathan</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Race in a bottle: the story of BiDil and racialized medicine in a post-genomic age</title></titles><dates><year>2013</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>Columbia University Press</publisher><isbn>9780231162982</isbn><urls><related-urls><url>http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qw_HNWaOsnAC</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2013), Koenig, Lee and Richardson ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Koenig</Author><Year>2008</Year><RecNum>2172</RecNum><DisplayText>(2008)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2172</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2172</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Edited Book">28</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Koenig, Barbara A.</author><author>Lee, Sandra Soo-Jin</author><author>Richardson, Sarah S.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Revisiting race in a genomic age</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>New Brunswick, NJ</pub-location><publisher>Rutgers University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2008), Krimsky and Sloan ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Krimsky</Author><Year>2011</Year><RecNum>3231</RecNum><DisplayText>(2011)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3231</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3231</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Krimsky, Sheldon</author><author>Sloan, Kathleen</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Race and the genetic revolution: science, myth, and culture</title></titles><dates><year>2011</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>Columbia University Press</publisher><isbn>9780231156967</isbn><urls><related-urls><url>http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mgZ8mZu8WwkC</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2011), Marks ADDIN EN.CITE (2013), Palsson ADDIN EN.CITE (2007), Roberts ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Roberts</Author><Year>2011</Year><RecNum>3493</RecNum><DisplayText>(2011)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3493</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3493</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Roberts, Dorothy</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Fatal invention: how science, politics, and big business re-create race in the twenty-first century</title></titles><dates><year>2011</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>New Press</publisher><isbn>9781595588340</isbn><urls><related-urls><url>http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8yUuuAAACAAJ</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2011), Rose ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Rose</Author><Year>2007</Year><RecNum>2254</RecNum><Pages>155-186</Pages><DisplayText>(2007: 155-186)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2254</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2254</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Rose, Nikolas </author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century</title></titles><dates><year>2007</year></dates><pub-location>Princeton, NJ</pub-location><publisher>Princeton University Press</publisher><urls><related-urls><url>Dawson ebook</url></related-urls></urls><research-notes>Ch 6 (pp. 155-186) is on race and genomic medicine.&#xD;&#xD;160-61: traces constant link between race, medecine and genetics in US medicine, where race is often seen as a biological reality; but there is also some ambiguity; as some people see environment as key; etc. Says race in genomics is not the same as the old racial science; it is different in part because of the identity politics at work, in which race can function positively for some biosocial communities (uses example of Howard University [p. 174]); and in part because genomics treats race in a molecular not molar way (molar is the old typological view, perhaps added to with simple notions of genetic determinism); race now operates in the ambiguous space between the molecular level and the molar level&#xD;&#xD;177: contests simple notions of geneticisation of identity; genetics doesn&apos;t lead simply back to eugenics; instead it is all about how race inserts into practices of self-actualisation, enterprise, choice, prudence, etc. (uses e.g. of tracing genetic ancestry - Motherland programme, commercial comapneis in US, etc.)&#xD;&#xD;179: says identity and race, when “rewritten at the genomic level, visualized through a molecular optic” are “both transformed”. </research-notes></record></Cite></EndNote>(2007:155-186), Whitmarsh and Jones ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Whitmarsh</Author><Year>2010</Year><RecNum>2750</RecNum><DisplayText>(2010)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2750</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2750</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Edited Book">28</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Whitmarsh, Ian</author><author>Jones, David S.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>What&apos;s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference</title></titles><dates><year>2010</year></dates><pub-location>Cambridge, MA</pub-location><publisher>MIT Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2010). See also, among many others, Bliss ADDIN EN.CITE (2009, 2011, 2012), Fullwiley ADDIN EN.CITE (2007a, 2007b, 2008), Montoya ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Montoya</Author><Year>2011</Year><RecNum>2950</RecNum><DisplayText>(2011)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2950</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2950</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Montoya, Michael J.</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Making the Mexican diabetic: race, science, and the genetics of inequality</title></titles><dates><year>2011</year></dates><pub-location>Berkeley, CA</pub-location><publisher>University of California Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2011). In this paper, we use Latin American data to develop and diversify this argument by bringing the concept of nation strongly into the picture. In most countries in the region, the categories and language of race are a much less accepted feature of policy and public discourse than in the US, even after some two decades of multiculturalist reform that have given recognition to black and indigenous “ethnic” minorities. Even in Brazil, where categories of “colour” – and, since 1991, “colour/race” – have been used for many decades in the census, where race has long been an academic topic, and where it is accepted by many that racism and racial inequality are problems, there is a heated debate about whether racial categories are an appropriate tool for policy-making in a country that is very mixed (Carvalho 2005; Fry et al. 2007; Guimarães 1999; Htun 2004). In many Latin American countries, race is an absent presence – both erased and denied, and yet present in an everyday sense and in some official domains. The way race appears – and disappears – in genomic science in Latin America reflects this deep-rooted ambiguity. Our data indicate that race-like or racialized categories are visible in genomic science in the region, while the same science acts as a forum for the denial of race, as a biological reality and, in some cases, as a relevant social category. Racialized categories are implied in the use of concepts of genetic ancestry – usually talked of in terms of African, European and Amerindian components. For the geneticists, genetic ancestry (understood as very specific sets of genetic markers) is distinct from race (which they understood as a set of coherent biological-bodily types). But the constant reference to African, European and Amerindian ancestries evokes familiar racial meanings. This is a process of implicit racialization, insofar as the concept of genetic ancestry does not speak of “race” in explicit terms, but it nevertheless evokes meanings that are recognisably linked to a discourse of race, seen in all its historical variety. We define racialized discourses as those that – even if the word race is absent – interweave notions of physical appearance, heredity, nature-culture and essences together with the classic historical categories of race produced by colonial and post-colonial domination (e.g. black/African, Indian/Amerindian/indigenous, white/European, Asian, etc.). The erasure or sublimation of explicit reference to race is what Goldberg ADDIN EN.CITE (2008) calls race being “buried alive” and others have called neo-racism ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Balibar</Author><Year>1991</Year><RecNum>30</RecNum><DisplayText>(Balibar 1991)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>30</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">30</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Balibar, Etienne</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Balibar, Etienne</author><author>Wallerstein, Immanuel</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Is there a &apos;neo-racism&apos;?</title><secondary-title>Race, nation and class: ambiguous identities</secondary-title></titles><pages>17-28</pages><dates><year>1991</year></dates><pub-location>London</pub-location><publisher>Verso</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(Balibar 1991), new racism ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite><Author>Winant</Author><Year>2002</Year><RecNum>3366</RecNum><DisplayText>(Winant 2002)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3366</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3366</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Winant, Howard</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The world is a ghetto: race and democracy since World War II</title></titles><dates><year>2002</year></dates><pub-location>New York</pub-location><publisher>Basic Books</publisher><isbn>9780465043415</isbn><urls><related-urls><url>http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-VQtTCQ9F-gC</url></related-urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(Winant 2002) or cultural racism ADDIN EN.CITE (Hale 2006:144; Taguieff 1990). Race thus combines a) certain ways of categorising human difference, which link bodies and behaviour in a naturalizing discourse – bearing in mind that what counts as “nature” varies by cultural and historical context; and b) certain categories of difference that have their roots in a “modern” history of oppression. Race is thus a biosocial or natural/cultural fact (Hartigan 2013a; Marks 2013; Wade 2002). It is important that race is usually not explicitly mentioned in this Latin American genetic science and in some cases is vehemently denied as a biological reality. It is thus an absent presence. This is both because race is a contested concept in genomics generally and because the particular instances of genomics science we are exploring here are located in Latin American nations, where race has long been an absent presence in society. This does not mean Latin American geneticists are compartmentalized into purely national or regional domains of knowledge production – on the contrary, they are part of a transnational scientific community – but the nation (and sometimes the supra-national region) play an important role in shaping the approaches of these scientists, as we show below. Our argument in this paper is that racialized meanings in genomics, rather than standing alone, are very often wrapped up in ideas about nation. This seems to us a rather neglected aspect in the literature about genomics and race. More specifically, the absent presence of race in Latin American genomics finds a particular expression in concepts of nation, because this vehicle suits the deep-rooted ambiguity of race in the region. The nation figures in critical commentaries on genomic patrimony and sovereignty (Benjamin 2009; Rabinow 1999). Nation is also important in studies of biobanks and national databases (Fortun 2008; Hinterberger 2012; Pálsson 2007; Pálsson and Rabinow 1999) and in concepts of biological-genetic citizenship (Heath, Rapp, and Taussig 2007; Rose 2007; Rose and Novas 2005). The nation does not, however, figure much in studies – many of them focusing on the US – of the way racialized meanings are reproduced and transformed in genomic science. When the nation does figure more prominently, it tends to be for contexts outside the US (e.g., Benjamin 2009 on Mexico and India; Kohli-Laven 2012 on French Canada; Nash 2012 on Britain). More generally, the nation tends to figure as the nation-state, with the focus on citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, rather than on the nation as an imagined community or identity. Rose ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Rose</Author><Year>2007</Year><RecNum>2254</RecNum><Pages>155-186</Pages><DisplayText>(2007: 155-186)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2254</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2254</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Rose, Nikolas </author></authors></contributors><titles><title>The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century</title></titles><dates><year>2007</year></dates><pub-location>Princeton, NJ</pub-location><publisher>Princeton University Press</publisher><urls><related-urls><url>Dawson ebook</url></related-urls></urls><research-notes>Ch 6 (pp. 155-186) is on race and genomic medicine.&#xD;&#xD;160-61: traces constant link between race, medecine and genetics in US medicine, where race is often seen as a biological reality; but there is also some ambiguity; as some people see environment as key; etc. Says race in genomics is not the same as the old racial science; it is different in part because of the identity politics at work, in which race can function positively for some biosocial communities (uses example of Howard University [p. 174]); and in part because genomics treats race in a molecular not molar way (molar is the old typological view, perhaps added to with simple notions of genetic determinism); race now operates in the ambiguous space between the molecular level and the molar level&#xD;&#xD;177: contests simple notions of geneticisation of identity; genetics doesn&apos;t lead simply back to eugenics; instead it is all about how race inserts into practices of self-actualisation, enterprise, choice, prudence, etc. (uses e.g. of tracing genetic ancestry - Motherland programme, commercial comapneis in US, etc.)&#xD;&#xD;179: says identity and race, when “rewritten at the genomic level, visualized through a molecular optic” are “both transformed”. </research-notes></record></Cite></EndNote>(2007:155-186) and Roberts ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Roberts</Author><Year>2010</Year><RecNum>3202</RecNum><DisplayText>(2010)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3202</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3202</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Roberts, Dorothy</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Whitmarsh, Ian</author><author>Jones, David S.</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Race and the new biocitizen</title><secondary-title>What&apos;s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference</secondary-title></titles><pages>259-276</pages><dates><year>2010</year></dates><pub-location>Cambridge, MA</pub-location><publisher>MIT Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2010) address race and biocitizenship – focusing on the US – in terms of biosocial communities and processes of inclusion and exclusion, but without exploring the nation in terms of identity and belonging. Yet in Latin America and elsewhere, the intersections of race and nation are well known, particularly in relation to national identities. This paper explores the way race and nation interweave in genomic science in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The aim is to show how the evocation and discussion of the nation, in genomic science, provides an arena for the deep-seated ambiguity of race as an absent presence that is articulated and re-articulated. Race in Genomic Science Since the 1980s, the era of “genomics”, enabled by huge advances in DNA sequencing, has allowed the study of whole genomes as well as complex gene-environment interactions. Geneticists have long been interested in the genetic dimensions of human variation and genomic-era tools have allowed them to map genetic diversity in ever-greater detail, providing data that can help in exploring human evolutionary diversification and global migration histories, and in the search for genetic variants that may be linked, in as yet undetermined ways, to disorders such as diabetes and heart disease. The conceptualization and categorization of human diversity is thus of perennial interest to geneticists and to others concerned with their work. The question of “race” has been one area of discussion in these debates, especially as many geneticists reject the concept of race as a biologically meaningful category (Cooper, Kaufman, and Ward 2003), while others suggest it has some biological validity in medical genomics (Burchard et al. 2003), indicating a lack of consensus. See also the references cited in note 2. Studies, based in the United States, show us what can happen to racial categories in genomic practice. Fullwiley contends that use of “ancestry informative markers” (AIMs, which are specific genetic markers that help to indicate where a person’s distant ancestors came from) by US geneticists brings about “a correspondence of familiar ideas of race and supposed socially neutral DNA”. Thus populations of Africans, Europeans and Native Americans are sampled and then used as “putatively pure reference populations” to define the genetic ancestry of what geneticists call “admixed” populations, such as African Americans, Mexicans or Puerto Ricans (Fullwiley 2008:695). The simple use of social taxonomies in genomic research risks conflating social and genetic definitions of populations (Bliss 2009, 2011). Even in nominally “race-free” software, used by geneticists to detect how samples cluster together in terms of their genetic similarity, concepts about the bio-geographical origins of populations constantly filter into the analysis, as standard population samples representing African, European and Asian ancestry are routinely used as reference points to organise and compare the data. This “genome geography” can approximate to familiar notions of race, even if the geneticists themselves are careful to avoid this language (Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011). Our ethnographic research in genetics labs in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico revealed some of the same processes at work. Geneticists by now had generally rejected the language of race (Gómez Gutiérrez, Briceño Balcázar, and Bernal Villegas 2011; Pena 2008) – although some had made occasional reference to “the three races” (African, European and Amerindian) twenty years before (Gómez Gutiérrez 1991) and talk of “racial mixture” as a biological process had been common up until the 1980s (Franco, Weimer, and Salzano 1982). In Brazil, in particular, geneticist Sergio Pena was very vocal in the rejection of race as a valid concept, genetically and medically (Pena 2005, 2008). Still, it was very common practice to analyse the genetic make-up of sample populations in terms of the contributions of African, European and Amerindian genetic ancestry: there was a clear “genome geography” at work. This practice was not seen by the geneticists as involving a biological concept of race, because it made use of specific sets of genetic markers, often unrelated to phenotype. This was not a question of dividing up people into clear “races”, much less assigning them relative value. But the practice inevitably evoked the possibility – especially among those less versed in genetic science – to think about Africans, Europeans and Amerindians as biologically distinct populations. We also found that, using social criteria, geneticists routinely separated their samples into three sets of populations labelled as “African-derived” (or a variant thereof), “Amerindian” or “indigenous”, and “mestizo” (people popularly and scientifically understood to have a mixture of European, African and Amerindian ancestry). Genetic data on these categories would frequently be collected and presented separately, even if the data also showed that these populations were, genetically speaking, often mixed and thus not biologically separable (García Deister 2011; Wade 2013). This could create the impression that the populations were not only socially but biologically different (Wade et al. 2014, forthcoming). So far, so similar to studies of genomics and race in other regions. But we want to push the analysis further by approaching the relations between genomics and race from the perspective of the nation. Before we do this, it is helpful to look briefly at the relationship between race and nation in Latin America in more general terms. Race and Nation in Latin America The links between the concepts of race and nation have been well established. The way in which, in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards, the emerging concept of the nation and its people depended on ideas of blood and breeding, kinship and genealogy, (im)purity and sexual (im)propriety – all key features of contemporary ideas about race – have been explored in detail. The ways racism can thus be an expression of nationalism, and vice versa, have also been analysed (Alonso 1994; Balibar 1991b; Foucault 1979; Gilroy 1987; Mosse 1985; Povinelli 2002; Stoler 1995; Wade 2002). In Latin America, race and nation intersected in ways that were similar to, but also different from those in Europe (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003; Basave Benítez 1992; Gotkowitz 2011b; Graham 1990; Wade 2001, 2009b). European and North American ideas about race were influential in the ways elites thought about building their new nations, which were internally diverse. Colombia and Brazil, for example, had important black populations, with slavery in place until 1851 in Colombia and 1888 in Brazil, and Colombia and especially Mexico had significant indigenous populations. In all three countries, racial hierarchy was – and remains – very marked, with black and indigenous populations at the bottom of the social scale. In this context, the fact of mestizaje (mestiçagem in Brazil), understood as the physical and cultural blending of “the three races” of Africans/blacks, Europeans/whites and indigenous people, was a key point of reflection: in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, mestizos were the majority population. The mixture of races was held to be a degenerative process by European racial science and this posed problems for Latin American elites and their mainly mixed citizens. Elites varied in their reactions. On the one hand, they generally saw black and indigenous peoples as inferior and refractory inputs into the developing nation; mestizos might also be seen as degenerate and difficult. The way forward was to encourage large-scale European immigration, which would “whiten” the population. On the other hand, mixedness was embraced by some as a different way forward that was not entirely beholden to European – especially Anglo-Saxon – definitions of racial hierarchy, which condemned Latin American nations to a biologically determined inferiority. These thinkers hoped there could be a “constructive miscegenation” (Stepan 1991) which, in their view, would actually enhance liberal democracy by erasing divides based on race – and which might, into the bargain, lead to a “whitened” society, as “white” traits were believed to prevail over black and indigenous traits. The Colombian politician José María Samper talked of “this marvellous work of the mixture of races”, which he considered could “produce a wholly democratic society, a race of republicans” and would give “the New World its particular character” (Samper 1861:299). Later exemplars of the positive assessment of mestizaje included the Mexican politician, José Vasconcelos, who described the Latin American mestizo as the founder of a future universal and superior “cosmic race” (1997 [1925]); and the Brazilian writer, Gilberto Freyre, who painted a favourable picture of a tropical Brazilian society, in which mixture was a solution rather than a problem (Freyre 1946 [1933]). These are indications of a post-colonial concern with defining and defending a Latin American specificity, based on the image of mixture, in the context of global hierarchies of value, based on whiteness. At the same time, these global hierarchies retained their power, insofar as whiteness remained a highly valued trait in Latin American societies, linked to economic and political dominance. From about the 1920s in Latin America, a public discourse explicitly about raza (race) tended to decline, with more emphasis given to “culture” (or terms such as “soul” and “spirit”) to refer to a people or a nation, although “culture” could retain many of the essentialist and embodied meanings often associated with the concept of race and the term race did not disappear (De la Cadena 2000; Gotkowitz 2011a; Restrepo 2007; Wade 2010). Everyday reference to, for example, la raza negra (the black race) remained and remains a possibility – although it is more common to hear references to los negros. In Mexico and among Mexican Americans, one can find public use of la raza to refer to a national collectivity, but one which imagines “a culture of mixedness, one in which biology [is] specifically downplayed” (Hartigan 2013b:32). In the last two decades, multiculturalist reforms in many Latin American nations have given differentiated legal rights to black and indigenous minorities and, while public discourse around these reforms has generally used a language of ethnicity and culture, there has been renewed attention to the problem of racism – especially in Colombia and Brazil (Htun 2004; Meertens 2009; Restrepo 2012:180; Wade 2009a) – which in turn has placed the concept of race onto the table, quite explicitly in the case of Brazil. This brief outline gives an indication of the ways race and nation have been woven together in Latin American contexts. Race has been quite explicit at some points, as in the 1920 book Los problemas de la raza en Colombia (Jiménez López et al. 1920); or in the use of raza to refer to collective groups, united by history and culture, but also common descent; or in the use of raza to refer to categories seen as phenotypically distinct – and especially subordinate (e.g., la raza negra). At other points, race has been quite implicit, for example, when it is only suggested by references to categories such as los blancos (the whites), los indios (the Indians), which do not use the word race but evoke racialized concepts. At yet other points, race has been denied, seen as a concept relevant to the United States or South Africa, but not Latin America; or seen as an outmoded concept redolent of racism and threatening to divide a basically non-racialized society. The ambiguity of ideas about race, which has long roots in Latin America, are reflected in the way racialized meanings are at once present and absent in Latin American genomic science, an absent presence that is enabled by the invocation of the nation as a relevant, and often taken-for-granted, unit of analysis and concern. In what follows, we explore concrete examples of these entanglements. Genomics, Public Health and the Nation In line with the fact that health improvement is a major driver for much genomic research, the Mexican state in 2004 set up and funded a new Instituto Nacional de Medicina Genómica, INMEGEN. Its first major project, starting in 2005, was the Mexican Populations Genomic Diversity Project, popularly known as the Map of the Genome of Mexican Populations (the title of a public dissemination booklet on the project). See HYPERLINK "http://www.inmegen.gob.mx/tema/cms_page_media/430/libro_ilustrado.pdf" http://www.inmegen.gob.mx/tema/cms_page_media/430/libro_ilustrado.pdf. Already a slippage is evident in the move from the scientific “genomic diversity” to the popular “genome” of Mexicans, as if there were one specific genome. From the beginning, the project had strongly nationalist overtones, seeking to put Mexico on the international genomic science map (cf. Bustamante, De La Vega, and Burchard 2011) and basing itself on the idea that the “genomic sovereignty” of the nation was at stake (Benjamin 2009; López Beltrán and Vergara Silva 2011). This idea, imbued with postcolonial sensibilities, implied that the nation should exercise custodianship over the genetic resources of its people (parallel to the way it has control over the animals and plant life in its territory) and that foreign use of these resources should be strictly regulated. But the notion also depended on the idea that, in the words of the Institute’s director, Gerardo Jiménez Sánchez, “Mexico has a population of unique genomic makeup as a result of its history” (Schwartz-Marín and Silva-Zolezzi 2010:495). Project participants were reported to agree that “there are unique patterns of variation that might exist in sub-populations that have implications for the development of genomic diagnostics and therapeutics in Mexico” (Seguín et al. 2008: S5). The underlying idea was that Mexico was characterised by being mestizo, but also that its mestizaje was unique, because of a “unique history [that] resulted in a population that derives from more than 60 local Amerindian groups, Europeans, and, to a lesser extent, Africans” (Jimenez-Sanchez et al. 2008:1192). This meant that “genomic medicine in Mexico needs to be based on the genetic structure and health demands of the Mexican population, rather than importing applications developed for other populations” (Jimenez-Sanchez 2003:295-296). The sampling methods of the project reinforced the standard geography of the nation: samples were taken during highly publicised trips to a number of cities and the data were organised and presented by Mexican state, showing the proportions of African, European and Amerindian ancestry for each state (Silva-Zolezzi et al. 2009). The very idea of a “map” of the Mexican genome was made concrete in a map of the nation (Haraway 1997:131-172). For this and subsequent examples, the reader is encouraged to view the maps and charts that form part of key scientific papers. Internet links are given in Supplement A. In effect, the nation was being geneticised and presented as a biological unit, with its own particular characteristics that apparently differentiated it from other mestizo countries. The word race was barely mentioned in all this: it was not explicitly denied; it was simply almost completely absent. In fact, an early account of the project, by two journalists for the international audience of Nature Biotechnology, did describe it as a “race-based genome project” ADDIN EN.CITE (Guerrero Mothelet and Herrera 2005), but this is the only occurrence we found. Yet the categories of Europeans and Amerindians (and Africans) – geographical and social categories given genetic dimensions and racialized in the sense defined at the start of this article – were constantly deployed to give meaning to the concept of mestizo (López Beltrán 2011:22-25). The mestizo is a figure in which, as in the concept of la raza, biology might be downplayed in favour of history and culture, but is still present as a trace. For the geneticists, what they were doing was far removed from race, because they were dealing with particular sets of genetic markers, which indicated certain ancestral origins in particular parts of the world where such markers were common; they were not defining populations as the racial types of late nineteenth-century racial science. Yet the way the data were presented often showed European, Amerindian and African reference populations as separate clusters or points on a chart, apparently biologically distinct entities (Silva-Zolezzi et al. 2009). Claims about genomic sovereignty also suggested the genetic separateness of the national population. The way the data were collected and presented also reinforced a clear distinction between indígenas and mestizos as the key categories that constitute the Mexican nation. Even though the indigenous populations might be, from a genetic point of view, mestizos, they were still presented as distinct category (García Deister 2014). The Mexican Genomic Diversity Project (MGDP) is a clear example of a discourse that is primarily about the nation, in a post-colonial context, in which ideas about race do not figure explicitly at all. It is evident, however, that racialized meanings are immanent in the use of concepts of bio-geographical genetic ancestry, which can escape the particular definitions geneticists give to them and can evoke familiar ideas of la raza negra or la raza india. The key point for our argument, however, is that these racialized meanings gain particular traction from their articulation within the imaginative space of the “mestizo nation”; this is above and beyond the racialization that may result from the way in which genomic science deploys its concept of genetic ancestry or from the way this may be interpreted by non-geneticists in relation to existing popular concepts of race. It is the concept of the mestizo or Mexican nation that allows these racialized meanings to be both absent and present, in a characteristically Mexican way. The mestizo nation is a natural-cultural construct built on the idea of simultaneous biological and cultural mixture, and rooted in the foundational mixture of distinct continental populations – Europeans and Amerindians (with Africans having been systematically marginalized in Mexico, despite some recent moves to correct this). Genomic studies in Brazil show the key role played by the idea of the nation as a space in which racial meanings are made both present and absent. One geneticist working on pharmacogenetics has affirmed that studies done elsewhere to link genetic profiles to drug response for “well-defined ethnic groups” are not easily applicable to Brazil where there is a “poor correlation between Color [the Brazilian census term] and [genetic] ancestry” (Suarez-Kurtz 2011:122, 132). The argument is that Brazilian geneticists should preferably use measures of genetic biogeographical ancestry (proportions of European, African and Amerindian ancestry), rather than colour/race self-identifications (Suarez-Kurtz 2011:123). Pharmacogenetic research in Brazil has “the potential to contribute relevant information toward personalized drug prescription worldwide”, by offering a focus on diverse and more admixed populations (Suarez-Kurtz 2011:132). The issue of race is broached in explicit terms, with the Brazilian census term cor (colour) being taken as “equivalent to the English term ‘race’”, and simultaneously its relevance is denied because colour/race terms are seen as inadequate to medically handle the variety of mixed ancestries in Brazil and indeed more generally, as “many populations” are admixed (Suarez-Kurtz 2005:196). Then, a racialized concept hovers in the background, as mixture is conceived in terms of differing proportions of European, African and Amerindian ancestries. Throughout, it is the Brazilian nation that acts as the common-sense forum both for the denial of race and for reference to race or to racialized ancestries. There is a similar pattern in the work of prominent population geneticist, Sergio Pena. He is explicit about the need to de-racialize medicine (Pena 2005). He believes that “the only way of dealing scientifically with the genetic variability of Brazilians is individually, as singular and unique human beings in their mosaic genomes and in their life histories” (Birchal and Pena 2011:93). Pena maintains that race is not valid biologically and particularly makes no sense for the highly diverse Brazilian population. See the video by Pena to illustrate the “We R No Race” campaign, HYPERLINK "http://wearenorace.com/" http://wearenorace.com/. Alongside Pena’s anti-race stance, the nation continues to play a key role and, as in Mexico, is a space in which race both disappears and reappears. In the popular science text “Retrato Molecular do Brasil”, or Molecular Portrait of Brazil (Pena et al. 2000), Pena explains the non-existence of biological races, but also gives an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of samples of Brazilians that apportions matrilineal ancestry into African, Amerindian and European components. Pena takes trouble to explain mitochondrial DNA matrilineages and haplogroups, but the apportionment of ancestry in terms of bio-geographical categories of continental dimensions still suggests the existence of three biologically distinct populations, which combine to create a biologically defined national population. Although there are no claims made about national uniqueness, the nation forms the taken-for-granted unit of analysis and the article title recalls Prado’s classic essay on Brazilian national characteristics, Retrato do Brasil (1931). The idea of the Brazilian nation thus encompasses both a vehement denial of biological racial difference, highlighted as a national characteristic as well as a universal truth, and a portrait of the country based on the mixture of bio-geographical populations that seem to be biologically distinctive – and correspond to familiar ideas about colours/races in Brazil – and that, when mixed, produce a distinctive genetic national profile. The nation creates a space in which it is common knowledge that Brazil is both a place where race might not really be relevant; and a place founded by three bio-geographically distinctive ancestral populations. In grasping the role of the nation in articulating the absent-presence of racial meanings, it is important to appreciate that shifting scales of analysis can operate. For some purposes, it make sense for geneticists to present data and findings samples framed as “Mexican” or “Brazilian”, as we have shown, and this can be for national and international audiences. In other cases, the relevant unit of analysis is supra-national – “Latin American mestizos”, “Hispanics”, “South America”, the “Americas”, or “trihybrid populations of the Americas” (Bedoya et al. 2006; Bortolini et al. 1995; Galanter et al. 2012; Suarez-Kurtz 2005; Wang et al. 2008). Or the focus may be on a particular region within the nation, such as north-west Colombia or southern Brazil (Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000; Marrero et al. 2007). These scalar shifts show two characteristics. First, the articles emphasize heterogeneity, pointing out that the supra-national categories are very diverse in terms of their mixtures. Thus the argument that Suarez-Kurtz makes for Brazil, described above, he also makes for “admixed populations” in general, with the “trihybrid populations of the Americas” as exemplars. Pharmacogenomics needs to address increasing global patterns of admixture, which increases heterogeneity and leads in his view to greater “fluidity of racial and/or ethnic labels”; researchers are limited by a focus on “well-defined ethnic groups” (Suarez-Kurtz 2005:196). Heterogeneity also occurs within nations: sub-national regions may be quite varied (on Colombia, see Olarte Sierra and Díaz del Castillo H. 2013). For example, referring to admixture mapping techniques, which study admixed populations in the search for disease-linked genetic variants, one study commented that “optimal application of this approach [of admixture mapping] in Hispanics will require that the strategy used is adjusted to the specific admixture history of the population from where patients are being ascertained” (Bedoya et al. 2006:7238). That is, “Hispanics” – a category used by some North American researchers – were not all the same, but varied massively according to regional histories. What emerges is that the national origin of populations was not always important. In that sense, genomics did not necessarily reproduce the nation as a foundational concept. However, second, the data always reflect mixture, analyzed in terms of European, African and Amerindian ancestries; in that sense the larger and smaller scales reproduce the dynamics that can be observed for nations. Race is not explicitly mentioned in the way it may be in publications more firmly located in the US science academy (Burchard et al. 2005), but it is evoked by the very concept of mestizo and mixture. In that sense, race as an absent presence works to articulate these different scales together. In sum, the absent presence of racialized concepts could circulate with or without the idea of the nation as a powerful organizer, but they drew particular force from their articulation with the nation, because in Latin America the national frame has traditionally been and remains today the space for discourses about both the natural-cultural process of mixture and its originary populations, and the way in which mixture is thought to generate the possibilities for the transcendence and invisibility of race. The nation is a frame that permits both the idea (or rather ideal) of a “racial democracy” supposedly born of endless mixtures and the idea of racial difference, originary and persisting, which generates the possibility of mixture in the first place, but a mixture that produces anything but a racial democracy. Multiculturalism, affirmative action and the nation Since about 1990, multiculturalist political, legal and constitutional reforms have been under way – unevenly – in much of Latin America, giving greater recognition and rights to indigenous and black or “Afro-descendant” minorities (Van Cott 2000; Wade 2010; Yashar 2005). These reforms are the cause and result of a contested and publicly debated process of re-imagining the nation to be more inclusive of “ethnic” minorities, moving away from the a singular image of the (often lighter-skinned) mestizo as the unquestioned citizen. Typically, the debates are phrased in terms of culture and history, but race is always absently present, because the discussions concern the relative places of blackness and indigeneity in the nation (and, to a lesser extent, mixedness and whiteness, which tend to function as unmarked categories of normality). Meanwhile, the atmosphere of reform – plus the impact of the 2001 Durban conference on racism – has resulted in more public attention to questions of racism, increasing the public presence of “race” in some instances. For example, in Colombia in 2009, the Vice-President’s office supported the first National Campaign Against Racism, as part of a government remit to combat racism, and in 2011 there was a state-sponsored local anti-racism campaign in Bogotá. On 14 February 2011, a Colombian state TV channel aired a programme about race and racism in Colombia, which asked people on the streets of Bogotá if they thought races existed. Many people said they did and some were happy to say to which one they belonged. See HYPERLINK "http://www.canalcapital.gov.co/defensor-del-televidente/3976-televidente-capital-14-de-febrero-de-2011" http://www.canalcapital.gov.co/defensor-del-televidente/3976-televidente-capital-14-de-febrero-de-2011 and HYPERLINK "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDHXls8wdu0&p=292C776DB8B3121B" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDHXls8wdu0&p=292C776DB8B3121B. In Brazil, race has been more explicit as a term of reference. The census has long had a “colour” question, asking people to identify as white, brown, black, yellow (meaning of Asian origin) or indigenous. In the 1991 census, as result of lobbying by black activists, the question changed to ask about “colour or race” (Nobles 2000:121). In 1995, the president publicly acknowledged that racism was a problem, which deserved redress through affirmative action policies, targeting the “black” population in the areas of higher education, employment and health (Htun 2004). This culminated in the passing of the Statute on Racial Equality in 2010, followed on 29 August 2012 by the Law of Social Quotas, consolidating the cotas raciais (racial quotas) that had begun in 2004 in some public university admissions. The way the nation and its internal diversity appear in genomic science is contradictory in this context and highlights clearly how, in genomics, the nation acts as a vehicle for articulating race as an ambiguous absent presence. On the one hand, some aspects of genomic science reinforce the multiculturalist version of the nation, highlighting racial difference. It was common practice in population genomics studies to distinguish samples along ethnic-racial lines. Thus mestizos, indigenous/Amerindian people and black people (usually labelled, in English, “African-derived”, Afro-descendant”, “Afro-Colombian” or, occasionally, “black”) – and, in Brazil, “white” people – were routinely treated as separate categories, giving rise to separate samples and presented separately in many publications. One overview Colombian study, for example, divided its various sample populations into categories labelled mestizo, Native American and African Colombian (see Figures A2 and A3); of the 24 samples, just one was African Colombian, apparently representing this entire category (Rojas et al. 2010). The criteria for identifying populations were diverse – and not always very clear – but were generally social ones. They might be based on where people lived. For example, when Colombian researchers wanted a population that was “mainly Caucasian”, they went to highland Antioquia (Builes et al. 2004), an area reputed in Colombia to be quite “white” and which previous studies had shown to be “a Caucasoid group with very low Amerindian or Negroid contributions” (Bravo, Valenzuela, and Arcos-Burgos 1996). When the same researchers did a study of “African descent” Colombians, they did not specify how the sample was chosen, but simply selected people resident in Chocó province (Builes et al. 2008), the so-called black province of Colombia (Wade 1993). Criteria could also be perceptions of appearance: some Brazilian studies used “morphological classification”, “taking into consideration skin colour and characteristics such as hair type and nose and lip shape” (Bortolini et al. 1999:552) and another “clinically classified” the samples using measurements of phenotype (Parra et al. 2003:177). Criteria might also be based on self-identification: in the Mexican MGDP, volunteers were said to be “self-defined” as mestizos (Silva-Zolezzi et al. 2009:8616) and some Brazilian studies asked people to identify themselves, using census categories (Pimenta et al. 2006). Frequently, genealogical criteria were added to ensure volunteers were good ancestral representatives of a given locality or group: individuals were asked to confirm that their four grandparents had lived in the same locality (or spoke an indigenous language). Thus, using criteria of place of birth and/or descent and/or appearance and/or self-identity, the nation’s population was broken up into categories of people who were, effectively, black, indigenous, mixed or, in Brazil, white. As the criteria for differentiation were ones used in everyday social life, it is to be expected that this kind of categorization reproduced rather faithfully the image of the multicultural nation, with its separate “cultures”, which, in the Latin American case, are usually defined as either Afro-descendant, or indigenous, or neither of the above. The internal diversity of the nation was not defined in simple genetic terms – and race itself was either not mentioned or actively denied. Yet the way the samples were defined and the fact that the samples were then profiled genetically meant a racializing slippage between culture and nature was immanent, opening the possibility, especially for non-geneticists, of thinking about difference in biological mode. This way of using cultural categories makes them “appear to be genetic units; indeed it would make them genetic units” (Marks 2003:203). But this is not the whole story, because, at the same time, other aspects of genomic science challenge this multiculturalist perspective of a nation structured in terms of familiar cultural-racial categories. These aspects instead produce a second genomic version of the nation that emphasizes overall national mixedness and is thus orthogonal to the recently minted image of the multicultural nation, with its emphasis on black and indigenous ethnic minorities. Much of the overall thrust of genomic science in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico emphasized the category that has tended to go unmarked in multiculturalism – the mestizo majority. The mestizo – especially the light-skinned version – as the normal, unquestioned, majority and unmarked citizen, has long underpinned the national identities of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The mestizo is a deeply racialized character, because it is seen as the outcome of racial mixture, yet it appears raceless because that mixture is said to have blurred racial identities and boundaries. The mestizo’s apparent racelessness allows a blindness to racial difference and inequality, permitting these to be evaded (on colour-blindness, see Bonilla-Silva 2003; Frankenberg 1993; Reardon and TallBear 2012). Genomic science explicitly pointed to these countries as quintessentially mestizo nations – an image that is back-grounded in multiculturalist discourse. In doing so, genomics both marks the mestizo category and racializes it by constantly referring to its ancestral make-up in terms of European, African and Amerindian genetic contributions. Studies of Brazilian whites revealed they had appreciable amounts of Amerindian and African ancestry, while blacks and pardos (browns) had significant European ancestry (Alves-Silva et al. 2000; Pena and Bortolini 2004; Pena et al. 2000). Mexican populations were routinely labelled mestizo (Silva-Zolezzi et al. 2009). Many Colombian researchers described their samples as mestizo or detailed their mixed ancestries (Bedoya et al. 2006; Carvajal-Carmona et al. 2000; Rojas et al. 2010). Overview studies traced variation among Latin American mestizos (Wang et al. 2008). Other studies in Brazil and Colombia, while they might categorically separate black and indigenous populations from others, also showed that the former, especially the black populations, were often actually quite mixed in terms of genetic ancestry (Bortolini et al. 1999; Rojas et al. 2010). The emphasis on mixture was partly a reflection of the priorities of international genomic science, from whose perspective Latin America had two things going for it: indigenous populations, which could help researchers find out about the past and might give clues about disease-causing variants among contemporary mestizo populations; and mestizos themselves who could be useful genomic objects in the search for these same genetic variants. Yet the image of genetic mixture also fed back into taken-for-granted ideas of the character of Latin American nations as the products of mestizaje. The emphasis on mixture in Brazil was reflected in the way some geneticists lobbied against the affirmative action policies that allocated racial quotas for some university admissions. Sergio Pena, for example, criticised these policies on the basis that they had no foundation in biology – it was impossible to biologically define a category that could be the recipient of quota places for “blacks”. He acknowledged that social policy had to take into account social realities, but insisted that policy-makers should also be aware of the scientific evidence (Pena and Bortolini 2004) – and in 2010 the Supreme Court called him to give evidence in hearings on the constitutionality of the quotas. Pena also made more general statements against what he saw as the tendency of racial quotas to heighten racial division: “We strongly believe we should avoid this effect in Brazilian society. Biology contributes effectively to a nonracialist conception of mankind. And in Brazil, the consciousness of the weak correlation between colour and ancestry meets the utopian wish of a nonracialist society” (Birchal and Pena 2011:93). Pena also criticised public health policies aimed at the “black” population on the grounds that this social category did not define a medically and biologically meaningful population (Pena 2005; Santos et al. 2009). In these controversies, “It is not just social policy that is at stake, but the country’s understanding and portrayal of itself” (Htun 2004:61). At issue is the image of Brazil seen as a country where “race” has not had, and should not acquire, a strong grip on the public imagination. This is an image built in part on an implicit comparison with the United States – a comparison that has been self-consciously developed by some Brazilian intellectuals over many decades in a dialogue with the United States (Seigel 2009). Some Brazilians fear that race-based affirmative actions threaten to crystallise and heighten racial divisions in a country where, although racism and racial inequality are undeniable, some believe that they are best combated by an attack on class inequality, not by emphasising racial identities (Fry et al. 2007). Pena was by no means alone in criticising race-based affirmative action policies, but what is notable is the use of a genetically-validated emphasis on the mixed nature of Brazilian society to undermine multiculturalist priorities about the way the nation should be conceived and built, with special attention given to underprivileged ethnic and racial minorities. In Colombia, the predominant emphasis on the mestizo as the typical member of the national population was combined with a highly flexible and varied definitions of mestizo by different geneticists. This allowed a number of different readings, which slipped between the genomic reiteration of the multiculturally diverse nation and the genomic insistence on mixture. Everyone was seen as mestizo, but some were seen as more mestizo than others, whether in terms of the relative proportions of biogeographical ancestries or their location in a racialized geography of the country (see below). This geography meant that, according to some geneticists, cities were more mestizo than rural areas or specific regions were more genetically indigenous or more African than others. In short, the emphasis on the mestizo co-existed with the possibility of defining Afro-Colombian and indigenous peoples or regions as different and other (Olarte Sierra and Díaz del Castillo H. 2013). In Latin American multiculturalism, the nation acts as an important frame for the way racialized meanings both appear and disappear in genomic science, paralleling the way they are absently present in the political domain. As race has become increasingly publicly present, especially in Brazil, in terms of political and social identities, often marked by phenotype within the nation, genomics is playing an interesting role. It denies the biological validity of race in general and highlights the mixedness of Latin American national populations; yet it also routinely uses familiar categorical distinctions to define both populations and their mixture – Africans, Europeans, Amerindians, Afrodescendants, mestizos, etc. Genomics racializes the mestizo and marks it – the usually unmarked category – as the centre of the nation, thus potentially drawing the mestizo into a politics of identity that is generally reserved for racial and ethnic “minorities”. Yet genomics still retains the apparent racelessness of the mestizo, because it denies biological race in general and in particular in a nation of mestizos. On the social level, the implications of these contradictory practices – implications only sometimes made explicit by geneticists – are likewise twofold: the irrelevance of the increased political salience of race as a point of identification and the inadequacy of categorical distinctions based on racial identities; and yet also increasing possibilities, especially among non-geneticists, for imagining a genetic basis for social categories that may, or may not, be named as “racial”. In a context in which race is becoming socially more present, genomics acts to make its presence more absent, without actually erasing it and indeed providing the conceptual wherewithal to biologize it in the public domain. Thus when BBC Brazil asked Sergio Pena to do ancestry tests on nine Brazilian celebrities and the famous black musician, Neguinho da Beija Flor (little black man of the Beija Flor samba school), was revealed to have 60% European ancestry, some commentators ironically re-named him Branquinho da Beija Flor (little white man…). HYPERLINK "http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2007/05/070424_dna_neguinho_cg.shtml" http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/reporterbbc/story/2007/05/070424_dna_neguinho_cg.shtml; see also HYPERLINK "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6284806.stm" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6284806.stm. These genomic facts were used as authenticators of racialized social identities, despite the fact that Sergio Pena is a keen exponent of the invalidity of race as biology. Regionalisation, Race and the Nation A final example of the entanglements of race and nation in genomic science comes from the way Colombian geneticists dealt with the country’s regional diversity (Olarte Sierra and Díaz del Castillo H. 2013). In 2003, a team of Colombian and Spanish forensic geneticists, based in institutes of legal medicine, published a paper with tables of allelic frequencies, defining four regional populations that could be used as reference points for Colombian forensic experts trying to match DNA samples (Paredes et al. 2003). For an example of how race/ethnicity enters into the definition of reference populations, see M’charek ADDIN EN.CITE (2005: Ch. 2). The Colombian Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) and the public prosecutor’s office then adopted these tables as the standard tool for DNA matching in paternity suits and the identification of living individuals and corpses. Like initiatives in Mexico and Brazil, this obeyed an underlying rationale of creating databases tailored to the character of national populations, rather than using imported ones. The regional populations in question were established by Paredes et al. using a combination of two methods. First, secondary sources were used to define four regions, rooted in historical demographic patterns said to have followed a “model of fragmented settlement and later unification” (Paredes et al. 2003:67). Second, genetic data from 1429 individuals were classified by department (administrative-territorial unit) of origin and the departments were grouped into clusters, according to genetic similarity, using a simple statistical technique. The clustering “showed a complete correlation of the genetic data with the historical classification”. The resulting map (see Figure A1) shows four regions (Paredes et al. 2003:68): (a) African-descendants population inhabiting the North Colombian Pacific coast and the Caribbean island of San Andrés, (b) ‘Mestizo’ populations from the Colombian mountain range of Los Andes and populations settled in the Amazonian region and Oriental flats (Orinoquian region), (c) populations from the Southwest Andean region (with an important Amerindian component), and (d) African-descendant populations inhabiting the Colombian Caribbean coast. In fact, there are no statistically significant differences in the allelic frequencies of the regions profiled in the paper, which makes the organization of the data into regional groups all the more striking. We are indebted to our colleague Ernesto Schwartz-Marín for this insight. The regional framing of the paper is rooted in commonplace descriptions of Colombia as a “country of regions” (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular 1998; Zambrano and Bernard 1993). For example, the state’s Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (IGAC) divides the country into five “natural regions”. These or very similar regions are frequently used by scholars to describe the country’s cultural zones (Abadía Morales 1983; Ocampo López 1988) and they are common currency in tourist descriptions. See the 2002 map at HYPERLINK "http://geoportal.igac.gov.co/mapas_de_colombia/IGAC/Tematicos/34813.jpg" http://geoportal.igac.gov.co/mapas_de_colombia/IGAC/Tematicos/34813.jpg. For a tourist description, see HYPERLINK "http://encolombia.about.com/od/ViajaraColombia/tp/Regiones-Colombianas.htm" http://encolombia.about.com/od/ViajaraColombia/tp/Regiones-Colombianas.htm). Although regional differences are generally phrased in the language of culture, they are often given racialized dimensions: the Pacific coastal region is seen as the “black region” of the nation; the Caribbean coastal region is very mixed, but with a strong black presence; the central region of mountain cordilleras and valleys are generally seen as lighter-skinned mestizo, with a more obvious indigenous presence in the south-west; the Amazon and Orinoco basins are, in their more remote reaches, populated by indigenous peoples (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular 1998; Wade 1993, 2000). Gutiérrez de Pineda (1975), for example, referred to regional “cultural complexes” labelled as “negroid”, “American”, “neo-Hispanic”, and “Antioqueño”, thus creating hybrid natural-cultural categories in which race both appears (especially in relation to black populations) and recedes. The IGAC’s 2012 map of cultural regions shows eleven regions, which are then grouped into three bigger categories by “anthropological origin”: Hispano-American, Amerindian and Afro-American. See the map at HYPERLINK "http://geoportal.igac.gov.co/mapas_de_colombia/IGAC/Tematicos2012/RegionesCulturales.pdf" http://geoportal.igac.gov.co/mapas_de_colombia/IGAC/Tematicos2012/RegionesCulturales.pdf. Thus the nation acts as a frame in which racial difference may not always be named, but can be evoked through a discourse of “cultural regions”. Other genetics papers took a more nuanced approach than Paredes et al. One article started with a classic regional description (Rojas et al. 2010:13): The population of mixed ancestry concentrates mainly in urban areas, particularly on the Andes. African-Colombians live predominantly on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and islands. Native American populations concentrate mainly in the East (on the vast Orinoco and Amazon river basins) and in rural areas of the SouthWest and North of the country. But Rojas et al. did not geneticize four simple regions in the way Paredes et al. did. In fact they divided up their 24 samples into nine regional categories and they made no attempt to describe each of these in genetic terms, emphasizing instead overall diversity. But they did reinforce the idea of a basic regional/racial structure by locating all their eight indigenous samples in “typical” indigenous peripheral regions, their single African Colombian sample in the Pacific coastal region, while the fifteen mestizo samples came from the rest of the country. They also suggested that there is a “geographic structure in the patterns of genetic variation in mestizo populations”, noting for example high levels of African ancestry in the mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA for the Caribbean and Pacific regions – but also “an important maternal African contribution” in North Santander, a province not usually associated with blackness. For the geneticist Emilio Yunis Turbay, regional diversity, with its deep historical and cultural roots, is a problem for Colombia and is related to the political fragmentation of the country and its problems of violence. Yunis’s popular book title asks plaintively, “Why are we like this? What happened in Colombia?” and he seeks the answer in “an analysis of mestizaje” (Yunis Turbay 2009). Interestingly, he explicitly – and unusually – uses the language of race: he identifies the “regionalization of race” and the “regionalization of genes” in Colombia as a profound problem, dividing the country and causing social exclusion and inequality (2009:19). He identifies the “black”, “Caucasian” and “indigenous” components of Colombia’s mestizaje and his maps of Colombia reiterate the classic racialized regionalization that locates “black Colombia” in the Pacific and Caribbean, the “indigenous contribution” in the far south-west and the Amazon/Orinoco regions, while central regions have mestizos with a strong “Caucasian contribution” (Yunis Turbay 2009:349-372). All these maps reproduce the regionalized nation, now in molecular idiom. Unlike Yunis, other researchers do not use the term race, yet Paredes et al. manage to make the racialized dimensions of region particularly explicit and effectively divide the country into mestizo, black and indigenous regions, while even the more nuanced approach of Rojas et al. ends up underlining, in genetic terms, basic features of the regional/racial structure of the nation. The nation and its regions are the taken-for-granted vehicle for affirming the significance of racial difference, while race itself remains an absent presence, explicit at some moments and hidden at others. Conclusion The analysis of these examples from Brazil, Colombia and Mexico reveal how crucial the nation is as a frame for understanding the way racialized concepts get reiterated and reworked in genomic science, in ways that make race both disappear and re-appear. Public health, multiculturalism and forensics are all political and policy domains that directly invoke the biopolitical nation and its people in terms of their well-being, their diversity and unity, and their biological relatedness in procreation, violence and death. The governance of these domains is of central interest to the state. Genomics also intervenes in these domains, with the promise of better health for the nation’s people, representations of both diversity and unity, and techniques for connecting bodies in ways that, it is hoped, will lead to reconciliations and peace. On the promissory character of genomics, see Fortun ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Fortun</Author><Year>2008</Year><RecNum>2767</RecNum><DisplayText>(2008)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>2767</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">2767</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Fortun, Michael</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Promising genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a world of speculation</title></titles><dates><year>2008</year></dates><pub-location>Berkeley</pub-location><publisher>University of California Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2008). The idea of race, in previous times, figured explicitly in the way all these domains were conceptualised in all three countries – los problemas de la raza, to recall the title of the 1920 Colombian book cited earlier on, concerned precisely health, progress, unity, diversity and conflict in the nation. Race was of course not the only factor to be considered – violent conflict, for example, also followed cleavages of class, region, religion or political faction – but it was an important way of thinking about difference and the problems it might cause within the nation. The demise of race as an explicit discourse for talking about these matters did not mean that racialized concepts disappeared. Geneticists and medics continued to be interested in the racial mixture of their national populations in relation to public health, cultural commentators continued to reflect on diversity in terms of black, indigenous and mestizo cultural traits, and indeed forensic scientists continued to classify bodies in more or less explicitly racial terms. On public health, see López Beltrán, García Deister and Rios Sandoval ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>López Beltrán</Author><Year>2014</Year><RecNum>3345</RecNum><DisplayText>(2014)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3345</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3345</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>López Beltrán, Carlos</author><author>García Deister, Vivette</author><author>Rios Sandoval, Mariana</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Wade, Peter</author><author>López Beltrán, Carlos</author><author>Restrepo, Eduardo</author><author>Santos, Ricardo Ventura</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Negotiating the Mexican mestizo: on the possibility of a national genomics</title><secondary-title>Genomics, race mixture and nation in Latin America</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2014</year></dates><pub-location>Durham NC</pub-location><publisher>Duke University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2014), Santos, Kent and Gaspar Neto ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Santos</Author><Year>2014</Year><RecNum>3369</RecNum><DisplayText>(2014)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3369</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3369</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Santos, Ricardo Ventura</author><author>Kent, Michael</author><author>Gaspar Neto, Verlan Valle</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Wade, Peter</author><author>López Beltrán, Carlos</author><author>Restrepo, Eduardo</author><author>Santos, Ricardo Ventura</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>From &apos;degeneration&apos; to &apos;meeting point&apos;: historical views on race, mixture and the biological diversity of the Brazilian population</title><secondary-title>Genomics, race mixture and nation in Latin America</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2014</year></dates><pub-location>Durham NC</pub-location><publisher>Duke University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2014), Restrepo, Schwartz-Marín and Cárdenas ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Restrepo</Author><Year>2014</Year><RecNum>3370</RecNum><DisplayText>(2014)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>3370</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">3370</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book Section">5</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Restrepo, Eduardo</author><author>Schwartz-Marín, Ernesto</author><author>Cárdenas, Roosbelinda</author></authors><secondary-authors><author>Wade, Peter</author><author>López Beltrán, Carlos</author><author>Restrepo, Eduardo</author><author>Santos, Ricardo Ventura</author></secondary-authors></contributors><titles><title>Nation and difference in the genetic imagination of Colombia</title><secondary-title>Genomics, race mixture and nation in Latin America</secondary-title></titles><dates><year>2014</year></dates><pub-location>Durham NC</pub-location><publisher>Duke University Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2014) and Barragán ADDIN EN.CITE (2011). On cultural commentary see, for example, Wade ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Wade</Author><Year>2000</Year><RecNum>458</RecNum><DisplayText>(2000)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>458</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">458</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Wade, Peter</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Music, race and nation: música tropical in Colombia</title></titles><dates><year>2000</year></dates><pub-location>Chicago</pub-location><publisher>University of Chicago Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(2000), Vianna ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Vianna</Author><Year>1999</Year><RecNum>1798</RecNum><DisplayText>(1999)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>1798</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">1798</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Vianna, Hermano</author></authors><subsidiary-authors><author>Chasteen, John Charles</author></subsidiary-authors></contributors><titles><title>The mystery of samba: popular music and national identity in Brazil</title></titles><dates><year>1999</year></dates><pub-location>Chapel Hill</pub-location><publisher>University of North Carolina Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(1999) and Lomnitz ADDIN EN.CITE <EndNote><Cite ExcludeAuth="1"><Author>Lomnitz-Adler</Author><Year>1992</Year><RecNum>1561</RecNum><DisplayText>(1992)</DisplayText><record><rec-number>1561</rec-number><foreign-keys><key app="EN" db-id="ppttt5eds59fsde0rpbvssvkaat5fdd5zefx">1561</key></foreign-keys><ref-type name="Book">6</ref-type><contributors><authors><author>Lomnitz-Adler, Claudio</author></authors></contributors><titles><title>Exits from the labyrinth: culture and ideology in the Mexican national space</title></titles><dates><year>1992</year></dates><pub-location>Berkeley</pub-location><publisher>University of California Press</publisher><urls></urls></record></Cite></EndNote>(1992). Genomics, characterised by its very detailed examination of the structure of DNA sequences, generally rejects a language of race, both biologically and, in Latin America, socially. Brazil, where colour/race labels operate in some domains, is a partial exception, while also being the country where the most vocal rejection of race is to be found. Yet, as we have seen, racialized concepts continue to appear implicitly (and occasionally more explicitly) in genomic analysis and are frequently harnessed to the idea of the nation. But genomics does not simply reproduce either nation or racialized versions of the nation in unaltered form. First, as we have seen, international genomic science may not be concerned with national framings: the interesting genomic object is often “the mestizo”, or different populations of mestizos, not necessarily organised by national borders. To the extent that Brazilian, Colombian or Mexican geneticists address themselves to this international scientific community – and they certainly do this, as well as publishing in journals of more national scope and in popular outlets that are generally national in orientation – then they undermine the significance of the nation, even if concepts of African, European and Amerindian genetic ancestries continue to evoke race-like imagery. Second, the analysis of genomics and multiculturalism shows that geneticists may produce versions of the nation that are orthogonal to multiculturalist priorities in the sense that the genomic analyses highlight mestizos, thus marking the category that generally remains unmarked. Genomics produces the nation in another way, in which the mestizo is given a new and more explicit role in the molecular portrait of the nation. Third, and most important, genomics operates in a space of contradiction that is common in the post-WWII world. On the one hand, a global consensus has emerged, driven by factors as varied as decolonisation and genetic science, around the idea that race, a concept that had been hegemonic as a way of thinking about human diversity for over two hundred years, is no longer acceptable or valid. On the other hand, racial inequality and racism continue as potent and even growing realities. Genomics participates in this contradiction. On the one hand, it puts the last nail in the coffin of the biological validity of race, although this has been an uneven and slow process (Reardon 2005). On the other hand, as we have seen, a minority of geneticists contend that genetically race has some degree of validity, many geneticists in the United States at least continue to explicitly use the social category of race to organise aspects of their data, and geneticists more widely deploy concepts of genetic ancestry that, although biologically speaking are far removed from the race of early twentieth-century racial science, nevertheless seem to evoke racial categories and ground them in a molecular reality. If a geneticist such as Sergio Pena in Brazil reiterates familiar notions of Africans, Amerindians and Europeans and their mixed offspring, we also have to contend with the fact that he is the most vocal and explicit debunker of the very idea of race. In this sense, genomics is not simply reproducing race or the racialized nation in a seamless continuity with the past. It is participating in the on-going re-figuring of race as an absent presence, a presence that can be known through the quite precise measurements and calibrations of genetic ancestry, precisions that simultaneously indicate an absence of race. In all this, the nation remains as a key frame in which these contradictions are enacted, a frame in which the concurrent presence and absence of race can be apprehended. Endnotes  References Cited Abadía Morales, Guillermo. 1983. Compendio general del folklore colombiano. Bogotá: Fondo de Promoción de la Cultura del Banco Popular. Abu El-Haj, Nadia. 2007. The genetic reinscription of race. Annual Review of Anthropology 36(1):283-300. Alonso, Ana María. 1994. The politics of space, time and substance: state formation, nationalism, and ethnicity. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:379-405. Alves-Silva, Juliana, Magda da Silva Santos, Pedro E. M. Guimarães, et al. 2000. The ancestry of Brazilian mtDNA lineages. 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