'Que Te Corre la Sangre de Indio, Cabron': The Myths of Mestizaje and Nation in Pancho Goes to College

Mestizaje as an ideology has shaped Xicano/Mexicano notions of identity over the past five centuries by privileging Western civilisation as the dominant paradigm in Meso-America. This racial paradigm, the idea of 'conquest' and the belief in the fusion of two distinct civilisations through the mixing of Spanish and indigenous blood, has prevented Xicanos from understanding the recent history of Mexico as a 'story of permanent confrontation between those attempting [to move] toward the path of Western civilization and those… who resist', in the words of Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. This article analyses how the 1997 film Pancho Goes to College, directed by Ruben Reyes, offers a microcosm of this clash of civilisations within the framework of a college campus in the Southwest United States. The film's rhetorical moves are seen through the lens of revolutionary Xicanismo and through African liberationist Frantz Fanon's writings on the colonised. The film supplies a context in which to analyse why this racialised identity of genetic mestizaje cannot offer a viable conduit to national liberation.