Mestizo Modernity in Latin America

The modernity of Latin America has been described as incomplete, imitative, fragmentary, imposed, false. These perspectives of interpretation are based on binary social models and of opposite and successive extremes in time, where modernity and tradition are exclusive realities. This article seeks to understand and value the uniqueness of Latin American modernity as a new social reality that merges tradition and modernity and creates a particular type of modernity that qualifies as mestizo. The author carries out a comprehensive review of the literature on modernity to expose how the concept is transformed from serving to qualify a time in the history of Europe, becoming a model of social organization, and finally a universal and normative model of social change. The processes of mobilization, differentiation and secularization of modernization are analyzed and confronted with the singular form of how they have occurred in Latin America. The article affirms that modernity exists as a reality and as an expectation in the region, but it does not respond to binary schemes, nor is it a continuum, nor a juxtaposition of models, but it is a novelty that although it feeds on multiple origins, it is not same to them. The conclusion is that describing modernity as mestizo is more appropriate than the ambiguous, liquid, mausoleum, or entangled denominations that contemporary sociology has used. The mestizo modernity is then a current reality, but it is also a cultural program that proposes a proud recognition of its uniqueness and affirms that, rather than an obstacle, its hybridization can be a lever, and that the identity of societies should not be constructed by looking at past, but to the future.