“The Map of the Mexican’s Genome”: overlapping national identity, and population genomics

This paper explores the intersections between national identity and theproduction of medical/population genomics in Mexico. The ongoing efforts toconstruct a Haplotype Map of Mexican genetic diversity offers a unique opportunityto illustrate and analyze the exchange between the historic-political narratives ofnationalism, and the material culture of genomic science. Haplotypes are centralactants in the search for medically significant SNP’s (single nucleotide polymorphisms), as well as powerful entities involved in the delimitation of ancestry, temporality and variability (www.hapmap.org). By following the circulation ofHaplotypes, light is shed on the alignments and discordances between sociohistoricaland bio-molecular mappings. The analysis is centred on the comparisonbetween the genomic construction of time and ethnicity in the laboratory (throughparticipant observation), and on the public mobilisation of a “Mexican Genome” andits wider political implications. Even though both: the scientific practice and thepublic discourse on medical/population genomics are traversed by notions of “admixture”, there are important distinctions to be made. In the public realm, thenationalist post-revolutionary ideas of Jose Vasconcelos, as expressed in his CosmicRace (1925), still hold sway in the social imaginary. In contrast, admixture is treatedas a complex, relative and probabilistic notion in laboratory practices. I argue thatthe relation between medical/population genomics and national identity is betterunderstood as a process of re-articulation (Fullwiley Social Studies of Science38:695, 2008), rather than coproduction (Reardon 2005) of social and natural orders. The evolving process of re-articulation conceals the novelty of medical/populationgenomics, aligning scientific facts in order to fit the temporal and ethnic grids of “Mestizaje”. But it is precisely the social and political work, that matches theemerging field of population genomics to the pre-existing projects of nationalidentity, what is most revealing in order to understand the multiple and even subtleways in which population genomics challenges the historical and identitarian framesof a “Mestizo” nation