Peter Wade begins his book with reference to Roger Bastide's 1961 article ‘Dusky Venus, Black Apollo’, in which Bastide noted that when he asked about race in France and Brazil, the answer was often enough ‘sex’. This gives Wade a perfect starting point for the principal argument of his book: that race and sex should be treated not as separate spheres, but rather as mutually constituted and therefore inextricably linked. ‘Together’, he says, ‘race and sex form an articulation that is more than the sum of its parts’.

Bastide observed that while Brazil elected the mulatto woman as the supreme object of male sexual desire, France chose to sexualise black male immigrants. In both cases, however, he argued that far from providing proof of an absence of prejudice, these encounters should be understood rather as a manifestation of such prejudice: ‘In these bodies finding each other, fusing, there are two races at each other's throats’. Wade does not question the importance of sex as constitutive of processes of domination and subordination of men over women, masculinity over femininity, conquerors over conquered, Europeans over indigenous people and those brought under chains from Africa. He does, however, make a strong effort to ask questions that Bastide's approach avoids, namely how some social categories are highly sexualised while others are not and how desire operates in societies of intense social inequality marked by colour. He argues strongly that when it comes to race and sex, ambivalence is the key, where hate, loathing and fear coexist alongside love, desire and fascination. Furthermore, he makes a point of challenging the heteronormativity inherent to Bastide's analysis, bringing to the fore recent work on homosexuality in Brazil and Colombia above all.

Having set out his agenda, Wade marshals an impressive array of theory and ethnography to investigate the ways in which sex and race intertwine throughout Latin America. This is a daunting task, as the author himself recognises, given the dubious epistemology of the term ‘Latin America’ itself and the considerable cultural and linguistic variation that exists across the region. Necessarily, therefore, idiosyncrasies lose out to broad generalisations. In particular, of course, Wade is concerned with understanding the origins and logic of mestizaje and mestiçagem, and the ways in which the men and women associated with certain races or ethnic groups are characterised in terms of sexual attractiveness and power. He seems to accept the commonly received wisdom that the ideology of mixture in Latin American societies arose faute de mieux. ‘The nation-builders’ racial projects', he claims, ‘could hardly hope to emulate those of North America or Europe in terms of racial purity (or segregation) and had to adapt, using more positive ideas of mixture’. This phrase takes as given that Spanish and Portuguese colonisers would have preferred to be as the British or Dutch but ‘could hardly hope’ to be so. Surely one would have to understand the cultural predispositions on all sides of the colonial order that allowed these choices to be made in the first place. Commenting on Brazil, the sixteenth-century Dutch theologian Casparus Barlaeus produced the now clichéd aphorism ‘ultra aequinoctialem non peccavi’ (‘there is no sin south of the equator’). This religious man and his Portuguese contemporaries described a world that bordered on the old anthropological notion of primitive promiscuity. Latterly the phrase has been invoked to justify all manner of sexual excess on the subcontinent.

Wade brings psychoanalytic theory to help him understand all this in terms of the process of what he calls ‘othering’. The problem here is that the theoreticians of the human psyche are not overly interested in cultural difference and most often argue from a Western European cultural standpoint. I wonder why he felt the need to abandon his anthropology. Victor Turner and Mary Douglas had a lot to say about the magical power of margins, while Roger Bastide and Edmund Leach did not deny that all manner of sexual encounters might occur in all colonial situations, but plausibly suggested that the option for celebrating mixture and the recognition of paternity and incorporation of children into the dominant culture had to do with Catholicism, above all Mariolatry. In his 1969 essay ‘The Virgin Birth’, Leach had this to say:

In recent years, the ideologies of mestizaje in Spanish-speaking countries and ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil have come under concerted attack from black and indigenous activists and their allies, who argue that such concepts deny institutionalised racism and impede what they term ‘racial consciousness’. They plead for a multicultural understanding of Latin American societies. The author provides a succinct account of how sex/gender issues also permeate these movements, particularly in the context of health programmes directed at indigenous and black groups. He finds that the new multiculturalist discourse which underpins these movements tends to reproduce ancient notions of sex/gender and racial hierarchies – the sexual supremacy of black men, for example. Indeed, in practice, the old ideas remain strong throughout Latin America, where sexual desire increasingly crosses lines of class and colour and results in formal unions and the recognition of paternity.

Wade underplays the apparent rupture with mestizaje claimed by the discourse of multiculturalism, however. He argues that both discourses have much in common. While the ideology of mestizaje celebrates mixture built on the supposed biological and cultural differences between the various races involved, multiculturalism in Latin America preaches racial and ethnic singularity without abandoning mixture. What is particularly interesting – and this appears en passant in Wade's interesting discussion of Latinos in the US who tend to reject the North American system of racial classification – is that while activists/intellectuals in Latin America become more and more committed to an ideology of multiculturalism coupled to a persistent if latent heteronormativity, a growing number of their contemporaries in North America now challenge the old ideas associated with race, sex and gender, arguing for the recognition of complexity and, yes, mixture. Peter Wade's fascinating book shows clearly how the Latin American experience is of increasing relevance to the debate on these fundamental issues much further afield.