Comparing Ideologies of Racial Mixing in Latin America: Brazil and Mexico (original) (raw)
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Latin American racisms in global perspective
The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Racisms, edited by John Solomos, 78-88, 2020
This chapter explores the character of Latin American racisms and the way they have been shaped by ideologies and practices of mestizaje (biological and cultural mixture). The chapter traces the historical process of mixture that produced mestizos (mixed people) and also underpinned the idea of the mestizo nation, seen as founded on racial difference, but as having overcome racism through mixture. Claims to being "racial democracies" were, from the nineteenth century, made on a global stage and, after the Second World War, a global turn to anti-racism prompted social scientists to look at Brazil as a test case of racial democracy. Brazil failed the test and data accumulated documenting racial disadvantage and racism. However, mixture continued to obfuscate the operation of racism, by generating real experiences of racial conviviality. Post-1990 changes towards global trends in multiculturalismand, from the early 2000s, towards an incipient naming of racismaltered the shape of mestizaje-based racial formations in Latin America, but did not displace them.
Pigmentocracies: ethnicity, race, and color in Latin America
Choice Reviews Online, 2015
Pigmentocracies-the fruit of the multiyear Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)-is a richly revealing analysis of contemporary attitudes toward ethnicity and race in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, four of Latin America's most populous nations. Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America. Edward Telles, PERLA's principal investigator, explains that profound historical and political forces, including multiculturalism, have helped to shape the formation of ethnic identities and the nature of social relations within and across nations. One of Pigmentocracies's many important conclusions is that unequal social and economic status is at least as much a function of skin color as of ethnoracial identification. Investigators also found high rates of discrimination by color and ethnicity widely reported by both targets and witnesses. Still, substantial support across countries was found for multicultural-affirmative policies-a notable result given that in much of modern Latin America race and ethnicity have been downplayed or ignored as key factors despite their importance for earlier nation-building.
Race and nation in Latin America: an anthropological view
Race & Nation in Modern Latin …, 2003
Homogeneity and diversity exist in tension with each other in discourses and practices of mestizaje. I highlight this in an attempt to nuance the opposition between, on the one hand, the nationalist glorification of mestizaje as a democratic process leading to and symbolic of racial harmony and, on the other, mestizaje as a rhetorical flourish that hides racist and even ethnocidal practices of whitening. In my book Blackness and Race Mixture, I argued that Colombia was characterized by a racial order in which black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participating in the overarching process of mestizaje, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in ''national society,'' and as individuals with whom whiter people might not want to actually practice mestizaje, especially in the most intimate sense of forming links not just of sex but of kinship. ∞ Other scholars, such as Whitten and Stutzman, have noted something similar for Ecuador, but a good deal of their emphasis has been on the real exclusion underlying the apparent inclusion. ≤ This remains a vital argument and my own work has been strongly influenced by it. In Brazil, much of the revisionist literature on race that appeared from the
Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes ðBrazilÞ, mestizoizes ðColombiaÞ, darkens ðDominican RepublicÞ, or has no effect ðPanamaÞ. The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.
Race and Politics in Latin America
2021
IpQNbvxSNKLgaYzPB6F9BPp6pqOAE?usp=sharing This course introduces students to contemporary race/ethnicity debates in Latin America and specifically examines the role of race/ethnicity in the region's politics. In this course, we start from an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates different theoretical, empirical, and essayistic traditions to understand the intersections between race and politics in Latin America and, from comparative approaches, shed light on their specificities, continuities, and ruptures in the Brazilian context. To understand the intersections between race/ethnicity and politics, we will explore some questions: What is the origin of race? What is the basis of ethnicity? How to work with race/ethnicity in the social sciences? How has race/ethnicity been defined/redefined and employed by Latin American political actors and institutions? What is the nature of minority group representation, and how does it affect polity and politics? How do inter and intragroup dynamics affect individuals' worldviews and the political environment? To what extent do demographic changes in Latin America influence racial policy today and in the future? Assignments: • Engagement with Course Material (15%): This is a discussion-based seminar. Please come having read and thought about the readings. The quality of the seminar depends in large part on how prepared you are!
Not Just Color: Whiteness, Nation, and Status in Latin America
We thank the HAHR editors and especially Alejandro de la Fuente and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. We also thank George Reid Andrews and Ramón Gutiérrez for the opportunity to present a very preliminary version of this study at the " Race in the Americas " conference. We are also grateful for their comments and those offered by the conference participants.