‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico (original) (raw)

Distributed intensities: Whiteness, mestizaje and the logics of Mexican racism

Ethnicities, 2010

By analysing racist moments, this article engages with debates about the existence of racism in Mexico and how whiteness, as an expression of such racism, operates. It draws on empirical research that explores Mexican women's understandings of mestizaje (mixed-race discourses) and experiences of racism. It assesses how racism is lived, its distributed intensity, within the specific racist logics that organize everyday social life. I build upon arguments that Latin American racist logics emerge from the lived experience of mestizaje and its historical development as a political ideology and a complex configuration of national identity. Mestizaje enables whiteness to be experienced as both normalized and ambiguous, not consistently attached to the (potentially) whiter body, but as a site of legitimacy and privilege.

RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS IN MEXICO (Vigil and Lopez 2004)

Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, 2004

Recent research is beginning to reexamine the conventional wisdom in Mexico that a "mestizocracia" reflects the nation's racial and cultural heritage, and not the separation that exists between urban "European-appearing" elites and Indians or darker mestizos from a low income background. Challenging the common belief that race problems and racism were solved over a hundred years ago in the aftermath of the colonial era, this paper explores some of the key issues in the debate and shows that there are still many entrenched racist attitudes and practices that persist from that time period, affecting both Mexicans in Mexico and the United States. The creation and promotion of a mestizo ideology by government officials is offset by the recent surge of racial pride and ethnic nationalism among Indians, particularly in light of the Zapatista movement. National "identity" politics include psychological elements and intra-group racism denoting the striving for a positive self-image.

Networks of Alterity in Syndemic Times: Sociodigital Media Controversy Around Racism in Mexico

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2022

This contribution seeks to contextualize historically a particular conjuncture through which significant changes to the national formation of alterities are expressed and performed by different media outlets and socio-digital networks as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Mexico. By analysing three significant media eventswhich have triggered a broader discussion about racism, ethnicity, mestizaje, media and politics in Mexico-I argue for the need to develop a theoretical framework able to account for the constitutive relations between communication technologies, culture industries and singular articulations of local, regional, and cosmopolitan practices of inclusion/exclusion, at a time when notions of indigeneity, afromexicanidad, whiteness and mestizaje are being reshaped politically.

The Issue of Blackness and Mestizaje in Two Distinct Mexican Contexts: Veracruz and Costa Chica

2014

The construction of new nations in Latin America has triggered debate on the definition of national identity with a view to reconciling the reality of mestizaje with the attribution, inherited from Colonial times, of specific „characteristics‟ to groups and individuals („Spanish‟, „Indian‟, „Black‟, „mulatto‟, etc). It was also confronted with racist connotations which, in the early 19th century, included the ideas of progress and modernity, hence the difficulty in legitimizing its own „brand of mestizaje.‟ We will address these issues through empirical examination of two contexts in Mexico: the State and City of Veracruz, and Costa Chica on the Pacific coast of the States of Oaxaca and Guerrero. What these two case studies share is the issue of mestizaje, so strongly associated with that of Mexican national identity, from the standpoint of the African presence which, though considerable from the start of colonization, was not included in „classic‟ views of national mestizaje. This analysis helps reveal various ways in which populations of African origin were incorporated into the Nation. Thus, we can see how the local configuration articulates with the overall discourse to privilege one facet or dimension of (cultural, or social, or political) Afro identification over another.

Talking about Mestizaje: History, Value, and the Racial Present

Journal of Pan African Studies, 2013

This paper draws upon historical and ethnographic research to think through the effects of Mestizaje on Mexico's Black populations. The author argues that while a national discourse on Mestizaje was adopted as a strategy for national identity in the post-independence era, it may have promoted the "un-imagining" of Afro-Mexicanos from national racial and cultural landscapes although Blacks quite possibly maintained regional and racial identities due to day to day interaction, proximity, and cultural necessity. However, this identity only becomes politically useful as a changing political climate when it makes difference salient within a neoliberal and "multicultural" Mexico.

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 'It's Not Race, It's Culture': Untangling Racial Politics in Mexico PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Mestizaje and ethnicity are key ideas that inform Mexico’ s 20th-century racial project. But while mestizaje –as an ideology, state project, and daily practice– has beendiscussed and criticized at length, these roles for ideas about ethnicity and diversity have not. This article deals with some of the theoretical and political implications of theuse of ethnicity for race studies in Mexico. The emergence of the idea of ethnicity in thelate 1930s was closely linked to the racial project of mestizaje and indigenismo, whichwas carried out by the formative Mexican state in the decades after the Revolution(1910 –1920) and continues to shape today’ s discourses of multicultural, intercultural,and racial relations in that country. The uncritical deployment of concepts of ethnicity and difference actually hinders the development of an understanding of racism and mestizaje focused squarely on domination.

Cultural Studies Uses and abuses of culture: mestizaje in the era of multiculturalism

In this article, I analyse how intercultural ideas, practices and policies inform Mexico’s current racial formation, and how racial categories and meanings are shaped under neoliberalism and the politics of recognition. I argue that the uncritical use of cultural and ethnic differences as the central focus of interculturalism reifies and reproduces the preoccupation with culture and ethnic differences characteristic of the racial project of mestizaje that held sway for most of the twentieth century. This focus on difference has silenced a much-needed discussion about how neither interculturalism nor multiculturalism has changed existing racial hierarchies and privileges nor curtailed the effects of racism and racial injustice on indigenous people and their communities.

Racismo y escuela en México: Reconociendo la tragedia para intentar la salida

2016

Racism in Mexican society is reproduced through curricular content and everyday practices in schools. Its elimination is a social imperative demanded by historically discriminated groups. Nonetheless, this demand has not translated into significant educational policy because racism is very convenient for power relations that maintain the current social order. In this context we propose in this essay to identify and define possible avenues towards helping educational actors, primarily teachers, engage in concrete antiracist activity.

Mestizaje-Indigenismo and Racism in the Mexican State's Ideology of National Integration

For more than the last one hundred years, and especially after the Mexican 1910 revolution, anthropologists, historians interested in political and cultural history, politicians, writers and thinkers have abundantly written about the importance of mestizaje and indigenismo in the postrevolutionary Mexican state's ideology or Mexican state's project of national integration. Among the politicians, thinkers and writers who have expressed their opinions about these two closely linked subjects, we find most o f Mexican Presidents and Ministers of Education, and important names like José María Luis Mora, one of the pioneers of liberal Mexican thought towards the third decade of the XIX Century; Francisco Pimentel and Vicente Riva Palacio during the liberal era p revious to porfiriato; Andrés Molina Enríquez and Justo Sierra during the porfiriato; José Vasconcelos the creator of the idea of the " raza cósmica"; Luis Cabrera the oppositionist and democrat par excellence ...