‘It’s Not Race, It’s Culture’: Untangling Racial Politics in Mexico

Abstract

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 been discussed 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 the use of ethnicity for race studies in Mexico. The emergence of the idea of ethnicity in the late 1930s was closely linked to the racial project of mestizaje and indigenismo, which was 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.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• race
• racism
• ethnicity
• racial formations
• anthropology
• multiculturalism

Notes

[1] Martinez and Saldivar (2009, 6–7; translated by the author). From here on, all translations are made by the author.

[2] Article 4 of the Constitution (1992); Article 2 of the Constitution (2001); Language Rights (2003).

[3] Although national and international immigration has always existed, besides the pioneering works of Lourdes Arizpe in the mid-1970s, only since the early 1990s has there been an increasing recognition and interest in national and international indigenous immigration.

[4] One of the first programs that dealt with indigenous immigrants was the program of Jornaleros which helped people acquire personal identification. Regiones de Refugio is a term coined by anthropologist Aguirre that portrayed certain regions of Mexico as refugees of indigenous communities and limited their interactions with the rest of the society throughout the mestizo region. Aguirre considered this situation to be detrimental to indigenous people since they were forced to receive abusive treatment from mestizos and ladinos. Because of this, he was a big advocate of integrating these regions with the rest of the country through the construction of roads, schools, and the establishment of development projects.

[5] According to CONAPRED’s National survey on Discrimination (2010), over 58 per cent of Mexicans consider that skin color is a relevant factor in discrimination. Nevertheless, the topic is highly contested in academia. Recent remarks made by historian Mauricio Tenorio (2010), for example, criticize the use of the category of skin color in research on race and ethnicity in Mexico. For more on the relevance of skin color, see Moreno (2008), Sue (2009), Flores and Telles (2012), and Villareal (2010).

[6] A recent example is the furor that erupted over the stamps issued to commemorate the Mexican blackface comic-book character Memin Pinguin. In response to criticism by the Washington Post (2005), Mexican intellectuals across the political spectrum denied the racist nature of the cartoon and insisted that Mexico was not a racist nation (Krauze 2005; Monsivais 2009). For a discussion of racism among sociologists, lawyers, and doctors in the 1940s and 1950s, see Beatriz Urias (2007).

[7] For a discussion on popular racial ideologies, see Lomnitz (2010).

[8] This is still common today. A recent study shows that more than 70 per cent of the discussion of race in the press of Merida, Yucatán is about racism in the United States, either against Blacks or Mexicans (Iturriaga 2010).

[9] For a new take on the relationship between Boas and Gamio, see Urias (2007).

[10] Throughout the history of Mexico, ideas and policies of Indigenismo have gone through several changes responding to different definitions of indigenous people as subjects. Much of these changes have been informed by the development of different anthropological perspectives on the relationship between mestizos and indigenous people (Aguirre 1992a,). For an extended history of the idea of Indigenismo in Mexico, see Luis Villoro (1996) and Saldívar (2008).

[11] For more on the history of Mexican anthropology and race, see Castellanos (2000).

[12] For a comprehensive analysis of how African descendants and indigenous people have been discussed in Latin America, see Wade (1997); also see Hooker (2005).

[13] Even in the rare cases where he discusses racial discrimination, he considers that race ‘cannot be used as a synonym for ethnic group, due to its own ambiguity, as well as its biological affiliation, which it makes it unfit for the social explanation of social phenomena’ (Bonfil 1988, 11).

[14] For critics to the national project of Mestizaje, see Roger Bartra (1987) and León Olivé (1999).

[15] The diluted legal reforms of 2001 and 2003 are good examples.

[16] The central thesis is that prejudices will disappear as people enter in contact (and understanding) with different types of people. See Allport (1954).

[17] This is a central idea of the leading theories of interculturality, which attempt to deal with the resent waves of immigrants from other nations, i.e. Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, and the Netherlands (Goldberg 1995; Saldívar 2006).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emiko Saldívar

Emiko Saldívar has completed PhD Sociology. She is the author of the book safia del Indigenismo (2008). She has published on race and ethnicity in Mexico with special emphasis on state formation and Indigenous people. She is an Associate Researcher and a Lecturer at the University of California in Santa Barbara.