Pigmentocracy and the performance of whiteness in contemporary photography: Yvonne Venegas’s San Pedro Garza and Dana Lixenberg’s united states

ABSTRACT

I am writing about how whiteness works in the United States and Mexico, by looking at portraits by one photographer in Mexico, Yvonne Venegas and one photographer in the United States, Dana Lixenberg. I understand whiteness as something that goes beyond a skin tonality and that does something in the world. I analyze symbols and poses in portraiture to interpret how whiteness is performed and, also, how (through cultural, social and economic schemes of whiteness, by the photographer) the subject is called back into whiteness. I found that whiteness is performed similarly in both cultural contexts I examined, and although mestizaje in Mexico and slavery in the United States defined race relations in distinctive ways, whiteness must be studied as something that goes beyond a pigment and more in alignment with social and economic class perceptions. I propose study of pigmentocracy as an interlocking skin-color/class system in which skin tones are perceived based on social and cultural prejudices and linked to particular socioeconomic levels. In this system, perceptions of class and skin color work as self-reproducing and interdependent power apparatuses and dispositifs.

KEYWORDS:

• Photography
• whiteness
• pigmentocracy
• United States
• Mexico
• white

Acknowledgments

I will like to thank Yvonne Venegas, Dana Lixenberg, William Straw, Graciela Martínez Zalce, Armond Towns, and specially the anonymous reviewers, for all their help. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Dana Lixenberg uses united states, not capitalized, because she is not referring to the country but wants to make reference to states that are reunited. Personal Communication May 26 2022.

2. In this article, because of length restrictions, I engage less with with the production of the images or the intention of the photographers, and more with the racial performativity that I read in the photographs. Both photographers use professional cameras which makes subjects photographed aware of the camera.

3. See the work of Moreno Figueroa and Monika Saldivar, 2015.

4. This qualitative study was directed by researchers from PERLA (The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America). Participants were asked to self-identify in terms of skin color through a pantone of colors. This was contrasted with the identification done by the person conducting the interview. Researchers found that “identifying oneself as white in Mexico was neither commonplace nor the highest status identity”. For PERLA researchers, a “possible explanation for the relative lack of status associated with a white identity in Mexico (also found in other Latin American countries)” may lie in thinking of whiteness differently after a large number of Spanish immigrants, fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) “entered Mexico under a refugee status (which is somewhat stigmatized) and not a privileged immigration status, a status that was further devalued by the general xenophobia of the post-revolutionary period (Buchenau, 2001). These immigrants were generally lower class (Buchenau, 2001), and many of them were considered white (e.g., many of those from Spain and Argentina), which may help explain the findings about the contemporary disassociation between whiteness and status” (77).

5. The brownness I make reference here, I believe is very different than the brownness that Jose Esteban Muñoz put forward in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota Press, 1999) and later compiled in his posthumously published book The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press 2020). The main difference that I hope to elaborate in a future essay, lays precisely in the different cultural context of Mexico and Latin America in which one can be perceived and experience being and feeling white and brown at the same time.

6. When you go to a market in Mexico, it is common that the person selling fruits or vegetables calls you güero/a or its diminutive güerito/a. This is not because of a particular skin tonality, a pigment, but because the güero/a is the one that has the power of capital, is the one buying. Being named güero/a, the subject is called back to a scheme of whiteness.

7. Peter Kolchin in “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America” signals how Jacobson outlined three chronological periods of racial categorization.

8. Alexander describes how a performance of Whiteness includes having to “temper” his voice because otherwise speaking “to some White people with directness and honesty” is perceived as his being a “mean Black man”; historically “Black slaves were forced to sublimate their passion” in order to not be perceived as “rebellious”.

9. This is reflected in my own experience. My Mexican passport states my skin as white but I am invariably perceived as brown in Canada and the United States.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susana Vargas Cervantes

Susana Vargas Cervantes writes, researches and teaches. Her research mines the connections between gender, sexuality, class, and skin tonalities to reconceptualize pigmentocracy. She is the author of the book The Little Old Lady Killer: The Sensationalized Crimes of Mexico’s First Female Serial Killer (NYU Press, 2019) and Mujercitos (Editorial RM, 2015). After a Fulbright Visiting Fellowship at Columbia University, she joined Carleton University as an Assistant Professor in Communication and Media Studies. E-mail: [email protected]