Race-ing Across the Border: Comparative Constructions of Race and Inequality in Mexico and the U.S.

• In Event: 4147 - Global and Transnational Approaches to Culture and Power (Co-sponsored with the Section on Global and Transnational Sociology)

Abstract

This paper discusses the origins of racial thinking in Mexico and explores how nationalists promoted a racialized vision of Mexicanness that is in direct contrast to the United States. Specifically, by explaining how the mestizo has come to represent the quintessential Mexican, I show that the promotion of mestizaje by national elites and intellectuals has resulted in an ongoing marginalization of indigenous people and erasure of blackness – and afro-descendant people - from the national imaginary. Drawing on interviews with Mexicans in Central-Western Mexico, I show that on-the-ground understandings of race, ethnicity and discrimination reflect dominant nationalist ideologies of mestizaje that praise white European elements, marginalize the indigenous, and situate blackness as foreign to the nation. I argue that this nationalist ideology of race shapes the way ordinary Mexicans make sense of social inequality and racial/ethnic discrimination in their origin society – and that it is distinct from how they imagine race in the U.S. Whereas in Mexico prejudice and discrimination is understood as rooted in various (intersecting) personal characteristics such as class status, occupation, accent, skin color, and phenotype, the U.S. is viewed as a nation characterized by a Black/White racial divide. In so doing, this paper provides an in-depth look at the racial “lens” through which Mexicans view their home society in order to better understand how potential migrants to the United States might come to “see,” and potentially challenge, long standing racial hierarchies in the host society.

Author

• Sylvia Zamora, Loyola Marymount University