Beyond Raceblindness? The Emergence of Critical Race Talk in Official and Everyday Talk in Mexico

• In Event: What After Colorblind Racism? Theorizing Race and Ethnicity in the Modern World

Abstract

Theorizing and empirical research on colorblindness has largely emerged in the context of the United States (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2003; Omi and Winant 1986). However, in Latin America, colorblindness (or what has been referred to as “raceblindness”) has a much longer history, being the preferred strategy for dealing (or not dealing) with race for over a century. Raceblind ideology has had a particularly strong grip on thinking in Mexico, at both the elite (Loveman 2014) and popular (Sue 2013) levels. In this paper, we examine the recent turn away from color/raceblind ideology in Mexico, reviewing scholars’ attempts to capture this turn conceptually. Building on this “top down” analysis, we engage in a “bottom up” analysis of everyday race talk that challenges raceblind ideology. In doing so, we bring new empirical evidence to bear on how race talk is manifesting in new ways at the popular level. We execute the bottom-up analysis by systematically examining Mexican social media posts on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Facebook, that used racialized language, from 2018 to the present. We identify emerging racialized terms such as “whitexican” which shatter the historic silence on race talk in Mexico. We document the prevalence of these terms over time as well as how emerging race discourses are being used, and for what purposes. In doing so, we provide an illustration of how to capture shifting racial discourse in the current complex and highly politicized racial terrain. We also expand the analytic lens on colorblindness to look across national cases to provide a relational and global perspective on theorizing new developments on race and racial ideology. Whereas a focus on the U.S. case alone may suggest that a post-colorblind era is marked with increasingly overt racism and even more aggressive targeting of DEI policies, the case of Mexico reveals the potential for an alternate path away from colorblindness, one which creates a space for critical race discourse to emerge where it has historically been silenced.

Authors

• Christina Alicia Sue, University of Texas-San Antonio

• Antonio Jimenez, University of Texas - San Antonio