No Dejar Ver and Dejar Ver: Racialized politics of visual representation in Mexican education school textbooks and social media

• In Event: Leading, Learning, and Seeing: Global Perspectives on Education, Conflict, and Representation

Proposal

To see is to colonize (Barriendos, 2011), and to see is to become omniscient. Who does the seeing before we see? Schools play a pivotal role in the production of racial logics and experience of racial discourse. Until recently, in Mexico, the visual culture of schools has been deeply steeped in the project of mestizaje, visually exalting European legacy, romanticizing Indigeneity and erasing Blackness. Racist ideology was necessary, within K-12 education, in order to achieve the cultivation of Mexican citizens as shaped by the Vasconcelian vision of mestizaje (Cruz et al., 2016). Although millions of books are distributed every year, students are increasingly exposed to visual representations through social media. Educational research is needed to understand the various impacts and doings of the images produced in these spaces.
Anchored in anti-colonial theory and situated within the field of Visual Studies, this paper explores how secondary school students negotiate the meaning of visual representation across different platforms—from textbooks, to social media— with a focus on racial representation. This research is based on interviews with teachers and focus groups with secondary school students in Queretaro, Mexico, as part of my PhD dissertation. Drawing from visual methods, this qualitative study is concerned with what is brought into view, and what is concealed by looking at three sites where meanings are made (Rose, 2016): 1) the audience site (secondary school students), 2) the site of production (school textbooks and social media), 3) the site of circulation (teacher’s engagement with visual representation). Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this project is concerned with the ethics, the somatic aspects, and the politics of visual representations to which students are exposed.
As Diego Lizarazo (2004) explains, images do things in us and we, in turn, do things with images. No dejar ver—to not let see—entails the state discourse on Mexicanness and Dejar Ver—to let see—entails the mechanism and algorithms that determine what is visible in social media. Despite the evident distrust in social media and the perceived fragility of educators in navigating such technology, I argue that social media offers an alternative space for creating more critical and nuanced racialized visual representations.

Author

• Marycarmen Lara Villanueva, University of Toronto - OISE