The Relation between Class, Racialization, Whiteness and Privilege in Contemporary Mexico City

• In Event: Revisiting Race and Conceptualizing Whiteness in Latin America

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in upscale golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, my current project reverses the analysis of inequalities by focusing on wealth, race, and privilege in contemporary Mexico City. In spite of the widespread assumption that mestizaje (mixed race) eradicated all sort of racial ideas, my paper demonstrates that Mexican people employ a wide range of racialized notions in everyday interactions. The paper demonstrates the existence of a racialized scale, in which whiteness occupies the higher end of the hierarchy and brownness the opposite site. I do not argue, however, that race exists as a biological reality. Instead, I demonstrate that racial ideas in Mexico are social facts, a set of identities that have been created and maintained with substantial consequences for the distribution of wealth, status, and life chances. The paper concludes showing how racial ideas and class relations are indivisible dynamics because people's understandings of race are relational, situational, and contextual, and thus profoundly affected by class principles.

Author

• Hugo Ceron-Anaya, Lehigh University