Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa

Distributed intensities: Whiteness, mestizaje and the logics of Mexican racism

By analysing racist moments, this article engages with debates about the existence of racism in Mexico and how whiteness, as an expression of such racism, operates. It draws on empirical research that explores Mexican women’s understandings of mestizaje (mixed-race discourses) and experiences of racism. It assesses how racism is lived, its distributed intensity, within the specific racist logics that organize everyday social life. I build upon arguments that Latin American racist logics emerge from the lived experience of mestizaje and its historical development as a political ideology and a complex configuration of national identity. Mestizaje enables whiteness to be experienced as both normalized and ambiguous, not consistently attached to the (potentially) whiter body, but as a site of legitimacy and privilege.By analysing racist moments, this article engages with debates about the existence of racism in Mexico and how whiteness, as an expression of such racism, operates. It draws on empirical research that explores Mexican women’s understandings of mestizaje (mixed-race discourses) and experiences of racism. It assesses how racism is lived, its distributed intensity, within the specific racist logics that organize everyday social life. I build upon arguments that Latin American racist logics emerge from the lived experience of mestizaje and its historical development as a political ideology and a complex configuration of national identity. Mestizaje enables whiteness to be experienced as both normalized and ambiguous, not consistently attached to the (potentially) whiter body, but as a site of legitimacy and privilege.

Past and Future Perfect? Beauty, Affect and Hope

This article engages with and draws on what have been called two recent “turns” in feminist theory: to beauty and to affect. While much feminist research has concentrated on the beauty industry, where beauty is conceived as a series of economic, social and cultural practices, the authors suggest that beauty should also be understood as an embodied affective process. The authors’ focus is on understanding the conceptions of beauty that emerged in their own empirical work with white British girls and mestiza Mexican women. The authors suggest that for the girls and women in their research, beauty is an inclination towards a perfected temporal state which involves processes of displacement to the past and of deferral to the future. The authors draw on Colebrook’s discussion of the relationship between feminist theory and philosophies of aesthetic beauty, and on Lauren Berlant’s notions of “cruel optimism” and “aspirational normalcy”, and argue that beauty can be seen as an aspiration to normalcy that is, simultaneously, optimistic and cruel. Beauty is seemingly characterised by its inability “to be” in the present and is thus positioned as temporalities that have passed or have yet to come. Through these displacements and deferrals, beauty is understood as both specific and imaginary, and as promising and depressing. Following on from such a conception of beauty, the authors make a distinction between optimism and hope, and argue that while, in Berlant’s terms, optimism is that which is cruel, hope might involve a different way of thinking about how beauty might be experienced in and as the present.

Historically Rooted Transnationalism: Slightedness and the Experience of Racism in Mexican Families

An interest in engaging with what emotions do, rather than what emotions are, and in the pervasiveness of everyday racism, guides this exploration of Mexican family life. Drawing on womens life story interviews, and in particular on their discussions of childhood, I analyse notions of resemblance, slightedness and care within family life to develop the notion of “racist logics”. Attention is paid to historically rooted transnational dimensions of family life as “ways of belonging” to both family and nation. Resulting in private experiences of racism and the neglect of familial and public responsibilities, the discourses of belonging have been influenced by long-term effects of colonialism and migration from Spain.An interest in engaging with what emotions do, rather than what emotions are, and in the pervasiveness of everyday racism, guides this exploration of Mexican family life. Drawing on womens life story interviews, and in particular on their discussions of childhood, I analyse notions of resemblance, slightedness and care within family life to develop the notion of “racist logics”. Attention is paid to historically rooted transnational dimensions of family life as “ways of belonging” to both family and nation. Resulting in private experiences of racism and the neglect of familial and public responsibilities, the discourses of belonging have been influenced by long-term effects of colonialism and migration from Spain.

Displaced looks: The lived experience of beauty and racism

With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on.

Looking emotionally: photography, racism and intimacy in research:

In this article I argue the need for a reflexive use of photographic images in research, mainly in the publication and dissemination phase and specifically when the topic investigated relates to is...

Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico

Mestiza/o is a racial category that emerged as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation, Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. It refers to those who represent Mexicanness and therefore those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusive-ness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism ‘based on the idea of the inferiority of blacks and indigenous peoples and, in practice, of discrimination against them’ (Wade 2001: 849). Mestiza is then seen as a term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implying possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth).

‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico:

This article analyses the conflicting understandings surrounding the recognition of anti-black racism in Mexico, drawing from an analysis of the 2005 controversy around Memín Pinguín. We ask what is at stake when opposition arises to claims of racism, how racial disavowal is possible, and how is it that the racial project of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) expresses a form of Mexican post-racial ideology. We argue that the ideology of mestizaje is key for unpacking the tensions between the recognition and disavowal of racism. Mestizaje solidifies into a form of nationalist denial in moments when racism is openly contested or brought up. It becomes a concrete strategy of power that is mobilized to simplify or divert attention in particular moments, such as with the Memín Pinguín controversy, when the contradictions within the social dynamic are revealed and questioned. Here is where Mexico’s “raceless” ideology of mestizaje overlaps with current post-racial politics. We explore state, elite and popular reactions to the debate to discuss how such public displays reflect an invested denial of race and racism while, at the same time, the racial status quo of mestizaje is reinforced. This, we argue, is the essence of post-racial politics in Mexico.This article analyses the conflicting understandings surrounding the recognition of anti-black racism in Mexico, drawing from an analysis of the 2005 controversy around Memin Pinguin. We ask what is at stake when opposition arises to claims of racism, how racial disavowal is possible, and how is it that the racial project of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) expresses a form of Mexican post-racial ideology. We argue that the ideology of mestizaje is key for unpacking the tensions between the recognition and disavowal of racism. Mestizaje solidifies into a form of nationalist denial in moments when racism is openly contested or brought up. It becomes a concrete strategy of power that is mobilized to simplify or divert attention in particular moments, such as with the Memin Pinguin controversy, when the contradictions within the social dynamic are revealed and questioned. Here is where Mexico’s “raceless” ideology of mestizaje overlaps with current post-racial politics. We explore state, elite and pop...

Don’t You See?

“I can see you’re not from here. Where are you from?” This has been one of the key questions in my life. It has taken me a long time to understand it, although I have been hearing it since I was a child, and even more often since I arrived in the United Kingdom. It was 1999 and I was studying for my MA degree. I remember going to a black students conference in Southampton. I was very excited. I had never seen so many “black” people in one room in my life! I was truly fascinated, curious, observing, looking at every single one of them. There, I started talking with a group of people, and at some point the conversation turned to issues of identity and “race.” I told them I was a little bit confused about identifying myself as black. I explained I had been born and raised in Mexico and that I basically consider myself Mexican. One young woman looked at me impatiently, and pulled my hand towards her own and compared our skin color. She said: “Look, you are black, what are you arguing about, don’t you see?”

On dancing, lipstick and feminism: A response to Kathy Davis

Kathy Davis’ reflections in ‘Should a Feminist Dance Tango?’ allow us to reconsider and, crucially, be provoked by the role of feminism and by the possibilities of political action in the multiplicity of everyday life. As Davis carefully argues, we need to keep an awareness of the disjuncture between experience and politics and to be cautious about our rush to place politics before experience. Her comments made me think about the recent debates on beauty, some even extending and responding to Davis’ own influential work on the cultural construction of beauty and beauty practices (1995). There is a parallel between her proposal to think through tango and feminism, and how beauty and feminism have been more recently re-imagined. There is something about the anxieties that are being mobilised by new approaches to beauty that neither condemn nor forgive its allure: that is, by approaches that aim to complicate an analysis that could deal precisely with the ambivalences and contradictions necessary for a phenomenon to be appreciated in all its complexity. In this sense, Davis has dared to put a finger in the wound of some versions of feminism. Rita Felski has asked some pertinent questions in relation to the place of beauty within feminist debates:

Beauty, race and feminist theory in Latin America and the Caribbean:

Feminist theorising on the question of beauty has gained an important place amongst critical scholars, as attested by a wide range of well-documented and insightful research. Rather than seeing beauty simply as a ‘window’ into women’s lives, or as an ultimately unattainable but banal practice, recent scholarship demonstrates a push towards what Maxine Leeds Craig (2006) calls a more ‘complicated’ stance, generating a new wave of work that not only takes an intersectional approach but also believes wholeheartedly that the ‘lure’ of beauty (Felski, 2006) deserves serious consideration in itself. From this perspective, beauty is also theorised as an experience that ‘does’ something and in that doing entangles everyday life in unexpected ways. This upholds Peggy Z. Brand’s claim in Beauty Matters that, ‘[f]or women, beauty has always mattered – in a personal way, and as an inevitable, and underlying socio-political framework, for how they operate in the world’ (2000: 5–6). This special issue takes this stance as its starting point. It also develops Claire Colebrook’s important argument in Feminist Theory that a renewed interest in the ‘question [of beauty] for feminist politics . . . is not so much moral – is beauty good or bad for women? – but pragmatic: how is beauty defined, deployed, defended, subordinated, marketed or manipulated, and how do these tactics intersect with gender and value?’ (2006: 132). The specific contribution of this special issue to feminist politics and theory is to bring a focus on the pragmatics of beauty in its intersection with notions of ‘race’ and the specificity of racial projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. We therefore aim to demonstrate that theorising gender and beauty always requires