Until recently, ‘ethnicity’ was the dominant paradigm for framing categories such as indigenous peoples, mestizos, mestizaje, ladinos, whites and – occasionally – black people in much of Latin America. Recently, the placing of these categories in the conceptual frame of ‘race’ has proved increasingly acceptable and not necessarily a simple imposition of US knowledge practices. The idea that ‘race’ captures something about coloniality, domination and discrimination that is less clearly grasped by ‘ethnicity’ has persuaded many Latin American and Latin Americanist scholars to use the concept, while sensitive to the notion that ‘race’ in a Latin American context might be sui generis.
For Mexico, the potential significance of race as a conceptual frame has emerged more slowly than in some other Latin American countries, due in part to the pervasive marginalisation of black populations there – and it is often ‘blackness’ that seems to trigger the concept of race, rather than ‘indigenousness’. This volume represents a welcome addition to thinking about Mexican realities through the lens of race. It draws much of its strength from a broad historical span, tracing racial classifications from the colonial period, through nineteenth-century nation-building and early twentieth-century eugenics (when the discourse of race was explicitly clear), to more recent decades. This span brings out the continuities, as well as the differences, in processes of classification that are evident over time. Although the chapters are mainly written by historians or historians of art, there are also contributions from authors working in the fields of legal studies and film and performance studies, which give the volume an attractive diversity. Finally, as the title suggests in its invocation of ‘Mexican America’, the book is not confined to Mexico, the nation-state, but rather – as one would hope – encompasses changing configurations of Hispanic identities in the south-western United States as well as Chicano/Latino/border identities and contexts, where race has been a much more familiar concept both analytically and in daily life. The chapters provide plenty of background and context which, while mostly familiar to scholars of race in Latin America, make the book accessible to students and non-specialists too.
The first three main chapters, by María Elena Martínez, Susan Deans-Smith and Ilona Katzew, focus on the colonial period and are useful for specifying how we might think about ‘race’ at that time (when the word was not always commonly used): they show classifications of people into what we might call racial categories, such as negro, blanco, indio and mestizo, dependent on multiple ideas about religion, descent, appearance and occupation. Martínez traces the increasing emphasis given to hierarchy in the late eighteenth century, and how this was judged more in terms of appearance and blood. She sees the marriage legislation of that period, which attempted to protect elite status, as a Foucauldian shift from the symbolics of blood to the analytics of sexuality. I am not sure this legislation is evidence of the emergence of a normalised technology of sex – it was all about blood – but Martínez recognises that blood was being recast in ‘a partly new secular idiom’ (p. 38). By focusing on how eighteenth-century painters' guilds strove to increasingly restrict the entry of non-white people into their profession, Deans-Smith shows that racial classifications of whiteness and non-whiteness were sometimes flexible. Ilona Katzew's chapter on debates about the nature of the indio also reveals the character of racial thought at the time. Human nature was seen as shaped by the environment rather than consisting of a natural substrate, yet it had certain fixed qualities. The environment that made the indio weak and brutish did not affect the Spanish in the same way, due to each group's innate qualities.
Jaime Cuadriello's chapter on the changing uses of the image of Moctezuma reinforces the ambivalence that Katzew documents in representations of the indio, and Cuadriello introduces the growing dominance of the mestizo as a key icon of the Mexican nation in the late nineteenth century – a period that gets the least attention in this book. Alexandra Minna Stern moves to the eugenics of the early twentieth century, with an explicit and welcome focus on how Mexican ideas about race, despite sharing a common basis, differed from US approaches, being neo-Lamarckian and valorising the mestizo, although sometimes ambivalently. In the US, however, that ‘mixedness’ proved problematic for definitions of whiteness. While ‘Mexican’ was included as a racial category in the 1930 US census, it was dropped by 1940, as Mexicans were counted as white: Stern is less clear than she could have been about why this made sense in terms of US racial categorisations.
Ramón Gutíerrez traces the changing categories used to classify ‘Mexicans’ in California, New Mexico and Texas from the colonial period, with a focus on the period after the US expropriated the northern half of Mexico. Local populations, now in the United States, began to claim whiteness by calling themselves Spanish Americans and Latinos, and distancing themselves from both black Americans and new Mexican immigrants. Gutiérrez's emphasis on linguistic categories is particularly effective in conveying these changing classificatory panoramas. Ian Haney López's account of a 1951 court case also reveals the ‘whiteness’ of Mexicans: they protested at their exclusion from Texas juries not on the basis of ‘racial’ discrimination (despite their evidently racist mistreatment in daily life), but because it was simply unfair to them as a minority.
Adriana Katzew shifts the focus to stereotypes of Latinos in US films and gives a revealing analysis of how two films, made at very different times in relation to the beginnings of the Chicano movement – the early 1980s and early 2000s – differ in their approaches to racialised and gendered Chicano identities. Finally, an interview by Jennifer González with artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (which at times struggles to keep the conversation on the theme of race) provides a classic example of how racialised identities multiply and fragment in post-colonial border contexts while retaining basic relations of hierarchy and inequality.
I think this book will be highly valued by scholars and students of Mexico and of race in Latin America. Its historical depth and interdisciplinary, transnational approach make it a significant contribution.
