This volume adds an important discursive perspective to the study of racism in Latin America that has been absent from much social science work on the region. Its recent English translation (from a 2007 Spanish edition) now makes it accessible to a wider readership. It is the first book linking race and discourse across Latin American countries—including chapters addressing Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela—by collaborative groups of locally based scholars. Editor van Dijk's introduction emphasizes that while racism is not determined by exposure to discourse, because prejudices and ideologies are “acquired, confirmed and exercised through discourse … an analytic, discursive approach to the study of racism is crucial to understand its reproduction” (viii). Noting that research on indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples has lacked complementary investigations of whites, he advocates for studying the role of “symbolic elites” (5–6) in the reproduction of racism through their positions in business, politics, and media.
Each chapter includes a sociohistorical sketch and an analysis of racializing discourses for each country. All show negative stereotypes discursively associated with Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples, and some take the welcome step of also addressing other racialized peoples (such as Venezuelan Chinese). Some cases show overt racial language, as when a Peruvian politician referred to the masses as “llamas,” an Andean animal name used as a slur. Other cases show covert racism, like the erasure of nonwhites in public discourse in the Brazilian media or Colombian textbooks. The chapters track circulating jokes, insults, and songs, and a number also analyze interviews with elites. While explicit racist discourse persists, as in Guatemala where some interviewees advocated racial violence, the trend is towards more covert racist discourse throughout the region.
Covering many countries in a single volume provides a useful resource for anyone interested in race in Latin America, but there are limitations to its Critical Discourse Analysis approach, which tracks patterns across textual sources, partly by typologizing strategies of racial discourse into categories like “generalization” or “evasion.” The properties of these types often go underspecified, so it is unclear if they hold up as analytical categories or are instead more impressionistic. Only in limited cases do the contributions address issues of linguistic form like lexical choice, pronouns (us/them), or passivization to conceal agents, such as when a Chilean newspaper stated that indigenous people were “to be affected” (by land developers). Additionally, a tendency to isolate texts from their interactive settings means we learn very little about racializing discourse in social life. Bringing tools of linguistics further into discourse analysis can only strengthen its analytical foothold, and adding interactive and ethnographic components would help to fill methodological gaps. Jointly addressing the formal properties of racializing language, their manifestation in interaction, and their situation in social life is a promising direction for better understanding how racism is reproduced; but this is a formidable interdisciplinary task, so my comments are to encourage further work rather than to detract from this volume's impressive accomplishment of connecting discourse and racism broadly across Latin America.
