A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

Abstract

This chapter develops a long duration of social, political, and cultural history of Mexican racism, often characterized as a sui generis type of racism. Its first part goes through the history of ethnocentrism in the colonial New Spain: the Indigenous and the African populations, the criollos (Creole), the mestizos, and the castas. Its second part deals with the history of modern and contemporary Mexican racism. It goes through a long period, starting with the conquest of Independencie (1821) and finishing in 2018. On the one hand, it analyzes the way in which independent Mexico developed an apparently antiracist nation-building project, centered on the idea that the best thing for this young country was to dissolve all ethnic identities in the melting pot of a national mestizo race and culture, made of two components: the Indigenous and the Spanish. On the other hand, it explains how this ideology had a racist character, because it asked Indigenous peoples to mix in order to whiten, but did not ask the Spanish or Creole populations to Indianize themselves, and left the Afro-descendant important population of that time unseen, invisibilized, and not considered in the racial and cultural ideal national mixture. The text continues to develop around how, after the 1910–1920 revolution, this nineteenth-century ideology became one of the main political and cultural projects of the new State; how between 1920 and 1970 this project’s racist nature consisted in developing a series of powerful State policies to try to dissolve the Indigenous ethnicities and “bloods” in mestizaje, seen and the essence of Mexicanity and of Mexican nationalism; how it kept erasing the Afro-Mexicans; and how it also created racism among different fringes of mestizo population.