Reddit reviews Cien años de confusión (Spanish Edition)

Ugh, some of these answers grind my gears. Just a heads up, you might get some weird comments, OP, like “we don't have races, we have ethnicities,” or “we're all [insert nationality] here!”

It's because many Latin Americans are convinced that racial divisions either don't exist in their countries (anymore) or that any appearance of racial divide is better explained by more inoffensive abstractions, such as classism or colorism. This always seemed like a sleazy sleight-of-hand to me.

Fuck it, I'm in the mood to write so here's an obnoxious wall of text:

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We have deeply racial divisions. It was true before the 20th century and it didn't suddenly stop being true on January 1st, 1900. This has always been obvious to me and at the same time totally unfathomable to my fellow Mexicans. If knowing is half the battle then most Mexicans are on the battlefield naked except for a tightly wrapped blindfold around their head.

Mexicans are generally convinced that there's no racism here!—or they accuse me of being too “racially-minded,” a tragic victim of Americanization. Their reaction is typically snarky (though sometimes angry!) at the presumption that Mexicans could possibly be so naive or regressive like those poor gringos up there.

And yet I would see these same people engage in what was clearly racially prejudiced attitudes and biases all the time! It seemed very hypocritical to me and it turns out academics are well aware of this contradiction. In a nutshell: All Latin American countries, at some point, invented for themselves a homogenous, race-neutral national identity. This was usually adopted after a major civil conflict in order to promote social cohesion.

Specifically speaking about Mexico, Macario Shettino writes in his fantastic Cien años de confusión:

> Es propio de los regímenes modernos crear construcciones culturales que permitan esa comunidad imaginaria indispensable, La Nación. Pero cada construcción cultural tiene efectos adicionales: no sólo provee legitimidad al régimen, también refuerza o moldea la cultura política de la sociedad y abre o limita las esferas social y económica.”

... and what would be the basis of this new national identity? Andrés Molina Enríquez proposed in 1909:

> “La base fundamental e indeclinable de todo trabajo encaminado en lo futuro al bien del país, tiene que ser la continuación de los mestizos como elemento étnico preponderante y como clase política directora de la población.”

... and what were the effects of this national fairy-tale? Back to Macario Shettino:

> Los Mexicanos viven un poco mejor, porque todo el planeta vive un poco mejor a fines del siglo XX, pero sólo por eso. En el transcurso del siglo, la distribución del ingreso y la riqueza nunca mejoró significativamente. No se redujeron la discriminación ni el racismo de los mestizos, no cambió la estructura estamental, casi de castas, que arrastramos desde la Colonia.

Emphasis mine.

Mestizos won the civil war and rebuilt society in their image—and theirs only. As Guillermo Bonfil Batalla writes in his brilliant México Profundo (English translation here):

> El criollo ya no contaba como categoría histórica capaz de encarnar la nacionalidad mexicana: desde el triunfo liberal de 1857 ese papel ideológico lo desempeñaba el mestizo, visto siempre como resultado de la confluencia enriquecedora de dos razas y dos culturas. Los que se asumen mestizos no se quieren criollos, pero mucho menos indios; pretenden ser algo nuevo cuyos contenidos nunca se definen satisfactoriamente.

Since then, implicit in being born on Mexican soil was a choice: Are you in or are you out? In to what, exactly? Wiping your D&D character sheet clean of any pre-Civil war racial identity and replacing it (retconning it?) with the default mestizo back story based on Meshica iconography provided by the new political regime.

What do you get in return? The promise of social cohesion! Inclusion! And for the cynic in me: The plausible deniability to say “There's no racism here! We're all Mexican after all!” Except you can't wipe your racial identity clean. Yes, it's a social construct, but society is inescapable. Therefore, because race is written on our face, our skin, our bones, our speech, and our pride, anyone who could not easily submit to this fictional identity was summarily marginalized.

That's how the schizophrenia of Mexican society was born. (See Alan Knight's The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940.)

What should have happened? A complete dismantling of the Colonial caste system, for starters. But instead what happened was a post-racial fairy-tale band-aid that Mexicans believe to this day. Hence, a supposedly mestiza woman can be called “pinche india” by a supposedly mestizo man to the shock of literally no one. This isn't colorism, by the way! It's not because her skin is merely darker. It's because less than a century ago her heritage, the community she's from, her body-type, her facial features, etc. placed her in a different racial caste than his. The man's comment reveals the underlying schizophrenia caused by the 20th century process of de-indianization.

A lot of this is very Mexico-oriented, but this conflict between criollos, mestizos, and indios is replicated in many Latin American countries. Furthermore, childish comparisons with the U.S. have given Latin Americans a very dim awareness of their own racism.