Abstract
Abstract By the end of the twentieth century, with the rise of multicultural discourses and identity politics, Latin American ideologies of racial mixture had become increasingly denounced as myths that conceal (and thus support) the reproduction of racial inequalities. These studies have largely been guided by comparisons between countries with widespread racial mixing (usually Brazil, Mexico or Colombia) and countries in which it was less encouraged and visible (most commonly, the USA). In this paper we move the focus to the diverse ways in which racial mixture currently impacts racial formations in the Latin America, looking initially at Brazil and Mexico, two of the largest countries in the region, and also those with the largest Afro-descendent and indigenous populations in the continent. For comparison, we analyze survey data from the PERLA project.
Highlights
Academic interpretations of racial mixing in Latin America, in the North American literature, underwent a radical change during the second half of the twentieth century.1 After World War II, ‘Latin American miscegenation’ was seen as an alternative to ethnic and racial exclusions that had triggered the Jewish holocaust and had been a source of violent conflicts in the United States during the Jim Crow era and in South African apartheid during the 1950s and 1960s
DATA AND METHODS In order to compare how ideas of racial mixture contribute to the contemporary racial projects in Brazil and Mexico we rely on data provided by the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America – hereafter, PERLA – which surveyed a national representative sample in both countries in 2010.11 The sample comprised 1000 cases for each country
If we take skin color classification as a proxy to measure non-cultural aspects of race, it is clear that racial socioeconomic disparities are still very strong in Mexico, beyond the cultural indigenous/non-indigenous boundary
Summary
Academic interpretations of racial mixing in Latin America, in the North American literature, underwent a radical change during the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, ‘Latin American miscegenation’ was seen as an alternative to ethnic and racial exclusions that had triggered the Jewish holocaust and had been a source of violent conflicts in the United States during the Jim Crow era and in South African apartheid during the 1950s and 1960s. The legal recognition of Mexico as a pluricultural country in 1992 and the subsequent implementation of multicultural policies (such as intercultural education) were followed by an important change in the 2000 census.8 This included a self-ascription question, in which people were asked whether they belonged to any particular ethnic group. approximately 7.1% of all Mexicans spoke an indigenous language, and 6.2% considered themselves to be members of an indigenous group. Because we do not have data on the oscillations of this identification over the last century, it is impossible to know if mestizo identity is on the rise or in decline With this overview of similarities and differences in the ethnoracial formation of Brazil and Mexico we aimed to show how the broad idea of racial mixture has been historically constructed in different ways in each country. We rely on survey data on Brazil and Mexico to analyze the impact of these historical differences in racial mixture in the current perceptions of race and in the measurement of racial inequality in these two countries
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