Anti-black racism in Mexico
Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Senior Lecturer in Sociology (University of Cambridge, UK)
Anti-black racism in Mexico
Time: Mar 10, 2021 05:00 PM London
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The key piece that keeps mestizaje as a Mexican racial project in operation, and hence the stability of national identity, is anti-black racism. Moreover, a permanent and necessary feature of the mestizaje project is an ongoing aversion to blackness or ‘blackness’ as an idea, and a persistent de-favouring of, the racialised population as black. This means that the imaginary of being Mexican is based on the idea that 1) there are no black Mexican people (as an ontological matter), and 2) one must distance oneself from whatever represents blackness. Thus, the apparent denial and/or exclusion of the black population from the national imaginary is a necessary strategy for the very maintenance of national identity. As we enter the 2020s with a strong multicultural trend, in which there is a growing mobilisation of black and Afro-descendant organisations in the country, with the recent achievement of constitutional recognition of the Afro-Mexican subject in 2019 and the inclusion of the question on black self-identification in the 2020 national census, the relationship between mestizaje and anti-black racism is being re-configured. In this reconfiguration there is a debate, at times heated and confused, about what black is and how it should be named and understood.
Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow in Social Sciences at Downing College, Cambridge. She was born and raised in Mexico. She studied a BA in Media and Communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana in León and Mexico City, and then worked at the Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud, Secretaría de Educación Pública (Mexican Youth Institute, Ministry of Education), first as Head of the Addictions Prevention Department and then as Coordinator of the National Youth Gender Programme.
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