Mixed Race Studies

Making Güeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

Gender, Place and Culture
Volume 12, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 71–93
DOI: 10.1080/09663690500082984

Jamie Winders, Associate Professor of Geography
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

John Paul Jones III, Professor of Geography and Development
University of Arizona, Tucson

Michael James Higgins (1946-2011), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Northern Colorado

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product’s representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

‘la güera’: fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made. No one ever quite told me this (that light was right), but I knew that being light was something valued in my family. (Moraga, 1981, p. 28)

These lines from Cherrie Moraga’s 1979 essay, ‘La Güera’, succinctly describe the chromatic privilege into which she was born. With her mother’s Chicana features but her father’s white skin, Moraga, in her words, ‘had it made’. The only güera in her family, she could escape the correlation between being Chicana and being ‘less’ (p. 28), a connection that haunted her mother and other family members. Although her essay goes on to chart her denial of ‘the voice of [her] brown mother’ (1981, p. 31) and her struggles to grasp the specificities of various forms of sexual and racial oppression, Moraga’s initial discussion of an upbringing that ‘attempted to bleach me of what color I did have’ (1981, p. 28) captures several processes that we analyze in this article. As Moraga quipped, she was ‘“anglicized” ’; the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future’ (ibid.).

This article analyzes one contemporary path to that ‘white world’ as it operates within the context of Mexico. We examine discourses of whiteness and coloration through an analysis of ‘White Secret’, a cosmetic product marketed across Mexico that explicitly guarantees lighter skin and implicitly offers the lifestyle associated with such a chromatic change1. Historian Kathy Peiss (2002) has recently charted the ways that US cosmetics companies have relied upon and reinforced connections between healthy bodies, ‘made-up’ (female, white) faces and modernity, in efforts to market their products globally and create international mass markets. In this article, we trace similar links between bodies, race, cosmetic products and modernity, as we raise questions about whiteness and identity in Mexico, processes neatly packaged within a 30-minute, late-night infomercial peddling a skin-care solution that can produce in two weeks a white skin tone which previously required generations of racial miscegenation.

To think through how this skin-lightening product and its marketing strategies become legible and convincing within Mexico, we draw from a number of literatures that together help unpack the secrets of White Secret and the desire for white skin on which it depends. As Moraga’s autobiographical reflections and Peiss’s documenting of ‘American cosmetics abroad’ both make evident, in many contexts, ‘light’ was—and, we would add, still is—seen as ‘right’. White Secret is located squarely within this framing, as it explicitly promises white(r) skin and implicitly offers the improved socio-economic position of white privilege. As we subsequently suggest, what remains ‘secret’ in White Secret is why Mexican women want to move away from that ‘brown body’ of which Moraga wrote—a desire for lighter skin that signals the traces of a colonial past and present in Mexico. Postcolonial studies, driven ‘to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592), provide one particularly useful means of prising open these silences around questions of bodies, race and desire, as White Secret, as both product and text, resonates with many practices linked to colonialism and its deployment of racialized discourses. Postcolonial studies, in conjunction with whiteness studies and examinations of race and ethnicity in Latin America, create a useful theoretical framework through which to engage White Secret. It is to this White Secret that we now turn…

…Stepan (1991), in her analysis of eugenics in Latin America, suggests that historically, a whitening thesis in Mexico focused on a mestizo (mixed ‘blood’) ‘cosmic race’ rather than a ‘pure’ white race. This ‘cosmic race’, made famous by Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, was composed, at least in theory, of a racial configuration whose racial and ethnic mix surpassed all initial ingredients. The path by which Mexico could reach this ‘cosmic race’, however, led through eugenics to a set of practices that in Latin America constituted ‘above all an aesthetic-biological movement concerned with beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination, as represented in race’ (Stepan, 1991, p. 135). At the pinnacle of this movement was lighter skin, a location at which beauty and purity were concentrated and from which the ‘brown body’ denied by Moraga was successively removed over time.

Across Mexico’s ancient practice of whitening, Latin America’s eugenics of the early 1900s and a White Secret of the twenty-first century, then, the aesthetic and the biological are imbricated in a chromatic system that revolves around purity and contamination, beauty and ugliness. In all three instances that span Mexico’s post-conquest history, the chromatic system in operation is also a hierarchy of lightness for which, as Moraga noted, light is right. In this system where darker pigments signify what Ann Laura Stoler (1995) calls the ‘enemy within’ (p. 52), being Moraga’s ‘brown’ and ‘less’ remains the unspoken…

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Race in South Africa: Still an issue

The Economist
2012-02-04

Mixed-race citizens remain uneasy about black rule

If Barack Obama lived in South Africa, he might be called a coloured. Under apartheid, the government decided to which of four racial categories a South African belonged—black, coloured, Indian/Asian or white—depending mostly on looks. The same categorisation still exists, but it is now left up to individuals.

Given that coloureds were formerly regarded as racial misfits, once dismissed by the wife of former president F. W. de Klerk, Marike, as “non-persons…the leftovers”, one might have expected the number of South Africans wishing to describe themselves as such to plummet. But since the end of apartheid in 1994 the coloured population has in fact grown by almost a third, to 4.5m.

Most live in Cape Town and the Western Cape region, where they originated some 350 years ago after the arrival of the first Dutch settlers. Given the dearth of European women at the time, the Dutch—soon to be followed by French, German and English settlers—often took the pale-skinned indigenous Khoisan or, later, imported Asian and African slaves as their wives and mistresses…

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Art Review: A Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

The New York Times
2012-01-26

Martha Schwendener

What’s the difference between a political activist and a political hero? It’s often a matter of intention versus accident. Within the civil rights movement Rosa Parks is seen as an activist: She trained at the Highlander Folk School for social justice in Tennessee, and her refusal to give up her seat on a crowded bus was the catalyst for the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed in “The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet” as heroes who fell into history by accident.

he Loving story is well known in the annals of American civil rights history. It began on July 11, 1958, when a Virginia county sheriff and two deputies entered the Lovings’ bedroom at 2 a.m. and arrested them for violating the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage. (Or you might say it began several years earlier, when Richard Loving, a white teenager, met Mildred Jeter, a girl of African-American and American Indian descent, six years his junior.)

When, at 18, Mildred became pregnant, the couple decided to marry in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal. They were arrested five weeks later when they returned to Virginia and tried to live as husband and wife, kicking off a nine-year legal odyssey…

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Race Remixed?

Living Anthropologically
2011-03-28

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

The 2000 U.S. Census was the first in modern times allowing respondents to check off more than one box for the mandatory race question. In 2010, the number of people checking more than one box grew enormously. At the New York Times, Susan Saulny investigates “the growing number of mixed-race Americans” in a series called “Race Remixed.”

This post uses Saulny’s numbers to do a reality check. There may be some interesting things going on with regard to personal attitudes about racial identification, but in terms of how race really matters–economic and political inequalities, or structural racism–the trends look more like retrenchment.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is best seen through economic and political inequalities. The average white household holds ten to twenty times the wealth of the average black household. This gap is growing, as reported in “The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold” (2010). And despite Barack Obama, black political power is extremely limited:…

…Given these present inequalities–which by some measures are increasing, not decreasing–I don’t find it very interesting that “many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity,” the subject of Saulny’s first article “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above.” Personal feelings about race and identity could influence economic-political inequality, but it will not be automatic. There are already a lot of white people who say “race doesn’t matter anymore.” They are often the same people who ask “why do all the black people sit together?” or complain about affirmative action and “reverse racism.” Statements of “race doesn’t matter anymore” or rejecting color lines often are claims to a more enlightened-progressive state, better than benighted previous generations, or people of color, who are tagged as “more racist.” Saulny does briefly mention the “pessimists” who think the emphasis on mixing might “lead to more stratification.” She also writes “it is telling that the rates of intermarriage are lowest between blacks and whites, indicative of the enduring economic and social distance between them.” Still, the vast bulk of the article is about new multiracial college students celebrating mixture.

Saulny’s second article, “Black and White and Married in the Deep South” is more interesting. It is certainly worth investigating the rise of black-white marriages in places like Mississippi, where such unions were illegal 50 years ago, and where “a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race.” This is not to say southern states are “more racist” than northern states, which still boast the most segregated cities in the United States. Northern states have usually been able to get by on economic-geographic segregation instead of explicit legal sanction or lethal violence, although there has been plenty of legal sanction and lethal violence in northern states (see “A Dream Still Deferred” on Detroit). In any case, it is actually difficult to tell what is going on in Mississippi–is there really an increase, or are people just checking off different boxes in 2010 than they did in 2000?

The question remains as to whether inter-racial marriages can alter the structure of economic and political inequality. On this question, the graphic of “Who is Marrying Whom” is very enlightening. The numbers hint at three points I elaborate below: first, white people and the white-black household wealth gap are not going away; second, the “Hispanic” category shows signs of bifurcating into white and black; third, Asian-Americans have more securely become “probationary whites”:

What matters here is how the changing construction of whiteness intersects with the maintenance of a white/black divide that structures all race relations in the United States. Whether significant numbers of the people now called Latinos or Asian Americans–or the significant numbers of their known “mixed” offspring with whites–will become probationary whites and thus reinforce the structure is an important indicator of the future of race relations in the United States. (Trouillot 2003:151, Global Transformations)

White people are not going away

In 2009, approximately 95% of white people married each other, a figure that rises to 97% if “Hispanic (white)” is included. About five whites out of every thousand married a black person, or about 0.5%. That’s not going to change the wealth gap. Indeed, I suspect the numbers of white-black intermarriages decrease as one moves up the class ladder, but the overall number is so miniscule that further tracking is unnecessary.

There is certainly more white-black intermixture than registered by official marriage numbers. As “Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths” reveals, the most common multi-racial combination chosen is white-and-black. This may simply be recognizing a long history of intermixture: “America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew” (Brent Staples, 1999, “The Real American Love Story“). However, mixing has not altered overall white-black disparities. White people, white privilege, white-black wealth gap: no reason from the 2010 numbers to believe there will be much change….

Read the entire article here.

Are there ‘Mestizos’ in the Arab World? A Comparative Survey of Classification Categories and Kinship Systems

Middle Eastern Studies
Volume 48, Issue 1 (January 2012)
pages 125-138
DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2011.643301

Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste, Professor of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Terminology devoted to miscegenation and inter-ethnic relationships is extremely problematic, and this article shows that many of these categories are more classificatory than descriptive. Some North African and Middle Eastern examples reveal that theoretical concepts about mixture reflect the folk conceptions of the observers rather that the meaning of local categories which not necessarily share those notions of mixture. In this sense, it is suggested that social categorizations of miscegenation are created from specific structures of descent which consider the transmission of two different social statuses, and that the pre-eminent unilineal descent systems of the Arab world should refrain from the political construction of such classification categories.

The aim of this study is to consider the cultural classifications of mixture as a social category, despite the fact that the social sciences have used many concepts in an arbitrary way as analytical categories that arc supposedly neutral and descriptive of something evident, deriving from biology. In fact, the central problem is that historians and anthropologists have projected their folk conceptions of mixture onto the societies studied, instead of analysing it as a political exercise in social classification: mestizo, half-caste, half-blood, mulatto and so on are far from being objective concepts that describe people; they are social and political categories created in specific historical contexts. The question I would like to pose is what these mixture categories as applied to persons, taken for granted by those who should question them, refer to, and whether these ideas of mixture are applicable to Arabic societies. From this standpoint. I aim to show that: (1) the ideas about mixture depend on social classification systems, so that socio-political categories construct the idea of the mixture of people and not the reverse: (2) in the Maghreb, and in the Arab-Muslim world in general, there is an apparent absence of mixture categories as applied to persons: (3) explaining why some societies produce classifications about miscegenation while others do not involves taking into account political factors and the role of the systems of descent in defining group membership.

In social sciences, the idea of a mixture of people has become a category that is not only taken for granted, but is also considered as a description of a target biological phenomenon. My proposal is that the mixture can only emerge when one considers the contribution of two different entities that are transmitted in a bilateral way; and therefore requires that such entities be thought of as being different. This is the premise already discussed by Jean-Loup Amselle in terms of the paradox of racial mixing as an affirmation of pure essences. In contrast, the data I shall present regarding Arab contexts reflect the weight of a system of patrilineal descent that establishes membership without recognizing mixtures, and is based on the formal reproduction of the male lines.

In Western ideas about mixture, two major dimensions have converged concepts which are in fact based on a bilateral approach to the transmission of social status: (1) the idea that sexual mixing generates new people (mestizos, mulattos, half-caste, etc.), in accordance with the emerging racialist thinking of the eighteenth century,…

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