Mixed Race Studies

Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Auditorium of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York
Monday, 2011-09-12, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

Discussant: Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU

Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. She teaches extensively on these topics. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group) and Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación (INAH, UNAM, CEMCA and IRD), and has two forthcoming chapters in Contesting Recognition (Palgrave) and Cultures of Colour (Berghahn Books).

Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this paper presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. Mestiza is a racial category that emerges as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. Mestiza refers to those who represent Mexicaness and, therefore, those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism. Mestiza is then seen as term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implies possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. Such setting has given way to a process of racial and racist normalization that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the commonly spread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because we are all ‘mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status.

The title for the CLACS Fall 2011 Colloquium Series is Contemporary Racisms in the Americas. This colloquium will explore emergent racisms in the Americas as integral to the multicultural and what some have called “post racial” present defined within larger processes of economic and cultural globalization and transnational migration. It will also deepen the understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racism as major obstacles to the construction of intercultural relations, racial and economic justice, and democracy. In this way, it will complement the themes covered by the seminar on Racisms and anti-racist strategies in the Americas. It will become an opportunity for students to benefit from latest contributions to the analysis of racism in the hemisphere and develop a thematic and methodological comparative perspective. It will also become an opportunity for a larger audience to benefit from the information and analysis of cutting-edge scholarship which is also preoccupied with the construction of anti-racist strategies.

For more information, click here.

The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

Goldsmiths College, University of London
2006

Monica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

The thesis analyses the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mestizaje in Mexico. It focuses on the qualities of women’s experiences of racism and explores the significance of mestizaje in relation to Mexican discourses of race and nation. It provides a historical revision of the ways in which such discourses have developed in Mexico, emphasising the cultural conditions that make it possible to ‘think’ the nation, and relating them to the ways in which systems of differentiation amongst the population have operated. The thesis assesses the politics of difference in Mexico in relation to the ways in which notions of race and practices of racism have been detached from each other. For this, I analyse the historical development of the notion of mestizaje and the mestiza identity, and consider its impact and relevance in contemporary Mexico, calling into question official policies and public discourses that support the idea of the mestiza as the subject of national identity.

Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographic albums, I explore how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialised, gendered and classed bodies and national identity, in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. The thesis then looks at the specificity of the participants’ social location and analyses how these women today in Mexico think through the notions of racism, mestizaje, and national identity. The focus on the qualities of their everyday experience of racism led me to explore the significance of the role of emotions in revealing the lived experience of racism. In this way, my analysis associates racial and class displacement with inadequacy; beauty, ugliness and ordinariness with shame; and the anxiety about family belonging with slightedness; and exposes the contradictory and ambivalent ways in which the experiences of racism are lived and understood. The experience of racism is explored from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically looking at the relationship between visual representations of identities and racist practices, and in this context the ways in which women see themselves and perceive how they are seen by others: the meanings and metaphors of their own image.

Read this thesis at the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library here.