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Distributed intensities: Whiteness, mestizaje and the logics of Mexican racism

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Monica Moreno Figueroa

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Abstract

By analysing racist moments, this article engages with debates about the existence of racism in Mexico and how whiteness, as an expression of such racism, operates. It draws on empirical research that explores Mexican women’s understandings of mestizaje (mixed-race discourses) and experiences of racism. It assesses how racism is lived, its distributed intensity, within the specific racist logics that organize everyday social life. I build upon arguments that Latin American racist logics emerge from the lived experience of mestizaje and its historical development as a political ideology and a complex configuration of national identity. Mestizaje enables whiteness to be experienced as both normalized and ambiguous, not consistently attached to the (potentially) whiter body, but as a site of legitimacy and privilege.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Moreno Figueroa MG

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Ethnicities

Year: 2010

Volume: 10

Issue: 3

Pages: 387-401

Print publication date: 23/08/2010

Date deposited: 28/01/2011

ISSN (print): 1468-7968

ISSN (electronic): 1741-2706

Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468796810372305

DOI: 10.1177/1468796810372305

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