The Scope of the Books

Most of the books deal primarily with antiblack racism; only Telles et al. and Alberto and Elena address anti-indigenous racism. Even in these two books, the opportunity to really compare these forms of racism and analyze their intersection is mainly foregone, and this opportunity remains to be exploited in the future.

Alberto and Elena’s edited volume is a significant and welcome addition to the literature on race in Latin America in its extended interrogation of what Gastón Gordillo (“The Savage outside of White Argentina”) calls the project of “White Argentina.” In eleven chapters, historians, with a couple of anthropologists and literature specialists, challenge the exceptionalist view of Argentina, which depicts it as the only Latin American country where whiteness apparently engulfed indigeneity (often with violence), blackness, and mestizaje; estimates indicate that up to 85 percent of the population is “white.” The existence of a “brown” Argentina—alongside the small but more familiar indigenous groups and the tiny self-declared Afro-Argentine population—is drawn out, mostly through the ambiguous figure of “los negros,” the darker-skinned inhabitants of the provinces and the villas miseria (low-income peripheral urban settlements); the category includes migrants from Bolivia and Peru. Los negros are the traditional supporters of Peronismo and populism, who have been included in Argentina’s homogenizing whiteness and even seen as having authentically national criollo roots, and yet, with this epithet, are also rejected by the middle classes and the elites as not quite white enough, vulgar, and erring on the wrong side of the symbolic divide between civilization and barbarism. Argentinean multiculturalism tends to acknowledge historical mestizaje and thus highlight the indigenous and African-descent past, but gives less room to present-day racial difference and the blatantly racist abuse directed at the negros de mierda seen by white middle and upper classes to threaten the status quo with their political mobilizations against neoliberal reforms (Alberto and Elena, 255–257, 309–311).

Da Costa’s book takes an ethnographic approach while being oddly thin with the ethnographic detail. He focuses on the Orùnmilá Cultural Center (OCC) in the city of Ribeirão Preto, and we get a good sense of the center activists’ discourse, plus an account of their activities in Carnival, on the local music scene, and in relation to the implementation of ethno-educational policy in local schools; but the treatment lacks the thick descriptions of Hordge-Freeman’s and Sue’s works. There is not much ethnographic sense of the everyday. On the other hand, Da Costa gives a penetrating account of Brazil’s racial formation, using a decolonial perspective but with some emphasis on the messy mechanics of actually engaging with the state, and a nuanced appreciation of the dangers and opportunities presented by working with the state. Some of the best ethnography comes in his account of how Silvany Euclênio, an education race advisor appointed by the mayor after lobbying by the OCC, was systematically sidelined by the city administration and by many teachers.

Da Costa has a good account of “post-racial” ideology as a strategy of power to depoliticize race by highlighting mixture, racial innocence, racial democracy, racial exceptionalism, and the future transcendence of race. He describes well the dialectic of the “hyperconsciousness and negation” of race (borrowing from João H. Costas Vargas), in which Brazilians are acutely aware of racial difference and its social implications, even when it is not made explicit; but they will deny or minimize its importance—sometimes going to convoluted lengths—when challenged or when certain situations bring racialized difference to the surface. In fact, Da Costa gives us a better understanding of people’s denial and minimization than he does of their awareness of race. He shows how teachers rejected descriptions of the school system as institutionally racist, saying they treated blacks well in their own schools (148); he shows that they were unaware of racist incidents in their schools because they didn’t see them in the first place, or they were not alerted to them by the students, or they minimized them, assuming they were insignificant, or they believed it was inappropriate to make a big deal out of them. People in the city administration and in schools saw Silvany as tediously insistent on blackness; they thought that what she did concerned only black people and saw the ethno-educational project as just her pet project (151). This was reflected in the fact that, although in surveys many people say race-based affirmative action is necessary and worthwhile (an apparently unpredictable but politically correct response, which Telles et al. confirmed in their survey), in practice these teachers saw it as unfair and inappropriate for Brazil. Despite this depressing picture, some teachers who had done the teacher-training element of the project reported that they had learned a lot about black and African history and racism in Brazil, and said they felt they had more resources for dealing with racial difference and racism in schools.

Tanya Katerí Hernández is a lawyer, and her book focuses ostensibly on what she calls “customary law” as well as written legislation pertaining to Afro-descendants in Latin America, with a particular focus on Brazil and secondarily Colombia. Customary law covers the broad terrain on which state agents enact social norms via the deployment of state resources, giving them the force of (unwritten) law. The informal racism of police officers or city housing officials are examples insofar as they are state employees who have the power to impose certain social conventions relating to, say, racial segregation. Hernández’s aim is to draw attention to the neglected ways in which the state regulates racial dynamics in Latin America and to challenge the image of the state’s “racial innocence” that emerges from the relative absence of formal laws enshrining racial hierarchy (17). Hernández’s book is pitched at an introductory level and is very welcome as an incisive overview of the subordination of Afro-descendants and of multiculturalist and antiracist legislation. The focus on the state is also helpful, although Hernández perhaps does not sufficiently acknowledge previous work that looks not only at formal laws but also at state policy (e.g., regarding immigration, health, education, census taking, etc.), which is not customary law because it actually written down (not always publicly, as in secret memoranda banning the immigration of blacks and Jews in 1920s Mexico).Footnote ⁵ In fact, Hernández focuses quite heavily on this kind of social policy, and on written laws, and gives us less detail on customary law, defined by her as the unwritten practices of state officials. For example, in her account of changing census practices—seen as a state instrument of whitening—it seems that the Mexican state’s decision not to count blacks was explicit social policy, while the tendency of Puerto Rican enumerators to increasingly classify people as “white” was an unwritten customary practice enacted while using state resources (40–42). These kinds of nuances are not always clear in Hernández’s account, thus obscuring questions of structure and agency, and of how hegemony gets enacted through the diverse practices of state and nonstate institutions and agents.

Hernández’s depiction of racial inequality sometimes runs the risk of decontextualizing it. For example, she cites an online news agency report saying that, in 2001, 80 percent of Afro-Colombians lived below the poverty line (75). The figure looks impressive, but other 2003 data not only give a lower figure of 61 percent for Afro-Colombians but also, and more importantly, compare this to a figure of 54 percent for the rest of the population.Footnote ⁶ The difference is significant, of course, but racial inequality always needs to be put in a wider context of general inequality. Hernández does this better for Brazil, where some studies have controlled for class in a rigorous way.Footnote ⁷

Hordge-Freeman’s excellent ethnography interrogates families and bodies as sites of race-making in Brazil. Focusing on the women and some of the men of ten core families in a low-income neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, she brings out in vivid detail the complex, strongly gendered, and affectively powerful ideas and judgements made about racialized appearance (skin color, hair type, nose shape, etc.) and the stigma attached to body capital categorized as black, which may deeply affect relationships and emotional dispositions within phenotypically diverse families. The verbatim material and the ethnographic vignettes provide a stunning account of the symbolic and affective power of race in Brazil, which while it affects black people most directly, implicates everyone: light-skinned children may also be victimized by jealous darker-skinned mothers or sent away to live with whiter adoptive families (107–111). The stigma attached to blackness means people acquire multiple coping strategies, including instances of resistance: they learn “racial fluency” (how to use color/race terms appropriately, including not using them) and they learn racial etiquette to avoid possible shame and slights. Hordge-Freeman notes that this etiquette is common in dealing with class differences, too; ensuring one has on clean underwear in case of an emergency admission to hospital is a shame-avoidance tactic familiar among “poor but respectable” white Britons. But she rightly observes that racial stereotypes inflect the experience of class inequality in powerful ways, such that black folk are hypersensitive to reputational factors.

Rahier’s book is a collection of mostly previously published material, with two new chapters that focus on the politics of mestizaje and multiculturalism in Ecuador. As the vignettes of the title suggests, the book covers varied ground. It includes an analysis of Afro-Esmeraldan décimas (ten-line stanzas), in which he shows how Afro-Ecuadorians made this European poetic form their own through a process of creolization; an essay on the representation of Jews in Afro-Ecuadorian festive contexts, which shows how local blacks invert national ideologies by associating whiteness with the Devil and blackness with moral integrity; several essays on how blacks figure in representations and in the political order of the Ecuadorian nation as it has moved from “monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism” (175) (one essay here usefully summarizes multiculturalist legislation in several Andean countries); and a couple of essays that include a focus on the intersections of gender and race, one of which resonates with Hordge-Freeman’s work in its intimate and intriguing account of black women’s ideas about their own bodies and sexuality. Rahier’s overall message is that the dominance of whiteness and the marginalization and racialization of Afro-Ecuadorians in the nation—and their different status vis-à-vis indigenous groups—continue despite the turn to multiculturalism, which is in fact highly co-optative. His work adds to the small but growing literature on blackness in the central Andes—Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru.

With its in-depth exploration of a particular location, Sue’s rich and illuminating ethnography of Veracruz, Mexico, chimes nicely with Hordge-Freeman’s, although the latter has a tighter focus. Brazil and Mexico are two countries that, especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, made mestizaje a centerpiece of their national identities. Accordingly, although both ethnographies have “black” or “blackness” in their titles, both interrogate the middle ground of mixedness, which marks an interesting difference from Da Costa, Hernández, and Rahier, who tend to focus more on blackness. However, blackness and indigeneity have figured rather differently in these national identities, with Brazil according a much bigger cultural and institutional place to blackness, compared to Mexico, where indigeneity is given pride of place. The commonalities between the two countries are reflected in the striking similarities of Sue’s and Hordge-Freeman’s descriptions of the use of color/race terms, and the way mixed-race identities and families work as sites for the reproduction of common-sense racial hierarchies. (At the end of her chapters, Hordge-Freeman comments on similarities between Brazil and other parts of Latin America and the African diaspora.)Footnote ⁸ The differences between the countries are evident in the greater tendency among Veracruzanos to marginalize blackness (following a national trend in which blacks may often be seen as non-Mexican) and to avoid identifying explicitly as “black” (negro)—a category that does not yet have the political valence it has acquired in Brazil. It may be that the playing down of racism, alongside the playing up of mestizo nationalism, are also greater in Mexico, although Da Costa’s material raises doubts about this, as he emphasizes the negation of race in Brazil.

Pigmentocracies differs from the other books in several ways: it arises from a large multicountry comparative survey of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, coordinated by Telles, who is known for his research on Brazil and among Mexican Americans, and conducted by four teams, comprising mainly scholars based in the Latin American countries, although some are Latin Americans based in US universities. The survey methodology shows in a systematic way some things that had previously been shown qualitatively. A key finding was that the size of ethnoracial populations counted by censuses and surveys varies widely according to the questions asked and the categories used. Individual self-identification questions returned smaller indigenous populations in Mexico and Peru than questions about ancestry. This may seem predictable, but it is useful to reveal this in a systematic and comparative way, especially in Latin America, where the measurement of ethnoracial inequality is not only incipient in many countries but also beset by methodological and conceptual uncertainties about how—and indeed whether it is even meaningful—to classify people ethnoracially (especially if this means going beyond a simple division between indigenous and nonindigenous).

Another important finding is the systematic demonstration of the existence of ethnoracial inequality among indigenous, black, mestizo, and white people, although the survey only provides data on perceptions of discrimination (by color, class, and in some cases language) and does not measure the extent to which racial discrimination drives racial inequality. In Brazil, statistical data demonstrating the structural impact of racial discrimination were, in the 1980s and 1990s, arguably instrumental in changing government policy, which eventually admitted the existence of racism and took measures to combat it.Footnote ⁹ Pigmentocracies has the potential to underwrite similar kinds of shifts in other countries such as Mexico and Peru, where data on racialized inequality are less common, but additional data indicating the impact of racial discrimination, similar to those generated by scholars for Brazil, would be very useful.

A further key and innovative finding of this project has been the use of a measure of skin color, which was employed alongside classification (by self and other) as white, mestizo, indigenous, mulatto/pardo, and black; the survey did not address hair texture, which as Hordge-Freeman and other ethnographers know is a vital racial signifier (alongside facial features). The skin color data showed that inequalities were more clearly associated with color than with ethnoracial identity (225–227). For example, in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, self-identified mestizos and/or mulattoes were on average more educated than whites. But lightness of skin was associated more systematically with better education. This might mean that discriminators act on the basis of perceived color (not to mention other markers such as hair), creating a coherent association between color and social status, while self-identification responds to other influences, such as an aversion among the better educated to self-identify as white in countries where the national norm is a mixed person (225). We already knew that simple views of the dominance of whiteness are nuanced by the fact that in Brazil (especially in Bahia) some light-skinned people choose to identify as brown or even black for social reasons. Pigmentocracies reinforces this nuancing for Mexico (where, in addition, a significant group of whites in the north of the country had relatively low educational status) and for Colombia. As a member of the project team argues in a recent article, it may be that symbolic boundaries of whiteness are less rigid than the structural ones.Footnote ¹⁰

The Balance between Mixture and Racial Hierarchy

These books all attest to a well-known feature of the racial formations they examine, which is, in simple terms, a contradiction between racial democracy and racial hierarchy. On the one hand, there are processes—whether these are “merely” ideas or involve more material practices is a key issue—that move toward racial equality and the erasing or minimization of racial difference (albeit these take place in a context of class hierarchy). These processes are often seen as integrally linked to mestizaje, cast as a positive equalizing force that crosses boundaries and erodes difference. On the other hand, there are processes, nearly always seen as ideological and material, that reproduce racial inequality and point up racial difference. Paradoxically, the phenomenon of mestizaje is seen as being also a vehicle for this second set of processes, which are apparently diametrically opposed to the first set. Instead of tokening an egalitarian exchange, mestizaje can enshrine hierarchical difference by being recast as blanqueamiento (whitening); and it only draws its meaning from the founding differences between blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity. As Rahier notes (66), any use of the idea of racial mixing, whether positive or negative, “is always preceded by a necessary—although highly problematic—reification of the concept of biological ‘races.’”Footnote ¹¹

The various authors, however, address these contradictions in different ways. Rahier and Hernández talk in terms of a simple opposition in which the possibility of racial equality and positive views of mestizaje are simply an “ideological tool at the service of white and white-mestizo elites” (Rahier, 79) or are part of a blatant denial of racism, which is a “cloak” around the realities of discrimination (Hernández, 4). Although Rahier does not go into detail, this tool presumably works because the elites are dominant and are able to impose their worldview, despite resistance. For Hernández, the cloak of denial is effective because elites have made a point of portraying their countries as “racially innocent” (9) in comparison to the United States, where racial discrimination was once legally prescribed. As I noted earlier, these approaches tend to cast elites as simply cynical or as self-deceiving victims of their own rhetoric, while nonelites are either resistant (challenging but not necessarily able to overturn dominant structures of power) or they are plagued by false consciousness, misrecognizing the realities of racism, which are hidden from view by myths and ideologies of racial democracy and race mixture as a force capable of undermining racial hierarchy—myths that have no purchase on the realities of everyday life.

Other authors take a more nuanced approach, which encompasses the possibility that the egalitarian and inclusive aspects of mestizaje are more than just a lie, and that they resonate at some level with the realities of people’s lives, while existing in complex and contradictory tension with the hierarchical and racist dimensions of mestizaje. This resonates with Telles’s distinction between vertical and horizontal relations (although I argued above that this distinction cross-cuts the divide between family and workplace that Telles uses). It also chimes with Livio Sansone’s statement that “color is seen [by low-income residents of Salvador, Brazil] as important in the orientation of social and power relations in some areas and moments, while considered irrelevant in others.” These residents perceive a “soft” area of social relations (street corners, parties, the neighborhood, sports, and religion) and a “hard” one (work, marriage and dating, and interactions with the police).Footnote ¹²

Da Costa, for example, acknowledges that Telles’s approach suggests that “conviviality and interrelation are indeed aspects of the reality of race relations in society” (6) and states that “sociability and stratification do not exist as paradoxes—the former works to make the significance of the latter appear less so, an aspect central to the maintenance of anti-blackness and white supremacy” (7). However, he tends to see conviviality as a kind of ideological mask and, although he notes that the idea of racial democracy persists among many Brazilians, it is as a “future hope” (8) rather than some aspect of present reality. This means that any positive statement about racially harmonious interactions—such as those made by teachers he interviewed about social relations in the schools where they worked—inevitably appears as a manifestation of false consciousness and simple denial or misrecognition of racism.

Sue addresses directly the problem of false consciousness and rejects its assumption of a duped subaltern class. However, she still argues that people in Veracruz “turn a blind eye” when the realities of racial hierarchy contradict the national “ideology” and that they actively work to “silence, minimize and reframe” those realities (181), because in doing so they “achieve a sense of belonging to the national community,” built on the three pillars of mestizaje, nonracism, and nonblackness (184). In these formulations, a conceptual divide remains between the “realities” of racism and the “ideology” of nonracism. Sue goes further when, citing Terry Eagleton—who said successful ideologies must communicate “a version of social reality which is real and recognizable enough”—she identifies “shreds of truth in ideological myths” (182), but these get a mere paragraph. The possibility that mestizaje can encompass inclusion as a lived, embodied reality—partial and interwoven immanently with partial realities of exclusion—gets short shrift.

Hordge-Freeman also tussles with the contradictions produced by mixture. The main emphasis of the book is on exposing the gendered racial hierarchies evident in ideas about bodies, beauty, family relationships, respectability, and spatial structures; she also shows that the people she worked with often reproduced racial hierarchies by evading and minimizing them (for example, attributing racism to older generations, rather than their own), although they were willing to talk about race with her. She outlines the “critical accommodation” by which, “rather than blindly reproducing racial hierarchies,” people accommodated them with the “goal of ultimately challenging inequality” (73). For example, women tend to reproduce aesthetic standards that see light skin, straight hair, and a narrow nose as beautiful; these standards, oriented to whiteness, are internalized and naturalized. Yet in subtle ways, an alternative aesthetic is also enacted by women who want to look good and think they can achieve this by having slightly curly rather than totally straight hair or by adding synthetic extensions to disguise their “bad” hair, without approximating a “white” look. Also women who relax or even straighten their hair are not necessarily blindly reproducing a whitened norm and thus denying themselves; they may also be trying to get ahead in the job market, create a sense of self-worth, and challenge the simple equation of boa aparência (good appearance) with a white look. Another example is of a woman, from a family identified by Hordge-Freeman as antiracist, who plays with racialized language, calling herself and members of her family torradinhos (toasted) to accentuate their “beautiful” dark skin (206), explicitly discussing slavery past and present (a theme skated over by most, except in relation to the distant past), and making ironic comments on white privilege. At the same time she commented on the desirability of straightened hair and of marrying a white man.

However, while alive to these contradictions, Hordge-Freeman explains them in terms of a dual dynamic of the internalization and contestation of hegemonic norms of whiteness. This seems fair enough in relation to ideas about beauty—the overwhelming consensus in Brazil that African hair is “bad” can only be an expression of racism and its internalization. But it does not envisage the possibility that mestiçagem can be experienced as simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. For example, Hordge-Freeman looks at the huge success of the Instituto de Beleza Natural, which offers treatments relaxing, rather than straightening, hair. It sells its services in terms of helping people improve their career opportunities and does not mention race at all. This “contributes to a racial ideology that silences any questions” of race and “exploits the racial anxieties of black women,” although it also allows these women to carve out a space to challenge racial hierarchies (95). But its success could also be due to the fact that it taps into the normative image of the mixed-race woman and into those “soft” areas of social relations where race really is experienced as not very important. Of course, these inclusive meanings are always already exclusive ones as well. The mixed-race woman is notoriously a site for the enactment of race and gender hierarchy; everyone knows that the world of work—in which the Instituto suggests that a woman with relaxed hair could achieve more—is actually a “hard” area. Inclusion and exclusion are immanent in each other. The point is that the Instituto is tapping into experiential, embodied realities, not just ideologies and myths.

Alberto and Elena argue that whiteness, as it developed in Argentina, is “markedly similar to the tropes of racial and cultural inclusion” associated with mestizaje (11). They note that criticisms of ideologies of racial democracy have portrayed it as an obfuscatory “myth” and say that the same critique is possible of “whiteness” in Argentina. However, they caution that debunking a racial “myth” should beware of replacing it with another “more foundational ‘reality’ of race” (12). Whiteness is not a simple “misapprehension or lie,” it is a “racial formation with profound contradictions [that] … grants broad inclusion by muting explicit discussions of racial and ethnic differences,” while also reinscribing those very differences (12). Thus Peronism included the popular classes, avoiding the explicit discussion of race and implicitly extending the embrace of whiteness to encompass them and their mestizo background. Yet not only did the visual imagery of Peronismo make fairly unequivocal references to a stereotypical dark-skinned plebeian (as Ezequiel Adamovsky’s essay shows), but also elite opponents of Peronismo lambasted the rank-and-file “negros” they associated with the movement. Both these tendencies were ideological and material realities.

Final Thoughts

All of these books include some reference to comparative frames—usually ones comparing Brazil with the United States, but also ones comparing Latin American countries. The emphasis tends to be on nonexceptionalism: Argentina, according to Alberto and Elena, is not an exception in Latin America but is a variant on a Latin American theme. Brazil is not an exceptional racial democracy, compared to the United States, but a variant on a hemispheric American, a black Atlantic, or a Lusophone theme. This is all to the good; comparisons are useful, but defining one case as exceptional tends to play to nationalist myth making. The balance between inclusion and exclusion—seen not as “myth” versus “reality” but as simultaneous realities immanent in each other—is not specific to Latin America; it is characteristic of liberalism generally. In Latin America, the pervasiveness of mestizaje—understood as material-semiotic phenomenon—in all its regional variants gives the balance a particular form, rooted in the intimacies of kinship and neighborhoods, which holds the key to the persistence of ideas of racial democracy in the face of decades of sustained critiques. Only by grasping racial democracy as a myth but also more than a myth can we understand its persistence. Hegemony operates by constructing realities that are at once material and semiotic.