Whiteness, Mestizaje, and social equity

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between Whiteness and Mestizaje–the idea of a ‘race made of the mixture of other races’–in the context of Mexican public administration. It argues that Mestizaje promotes a raceless or ‘color-evasive’ narrative that has historically prevented the discussion of race and ethnoracial inequalities in Mexico; sustains Whiteness in public organizations, and creates the conditions for White supremacy, as an uneven distribution of social privileges and penalties along ethnoracial lines benefitting White people. Ultimately, these three aspects of the Mestizaje ideology and its connection with Whiteness could be preventing the advancement of social equity in Mexico. Moreover, the reflections presented here are potentially insightful for other contexts in which raceless and/or color-evasive narratives are prevalent as well.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• Mestizaje
• social equity
• Mexico
• race

Introduction

As a direct product of colonialism, Whiteness¹ is a global phenomenon, but whose specific forms and mechanisms are contextually bounded within the modern national state and the sociohistorical processes of creation of national racial regimes (Garner, 2007; Mills, 1997). In public administrative settings, Whiteness has been studied in South Africa (Posel, 1999), the United Kingdom (Macalpine & Marsh, 2005), Hong Kong (Leonard, 2010), Bolivia (Bohrt, 2020), and most prominently the United Sates (U.S.) In the U.S. public administration scholars have recently argued that Whiteness, White supremacy and White normativity can be produced and reinforced in public organizations (Blanco, 2022; Heckler, 2017 and 2019; Humphrey, 2023) and nonprofits (Heckler, 2019a; Nickels & Leach, 2021). The reproduction of Whiteness and White supremacy in public service is at odds with the fairness and justice ideals of social equity, as a pillar of public administration (Blessett et al., 2019; Frederickson, 1971, 1980, 1989, 1990, 2005; Gooden, 2014; Wooldridge & Bilharz 2019, among others).

In contrast, with the notable exception of Bohrt (2020), Whiteness remains unexplored in public administrative settings in Latin America. That gap may be due to the predominance of Mestizaje—a complex ideology of a ‘new race’ made from the ‘biological’ and/or cultural mixture of ‘other races’ (Telles, 2014; Wade, 2017, LAPORA n.d)—and the Mestizo as the main ethnoracial² identity in many countries in the region. The Mestizaje narrative has been historically present in different degrees in several countries throughout Latin America, including Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, and most prominently Mexico (Moreno Figueroa & Wade, 2022; Telles, 2014; Wade, 2010; Woo-Mora, 2022).

Consequently, this paper studies the Mexican case to disentangle the relationship between Whiteness and Mestizaje and reflects upon the implications of that relationship for the advancement of social equity in public administration. To that end, the paper is organized as follows. Section one briefly discusses Whiteness, color evasiveness and White supremacy, and reviews how these concepts have been incorporated in the context of public administration. Section two presents a historical account of Mestizaje. With that background, section three discusses the relationship between Mestizaje, Whiteness, color-evasiveness and other important ethnoracial identities in Mexico, namely Indigenous and Black peoples. Section four analyzes the implications of such relationships for public administration and social equity in Mexico. The paper concludes with some reflections on recent symbolic actions to challenge Mestizaje in Mexican society and the federal government, and on the implications of this work beyond the Mexican case.

Whiteness, White supremacy, and color-evasiveness

Whiteness can be broadly understood as a system of domination based upon the normalization of White identity as the standard against which otherness is constructed, understood, and evaluated (Garner, 2007; Harris, 1993; Levine-Rasky, 2013; Lipsitz, 2018; Mills, 1997; Pinder, 2012). The creation of ‘others’ in opposition to a White identity is closely linked to European colonization processes that occurred worldwide as early as 1500 (Nowell et al., 2020), creating and racializing Black, Indigenous, Asians and other ‘nonwhite’ bodies as inferior to Whites (Fanon, 1991; Mills, 1997; Wade, 2010 and 2017). The alleged superiority of a White identity of the colonization era was further revamped in modern capitalism, portraying both a white phenotype and the cultural and ethical features of European—and later American—Protestantism as the archetypes of modernity itself (Echeverría, 2019).

Whiteness has a cash value for White individuals, accounting for advantages from discriminatory practices and unequal educational opportunities, insider networking to access jobs and intergenerational wealth that transfers the spoils of discrimination to new generations (Lipsitz, 2018). But the benefits of Whiteness can be reaped by racialized ‘others’ as well. Individuals that pass as Whites (Harris, 1993) and even those that may not necessarily fit a ‘white phenotype’ but that embrace and perpetuate Whiteness as an ideology (Nishi et al., 2016) can participate of the material and symbolic advantages of Whiteness. This means that Whiteness is not a physiological condition (i.e., that of having white skin), but primarily an exercise of power through dynamics of inclusion and exclusion simultaneously occurring at the individual and collective levels (Levine-Rasky 2013; Lipsitz, 2018). From that perspective, Whiteness sustains and promotes White supremacy, as a normalized political system that distributes material and symbolic benefits and penalties along racialized hierarchical lines (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Leonardo, 2013; Lipsitz, 2018; Mills, 1997; Nishi et al., 2015 and 2016).

According to Mills (1997), Whiteness and White supremacy are preserved through a tacit “racial contract” that is at the same time political, moral, and epistemological. As a product of colonialism this racial contract is global in scope but admits local variations depending upon the sociohistorical processes of otherization and racialization defined by the creation of modern national states (Garner, 2007; Mills, 1997).

Epistemologically, and in the U.S. in particular, the contemporary racial contract relies upon a color-evasive³ ideology that allows for a veiled racism that “softly otherizes” people of color upon the basis of notions of individual merit (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). This color-evasive ideology minimizes racism as a problem, explains racial matters in a decontextualized manner (abstract liberalism), naturalizes unjust outcomes of racialized practices and attributes social inequalities to cultural traits (Bonilla-Silva, 2003 and 2018). In this way, a color-evasive ideology sustains Whiteness and thus White supremacy through the general claim that racial inequalities are the result of nonracial dynamics (Bonilla-Silva, 2003 and 2018; Doane, 2003; Nishi et al., 2016). Moreover, this purposefully promoted racial ignorance “reinforces white supremacy, attending to mechanisms of knowledge evasion and resistance that facilitate racial reproduction in everyday life, through the work of institutions, and across societies more broadly” (Mueller, 2020, p. 143). In the public administration scholarship published in English, a few works have recently integrated some of these ideas, as discussed next.

Whiteness, White supremacy, and color-evasiveness in public administration

A first documentation of the way in which the epistemological root of the racial contract (Mills, 1997) and the normalization of a White identity occur in public administration can be found in the work by Macalpine and Marsh (2005). They study a sample of organizations of the public and voluntary sectors in the United Kingdom, finding evidence of a systematic discursive concealment of Whiteness as a hegemonic strategy. This concealment, they argue, contributes to a sense of neutrality that masks and sustains the power and identity of White people, by preventing them to recognize their power in the first place.

Mill’s notion of the epistemological racial contract was also employed by Heckler (2017). He inquired on the relationship between color-evasiveness, Whiteness, and White supremacy in public organizations. Far from being neutral, he argues, the legally mandated color-evasiveness of the U.S. has important administrative and political consequences as an effective device to maintain Whiteness and White supremacy as publicly realized values in public organizations. In subsequent work, Heckler (2019) employs an intersectional approach to study Whiteness and Masculinity as performative acts in public organizations and finds that both elements have statistically significant effects on how federal workers in the U.S. experience public service. Heckler also applied his performative and intersectional framework to the study nonprofit organizations, showing that when nonprofits perform in accordance with the legal and economic constraints of the sector, White men are benefited (Heckler, 2019a).

Following the work by Heckler, Blanco (2022) shows how the egalitarian and colorblind legal framework of the Department of Motors and Vehicles in a Midwestern U.S. state portrays a white phenotype as the norm and allows for harmful depictions that construct people of color as potential terrorists and/or immigrant ‘others.’ These mechanisms, he argues, reinforce Whiteness and White supremacy (Blanco, 2022).

Lastly, the works by Nickels and Leach (2021) and Humphrey (2023) offer theoretical approaches to further study and challenge Whiteness in nonprofits and public organizations. Nickels and Leach (2021) propose a synthesis of elements of Critical Race Theory (CRT), feminist theory, and intersectionality as a framework to identify and disrupt the knowledge production of nonprofits as White and masculine spaces. Similarly, Humphrey (2023) contends that public organizations are gendered as masculine and racialized as White, and calls for the usage of White normativity, or “the cultural beliefs and ideals that lead whiteness to be perceived as right (Ward, 2008)” (p. 6) as a framework to study the racialization processes occurring in public organizations.

In other national contexts, scholars from other disciplines have studied Whiteness in administrative settings as well. However, these works only employ public administration as the locus of their research and do not engage systematically with public administration literature. These works include the study of ‘wages of Whiteness’ in South African public sector during the apartheid regime (Posel, 1999); the exploration of the construction of Whiteness, Masculinity, and expatriate citizenship in Hong Kong (Leonard, 2010), and the analysis of the racialization of the central state bureaucracy in Bolivia (Bohrt, 2020). Again, although Bohrt does not engage with public administration literature directly, his work is relevant for this paper as a depiction of the relationship between Whiteness and Mestizaje, and the usage of the bureaucratic apparatus to sustain Whiteness and White supremacy through racialized narratives of modernity and ‘backwardness.’ In Bolivia, Bohrt (2020) asserts,

Criollo and, later, white-mestizo state elites understood and represented themselves as the embodiment of modernity and natural holders of state authority. They simultaneously rationalized control of the central bureaucracy through discourses that variously casted indigeneity as backward, unfit, and/or dangerous (p. 9. Italics in the original).

In summary, the literature above suggests that Whiteness and White supremacy can be reproduced in public organizations and nonprofits alike. In that reproduction process, color-evasiveness acts as a key element that detaches White individuals from the larger socio-historical context that benefit them as a collective. In Latin America, and for the Bolivian case to be precise, Whiteness has also been associated with the idea of modernity and an otherization process that depicts Indigenous peoples and practices as ‘backward’ or anti-modern.

The reproduction of Whiteness in the administrative setting, in turn, is clearly at odds with one of the normative guides of public administration, that of social equity as the fourth pillar of the discipline (Wooldridge & Bilharz 2019). Forged by Black scholar and practitioner Frances Harriet Williams (Gooden, 2017) but largely credited to the work by Frederickson (1971, 1980, 1989, 1990, 2005), the social equity perspective calls for public administrators and scholars to play an active role in identifying and correcting social inequalities to advance the wellbeing of historically marginalized populations. Furthermore, for some scholars the violations of equity are contrary to democracy and good governance, thus social equity should be conceived as a foundational anchor rather than an isolated ‘pillar’ of public administration (Blessett et al., 2019). Although several definitions and approaches to social equity exist, most of them are tied to the broad values of fairness and justice (Wooldridge & Bilharz 2019).

To start unraveling the ways in which Whiteness may be operating in administrative settings in the Americas and thus affecting social equity, the next section provides a historical account of the dominant ethnoracial ideology in the region, that of Mestizaje. As mentioned earlier, Mestizaje is still prevalent in several Latin American countries, with Mexico as the paradigmatic case (Moreno Figueroa & Wade, 2022; Telles, 2014; Wade, 2010; Woo-Mora, 2022).

Mestizaje, a historical overview of the ‘cosmic race’

In Latin America the origin of ethnoracial categories can be traced back to colonial times (Sue, 2013). The violent colonization process created ‘others’ around the colonizer’s idea of themselves and their own notions of superiority and inferiority (Wade, 2010). In the territory that comprises contemporary Mexico—known in colonial times as the Viceroyalty of the New Spain—the otherization was officialized in the Sistema de Castas (Castes System), a social order around the miscegenation between the three main groups or ‘trunks’ of colonial society, Indigenous peoples, Europeans and Black people and their descendants (Martínez, 2009). In the Castes System the word Mestizo was used to refer to the offspring of Spaniards and Indigenous people, so the term was just one in the rich and complex nomenclature of the New Spain’s society, as illustrated by the famous pinturas de castas, or castes paintings (Martínez, 2009). In that context, caste classification had important social and economic consequences, as it was employed to determine identities, rights, privileges, and obligations (Martínez, 2009).

Importantly, during the sixteen and seventeenth centuries the term ‘race’ was related to religion, rather than any set of phenotypical traits. Jewish and Muslim individuals, for example, were considered members of ‘bad races,’ in contrast to the ‘good Old Christians.’ By then, in the Viceroyalty of the New Spain the Old Christian title and the privileges attached to it could be claimed and literally certified through a process known as limpieza de sangre, or “blood cleansing” (Martinez, 2009). This allowed some degree of intergenerational social mobility for ‘native blood’, as it could be ‘cleaned’ in a couple generations if ‘mixing properly’ (i.e., with ‘pure Spaniards’). But that was not the case for Black people, whose blood was considered “a corruptive force on ‘pure’ lineages and the social body as a whole” (Martínez, 2009, p. 42).

By the eighteenth century, with the extension of merchant capitalism, the notions of purity and race were gradually secularized and mixed with new expressions regarding class (Knight, 1990; Martínez, 2009). The castes system formally ended in the nineteenth century, after Mexican Independence from Spain was achieved, in 1821. The independence movement abolished enslavement and during the nineteenth century Mexicans liberals embarked on an effort to modernize and unify the country, while formally undoing the institutions, privileges, and hierarchies of the colonial period (Deans-Smith and Katzew, 2009).

However, the process was one of transformation rather than of elimination. The complex racial classification of the colonial period was reduced to three ‘races,’ White individuals, Indigenous peoples (referred to as Indios or ‘Indians’) and Mestizos–as an intermediate category. At the same time, some of the harmful racial ideas of the New Spain were revamped, “especially those that referred to the brutishness in Indians (…), the inferiority of dark skin (…), and whiteness as an attainable status to which many people aspired” (Lomnitz, cited in Deans-Smith and Katzew, 2009, p.12). In this process, the historical presence and contributions of Black people to the new country were virtually erased from the nascent national narrative (Deans-Smith and Katzew, 2009) and would not emerge for nearly 150 years.

The goal of modernizing the country set after the independence was partially accomplished during the period known as the Porfiriato a three-decade-long dictatorship by Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) that significantly developed the nation in economic terms under the positivist motto of order and progress (Knight, 1990). By then, the European notion of ‘scientific racism’ was gaining momentum, and many Porfirian intellectuals fully embraced it claiming that the largely ‘mixed’ and nonwhite population of Mexico was an impediment for national progress (Stepan, in Sue, 2013). Consequently, the Díaz government implemented oppressive policies particularly aimed against Indigenous populations that included forceful assimilation, land expropriation, privatization, and disintegration of Indigenous communities, among other authoritarian practices (Sue, 2013). In addition, Díaz’s government encouraged and fostered European immigration, under the assumption that ‘whitening the country’ would in turn bring modernity (Sue, 2013). In short, as Knight (1990, p. 80) states:

the logic of Porfirian ‘development’ (…) conspired with [an] imported ideology to create a climate of racism that was both official (that is, justified, albeit non uniformly, by elite intellectuals) and, more important, unofficial (practiced by the regime’s minions and by social elites more generally).

Díaz’s government was overthrown in 1917 by a Revolution that would define the narrative, institutions, and destiny of Mexico for nearly one century. Once consolidated around 1920, the revolutionary government adopted Indigenismo as part of its official ideology, seeking for Indigenous peoples “emancipation from the old oppressions of the landlord, cacique [local boss] and priest, [and their] integration into the new revolutionary state and nation” (Knight, 1990, p.80). Although different versions of Indigenismo coexisted disagreeing on the extent of ‘integration’ needed on topics like monolingualism or political autonomy, all of them shared a patronizing approach—to say the least—that saw Indigenous people as objects rather than authors of their own destiny (Knight, 1990). For example, Manuel Gamio, a well-known Indigenista wrote: the Indian (sic.) suffers, “but unfortunately does not understand, does not know, the appropriate means to achieve his liberation” (cited in Knight, 1990, p. 77).

Gamio and other nationalist thinkers paired the condescending view of Indigenismo with an even more powerful idea: that of Mestizaje, an ideology based upon the fusion of two cultures to create a new national one, neither European nor Indigenous, but Mexican (Martínez Casas et al., 2014). The most celebrated promoter of the Mestizaje, José Vasconcelos, went even further, portraying Mestizaje as mixing not only in cultural, but mainly in—supposedly—biological terms. Vasconcelos wrote against the White supremacist-eugenicist literature that flourished in Europe and the U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century, arguing that miscegenation resulted not in the detriment but in the improvement of society. Thus, he elaborated a ‘theory’ of Mestizaje around the supposed virtues of hybridism, arguing that it “‘tends to produce better types,’ since it blends different races possessing different qualities” (Knight 1990, p. 92). In his view, the combination of Spaniards and Indigenous peoples resulted in a ‘new race’ with outstanding ‘spirit’ and qualities, that he referred to as the ‘cosmic race’ of the Mestizos (Stavans, 2011).

Through his essentialist ideas of Mestizaje, Vasconcelos was instrumental for the creation of modern Mexico, acting as an active promotor of the national ideology of the ‘cosmic race’ as an intellectual, educator and public officer (Knight, 1990; Martínez Casas et al., 2014; Sue, 2013). As Secretary of Education—from 1921 to 1924—he supported the work of muralists like Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, as well as many other artists and institutions that exalted the Revolution and its official ideology of Mestizaje. As a state-sponsored ideology, Mestizaje served as the touchstone of national unity, fuzing racial ideology with national identity, thus equating being Mexican with being Mestizo (Sue, 2013). So successful was that process that some authors have stated that “the great ‘victory’ of Mexico’s national building process (…) was the invention of the mestizo as the dominant ethnoracial category” (Trejo & Altamirano, 2016, p.3, emphasis added).

The Mestizaje ideology was further capitalized by the Revolutionary Institutional Party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional, PRI), that ruled Mexico under an authoritarian de facto single-party regime, from 1929 to 2000.⁴ Under the PRI government, being or ‘becoming’ Mestizo—in a cultural sense rather than a biological one—was the ticket to the social mobility and justice promised by the ‘institutionalized revolution.’ This was especially the case for Indigenous populations. As Trejo and Altamirano observe,

[a]s part of a process of cultural assimilation rather than racial mixing, Indigenous people could become mestizos even if they remained racially Indigenous. In the context of a one- party regime, poor and lower-middle-class mestizos were mobilized within corporatist organizations linked to the PRI, as peasants and workers (Trejo and Altamirano, 2016, p.3).

In sum, although the notion of Mestizaje was not new, it blossomed after the Mexican Revolution (Knight, 1990) and has strongly marked Mexican national identity since then (Villoro, in Martínez Casas, et al., 2014). As an ideology, Mestizaje became so prevalent that went largely unchallenged during most of the twentieth century and arguably remains powerful today, as most Mexicans self-identify with the Mestizo category.

Although the country does not collect official data on ‘race’⁵ an exception was made in 2016, when the Intergenerational Social Mobility Module (INEGI, n.d.) inquired on the ‘racial origin’ of Mexicans. In that questionnaire 61.2% of the respondents identified themselves as Mestizos. Similar numbers have been obtained by unofficial but nationally representative accounts that provided respondents with a list of ethnoracial groups to choose from. In this way, the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA) survey accounted for 64.3% of Mestizos (Telles, 2014), the Project on Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Mexico (PRODER) survey registered 57.5% of them (Solís et al., 2020a), and the LAPOP project, a survey research lab at Vanderbilt University, reported 50% of Mexicans under the Mestizo category (LAPOP Lab, 2022).

More importantly, the pervasiveness of the Mestizaje ideology, as promoted particularly by the PRI regime, determined the local understanding and power dynamics of Whiteness, and regulated other ethnoracial identities, namely those of Indigenous and Black peoples. This, in turn, has implications in terms of current ethnoracial inequalities, which ultimately should concern public administration from a social equity perspective, as discussed next.

Mestizaje, color-evasiveness, Whiteness, and White supremacy

The previous section shows that Mestizaje emerged in Mexico as the product of a complex sociohistorical process that placed the Mestizo as the dominant ethnoracial category. The triumph of the Mestizaje ideology, as promoted particularly by the PRI regime had at least two enduring and important consequences. First, it effectively erased references to race and racism under the idea that racism cannot exist in a racially mixed society (Knight, 1990; Sue, 2013). Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka describe this raceless and/or color-evasive narrative, as “a process of racial and racist normalization that acts in such a way 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’” (Moreno Figueroa & Saldívar Tanaka 2016, p. 516).

In addition, the color or racial-evasive narrative of Mestizaje as promoted by the PRI regime articulated and still regulates other ethnoracial identities in the country, thus playing an instrumental role on the maintenance and promotion of White supremacy, as a system of distribution of benefits and penalties along ethnoracial lines, to the benefit of a white phenotype.

In the context of a ‘raceless’ or color-evasive society, the relationship between Mestizaje and Whiteness is complex and ambiguous. On the one hand, Mestizaje rejects the White identity as the norm, and substitutes it with the Mestizo as the prototypical Mexican (Knight, 1990; Sue, 2013; Trejo and Altamirano, 2016). On the other hand, Mestizaje fosters a preference for a white phenotype and a series of behaviors associated with Whiteness, constructed along the lines of race, ethnicity, class, and modernity (Campos-Vazquez, & Medina-Cortina, 2019; Cerón-Anaya, 2019; Echeverría, 2019; Navarrete, 2020; Solís, Krozer, et al., 2019).

Mexican popular culture is full of references that situate a white phenotype and/or ‘culture’ as an ideal to aspire to, both for esthetic and socioeconomic reasons (Cerón-Anaya, 2019; Krozer & Urrutia Gómez, 2021; Solís, Krozer, et al., 2019). A prime example of the former is the well-known phrase mejorar la raza which literally translates as “improving the race.” The next quote by a participant from a study on the everyday practices of ethnoracial discrimination in Mexico illustrates the point in the specific context of government-citizen interactions:

My grandpa told me: ‘Do you want to improve the race? Marry a white woman’ […]. Whether you like it or not, marrying a person with a white skin do opens a lot of doors, it attracts more attention. At least [their kids] won’t turn out that ugly. That’s what you think, right? At least they’ll be pretty […] Because they’ll go and ask for something in a government office or they’ll go there because they need to complete some paperwork and will get treated nicely (Participant in the study by Solís, Krozer, et al., 2019, p. 15. Translation is mine).

The preference for Whiteness as an esthetic and cultural ideal allowed by Mestizaje is better captured by Krozer and Urrutia Gómez (2021). In Mexico, they write, Whiteness “implies a package of features beyond skin color, including facial features and bodily attributes, but also socioeconomic and cultural indicators, all intrinsically entangled with assumptions about wealth and loaded with aesthetic values” (p. 24). This predilection for a white phenotype in Mexico has also been documented in the political arena, where ‘European-looking’ candidates are more positively evaluated than those with an Indigenous or Mestizo appearance (Aguilar Pariente, 2011). Similar inclinations have been documented in the labor market (Arceo Gómez & Campos-Vázquez, 2014), access to financial services (Martínez Gutiérrez, 2019), among other arenas where ‘white-looking’ people are favored. Moreover, these and other studies also tend to show the challenges and disadvantages that Indigenous people and/or dark-skinned individuals face as compared to their white counterparts.

Similarly, the Mestizaje narrative promoted a dual and contradictory relationship with Indigenous populations, exalting them as a foundational root of Mexico while, at the same time, portraying them as an obstacle to modernization that needed to be removed by virtue of cultural or ‘biological’ miscegenation (Knight, 1990). Again, empirical evidence shows how Indigenous people are discriminated against in the job market (Arceo Gómez & Campos-Vázquez, 2014) access to public services like clean water (Trejo & Altamirano, 2016), and face structural disadvantages in education (Telles et al., 2015; Trejo & Altamirano, 2016) among other well-documented inequalities.

In contrast to the ambiguity between Mestizaje and the White and Indigenous identities, the relationship of the Mestizaje ideology with a Black or Afro-Mexican identity is straightforward and can be characterized as one of rejection and anti-blackness. Portraying the Mestizo as the result of Spaniards and Indigenous populations, and in turn equating Mestizaje with the Mexican national identity was a de facto exclusion of Black people and other populations, as the still widespread notion that ‘there are no Black people in Mexico’ illustrates (García, et al., 2022; Moreno Figueroa, 2020; Velázquez and Iturralde, 2016; Zárate, 2017. Moreover, the Mestizaje ideology is also profoundly anti-black and employs systematic repugnance (asco) toward blackness as a device to sustain both, Whiteness and the Mexican racial project of Mestizaje (Moreno Figueroa, 2020). As Moreno Figueroa writes:

The dehumanization of the Black person, of the individual with some blackness, of the person close to blackness seems to be a necessary feature for Mestizaje as a racial project. The idea is to situate the Black self as the limit that must never be achieved, letting blackness to act as a filter to regulate day-to-day interactions (Moreno Figueroa, 2020, p. 67).

The lines above are helpful to understand why it was until very recently (2019) that Black populations were officially recognized as part of the Mexican nation, counted in the population census for the first time (2020), and had their history incorporated to the official curriculum of public education (2021) (Iturralde Nieto, 2021; Velázquez Gutiérrez, 2020).

The relationship between Whiteness, Mestizaje and inclusion/exclusion dynamics that distribute privilege and marginalization benefitting White people (White supremacy) is summarized by Moreno Figueroa (2010). She observes that although Mestizaje offers the possibility of flexible inclusion, it also “allows an everyday experience of racism that continues to privilege processes of whitening alongside notions of whiteness and uses the national discourse, such as a ‘Mexican’ identity, to cover up and render invisible processes of discrimination and social exclusion” (p. 399). In this way, the raceless or color-evasive ideology of Mestizaje is a key structural element driving the several ethnoracial inequalities that have been documented consistently in the last decade in the country, linked to ethnoracial origin and/or features like skin color (See, for example, Arceo Gómez & Campos-Vázquez, 2014; Campos-Vazquez & Medina-Cortina, 2019; Güémez & Solís, 2021; INEGI, n.d.; Martínez Casas, et al., 2014; Lomelín Rojas et al., 2019; Martínez Gutiérrez, 2019; Telles et al., 2015; Trejo & Altamirano, 2016; Solís, Güémez & Holmes, 2019; Solís et al., 2020b, 2021; Villarreal 2010; Woo-Mora, 2022, among several others).

From the social equity perspective, public administrators and scholars have a duty to actively help to overcome inequalities (Blessett et al., 2019; Frederickson, 1971, 1980, 1989, 1990, 2005; Wooldridge & Bilharz 2019) including those resulting from ethnoracial power dynamics (Gooden, 2014) like the ones fostered by the Mestizaje narrative. Therefore, the next and final section further reflects upon the role of Mestizaje and Whiteness for public administration.

Mestizaje and Whiteness: Implications for public administration and social equity

The previous pages show that the raceless or color-evasive narrative of Mestizaje has had an instrumental role in: (1) largely preventing the discussion of race, racism and ethnoracial inequalities in Mexico; (2) sustaining Whiteness, White/Mestizo normativity, and White supremacy through an apparent neutral and inclusive ideology that, nevertheless; (3) distributes privileges and penalties by ethnoracial origin and/or features, favoring white phenotypes. Ultimately, these three aspects of the Mestizaje ideology and its relationship with Whiteness could be preventing the advancement of social equity in Mexico and, as such, should be addressed in public administration scholarship and practice.

The prevalence of Mestizaje and its color-evasive or raceless ideology suggests that public organizations in Mexico may be sustaining a local version of the epistemological branch of the racial contract (Mills, 1997). Under that logic, in an ‘all mestizo nation’ there will be no need to talk about, understand, and incorporate an ethnoracial lens in public administration and public policies. At the same time, however, evidence on the existence of various inequalities associated with ethnoracial origin and/or features accumulates, as showed previously. This gives origin to what Cerón-Anaya aptly called the “(institutional) invisibility and (everyday) visibility of race,” a situation in which “racial terms and references are absent from institutional practices and government documents … yet the concept of race persists in popular discourse and everyday interactions” (2019, p. 94). So, instead of the racism without racists situation that Bonilla-Silva (2018) famously identified in the U.S., in Mexico the color-evasive or raceless narrative of Mestizaje narrative seems to be supporting the existence of a racism without races, in which public organizations and institutions are accomplices, reproducing ethnoracial discrimination (Trejo & Altamirano, 2016) by adhering to the color-evasive ideology of Mestizaje that sustains Whiteness and White supremacy.

A prime example of the raceless narrative of Mestizaje and its effects on public administration and public policy is provided by the Report Submitted by the Mexican Government to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, (CERD), in 1994. There, the Mexican Government claimed an absence of racism and racial discrimination in the country, arguing that Mestizaje prevented that to occur (CERD 1994).

[O]ur historical experience and the make-up of the Mexican population, which is 90 per cent mestizo as a result of the mixing of Spaniards and indigenous inhabitants, have given rise to one indisputable fact, namely, that there is no negation of one or another racial origin in our country, so that it has not been seen to be necessary to legislate on that subject, unlike in other countries where miscegenation did not take place [sic.] (CERD, 1994, pp. 36–37).

Although the national legislation changed in 2003 acknowledging the possibility of racial discrimination to occur in the country and creating the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED) (LFPED, 2023), that institution seems to operate under an organizational culture that avoids conversations on ‘race.’ In a small n research project in which public employees were asked if they “talked about race at CONAPRED,” most of the participants stated that that they do not, and that they rather prefer to use an alternative language to make sense of the problem of discrimination (Blanco, 2021). Moreover, under the current legal framework CONAPRED works under an all-encompassing approach to tackle “all kinds of discrimination” (LFPED, 2023) that tends to dilute the interest on racial discrimination and structural racism as public problems and obscures the complexities and specificities of racist practices and experiences (LAPORA, n.d., Wade, 2017), thus harming the chances to effectively address ethnoracial inequalities.

Similarly, the way in which data is being collected and, more importantly, not being collected in the country through key administrative instruments like the census, is revealing of the ways in which Mestizaje ideology may be ultimately harming equity. Except for the 1921 census, race has never been incorporated in Mexican official population counts. Indigenous populations have been traditionally counted employing a language approach, and it was not until 2000 that self-identification was used as an additional method to count these groups (Martínez Casas, et al., 2014). In contrast, as stated earlier, Black Mexicans were not included in the census until 2020, and Whites and Mestizos have been officially counted just once, in the 2016 Intergenerational Social Mobility Module (INEGI, n.d.).

Although some official data has been collected on skin tone and have been proven particularly useful for researchers interested in ethnoracial inequalities (INEGI, 2017, 2018) the lack of comprehensive and consistent official data on ethnoracial identities speaks to the pervasiveness of the Mestizaje narrative, and its associated power dynamics of Whiteness and White supremacy. Having access to reliable data is a necessary condition to better understand, assess and eventually address inequalities by clearly naming problems, understanding their causes, and proposing feasible solutions, in a process that Gooden (2014) called, naming, blaming, and claiming.

In addition to the race-evasiveness process discussed above, the Mestizaje ideology could be laying the ground for the reproduction of Whiteness and White supremacy in public organizations in Mexico, through a process of identity normalization. In contrast to the U.K. (Macalpine & Marsh, 2005) and the U.S. (Heckler 2017, 2019, 2019a; Blanco 2022), where Whiteness is reproduced in public organizations through the normalization of a White identity, in Mexico Whiteness would be sustained indirectly, through the normalization of a Mestizo identity; an identity that promises neutrality and inclusivity by diluting references to races, but still prefers Whiteness and regards Black and Indigenous phenotypes and cultures as inferior, as discussed previously. In this way, in terms of the framework proposed by Humphrey (2023), the Mestizo-normativity would be the cornerstone of the reproduction of Whiteness and White supremacy–in the sense of Mills (1997)–in the Mexican administrative setting.

Both, the raceless or color-evasive narrative of Mestizaje and the Mestizo-normativity that sustains Whiteness and White supremacy, would be in turn creating the conditions for an uneven distribution of privileges and costs along ethnoracial lines through public policies in Mexico. This theoretical proposal must be further advanced and tested beyond the couple examples discussed here, aiming to address questions like: How the actual legislation sustains or not the race-evasive narrative of Mestizaje? How public organizations incorporate–or not–ethnoracial approaches and with which mechanisms? Is the Mestizo-normativity observable in public administration? How the supposed neutrality of Mestizaje relates to and/or operates along other important neutrality narratives like that of meritocracy in public organizations (Portillo et al., 2023)? How public organizations and policies can contribute to challenge the Mestizaje narrative and the preference for Whiteness?

Answering the questions above and further developing the theoretical and empirical tools to study Whiteness and Mestizaje will help to advance social equity in Mexico. At the same time, the color and race-evasive epistemology of Mestizaje must be challenged, seeking to institute what, borrowing from Cerón-Anaya’s terminology could be called an institutional visibility of race, this is, the active incorporation of ethnoracial terms and references to governmental practices and processes.

However, the usage of racial categories in Mexico is controversial, as a recent debate on the matter among anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists shows (García et al., 2022). A group of scholars argue that using racial categories in the collection of official data “fosters the belief that races exist, and turns ethnic, cultural and physiognomic differences of human beings on races” (Red INTEGRA, 2017, para. 7), ultimately reinforcing racism. In contrast, while acknowledging that risk, other scholars argue that ethnoracial data is needed to better understand, measure, and eventually correct inequalities through public policies focused on populations affected by structural and everyday racism. Which specific categories to employ to collect such data (racial, ethnical, cultural, etc.) remains an important question from this second approach (Wade, 2022).

Conclusion: A glimmer of hope?

Despite the important implications of this debate for public affairs, public administration and public policy scholars in Mexico remain largely absent from the discussion. In this regard, a critical and contextualized incorporation of the social equity perspective as developed in the U.S. can offer some important insights. In particular, the ‘nervous’ area of government framework by Gooden (2014) could offer valuable knowledge and tools to start conversations on race, ethnicity and ethnoracial inequalities in public organizations, as exemplified by the intersectional study of Indigenous women in Mexico by Rubaii and Appe (2020).

In the meantime, a glimmer of hope seems to arise with the increasing demands of prominent artists, nonprofits and some sectors of Mexican population, openly speaking about and against racism as a public problem. For example, Oscar-nominated actress and self-identified Indigenous woman Yalitza Aparicio penned an article in the New York Times, denouncing “the normalization of classism, racism and denigration, along with other forms of segregation and belittlement based on skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation or social class” in Mexico (Aparicio, 2020). Similarly, actor Tenoch Huerta has been the visible face of a series of campaigns against racism, like the one entitled Racism, the Problem that Mexico Doesn’t Want to See (Huerta, et al., 2021). Huerta has been also an active collaborator in the work by the nonprofit Racismo MX, “a project that seeks to make visible, denounce and open a conversation about racism in Mexico” (Racismo MX, n.d).

Moreover, at the federal level the Mexican government seems to be slowly moving—at least symbolically—toward a narrative that embraces racism as a public problem in which Mestizaje and its race-evasive and Mestizo-normative rhetoric are being problematized. President, López Obrador has publicly denounced racism and held official acts to ask for forgiveness from the Mexican State to historically abused populations like the Mayans in the Yucatan Peninsula (La Jornada, 2021), and the Chinese community in the state of Coahuila (Morales & Villa y Caña, 2021), making explicit references to the historical ethnoracial discrimination suffered by these groups. However, at the same time, President López Obrador expressed his intention to dissolve CONAPRED, calling it a useless institution that “simulates fighting discrimination and racism” to cater political clienteles from previous governments (Presidencia de la República, 2020). Similarly, the main infrastructure project of his tenure, the Mayan Train, has been criticized for ignoring the voices and concerns of local Indigenous populations, allegedly violating several of their rights in the process (Vázquez, 2020). At the end of the day, empirical research is needed to assess if public organizations are in the path of challenging Mestizaje and if so, in which ways.

Beyond the implications for the Mexican case, this paper shows how color-evasive ideologies exists and operate in public institutions and its practices, as an instrumental feature of Whiteness and White supremacy with potential negative implications on social equity. Thus, the reflections of this article may be also of interest for public administration and public policy scholars studying countries like Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, among other nations where Mestizaje and/or racial democracy narratives are well alive and racial inequalities and racism prevail (Moreno Figueroa & Wade, 2022; Woo-Mora, 2021).

In addition, the work developed here can help to understand and challenge the ways in which the White-supremacist, anti-black and anti-indigenous features of the Mestizaje ideology may be present in the U.S., in settings where Latinx communities are relatively large and Latinx people are reaching salient public positions. A prime example of the harmful narratives of Mestizaje in the U.S. occurred in 2021 in Los Angeles, California. There, then president of the city council and daughter of Mexican immigrants, Nury Martinez, was caught in tape referring to another councilmember’s Black son as “changuito” (little monkey) and calling Indigenous immigrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca “short,” “dark,” and “ugly” people (Gamboa & Flores, 2022).

As some scholars noted following that case, the discriminatory and racist narratives of Mestizaje are carried to the U.S. with those who migrate from Mexico and other Latin American countries (Stephen, in Taxin & Melley, 2022), and are likely being replicated in Latinx communities in the U.S., as the example above suggests. Martinez’ comments were clearly racist and hurtful, especially for people from Oaxacan descent in Los Angeles, but as scholar Flores-Marcial points out, the former councilwoman’s comments were even more egregious coming from a public official making decisions that directly affect that community in terms of their life opportunities (Flores-Marcial, in Taxin & Melley, 2022).

Due to the implications above, for Mexico and beyond, the research agenda outlined here exploring the linkages between Whiteness, Mestizaje and social equity must be extended in the future, in the hope of increasing social equity and advancing social justice in the Americas region.

Acknowledgements

The author sincerely thanks the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue for their helpful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Felipe Blanco

Felipe Blanco is an Assistant Professor in Public Administration at the University of Colorado Denver. His research interests include social equity and ethnoracial inequalities, representative bureaucracy, and comparative public administration and public policy. He obtained his Ph.D. in Public Administration at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Notes

1 Following previous work in public administration (Heckler 2017 and 2019), I capitalize Whiteness, White identity, White supremacy, and White normativity as power structures that need to be distinguished from white as a color or even a ‘phenotype.’ Similarly, following Blay (2021) I capitalize Black, Indigenous, Mestizo/a, and White when referring to the “lived, politicized, and racialized identities” (p. x) of these different groups of people. I am aware that discrepancies exist on this regard, (see Crenshaw, 2011; Humphrey, 2023; Ray, 2022) and would welcome a dialogue on which terminology should public administration scholars adopt and why.

2 The term ethnoracial is “a generic umbrella descriptor to refer to any categorical distinction that names or delimits sets of human beings who are construed to belong together naturally, as a collectivity or community, due to some source of heritable similarity” (Loveman, 2014, p. 37). This umbrella concept “recognizes the overlapping and complex relationship between” race and ethnicity (Sue & Riosmena, 2021, p. 507), including the political and socially constructed nature of both terms.

3 In the work by Bonilla-Silva and other authors, as well as in a previous version of this paper, the term colorblindness was employed. However, as Annamma and their colleagues note, that term “[u]tilizes dis/ability as a metaphor for lacking and equates blindness with ignorance” (2017, p. 157). Following Annamma et al., I instead employ color-evasiveness, aiming to resist “positioning people with disabilities as problematic” (2017, p. 157). I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out and suggesting Annamma’s work to avoid employing an ableist language.

4 In 2000 the PRI lost the Presidency but remained strong at the state and local levels. For example, in the State of Mexico, with a population of 17 million people by 2020 (INEGI, 2020), the PRI had been in power since 1929, and did not lose a gubernatorial election until June 2023.

5 Mexican censuses do collect data with an ‘ethnic lens,’ thus data is available for Indigenous populations and much more recently for Afro-Mexicans, as discussed later in this text.