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

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.

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.

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.