The Study of Race and Racism in Mexican Feminist Scholarship : Analyzing Mestizaje through race, class and gender

Sammanfattning: This study explores how feminist scholarship in the Mexican context relate to race and racism. The study is particularly interested in critically reflecting on how race and racism have been problematized and conceptualized in Mexican feminist scholarship. The study is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews and a wide examination of the existing literature on the themes of the study. Of special interest to this study is the concept of mestizaje, used in this study as one of the main analytical concepts to make sense of race and racism in Mexico. The findings indicate that the feminist scholarship on race and racism in Mexico has focused mainly on studying race and racism in relation to indigenous people and more recently black Mexicans, in the process constructing mestizaje as a homogenous category of privilege. However, the findings of the study suggest that there is a blind spot in the Mexican feminist scholarship on race and racism, as it has left unacknowledged how the tone of skin interacts with gender and class in a way that transcends the whole of society and not just certain groups. Furthermore, the study argues that the illusion of homogeneity within mestizaje is among the core problems that hinders the public recognition of racism as a social and political problem. Therefore, it is argued that making visible the diversity within mestizaje becomes an essential strategy for transforming the relations of racial differentiation that characterize social relations in contemporary Mexico.