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

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.