“People are not aware that we are racist. Since racism in Mexico is so ingrained in our everyday lives that it is hardly noticeable, it is very subtle. “We’re all racists in some way, to a greater or lesser extent,” affirms Mexican actress Vania Sisaí Rodsán. The country turns a blind eye, but it has always been there, from public spaces to the most private places. It’s in the language, in phrases like “Don’t go out in the sun like that, don’t get dark” or “Oh, it’s good that your child turned white!”; or in practice. The context and actors change, but the headlines…
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“People are not aware that we are racist. Since racism in Mexico is so ingrained in our everyday lives that it is hardly noticeable, it is very subtle. “We’re all racists in some way, to a greater or lesser extent,” affirms Mexican actress Vania Sisaí Rodsán. The country turns a blind eye, but it has always been there, from public spaces to the most private places. It’s in the language, in phrases like “Don’t go out in the sun like that, don’t get dark” or “Oh, it’s good that your child turned white!”; or in practice. The context and actors change, but headlines are renewed from time to time, whether it’s because of a restaurant’s race discrimination or certain marketing stereotypes that portray some of its citizens negatively.
One of the most recent cases is attributed to TV presenter Patricio Borghetti during the show Venga la alegría while interviewing American actress Halle Bailey, who was in Mexico to promote the new adaptation of the Disney classic The Little Mermaid. Since announcing that the protagonist of the original 1989 animated version, a young white woman with red hair, would be played by a black actress, The company was targeted Criticism of alleged “forced integration”.
During the telecast, as a “compliment” — as he clarified on his Twitter account — Borghetti told the actress: “That’s not a question, it’s something I want to share with you, I promise.” None of us who we were in that room yesterday saw the color of your skin everyone including my wife and children we were all lost in your eyes.” Thousands of people reacted quickly, describing the driver as “xenophobic” and “unprepared”. What he called “words of love” were actually “micro-aggression” for many.
Another case is the recent premiere of the film Que viva México! by Luis Estrada, which its creator sees as a satire on Mexicanness, from which not even the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spared. However, the film was accused of classicism and racism. Among them is the renowned critic Alonso Díaz de la Vega of Gatopardo magazine, in whose text he affirms that the director, with his caricatured characters, “created a three-hour film whose argument, given its aesthetic poverty, is almost as offensive as his.” Racism, Classism and Transphobia”.
A frame from Mexican director Luis Estrada’s film ¡Qué viva México! (2022).IMDB
As if Estrada was prepared for this kind of comment, Estrada replied in an interview with EL PAÍS a few days before the premiere: “The political correctness, which in many cases naturally makes very legitimate claims, is being exaggerated.” Freedom of expression is being restricted, by many Not to interfere with areas that shouldn’t be violated, but that too shouldn’t be neglected, because one has to understand that criticism and provocation are a tradition of the arts. We have to laugh at ourselves.
For José Antonio Aguilar Contreras, director of RacismoMX, cultural expressions such as cinema, theater and television are the tip of the iceberg of this problem and it has to do with people holding positions of power. “White people are typically in the highest socioeconomic strata and tend to have a white mentality. In this sense, it hurts to recognize racism, because it would mean recognizing the privileges of these elites,” affirms the leader of the civil association that fights racism through education, research and dissemination.
Sisaí Rodsán, who also belongs to the Poder Prieto collective, adds: “Many people deny it and say: “I’m not a racist”. Well, maybe in their practices, but not being racist is not enough. You have to be anti-racist. We have to fight against this system because at the end of the day it is a system that we all live in.”
Another practice in this field is skin lightening with digital retouching tools. As part of the advertising campaign for the primetime series, many network users pointed out that Maya Zapata, one of the actresses in the cast, looked much lighter in skin than on her promotional poster. Even the actress herself – being part of the Poder Prieto collective – has been questioned for not having spoken out against the practice. In a tweet, she said: “If you knew what the first thing I said to you when they took these pictures of me is don’t sugarcoat me like I’m your fan movie poster, I urged you because that so is the same platform.”
Aguilar says he’s been in communication with Disney on the matter and, despite Zapata’s request, the poster was edited with many post-production filters that made it look whiter. “We are considering how we can subject these types of practices to certain controls, and the company in particular has been very receptive to this type of change.” The meeting dedicated specifically to this topic was very satisfactory,” says the director of RacismoMX.
Sisaí Rodsán believes there should be a shared responsibility in such a situation, because in most cases the producers who make the important decisions when a product is launched “don’t show their face”. “The industry should be held accountable for making these mistakes. We all learn. It’s not like we’ll wake up one day and say we know everything about racism. In other words: we learn and this is a construct, like society, it is a conflict. We can do it together and the most important thing is to open the dialogue,” adds the actress.
The opposite happened in La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta, where the skin of the protagonists Juan Manuel Bernal and Alejandro Speitzer darkened. Known as brownface, the practice involves a white or fair-skinned person attempting to impersonate someone with brown skin. It’s a derivative of blackface, where white actors paint their faces black to caricature a black person.
“Since I don’t want to hire black, dark-haired actors, I paint the ones I have brown.” “This signaling came through a lot of Twitter accounts,” says Contreras, explaining that like Disney, there was an opportunity with Amazon have to talk about the topic. The resistance came from the actors who are part of this production.
In light of the allegations, Speitzer responded to allegations of skin darkening thrown at him by users of Redes and Poder Prieto on the series’ red carpet. He replied to the journalists present: “Have you seen the series? she neither [Poder Prieto]. I don’t know, they can voice their opinion if they don’t know what the show is about. The figures are set in 1850, full of earth, exposed to the sun… That’s the answer.”
Alejandro Speitzer as Carillo in the series The Head of Joaquín Murrieta (2023). Amazon (IMDB)
“It’s about racist practices, the fact of painting an actor’s skin or altering their facial features. There are many things that are part of characterization, but specific skin color is not part of it. Therein lies the problem. “If you need people who are a certain color of skin, hire someone who is of that color,” he replies. Sisai Rodsan.
According to Aguilar, the problems also include people of color who reject their peers and behave in a racist manner on the grounds that racism does not exist because it did not happen to them. Or that those who denounce this problem are “resentful” or “envious”. “To recognize oneself as a racialized, brown, black, black, indigenous or African American person and to accept that this condition causes us to experience violence and discrimination and creates pain.” “Considering that Mexico is predominantly brown, there are still people who constantly deny racism,” adds the director of RacismoMX.
Although there seems to be an opening of the audiovisual industry in the United States towards diversification and the casting of Latin American and Mexican artists in leading roles, the activist from Poder Prieto believes that the country still does not have a truly inclusive screen quota and it does not is not the case It is still possible to talk about inclusion. “We’re just putting the issues on the table so that these violent models don’t repeat themselves, where we dark-skinned or dark-skinned people continue to reproduce the same characters, where we’re poor, wild, filthy, and where we only represent a type of human being,” says the Actress.
While movements against racism have been around for a long time, and the debate about opening up to inclusive, intersectional, and gender-centric stories began a few years ago, various productions we see on screen now haven’t made that shift by Chip. “We hope that in the coming years, in the near future, we will see this reversal, this change. We see very talented African American, Indigenous or Brown skinned actors and actresses, but they didn’t have the opportunity to be considered. And although this is the case, they are not taken into account by the producers either. When there is an unequal society, few can be there arguing that they are the ones with talent when in fact they are not,” concludes the RacismoMX director.
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