The ‘mestizo gaze’ and the ‘scopic regime of mestizaje’: Racial logics, visual culture, and citizenship in Mexico

Description

Part of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies research seminar series 2020/21.

Abstract: In this talk, I introduce two concepts: the ‘mestizo gaze’ and the ‘scopic regime of mestizaje’ (Ortega 2018; 2022 [forthcoming]) to analyse the relations between racism, mediatized visual culture, and citizenship practices in Mexico. Like other countries in Latin America where national identity is foregrounded by mestizaje (mixed-‘blood’) myths, in Mexico, racism is pervasive yet usually unacknowledged or denied. Racism in Mexico operates primarily through ‘mestizaje logics’, the politics of racist prejudice based on mixed-race discourses which privilege and aspire to whiteness (Moreno Figueroa 2010).

The shape of the exclusions produced by mestizaje logics is defined by the representations generated by what I call “the mestizo gaze,” a privileged, racist looking position and action that enables the “scopic regime of mestizaje”: assemblages of sensorial racialized representations that stem the “mestizaje logics” of Mexican racism. The function of the mestizo gaze is to materialize the agenda of mestizo politics and the narrative of mestizaje through the production of social visual, aural, and other sensorial representations. Hence, as a social act of seeing, the mestizo gaze institutes who has the social capital to exert the right to see and to be seen in the public sphere, and in what terms.

Period	24 Nov 2021
Held at	Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies