"People are not aware that we are racist. Because racism in Mexico is so embedded in our day-to-day practices that it's very hard to see, it's very subtle. We are all racist to a lesser or greater extent in some way," says Mexican actress Vania Sisaí Rodsán. The country closes its eyes, but it has always been there, from the public sphere to the most private places. It is in the language, in phrases like "do not sunbathe so much, do not go to get tight" or "Oh, how good that your child came out güerito!"; or in practices. The context and the actors change, but the headlines are renewed from time to time, either by discrimination in a restaurant by skin tone or by certain marketing stereotypes that negatively represent some of its citizens.
One of the most recent cases is attributed to television host Patricio Borghetti, during the program Venga la alegría, when he interviewed American actress Halle Bailey, who was in Mexico to promote the new adaptation of the Disney classic The Little Mermaid. Since the announcement that the protagonist of the original 1989 animated version, a young white redhead, was going to be played by a black actress, the company cameunder fire for alleged "forced inclusion."
During the television segment, Borghetti, as a "compliment" – as he clarified on his Twitter account – told the actress the following: "This is not a question, it is something I want to share with you, I promise you. None of us who were in that room yesterday were seeing the color of your skin, everyone, including my wife and children, were lost in your eyes, everyone." Thousands of people were quick to react, calling the driver "xenophobic" and "unprepared," and what he called "words of love," for many, was actually a "microaggression."
Another case is the recent premiere of the film ¡Que viva México!, by Luis Estrada, which its creator considers a satire of Mexicanness, from which not even the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spared. However, the film has been branded as classist and racist. Among them is the renowned critic Alonso Díaz de la Vega, of the magazine Gatopardo, in whose text he states that the director took his caricatured characters to create "a three-hour film whose argument is almost as offensive for its aesthetic poverty as for its racism, classism and transphobia".
A still from Mexican director Luis Estrada's film, '¡Qué viva México!' (2022). IMDB
As if he were prepared for this type of comments, Estrada gave days before its premiere, in an interview with EL PAÍS, this answer: "Political correctness, which in many cases, of course, has very fair claims, is being exaggerated. Freedom of expression is being corseted in order not to hurt many sectors that should not be hurt, but that should not be left aside because we must 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 have to do with people who are in positions of power. "White people are usually placed in the highest socioeconomic levels and mostly by a mentality of whiteness. So in that sense, it hurts to recognize racism, because it would be to recognize the privileges of these elites, "says the head of the civil association that fights racism through education, research and dissemination.
To this, Sisaí Rodsán, who is also part of the Poder Prieto collective, adds: "many people deny and tell you 'I am not racist'. Yes, maybe in their practices, but it is not enough not to be racist. You have to be anti-racist. You have to fight this system because at the end of the day it's a system where we all live."
Another practice within this line is skin whitening with digital retouching tools. As part of the promotional campaign of the series Primetime, many users in networks pointed out that the skin of Maya Zapata, one of the actresses of the cast, looked much lighter than it is in her promotional poster. Even the actress herself – since she is part of the Poder Prieto collective – was questioned for not raising her voice against this practice. In a tweet she said, "If you knew that was the first thing I told you when you took those photos: Don't whitewash me like the poster for the I'm Your Fan movie, I strongly asked them, because it's the same platform."
Hehehe! If you knew that was the first thing I told you when you took those photos: Don't whitewash me like in the poster of the movie I'm your fan, I asked them very much, because it's the same platform. The result is that poster. Complaints and suggestions to @StarPlusLA https://t.co/7wZvNE6lWb
— Maya Zapata (@LaMZapata) February 17, 2023
Aguilar says he established communication with Disney on the subject and despite Zapata's request, the poster was intervened with many filters in post-production that made it look whiter. "We are looking at how to put certain controls on those types of practices and the company, in particular, was very open to these types of changes. The meeting to discuss this particular issue was very satisfactory," says the director of RacismoMX.
Sisaí Rodsán believes that when this type of situation arises it should be a shared responsibility, because in most cases the producers, who make the important decisions when a product comes to light, "do not show their face". "The industry should be held accountable when they make these mistakes. We are all learning. It's not that we wake up one day and say we know everything about racism. That is, we are learning and this is a construct, like society, it is a conflict. We can create it together and the important thing is to open the dialogue, "adds the actress.
The opposite happened in La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta, with the darkening of the skin of the protagonists Juan Manuel Bernal and Alejandro Speitzer. The practice known as brownface is when a white or fair-skinned person tries to pass for someone with brown skin. It is a derivation of blackface, when white actors paint their faces black to caricature a black person.
"Since I don't want to hire tight actors, brown actors, then I paint coffee for those I have." This accusation was made from many accounts on Twitter, "says Contreras and explains that, like Disney, there was openness on the part of Amazon to talk about the subject. Where the resistance came from is on the part of the actors who are part of this production.
Before the accusations, Speitzer responded on the red carpet of the series about the accusations of darkening of skin that users in Redes and Poder Prieto made him. He replied to the reporters present: "Did you guys watch the series? They don't [Poder Prieto] either. I don't know you can exercise an opinion if you don't know what the series is about. The characters are in 1850, full of earth, exposed to the sun... There's the answer."
Alejandro Speitzer in the role of Carillo, in the series 'La cabeza de Joaquín Murrieta' (2023). Amazon (IMDB)
"They are racist practices, the fact of painting the skin of an actor or changing their features. There are many things that are part of the characterization, but the specific skin color is not part of it. That's where the problem lies. If you need people who meet a skin tone quota, then you hire someone who has that skin tone," respondsSisaí Rodsán.
One of the problems, according to Aguilar, also goes through racialized people, those who reject their peers and act in a racist way, affirming that there is no racism because it has not happened to them. Or that those who denounce this problem are "resentful" or "envious". "Recognizing oneself as racialized, brown, prieta, black, indigenous, Afro-descendant and accepting that this condition makes us live experiences of violence, of discrimination, generates pain. Considering that Mexico is mostly brown, there are still people who fall into the constant denial of racism, "adds the director of RacismoMX.
Although in the United States there seems to be an opening of the audiovisual industry towards diversification and having Latin American and Mexican artists in leading roles, the activist of Poder Prieto sees that in the country there is still no real quota of inclusive screen and that it is still not possible to talk about inclusion. "We are just putting the issues on the table so that these violent models are not repeated, where the prietos or morenos continue to replicate the same characters, where we are poor, wild, dirty and where we only represent one type of people," says the actress.
Despite the fact that anti-racism movements have existed for a long time and that the debate on openness towards inclusive, intersectional and gender-sensitive stories began a few years ago, different productions that we now see on the screen have not yet had the change of chip. "Hopefully in the coming years, in the near future, we will begin to see that turnaround, that change. We see actors and actresses of African descent, indigenous or brown skin with a lot of talent, but they have not had the opportunities to be considered. And although they are, they are not taken into account by the producers either. If you have an unequal society, only a few will be able to be there and argue that they are the ones who have talent, when in reality they are not," concludes the director of RacismoMX.
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