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Accepted Paper:

Mestizaje: the all-inclusive fiction  
Linnete Manrique (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Paper short abstract:

I seek to examine the mediated (re)production of mestizaje and its pervasive racist logic of blanqueamiento or whitening understood in physical and cultural terms in Mexican telenovelas.

Paper long abstract:

I seek to examine the mediated (re)production of mestizaje and its pervasive racist logic of blanqueamiento or whitening understood in physical and cultural terms in Mexican telenovelas. I will explore how whiteness is valorized, upheld as the beauty ideal, and equated with notions of modernity, sophistication, power and wealth through a study of telenovelas' stereotypes, casting choices and central love plots that always includes marriage and a major class ascension. I will focus in particular on how telenovelas offer domestic work as a point of entry into modernity and the "white" world, but only to the main female characters that can easily bridge the class divide precisely because they exhibit pronounced European phenotypes and white/light skin in the first place. Telenovelas depict the illusion that mestizaje is all-inclusive, offering the means of integration and civilization through domestic service. However, telenovelas mask the fact that mobility in Mexico, while fluid, is underlined by racial whiteness and as such, the darker, more indigenous-looking characters are either contained for their alleged violence or doomed to remain in the background. As a case study, I will analyze the 1997 telenovela María Isabel, which featured a Huichola Indian (played by a white actress) as its eponymous main character. Note here that María Isabel was released only a few years after the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the San Andrés Accords in 1996, in which the question of the indigenous was key to the political agenda of the time.

Panel P34
Race, ethnicity and racism in Latin America: exploring the uncomfortable linkages
  Session 1