¿No hay racismo en México?

I moved to Mexico in 1996 for my doctoral research. I lived in Colonia Alamos, a declining middle-class area, and went to a mediocre gym in Narvarte. I have a vivid memory of one of my workout friends there telling me, quite emphatically, the title of this blog post. The context was a discussion of what he did not like about the United States.

Mexican families, like American families, and border-crossing families, show a wide variety of skin colors.

My wife has noted that she gets far less unwanted attention for her skin color than she received 13 years ago. No one asks to touch her hair. Stares and catcalls have also disappeared.

The only strange incident occurred in a Comercial Mexicana on M.A. Quevedo Boulevard, where an elderly gentleman asked my wife where she was from. When she said, “Estados Unidos,” he insisted that she wasn’t telling the truth. “No, where are you really from?” That one was odd. Mexicans know full well that one out of eight Americans are black, and the former President of the United States was not exactly an obscure figure down here. But really, that was it.

Well, that was it unless you count some odd moments where people, always female, and usually young, want to touch my daughter’s hair. Now, in Mexico City strangers feel free to rub my kids’ heads all the time. Any kids’ heads, in fact. What makes it a little strange is that when it is just me and the girl, people just rub her head; when it is me and my wife and our girl, well, then they ask permission. You could interpret this in several different ways, I think.

And anyway, these are anecdotes! Since when is this blog about anecdotes? This blog is about science™! So let’s do some science. 

Eva Arceo (CIDE) wanted to see how skin color affected life outcomes in Mexico. So she persuaded the Mexican statistical agency (INEGI) to add a question to the 2016 Modulo de Movilidad Social Intergeneracional survey. INEGI provided each respondent with a color palette and asked them to match it to their skin tone.

The palette (at right) as Dr. Arceo notes, is far from perfect and self-identification is not the best way to go about this, but the palette was developed by the Proyecto sobre Etnicidad y Raza en América Latina in conjunction with scholars at Princeton University, so it is what they used. (I think my skin color is an H? Maybe I? Like I said, it is not perfect.) 

Well, here is the histogram of the results. 

 

And here is how skin color lined up with years of schooling:

 

Here is how it lined up with relative income:

 

The results held when she accounted for the educational level of the respondents’ parents and their family income when the respondent was 14 years old. 

There were a few weird results that I would not take too seriously. (The author did not.) For example, when you account for parental characteristics, the educational level of people with skin color G or H spikes up compared to everyone else, including paler people. (I suppose that as an overeducated person of skin tone H, I should be more predisposed to believe this.) More plausibly, the rise in income level by skin color becomes steeper and more monotonic when you adjust for education and parental characteristics.

This result jibes with experimental studies. Rosario Aguilar (CIDE) found that voters were more likely to support white candidates with the same platform; Eva Arceo (CIDE) and Raymundo Campos (Colmex) found that employers were more likely to call in white applicants for interviews. And as Prof. Arceo points out, it should not be a surprising finding in a country where advertisements still commonly call for “tez blanca.”

But it is a little depressing. 

Comments

[Kuu Shaan]

Of course there is racism in Mexico. The best example of this phenomenon in Mexican culture are the "telenovelas", where the central characters are usually interpreted by Criollo Mexicans and Argentineans (eg fair-skinned), leaving darker Mexicans for the roles of servants or "bad guys".

On the other hand, it is worth mentioning that this is a cultural feature inherited from the Spanish colonial days, when only the Criollos and Peninsulares could aspire to large tracts of land or the highest administrative positions in the colony; the rest had to settle for work as employees, while those with Native American or African ancestry were relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid.

Really, it is a very old problem which is very difficult to eradicate, and as the Charlottesville protests and counter-protests made clear last weekend, even more progressive countries still have to deal with this issue.