Whiteness Beyond the Skin

Note: All figures created by the authors unless otherwise stated.

Note: All tables created by the authors unless otherwise stated.

Emilio Lezama

Racism in Latin America did not originate with television or romantic comedies. It was not the fault of shampoo commercials, nor of casting calls where “Latin American” women are expected to resemble a Bavarian heiress more than the reality of our lands. The racism we face is older, quieter, and more persistent. It was born with the very founding of Latin American states, which enthusiastically abolished castes on paper but never in practice. The republics declared equality, yet they never stopped looking into the colonial mirror, continuing to operate—de facto—as a caste system.

The independence movements in Latin America were usually not rebellions against the caste system itself, but against the position of the new Creole elite within that structure. These movements were not initiated by the majority or by those Mariano Azuela calls “the underdogs,” but by the Creole elites seeking greater control over the territories where they were born. This historical inheritance is fundamental to understanding the visual hierarchies explored in this volume: our screens did not invent the exclusion; they merely inherited the colonial gaze and gave it a digital resolution.

In some countries, popular uprisings eventually emerged against the caste system. The earliest of these was likely the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II in Peru, followed by several others in Mexico, such as the Caste War, the Mexican Revolution, and, more recently, the Zapatista uprising of 1994. Among these movements, the Mexican Revolution perhaps had the most significant influence on the narrative surrounding the caste system. Mestizaje—the ideology of racial and cultural mixing—became the central narrative of the post-revolutionary era. The art of muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as that of Frida Kahlo, along with the literature of writers like Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and many others, placed the mestizo figure at the forefront, rarely the white elites. The imagined Mexican subject was mestizo, brown-skinned, with a worldview deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions.

This failure was not accidental. As the chapters in this volume suggest, the media became the sanctuary for blanquitud—not merely as a skin tone (blancura), but as an ethical and aesthetic project of modernization. If the Revolution promised a mestizo nation, the advertising and television apparatus promised a European future, transforming whiteness into a “civilizational standard” that one must not only possess but perform.

The world of television and advertising, however, appears not to have received this message. If post-revolutionary culture attempted to recenter the mestizo subject, mass media often worked in the opposite direction. These domains have become the spaces where the post-revolutionary discourse of mestizaje has failed to take hold. Consequently, while neither advertising nor television invented racism, they have been more than mere bystanders; they have served as the backdrop for the reproduction of the status quo.

These media representations have reinforced an aspirational narrative in which whiteness is synonymous with beauty, success, and progress. Yet as the research in this book highlights, we must clarify that this whiteness is not a fixed or monolithic structure uniformly reproduced through representation. Whiteness, instead, is a slippery and relational performance. It manifests differently in a Colombian telenovela than in a Mexican advert, shifting its boundaries to include or exclude based on class or proximity to power. It is a whiteness that is neither stable nor uncontested; it operates unevenly, at times openly affirmed and at other times subtly rearticulated through humor, genre, and narrative form. This performance is inherently unstable. In the Latin American landscape, whiteness is often a moving target: a light-skinned mestizo might be “white” in a rural context but “dark” in an elite country club. It is a relational hierarchy in which the “Other” is not an external foreigner—as in the Hollywood model—but an internal presence, a neighbor or a family member, whose proximity forces the elite to constantly re-draw the boundaries of their own privilege through subtle cues of accent, consumption, and dress.

Latin American advertising has functioned as a sort of propaganda ministry for the oligarchy and its Eurocentric or U.S.-oriented aspirations. Through advertising, Latin American elites have produced content that idealizes white perfection and have achieved something nearly impossible in the region: rendering invisible the mestizo, the Indigenous, and the Afro-Latin American—in other words, the majority population. The advertising industry underpins the worldview of conservative Latin American aristocrats who frequent country clubs and gather in Miami during the summer to celebrate right-wing authoritarianism while condemning left-wing counterparts. These caricatured elites, whom Gabriel Zaid once described as “the least cultured elites in the world.”

The emphasis on whitening reveals a more profound truth about Latin American elites: their only meaningful distinction from the “common people” lies in their whiteness. They are not more cultured, refined, or empathetic. Their universities are neither superior nor the best prepared nor the most industrious. Their trips to Miami and Houston have not made them less xenophobic, less racist, or more tolerant. The only factors separating them from the rest are the color of their skin and their wealth—and for this reason, they reproduce these two attributes as the ultimate values of social status.

It is within this broader media ecology, shifting from the historical archive to the critique of advertising, that cinema becomes a crucial site of negotiation. Since Zama (2017), Latin American cinema has been poking fun at these elites. The film offers a perfect metaphor: the colonizer dressed for a ballroom in Moscow, yet forced to walk through the relentless Latin American tropics—a striking image that continues to define the aspirational ideals of the elite.

However, caricatures of the aristocracy can also have the opposite effect. The film Nosotros los Nobles (2013) is undeniably entertaining, but it ridicules the elites in a very different way. Unlike Zama, which aims to expose through an extended metaphor, the humor in Nosotros los Nobles works to ensure that nothing truly changes. The wealthy young protagonist ultimately learns moral lessons, yet remains fundamentally “likable.” His arrogance, classism, and ignorance become a source of amusement. The film’s success spawned a wave of imitators that replicated its formula of mocking the wealthy “mirrey” in a manner that ultimately celebrates him. Unlike these derivative works, however, Nosotros los Nobles at least had the considerable virtue of being genuinely funny. These contrasting uses of caricature reveal a broader tension explored throughout this volume: whether representation disrupts or ultimately stabilizes existing hierarchies.

Televisa, through its soft power—most notably the telenovela—has crafted a gospel of inequality, constructing an infallible narrative that romanticizes the Latin American caste system. The archetypes are familiar: the virtuous Indigenous woman who cleans houses and prays the rosary, and the capricious white man who betrays his wife with a brown-skinned woman of limited means. The audiovisual world did not invent racism, but it has undoubtedly helped to reproduce and normalize it.

Yet it would be unfair to claim that all audiovisual production carries this burden. While Latin American cinema has, for decades, sustained an operation of symbolic whitening—where the Indigenous becomes mere folklore, the Black character is reduced to rhythm, and the mestizo is rendered an invisible backdrop—there have also been heretical voices that disrupt this canon, unsettling dominant narratives through humor and irreverence. Cantinflas and Tin-Tan, those two great dissidents of popular entertainment, did more than embody the figure of the pelado; they dignified him. In the rhetoric of Mexican cinema, they came closest to an anti-hegemonic manifesto. As Monsiváis insightfully notes about Cantinflas, the only aspect he gains from the Mexican revolutions is a sense of dignity: he shows no inferiority complex and is not humiliated like Chekhov’s comic characters. Besides this, inner self-sufficiency is common among popular comedians, who tend to ignore the fury of classism and create resistance through disorder rather than rebellion.

Disorder (el relajo) functions as a form of resistance: neither Cantinflas nor Tin-Tan is humiliated, nor do they apologize for their poverty, ignorance, or clumsiness. Instead, it is through these very traits that they refuse to submit to the established order. They are disruptive because they slip through hierarchies with the agility of those who know that language itself can serve as a trench in the struggle. Don Ramón achieves something similar, wielding language, idiosyncrasy, and spontaneity as tools to construct a particular kind of equality. Unlike telenovelas, where popular classes display deference and an aberrant awareness—not of class, but of caste—in the cinema of these figures, barriers are broken down through their ingenuousness, spontaneity, and pride. This tension between the “pelado’s” dignity and the elite’s anxiety travels from the historical archive to our current streaming screens. The transition is seamless: the same white modernizing impulse that erased Afro-descendant majorities in the silent films of the 1920s is echoed today in the “Whitexican” aesthetics of high-end series, where the brown body is once again relegated to the deep background of the frame.

Against this historical backdrop, contemporary cinema reveals a fragmented landscape. On one side is a recycled, broadly comedic cinema that delights the elites—formulas repeated endlessly, producing mediocre comedies from the perspective of the white elite and at the expense of racial stereotypes: Mesa de regalos (2025), Mirreyes contra Godínez (2019), Una pequeña confusión (2025), and many others. These productions are a televisual cinema, functioning as an extension of Televisa’s telenovela narrative transplanted into comedy and film. On the other side lies a moralizing cinema, obsessed with exposing the rawness of Latin American inequality—a voyeuristic gaze upon violence and poverty.

Yet there is also a countercurrent. Films such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2019) opened a breach. It is not that Roma discovered domestic workers—they have always been there—but for the first time, a story placed them at the center without folklorization, without victimhood, without guilt. At its core, the film found the beating heart of a nation. Much like in Y tu mamá también (2001), where classism seeped through the cracks of an adolescent road trip, Cuarón understands that social realities are not to be declaimed; they are to be framed. Cuarón’s gaze is powerful precisely because it confronts this “internal Other”—the Indigenous presence that inhabits the most intimate spaces of the white home but remains historically invisible to the camera. By placing the domestic worker at the center, the film disrupts the silence that the Latin American middle class has used to shield itself from its own pigmentocracy.

Roma transformed the landscape of Latin American cinema by offering a vision neither moralistic nor ideologically driven, yet placing a social group long marginalized and forgotten by film at the center of its narrative. It is no surprise that the movie sparked political change in Mexico, leading to the creation of a social security program for domestic workers, the reform of labor laws, and the ratification of ILO Convention 189.

Roma shifted the conversation not because it was “politically correct,” but because it was an extraordinary work of art—turning silence into eloquence, testimony into poetics. Yes, cinema changed laws, but it did so because it was art before it was a slogan. Los Reyes del Mundo (2022), from Colombia, follows a similar path. It tells the story of those who were “nobodies” without turning them into martyrs. There is no poverty porn, no exoticism—only humanity. And that is no small achievement.

The success of these films does not stem from their moral virtue but from their masterful storytelling. Art should not be accountable to morality; a film need not justify its perspective through virtue. In this sense, the issue with Nuevo Orden (2020) by Michel Franco is not that it portrays a poor uprising overthrowing a white elite; the real problem lies in the belief that cinema is obliged to deliver ethical lessons. It is not. At times, an unsettling work is necessary—not because it is “correct,” but because it exposes something about reality or ourselves.

The challenge, however, does not rest solely with filmmakers; audiences share responsibility. In Latin America, racist reactions among viewers persist. When Yalitza Aparicio received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, the outrage from figures like Sergio Goyri or Elsa Burgos revealed a deeply ingrained classist and racist preconception: the belief that an Indigenous woman should only “be” herself (a domestic worker) and not “act” or transcend her caste.