The reconfiguration of mestizaje and whiteness in the diaspora

Abstract

As a light-skinned mestiza Mexican woman, I have enjoyed the privileges of ‘whiteness’ in Latin America. In this article, I talk about how my whiteness has helped me in the development of my own fieldwork with Latin American migrants in London, that is among other mestizas who have similar understandings of the complexities and contradictions of mestizaje and whiteness in the region. I engage with the literature on white passing to explore the shifting terrain of ‘passing’ through time in a new context in the diaspora. Reflecting on the embodiment of my own mestizaje, I explore the problems that this cultural notion has produced in my country, and the ways in which I have come to understand and reformulate it while living as a non-white person in the UK. I do it via my personal experience of race and ethnicity, of racism abroad, and through my own work with Latin American migrants.

‘You are not Mexican; you don’t look like a Mexican; you look like a gringa. Where is your family from?’ I cannot recall how many times I’ve heard those comments in my life. It did not matter that I was actually Mexican and that both my mother and father were Mexican as well. ‘No, no, there must be something else,’ people insisted. As a child, it took me a while to understand the implications of these questions regarding my appearance, which apparently did not conform to the ‘Mexican look’. I received compliments for my looks; I was quite blonde as a child, a trait that is regarded with a sort of pride in Mexico. My maternal grandmother had married a ‘white’ Mexican with green eyes and had three out of four children with blue eyes, consequently producing five out of twelve grandchildren (including me) who turned out güeritos (a common nickname for ‘blondies’). Undoubtedly, my grandmother’s children were the envy of the extended family, where there were no güeritos with blue or green eyes. By praising my whiteness and blonde hair, without knowing, my family were enacting a racialised notion of beauty that is globally persistent. I came to understand this much better when I did fieldwork among Latin American women migrants who worked as domestic and sex workers in London, who in their own ways reproduced similar notions of white beauty that included a whiteness that was ambiguous, but always present.

Despite of this celebration of whiteness, most people within my family were far from blonde and far from white. The most immediate contrast was with my sister, who, according to many, looked more Mexican than I did. I recall pondering in my childhood, questioning our sibling connection. ‘How can we be related when people always comment on my non-Mexican looks? How could we be sisters if I am blonde and white, and she is brunette and brown?’ As my childhood unfolded, I learned that my appearance was a result of a mixture of different people from various parts of the world. For years, I tried to gather information about my ancestors’ geographical and racial backgrounds to better understand my own identity. However, each attempt to reconstruct my family history and connect with my roots yielded a consistent response: We are all mestizos; we are all mixed. As Wade (2005) argues mestizaje in Latin America is much more than a national ideology or political project, it is a lived experience that ‘operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kin relationships’ (:2005 240). Therefore, at different levels and at different points in our lives some of us reclaim parts of our ancestries in order to, as Sanchez (2025, this volume) argues in this issue, make sense of the experiences of dissonances that accompany mixed-race people.

For a child who was getting annoyed and utterly confused by people asking about her origins, learning about kinship and, more importantly, about mestizaje, helped me to make sense of myself and the people around me. What I can recall from my childhood is that quite early on at school we started to learn about the Spanish conquest, the destruction of our original cultures and the decimation of indigenous people since the early 16th century.^⁠ Parallel to this narrative we were inculcated with the idea of mestizaje and its importance in the construction of our present nation. The historical narrative that I learned at school was that, we were not totally white, we were not totally indigenous (black people were not in the picture)^⁠ but we were a special mix (Garcia et al., 2022; Manrique, 2016; Sue, 2014). The realisation of the eugenic history of my country at an early age allowed me to understand my own identity and be able to find my place within this racial mixed landscape. If I had great grandfathers who were indigenous, I also had indigenous blood, hence I was also a mestiza. From that moment I knew how to answer the continuous questions about my origin, I was a mix of many different people, including indigenous people from Mexico; this mix I learned was my way of asserting that I was indeed a Mexican. In a way, I was sorting out jarring feelings created by the dissonance that my whiteness created; I was a white-looking Mexican who at times could pass as a white gringa due to a misrecognition on the part of others, ¹ or a white mestiza.

Moreno Figueroa (2010) has argued that mestizaje is about the possibility of passing, ‘of engaging in processes of whitening, and of positioning oneself – if at all possible, on “this side” it is also this same possibility that gives the experience of whitening in Mexico its ambiguous quality’ (2010: 398). This ambiguity relies on the fact that one can be considered white in one epoch or not in another; it is highly contextual and relational (Nayak, 2007). In other words, inhabiting the space of ambiguous whiteness depends not only on colour, but on where, when and with whom you are (Moreno Figueroa, 2010: 398). Furthermore, in this article I argue that the ambiguity of whiteness contained in mestizaje becomes much more salient because there is little contradiction, or only a small gap, between being white and mixed race. In Latin America people with mixed-race backgrounds can potentially claim a space of whiteness and pass as such. The possibility of passing is partly characterised by skin colour and body features; however, it is also determined by one’s context, social relations, and class locations (Telles and Paschel, 2014: 868). Passing, as a fundamental aspect of mestizaje in Latin America, is a deceptive practice because it does not rely on the obsession with purity and whiteness that exists(ed) in the US, where passing has been associated with the possibility of black individuals (who do not look black) passing as white so as to avoid racial discrimination and gain some of the privileges that they have no access to due to their non-whiteness. Although mestizaje (and other intermediate categories) might enable the possibility of passing, it does not erase race and racism, it perpetuates divisions between mestizos, indigenous and black people. Mestizaje, as an ideology and as a lived experience, coexists with a racial hierarchy and ideologies of whiteness that still hold a privileged location within social stratification due to the intertwining of whiteness with notions of power, social status, and beauty (Ceron-Anaya et al., 2023). In this regard, mixed race in Latin America reimposes a racial duality between blackness and whiteness as the measure of being mixed, hence its passing potential.

In this article, I delve into the interplay between the ambiguity of whiteness in relation to understandings of mixed-race identity in Latin America. I do so by examining mestizaje as an ideology and as a lived experience that includes discourses of differentiation that can exclude but can also ‘give rise to processes of qualified inclusion of a kind that does not rely on the disappearance of difference’ (Wade, 2005: 246). Wade further explains that there is a tension between sameness and difference that is experienced at the level of the body and the person, in other words, a dissonance. The result of this tension can result in forms of exclusion from, or inclusion in, a space of whiteness. I explore this tension via my own fieldwork among Latin America women in London, and auto-ethnography of my own embodied experience of mestizaje in Mexico. Building on long-standing feminist theorisations of the personal and the professional in the constitution of knowledge, I engage with auto-ethnography to take seriously my social location within a version of mestizaje that includes and is constructed on an idea of whiteness that, in the context of the diaspora, became dissonant. Auto-ethnography serves as an entry point to develop a theoretical analysis of how racial identifications are much more than identities, they are processes that shift constantly in different settings. I use auto-ethnography to illustrate a bigger point on the reconfiguration of Mixed-Race Thought in the diaspora, and as a tool to develop a conceptual and political point regarding its potential for discussions on racial inequality.

My analysis starts with the racial identifications of my interlocutors, as well as my own, constructed upon ideologies of mixed race. I use this to demonstrate how mestizaje encompasses an ambiguous and unstable whiteness that exists in tension with Eurocentric whiteness. Women’s understanding of their racial and class locations as middle-class people within their national contexts were challenged by their migration journeys and by their incorporation into precarious and highly racialised forms of labour, such as domestic and sex work. The stories of my interlocutors reveal how people negotiate their class and mixed-race dissonances in the diaspora produced by new socio-economic locations. In this article, through a lens of Mixed-Race Thought, racial identifications are considered as processes that shift constantly and are deeply intertwined with the possibilities and impossibilities of achieving migration projects of social mobility and white Eurocentric aspirations.

Mestizaje

Ideas of mestizaje, or race mixture, have played a pivotal role in shaping the postcolonial nations of Latin America. In the early 20th century, the ideology of mestizaje emphasised various processes of mixture that were crucial in constructing national identities. Initially, it functioned as a strategy for whitening and assimilation, creating what Garcia et al. (2022: 9) refer to as ‘a certain permeability and porosity of racial boundaries’. Simultaneously, it downplayed the racial and ethnic identities of black and indigenous peoples (Knight, 1990; Whitten, 1981). While several Latin American countries share a history grounded in the concept of mixed races, there are significant variations in how mestizaje developed in distinct ways in each postcolonial nation.

Brazil and Mexico particularly embraced strong mestizaje ideologies that advocated for the development of mixed-race people as the prototypical citizens. In Brazil, the concept of ‘racial democracy’ solidified in the 1930s with Freyre’s work, enabling the formation of a moreno (brown) meta-race, and the depiction of Zumbi dos Palmares, the black leader of a slave rebellion, in a national monument as part of the state’s official celebration of the 50th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1938. Simultaneously, the 1940 penal code acknowledged the cultural expressions of black people as fundamentally Brazilian, marking a shift towards viewing racial mixture as the basis of national identification rather than a problem to be solved (Silva and Saldivar, 2018: 432). The Mexican version of mestizaje also became central in the post-revolutionary project of the 1920s, popularised by Jose Vasconcelos’ (1925) deeply racist notion of the so-called raza cósmica. This ideology proposed that mixing could produce superior beings, leading to the ‘extinction of uglier stocks’ (Vasconcelos, 1925: 72), including the disappearance of black people. This narrative developed in parallel with indigenismo during the 1920s, celebrating indigenous peoples symbolically but without a real commitment to social reforms for their inclusion, and proposing that the determinant factor in human behaviour and differentiation was culture not race. After the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), the state implemented development and educational programmes to modernise indigenous groups, incorporating them into the capitalist economy as labour and consumers (Manrique, 2016). In this regard, mestizaje implied either the modernisation of indigenous people or their extinction, along with the disappearance of perceived deficiencies in black people. ¹

In both Brazil and Mexico, ideas of symbolic inclusion created a sense of national citizenship based on shared racial mixture, aiming for inclusivity and equality. However, there are significant differences in how these two countries presented themselves as mixed. One such difference, according to Silva and Saldivar (2018), is the presence of indigenous and African populations. For instance, Brazil imported ten times more enslaved Africans than all the mainland Spanish American colonies combined (Eltis and Richardson, 2010). In late colonial times, black people comprised 40 per cent of the population, while in Mexico, the entire black and mulatto population was about 5 per cent and hardly existed in the nation’s imaginary (Moreno Figueroa and Saldivar, 2015). Moreover, the perception, treatment, and racialisation of black and indigenous people were distinctly different, whereby black people were understood through the prism of race and indigenous people through culture and ethnicity. These different forms of racialisation are central to Latin America’s racial projects, as both groups have experienced similar forms of subordination in relation to white people. ²

Andean countries like Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and, to some extent, Peru also embraced ideologies of mestizaje but emphasised bipolar racialised distinctions. According to Telles and Garcia (2013), these countries favoured the indigenous–Spanish distinction as a strategy on the part of Andean elites to control indigenous labour, as suggested earlier by Larson (2004). These countries used mestizaje to index biological mixing and cultural assimilation but were not interested in promoting it as a national ideology. Similar to Mexico, Andean countries highlighted racial fusion with indigenous people while largely ignoring black people (Miller, 2004); these countries exhibited a clear bias, favouring whiteness as a superior element in their mestizaje ideologies (Telles and Garcia, 2013: 135). In contrast, countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica in the Caribbean) maintained the value of whiteness as a fundamental part of the nation.

During my own fieldwork I witnessed how the ideology of mestizaje is somehow still relevant, as a significant number of people categorised themselves and others as mixed-race. As Wade (2005) argues, the very idea of mixture in Latin America depends not only on the idea of whiteness but also on black and indigenous elements. This ideology ‘encompasses dynamics not only of homogenisation but also of differentiation, maintaining permanent spaces of a particular kind for blackness and indigenous, and creating a mosaic image of national identity’ (Wade, 2005: 240). My interlocutors maintained a space for blackness and indigenousness in their own racial identifications that correlated with their respective national ideologies. At the same time, they also reclaimed a space of whiteness (particularly among those who phenotypically could) that was important as a mechanism to differentiate themselves from other migrants who were perceived as less or non-white. In the next section, I illustrate how, while mixed-race can be held as an identity, as Ali (2003) argues, the category is neither singular nor coherent; it is an unstable process that can lead to various forms of ambiguous and non-fixed racialisation that intersect with ethnicity, nationality, class, and status (Parker and Song, 2001), and, in the case of my research, with migration and racialised forms of labour.

Doing fieldwork among mestizas

As a non-British, non-European woman, I conducted fieldwork between 2019 and 2021 (and consecutive stints over the years) among Latin American women migrants in London. My interlocutors came from diverse countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Honduras, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Most of them identified as middle-class women who had experienced the dwindling of opportunities to achieve their class aspirations in their countries of origin. During my fieldwork, I soon learned that their middle-class identification was infused with white Eurocentric ideals and aspirations that were reinforced in the UK. They had migrated to London to settle debts, support their families from afar, seek new experiences, or fulfil romantic notions of transnational love. Limited proficiency in English, qualifications that were unacknowledged in the UK, and restricted social capital led many to work in feminised, stigmatised, and racialised occupations like domestic and sex work in London (Gutiérrez Garza, 2019, 2023; Oso Casas, 2010). Women’s involvement in these forms of labour produced sharp downward status mobility that affected not only their middle-class identities, but also their racial ones.

Being a white mestiza Latin American migrant woman eased my initial access to my research in London; it helped me navigate and gain quick access into their lives. I was considered an insider who shared a similar cultural background, understood their Latin Americanness and therefore was able to understand their various histories and migration choices. Like my informants, I was a foreigner. I was a sort of ‘native anthropologist’ who was aligned to my interlocutors through the experience of migration, or a ‘halfie’, a fellow Latin American woman studying related non-Western communities (Abu-Lughod, 1996; Narayan, 1993). My identification as a feminist ‘halfie’ (Antohin, 2025, this volume) anthropologist compelled me to consider my own positionality and to be aware of the fact that ‘every view is a view from somewhere and every act of speaking a speaking from somewhere’ (Abu-Lughod, 1996: 468). So, despite being a ‘halfie’, there were significant immeasurable differences, primarily rooted in socio-economic disparities, racial identifications, divergent migration journeys, and varying migrant statuses (many of my interlocutors were undocumented migrants). During my fieldwork, different aspects of my identity became highlighted at different times. According to some women, I did not ‘look Mexican’; they mentioned that the images that they knew of Mexican people were mainly of brown people. Having moved to a different country I was once again facing the same dilemma that I faced throughout my childhood. This time, however, my interlocutors had fewer cultural referents regarding whiteness in Mexico and therefore my racial identity was perceived and interpreted through wider ideas of class, status and phenotype.

In their own racial identifications, I found that most of those who could pass as white identified as such, emphasising the social values of race mixture and proximity to whiteness (even though some of them included or acknowledged some form of mix within their families). This ability and the techniques to pass as white are not necessarily determined by race but, as Ahmed (1999) argues, can be achieved by exercising a technique of the self that includes, ‘the projection of a bodily image (say, through the alterations of speech, hair, fashion and gestures) which is seen to be conflatable with whiteness. Bodies become reconstructed through techniques which serve to approximate an image’ (Ahmed, 1999: 101). Some women used fashion, taste, and a sense of distinction (infused by white Eurocentric aspirations), educational background, and in some cases ancestry as markers of their whiteness. These traits were deeply intertwined with their self-identifications as middle-class migrants. Those who did not identify as white used racial categories that included some form of mixing, for example mestizas or morenas and referred to others as less white, morochos, mulatto or collas. These intermediate categories simultaneously emphasise the social values of race mixture: they signal a tendency to think of bodies as mixed in one way or another, and therefore leave a space for the inclusion of whiteness.

Overall, the categories ‘black’ or ‘indigenous’ were avoided because of their devalued characteristics, even among those who claimed to have had indigenous or black parents or grandparents. Those who could have been categorised as black or indigenous emphasised their racial mix as an intrinsic part of their national racial identities and personal identifications. ³ Some women – particularly those from Peru and Bolivia – talked about having grandparents who spoke an indigenous language, yet they did not self-identify as indigenous, but instead reasserted the parts of their genealogies that included white European heritage. For instance, Lourdes from Bolivia, who had an indigenous mother who spoke quechua, did not identify herself as indigenous due to the fact that, thanks to her mother’s sacrifices, she had been able to escape the poverty that characterises the lives of indigenous people in her country and had completed higher education qualifications. Lourdes identified as a mestiza woman – a colla – who had achieved a certain status that allowed her to detach herself from an indigenous identity. Colla is a term used in Bolivia to refer to people from the western part of the county (La Paz), who are officially considered mestizos. Nonetheless, people from the eastern part of the country (Santa Cruz), consider colla to be indigenous, backward, and overall poor. In sharp contrast, people from Santa Cruz (Cambas) considered themselves white. Their mixed-raceness is said to come from the interaction of Europeans with Guarani culture, not necessarily from indigenous people from the highlands (Andean cultures). Cambas in London were quick to judge and classify collas, and often complained that non-Bolivian people thought that in Bolivia everyone was or looked indigenous, which was not the case, as people from Santa Cruz proved otherwise.

Among my interlocutors, there was only one woman from Mexico, Felipa, who self-identified as an indigenous woman from a poor background. She had migrated to London to work as a live-in domestic worker for a rich Mexican family. This offered her a unique possibility to advance economically and attain the social mobility that would have been impossible to achieve as an indigenous woman in Mexico. As Saldivar (2014) has explained, indigenous peoples in Mexico have been associated with being culturally different from whites and mestizos and therefore they are required to assimilate and advance through education and development projects. The racial inequality that persists in the country is then explained as a problem of individuals who have failed to assimilate into the mainstream mestizo category – constructed around racial notions of whiteness and privilege – rather than a problem based on deep social injustice and racism. Within this logic, indigenous and black people would eventually evaporate through a process of blanqueamiento (whitening) via racial mixture based on a skin colour continuum (as happened in Brazil) or via cultural assimilation (as happened in Mexico and Peru) (Hooker, 2005; Saldivar, 2014). For an indigenous woman like Felipa, who had very few opportunities in Mexico and hardly any education (as she started working as a domestic worker when she was 13 years old), migration represented the opportunity to escape from the poverty trap and the racial and ethnic meanings attached to being indigenous.

Having built a solid patrimony for herself and her family back in Mexico, at the age of 37 she was ready to be a mother. In the search for a father for her child, she was adamant about disrupting her racial and ethnic heritage based on the discrimination that she suffered while growing up in Mexico. ‘I am already dark, I needed someone to whiten my child. I needed to mejorar la raza,’ she told me in a joking but nonetheless serious kind of way. Across Latin America popular pejorative expressions like ‘bettering the race’ (mejorar la raza), which refers to marrying lighter, strongly signal the undesirability of non-white categories (Sue and Golash-Boza, 2013; Telles, 2014; Telles and Paschel, 2014). The underlined meaning of these phrases is that one must marry a white (or whiter) person in order to produce more white babies, to whiten them. Nobody wants an indigenous-looking baby who, as an uncle of mine once said, ‘could look like the maid’s child’ when referring to his own granddaughter, who had inherited the indigenous-looking features of her father. Mestizaje, constructed on a racist logic, ‘ha[s] made it possible for racism to be lived as a constant, normalised feature of social life’ (Moreno Figueroa, 2013: 139), whereby people normalise processes of whitening through mixing as class mobility. Furthermore, as Wade (2003) has pointed out, lightening up is not only normalised but formalised too: it includes in itself the idea of progress and moral uplifting towards whitening. For Felipa, having a child that could have a white background opened up an important possibility to disrupt her own racial category and liberate her daughter from the negative cultural traits associated with such an identity. ‘I am glad that I have been able to offer my daughter the chance to grow up in London but also the chance to be whiter,’ she told me.

I found similar aspirations of whitening attached to migration projects among women from Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia, who considered themselves closer to the white spectrum in comparison with other people in their countries, but nevertheless felt the desire to whiten themselves even more. Women expressed their desire to whiten their families by bringing their children to London so they could acquire white Eurocentric social and cultural capital, or by promoting relationships with white Europeans or British people so they could produce white-looking babies. There was a particular obsession with blue or green eyes and blonde hair that were considered markers of beauty. This is far from a coincidence as, in many places across the region, white privilege (or near white) is naturalised through television propaganda in which light-skinned models still predominate and represent the ideal type (Winders et al., 2005). These ideal versions of whiteness have a deep impact on people’s notions of beauty and racism (Moreno Figueroa, 2012, 2013).

In contrast, dark-skinned persons, though they are the majority, are still nearly absent from television programmes or only represent problematic stereotypes such as maids in soap operas, gangsters, or poor people. ‘You can see it in Brazilian soap operas, the maid is always black, those are the roles that black women often get,’ Juliana, a self-identified mulatta from Brazil told me. By saying this, Juliana was exposing cultural understandings of beauty, race and privilege that go hand in hand with physical appearance and skin colour. This is also reflected on the multibillion-dollar industry of skin-whitening products and the obsession with white models of beauty, or in the hair products that keep babies’ hair blonde. Several studies have focused on the importance that practices like skin bleaching or cosmetic surgery have for people across the world. Such practices are used as a way to attain a light or white colour, and physical traits that resemble white European features (Glenn, 2008; Khanna, 2020). This body of literature, as well as my own personal experience as a child in Mexico, whose blonde hair needed to be preserved, are a reflection of the complex relationship that still exists between colour (white or whiter than) and beauty.

The mixed-race ideologies and lived experiences of my interlocutors are intimately intertwined with processes of mestizaje. Being mestiza or any other intermediate category allows for the possibility of passing, or temporarily inhabiting a space of whiteness. Passing, however, is not available to everyone, as it requires certain dispositions that others can read accordingly. So for Felipa and Lourdes who were closer to being indigenous, whitening needed to be achieved first by a process of acculturation and the shedding of indigenousness. If they were lucky, they could do it via their children and mejorar la raza (through white partners), as Felipa’s case shows. The possibility of being mixed race, and hence getting closer to a space of whiteness, provided an avenue for the realisation of aspirations linked to women’s migration projects and personal betterment.

Mestizaje at work

As I have explained, migration was a route that could potentially lead women closer to paying their debts, sustaining their families, and also to acquiring an idealised European whiteness enhanced through racial traits, beauty standards, and high culture. Whiteness, as de Santana Pinho (2021) argues, can be understood as a social practice, an identity and as an ideal ‘promoted discursively as a major social value to be preserved, by those who already possess it, or acquired, by those who do not’ (2021: 64–5). Among those who considered themselves closer to whiteness, maintaining this proved to be extremely difficult due to their incorporation in low-paid, menial and racialised forms of labour. Women’s insertion in the care market challenged and reconfigured their ambiguous whiteness (Gutiérrez Garza, 2019, 2023). In the case of domestic workers, the challenge was related to the fact that, in Latin America, domestic work is a demeaning occupation predominantly the work carried out by indigenous and black women who work for white or mestiza women. In the case of sex workers, the challenge resided in women’s need to reconfigure their mixed-race identifications in order to take advantage of a saturated sex market. Furthermore, both occupations have historically relied on the exploitation of non-white women. In this regard, women’s racial challenges and reconfigurations cannot be fully understood without considering the legacies of the ‘coloniality of power’ that still organise the international division of labour and power hierarchies. Following Quijano (2000), Lugones (2008) further argues that the ‘coloniality of power’ organised a racialised heterosexual gender system that was implemented through the organisation of labour, education and religion, as well as the organisation of the household, where the exploitation and domination of the sexuality and gendered labour of indigenous and black women were necessary for the colonial project to succeed (Gutiérrez-Rodriguez 2010).

For my interlocutors, taking up domestic work in London, not only created sharp class contradictions, but also racial ones, that forced women to think of themselves as less – or not at all – white. ‘In Ecuador I am regarded as a white mestiza, here in London I do not think of myself as white,’ Cristina told me. Similarly, Amelia commented that back in Venezuela she used to hire maids, ‘now in London I am one of those morenas hired by a white woman’, in this case by a woman from Sweden whom Amelia said looked like a Barbie doll. For Mariana, from Brazil, the new occupation injured her whiteness and coloured her in ways that she had never experienced before. These women’s racial identifications as white dramatically shifted and were coloured by the racialisation of their occupations as domestic workers and by the everyday encounters with ‘real white people’. They experienced a jarring feeling of dissonance (Sanchez, 2025, this volume) regarding how things should be and were not any longer. In other words, they could no longer pass as white, their self-identification as such was not enough for them to embody the privileged space of whiteness (partly defined by their middle class) that they inhabited back in their own countries. As Ahmed argues:

the assumption of an ability to pass which is fully determined by the skin, which is determined by race (or racial confusion), is a false one. Passing is not so much an ability, available only to certain subjects, but a technique. This technique is exclusive and exclusionary; it is not available to all subjects, as it depends on the relation between subjects and structures of identification where the subject sees itself, or is seen by others, as not quite fitting. (1999: 101)

In other words, passing is always relational; it takes place through encounters with others who are guided by their own and others’ structures of racial identification. As a result, this can (or not) potentially open up a space of whiteness to be occupied. The failure of their passing was mediated through the misrecognition and ambiguity of their whiteness in their encounters with others. In London women found it very hard to claim a space of whiteness; in many respects they were now forced to occupy a mixed-race identity that no longer offered opportunities of passing and therefore whiteness became site of melancholia and longing.

While domestic work reproduces racial hierarchies whereby non-white people perform this form of labour, racial categories that included some sort of mixture acquired a different meaning and value among the women who were in sex work. The competitiveness of the sexual market in London pushed women to reconfigure themselves as racially sexualised women from Latin America whose exoticism resided on their mixed racial backgrounds. The mixed-race experiences of women in sex work shed light on the myriad ways in which bodies can be commodified and that also engender sexual labour migrations. This, in turn, produces and reproduces a gaze of racialised eroticism that reminds us of the role that the ‘coloniality of power’ had in women’s sexuality (Segato, 2022). Sabrina, whose mother is an Afro Brazilian, did not consider herself as mulatta^⁠ but an exotic morena who had a complex mixture of different racial backgrounds. In this regard, Telles and Paschel (2014) explain how in Brazil racial identification of one’s parents does not always lead to the expected racial identification for children. ‘This tenuous relationship between ancestry and racial identification opens up the possibility for a kind of racial fluidity across generations, in addition to other forms of fluidity’ (Telles and Paschel, 2014: 869). Sabrina described herself as ‘misturada [mixed], I have black, white and indigenous blood. I take advantage of my “indigenous” looks in order to get clients as this makes me quite exotic. I am a total mistura [mixture], just like Brazil,’ she said.

The racialised bodies of my interlocutors were characterised by being brown or having a tanned skin, brunette hair, and for some, prominent breasts and big buttocks. For instance, Angelica, from Brazil, once explained that she would usually be called to take part in the Latin American swing parties because she fitted the racial category of what clients imagined an exotic Latina beauty to be: ‘they call me because I am morena with long brunette hair and brown eyes. I am neither white, nor black.’ As Maia (2012) explains, while studying middle-class Brazilian women working as erotic dancers in New York, ‘the category morena, in these contexts, comes to signify not just a tan colour, but also an ability to embody the sensuality resultant from the literal or symbolic mixing of races’ (2012: 52). Furthermore, it embodies selective sexual attractiveness that approximates that of the mulatta women, without having to compromise middle-class identities (de Santana Pinho, 2016). In other words, emphasising ‘Brazilianness’ through their bodies and skin colour was an efficient way of advertising services and competing in a racially varied and saturated sexual market, but it did not affect their racial identifications, which were located closer to the white spectrum, or at least included it. As Da Silva states, in Brazil, ‘anybody is more or less black, more or less white, more or less both’ (Da Silva, 1998: 228).^⁠

Among those Brazilians who considered themselves white, it became important to emphasise their Brazilian-ness in other ways, including the recognition of black and indigenous peoples within their own families, and subtle forms of racialisation towards mixed race. Some would do it by emphasising the bunda (buttocks) through exercise or surgery. In Brazil’s popular culture, ample female hips, buttocks, and thighs have been the aesthetic ideal which represent the beautiful effects of racial mixture (Edmonds, 2010; Jarrin, 2015). ‘Clients love the big bunda, they think that all Brazilian women look like this,’ Amanda would tell me. She believed that even though she appeared white and could pass as a white Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish, because of the colour of her skin, her body features signalled her exotic and mixed-race origins, something that, according to her, gave her an advantage when competing with European white women in the sex market. For some, saving money for breast augmentation surgery was another way to get around their passing as white, but not quite. Giselle managed to save enough money to go back to Brazil and get breast augmentation and a tummy tuck, these procedures, she told me, increased her value in the market. On top of this, she decided to start working with Sabrina and promoted their services together. Their ads and photos presented a white bleached blond with big breasts and a morena with an ample bunda, something they said promoted the idea of mixed races of Brazil. ‘We work together, offering clients the whole Brazilian experience of mestiçagem’, Giselle once told me. This marketing strategy turned out to be very successful and was copied by some of their closest friends who came from various mixed-race backgrounds within Brazil.

Women also enhanced their ‘Latin Americanness’ by embodying traditional feminine qualities of nurturance, docility, and passivity through emotional labour that clients regarded as Latino traits (Piscitelli, 2008). In this regard, women’s racial identifications cannot be detached from the gendered and sexualised aspects of their intimate labour and particular forms of affect that produce stereotypes of different groups. These stereotypes, such as the sweet, docile but sexy Latin American women, whose exoticism resided in their mixed racial backgrounds, were then used by women to advance their businesses. Their mixed-race bodies, which have been sexualised historically in Brazil (as well as in other parts of Latin America) were now exoticised as a result of migration and the multi-racial market of sex work. It is the fetishising of these particular mixed-race bodies that allows women to strategically emphasise various racial traits (body and affects) that could be exploited symbolically and economically and used it as ‘erotic capital’ within sex work (Kempadoo, 2004; Maia, 2012). The fetishising of the mixed-race, mulatto, sultry, tanned, Latin, brown-sugar women, as Kempadoo (2004) has suggested for the Caribbean, is more effective due to its contrast with notions of white women’s sexuality as cold, impersonal, or mundane. The link between sexuality and race is of significance in understanding the proliferation of survival strategies that involve some form of sexual labour and that have become the main source of income for many women in the world (Padilla et al., 2007). Within the global sexual market, the mixed-race body continues to shape ideals and fantasies about the ‘other’, who exists within the ambiguity and fluidity of a mixed racial identification that is exotic. As Sanchez (2025, this volume) argues, the perception of the mixed-race bodies of women in sex work is contingent on the imagined qualities of different races and, more importantly, on the volatile understanding of how a given mixture will shape the nature of the individual, including, in this case, various forms of affect and sexuality.

Not so white any more

As I said at the beginning of the article, as a white mestiza I have lived a life of privilege due to my closeness to the white spectrum. Even in situations where I am not ‘really white’, my whiteness is a reflection of this privilege. At the same time, being identified as white, and as someone who did not look Mexican, affected my sense of belonging to my country. In Mexico, mestizaje has been used as a way to make sense of a racial diversity that was meant to remain hidden but exacerbated at the same time; it has also become a way to explain and develop a sense of connection to the nation. As a child, it helped me explain my confusion over being regarded as not Mexican by other people who were not as ‘white’ as I looked. Being mestiza eased my dislocation, my sense of not-belonging, and allowed me to reconstruct part of my family history that has deep roots connected to colonialism. What mestizaje did not explain were the extreme racial inequalities that I encountered on a daily basis. It did not explain the different treatment that people received based on the colour of their skin; it did not explain the deep racism that persists in my country. Still, my white mestizaje is contingent upon the context in which it is performed and perceived by others. Similar to my interlocutors in London, my own migration journey has without doubt changed the way in which I experience my own racial identification as a white mestiza. Roth (2016) has explained how race and racial categories are constructed and negotiated in the context of migration and how these processes shape migrants’ experiences. The reflection of my own mestizaje, which could include whiteness or exclude it, started when I moved to the UK. In Mexico, I never had and never would claim not to be white. Even though there are various degrees of whiteness that are intimately intertwined with markers of social class and status among the elites, a social group that I am not part of, I nonetheless have an uneasiness towards claiming otherwise.

However, migration to the UK and the lack of racial or ethnic referents for Latin Americans in many ways have reshaped the understanding of my ambiguous whiteness. Whereas, in the US, I am pigeonholed as a Hispanic or Latinx, and therefore become part of a group that is highly diverse but that has found in these categories a racial and political identity, in the UK this is not the case. As a Latin American migrant in the UK I have experienced for the first time what others have described as being able to pass as European white, something that occurred without any intention on my part and as a result of my own whiteness. ‘It is here, for example, that a link between mixed-raceness and passing is often assumed. The mixed-race subject can pass for white given that the mixed-race subject does not fully inhabit blackness – by not quite, being black’ (Ahmed, 1999: 101). In this regard only some mixed-race subjects can pass, those who, according to Ahmed have the ability to reconstruct the body and have access to particular forms of knowledge. In this regard, my middle-class background, my way of presenting myself, in certain contexts could be conflated with European whiteness. My passing as white in the UK entails a degree of comfort and security about an identity previously constituted as white, however there is always the risk of being caught.

Like my interlocutors, it was in the UK that I was first recognised as Latin American, as a minority, by others. For some, this was based on a combination of my nationality, my accent, my hair, the way my skin gets tanned with the sun and my way of not being ‘really white’. After finishing the PhD and embarking on the search for a job, I soon learned that there were people saying I had been given preference due to being a minority and playing the ‘ethnic card’. As someone who does not believe in meritocracy in this country or any other, it could be the case that if I have experienced any preferential treatment in the job market this was due to the social and educational capitals that I accumulated in the UK and that are accessible for the British establishment to read under the logic of class and ‘merit’. Nonetheless, I was defined as non-white, as a minority that takes advantage of its race and ethnicity to advance in the white academic labour market. In my current job, I have been asked to identify as BAME as part of an institutional agenda of recognising racial diversity in higher education. Among my non-white friends from the global South, I am not white; in their eyes I qualify as a brown woman. This identification is based on a shared experience of not-belonging to a form of whiteness that exudes supremacy and colonialism. This identification is also a political one. As a result of migration, of being a regarded as a minority (ethnic, racial) in the UK, I have learned how being white in the UK can have other connotations and hold a different value that I cannot – and do not wish to – reproduce. However, there are important aspects to consider when talking about white people passing as non-white as it can fetishise the Other and potentially lead to the invisibilisation of those who are non-white. In many ways this is quite similar to what mestizaje as a mixed-race ideology promoted, by fetishising blackness under the umbrella of race and indigenousness under ethnicity and culture. Both are part of the mixedness but can potentially disappear into the mix or become invisible.

My own experience of mestizaje as an ideology and lived experience in combination with the ethnographic endeavour sheds light on its complexities and fluidity. Mixed race is a highly contextual, unstable and dissonant process that cannot be fully explained without its intersections with class, status, ethnicity and nationality. In the case of my research, the mixed-race identifications of my interlocutors were also contingent on migration and, more importantly, on racialised forms of labour that deeply affected women’s understandings of themselves as non-white. The intersection of the category of mixed race with sexualised forms of labour and migration trajectories pushed women across the colour line (to less white, or brown), to occupy racial locations that were rejected back in the countries they came from. However, at the same time, mixed race contains a space of whiteness, therefore it offered a space for creativity and a certain freedom, and hence the possibility to move, to locate oneself in an ambiguous space where whiteness could (or not) be contextually claimed.

Even though, as I have already explained with my story, whiteness was something I always questioned due to its inadequacy for the Mexican context, in the diaspora it has become a conflictive and ambiguous category that I feel the need to contest, both politically and personally. I feel inadequate under the identity of a white woman in the UK, because I am not one. As Ahmed argues; ‘such a sense of being inadequate to the identity one assumes (either consciously or unconsciously) involves phantasies about who is the real or authentic subject’ (1999: 96), in my case who is the ‘real’ non-white/white feminist, whatever that means. However, we should consider how asserting mixedness can be both liberating, as we can generate our own life worlds (Antohin, 2025; Sanchez, 2025, this volume), but it can also be entrapping – it is far for simple. I identified as a non-white feminist, not black, something in between, ‘white but not quite’ (de Santana Pinho, 2016: 40), an indeterminate that includes and excludes whiteness, just like mestizaje. However, unlike mestizaje that can potentially be used as a discourse of multicultural inclusion, mixed race can potentially be used as a liberating and inclusive way to challenge racial inequality. Conversations on mixed-race identities become pivotal in a time where there is a necessary and urgent recognition of the racial and ethnic diversity that constantly shapes our societies. People are increasingly finding ways to understand and explain their social location within diverse racial landscapes, and Mixed-Race Thought offers unique positionalities and ways to think about racial identities that go beyond understandings of black and white.