October 11, 2007
Memo From Mexico,
By
Allan Wall
Diversity Is Strength!...But Not For Mexican
Beauty Queens
Americans are
racist xenophobes while Mexicans are a
mixed-race people who are therefore
non-racist and
tolerant, right?
We’ve all heard it.
But contrary to the
self-congratulatory rhetoric, the plain fact is that
Mexican society is
highly stratified by race. It’s just that many
Mexicans don’t want to admit it.
According to the
CIA World Factbook, 60% of Mexico’s population is
mestizo (European/Indigenous), 30% is indigenous,
and 9% is white.
That fits in with the recent work
of the
Mexican Genome Project which calculates that 65% of
Mexican genetic material is indigenous (i.e., American
Indian) and 35% is non-indigenous (principally European
and African)
Of course, the term "mestizo"
is somewhat slippery. It includes individuals of mostly
European ancestry and a little Indian blood, or vice
versa.
The Mexican white-mestizo-Indian
spectrum
is a continuum. Technically speaking, the "mestizo"
classification includes every Mexican with any
white/Indian mixture—whether that’s 99% white and 1%
Indian or 99% Indian and 1% white.
So there are mestizos at the
white end of the spectrum who can pass as whites and for
all practical purposes are white. At the other
end of the spectrum, there are mestizos who are,
racially speaking, indigenous.
It
isn’t just skin color. Some Mexicans have dark skin
but European facial features. Others have light skin but
indigenous features.
And, although
many Mexicans won’t admit it, there’s a definite
correlation between racial background and socioeconomic
status.
It’s not a hard and fast rule.
There are plenty of exceptions. But, unmistakably, the
higher one travels up the
socioeconomic ladder, the
whiter the Mexicans are. The
farther down one travels, the darker they are.
The poorest three states in Mexico,
Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas, in the south, are the most
indigenous. (According to the Mexican Genome Project,
Guerrero is also 22% African).
Which brings me to
Mexican standards of beauty—especially feminine
beauty. They are
racially determined too.
I encountered this phenomenon soon
after moving to Mexico. My first job was teaching
fifth-graders in a private school. The students were
upper middle class and upper class. They were
predominantly white. Some were even blond.
In one of my fifth grade classes,
every student—with one exception—was white. The only
exception was a nice little girl with dark-skin whose
family’s economic background was not as high as some of
the others.
The fifth-grade boys regarded the
dark-skinned girl as the ugliest in the class. The girl
wasn’t ugly, but the boys considered her so because of
the color of her skin. The girl they thought the
prettiest in the class was blonde.
These fifth-grade boys didn’t
invent the Mexican standard of beauty. They just
reflected it. It’s been going on strong for about 500
years, since the Spaniards arrived.
In Mexican show biz, whites are
predominantly represented in the
movies,
TV and
pop music.
One of Mexico’s biggest cultural
exports these days is the
telenovela, a genre
akin to the soap opera. In these series, which are
exported worldwide, the
principal characters tend to be white and the
dark-skinned actors
portray servants. Like in
real life, in other words.
Last Saturday, October 6, Mexico
held its annual Miss Mexico beauty pageant (known here
as "Nuestra
Belleza Mexico"). The winner of this pageant
goes to the Miss Universe pageant—where Miss USA was
booed when it was held in Mexico City earlier this
year. The runner-up goes to the Miss World contest.
This year's winner was Elisa Najera,
(Photo)
Elisa is a brunette but she clearly falls within the
range of the white/mestizo-white range of the
Mexican racial spectrum. For
more photos go here.
But you can’t make up your mind
from one example. I invite you to look at this photo
gallery of all the Miss Mexicos since 1994. Note that
they
are all white, some are blonde.
The winner of "Nuestra Belleza
Mexico" represents Mexico in the Miss Universe
pageant, while the runner-up goes to "Miss World."
If you look at Mexico’s
Miss World representatives since 1995, you’ll see
they are white also.
Since
Mexicans use two surnames (one paternal, one
maternal), you can learn a little more about their
ancestry. Notice the presence among the contestants of
the surnames Jones and Murray (of the British Isles) and
Erhard and Honstein (Germany).
In fact, the Nuestra Belleza
contest is presided over by a certain Lupita Jones, a
former Miss Universe from Mexico (see photo
here . ).
As a point of reference, you might
visit the
Miss Spain website. If you look at the
recent Miss Spain winners, they aren’t that
different from Mexican beauty queen types—except that
the Miss Mexicos tend to be lighter-skinned.
This indicates that a Miss Mexico
candidate could easily cross the pond to the
"madre patria"
and be competitive.
That’s especially ironic given
the PC version of Mexican history. Today’s
Mexicans—including white Mexicans—view the Spanish
conquistadors as the bad guys and the Aztecs as the good
guys (the non-Aztec Indians are usually ignored). Even
white Mexicans will tell you "The Spaniards conquered
us."
Nevertheless, 500 years later, the
Mexican standard of beauty, as reflected in the Miss
Mexico contest, is so
Spaniard-oriented that a Mexican beauty queen could
compete, quite probably successfully, in a Miss Spain
contest.
In contrast to Mexico’s white
-oriented beauty pageants, notice the racial variety of
some recent Miss Americas:
And Rachel Smith, the Miss USA who
was
booed in Mexico City this year, was born in Panama
and is officially
described as
"bi-racial".
So
the
supposedly racist U.S. has more “diversity”
in its high-level beauty pageants than Mexico does.
One of the reasons that Nuestra
Belleza Mexico is weighted toward the white end of the
spectrum is the height requirement. In order to qualify
as a candidate for the Mexican beauty pageant, a
contestant is required to have a minimum height of 1.68
meters. (That’s 5’ 6" for those of us who think in
English measures). The newly crowned Miss Mexico,
Elisa Najera, is a six footer. [See pictures]
Well, maybe all countries have
their height requirements. After all, nowadays they like
tall models.
However, in the case of Mexico,
that effectively
discriminates against indigenous women who are, on
average, shorter than Euro-Mexican women. (In
pre-Hispanic Mexico, there was even a height difference
among the indigenous—the Indians of northern Mexico were
taller than those of the south.)
Looking at the list of the winners and runners-up of
Nuestra Belleza since 1995, with one exception, only one
is from a state with an indigenous majority. They are
almost all from central and northern Mexico, several
being from border states. (According to the Mexican
Genome Project, the border state of Sonora is 58%
European).
I don’t mean to suggest, by the
way, that this sort of Eurocentric beauty contest
business is unique to Mexico. Oh no. As
I pointed out in an article several years back, it’s
all over Latin America.
For a recent example, see the
contestants in the Reina Hispanoamericana
(Hispano-American Queen) pageant scheduled to begin
today (October 12th).
So Mexican beauty pageants
definitely favor the white end of the Mexican racial
spectrum. What’s the point?
Am I telling Mexicans and other
Latin Americans how to run their own beauty pageants?
Perish the thought. They can do
what they want.
They just need to quit calling us
racist.
American citizen Allan Wall (email
him) resides in Mexico, with a
legal permit issued him by the Mexican government. Allan
recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with the
Texas Army National Guard. His VDARE.COM articles are
archived
here; his FRONTPAGEMAG.COM
articles are archived
here his "Dispatches from
Iraq" are archived
here his website is
here.
