COLORISM LATINX COMMUNITIES.
YESENIA PADILLA, WRITER, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (ALLUMNI). A few weeks ago, I was absentmindedly scrolling through my Facebook feed when I noticed a meme a relative -- we’ll call her Jenni -- posted. “Lol,” she wrote, “too good not to share!” The meme was in English and Spanish, and read, “When people tell me I look White [sic] not Mexican [sic]” then was followed by a litany (in Spanish) of talking-out-one’sneck insults to the hypothetical insulter: “Listen you tacky barefoot Indian from the hills, not all Mexicans are the same dark-as-a-tire skin color as you.” I stared blankly at the post as it collected likes, the “tears of laughter” emojis, and “jajaja”’s piling up in the comments. I was shocked. Jenni posted this? My relative, who goes to protests for immigrant rights and anti-gentrification rallies, who knows all of our ita’s traditional recipes, who listens almost exclusively to salsa and cumbias? Does this person who shares my blood feel this way about my brothers, and our cousins who are considerably darker than she? Does my family member feel this way about me? In posting this meme, my milk-white, freckled pariente Jenni was reproducing colorist attitudes and ideas that were not only accepted in Latinx communities but actively encouraged and enforced. It didn’t matter that we grew up together in San Francisco, one of the more liberal cities on the West Coast (pre-tech boom, of course). Colorism, the discrimination and prejudice of lightskinned People of Color (POC) against darker-skinned POC, has deep roots in Latinx communities and must be confronted.
The Roots of Colorism During the conquest and colonization of Mexico, and Latin America as a whole, the Spanish adhered to a detailed and complex racial caste system known as the sistema de casta. The sistema de casta greatly informed one’s socioeconomic status in colonial Latin American Society, with the top of the hierarchy being Criollos, who were white (from Spain). From there, the caste levels blossom into a dizzying array of permutations, such as Mestizo, a term still used today to denote the progeny of a white person and one of Indigenous ancestry, and the insidious “salta atras” — which literally translates to “jump backwards” — to denote the progeny a mulatto (person of Black and Spanish ancestry) and an Indigenous person. This anti-Black and anti-Indigenous system had the purpose of upholding white supremacy, and continues to do so today. The extreme anti-Black “social cleansing” of Dominicanos of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic is only one of many examples of the long-lasting effects of sistema de casta and it’s legacy of white supremacy. Ever heard the phrase “pelo chino” used to describe coarse, curly hair? In the caste system, a “chino” is the progeny of a Morisco (the progeny of a mulatto person and a white person), and a white person. In the United States, colorism in our communities is not only manifested through anti-Black and anti-Indigenous attitudes, but also cooptation of Black and Indigenous movements to the benefit of lighter skinned Latinos. When I think about
76 // BIOLOGICAL PIGMENT BIAS: PERSPECTIVES ON COLOURISM
