Race in Mexico

For many years, the Mexican government proclaimed that the country was color-blind, unaffected by the problems of race commonly seen in the United States. The Mexican revolution, after all, empowered both mestizos and indios.

Yet sometimes the racism is open. A Mexican blogger posted a picture of a casting call for Aeroméxico, which explicitly said "no dark-skinned people." When called on it--via the power of Twitter--the company apologized for offending anyone, assuredly just figuring they would weed out the dark-skinned people on the spot rather than get them to self-select out prior.

In the article, Julio Ricardo Varela writes:

This whole story is the perfect example of the bigger issue: how light skin will always be better than dark skin when it comes to advertising and mass media. @plauqeta’s tweet has re-opened the dialogue as to why such an embedded cultural and social construct continues to exist in Latin America, as well as in U.S. Latino communities.

Whites comprise only about 9% of the population, but dominate media images. Viva la revolución!