Race relations in Mexico

Ginger Thompson:

Mexicans typically pride themselves on being a colorblind society of mixed-race people, part Spanish, part Indian, and everyone equal. Slavery was abolished here decades before it was in the United States. Mexico never adopted anything like Jim Crow laws, and thousands of African-Americans moved south of the border to escape segregation.

But some commentators said that President Fox inadvertently exposed the disturbing reality beneath the facade and forced Mexico to take a more honest look in the mirror. The truth, said many observers on the radio and in newspaper columns this week, is that Mr. Fox's comments were not uncommon among Mexicans. They would hardly raise an eyebrow at dinner tables and cocktail parties.

A columnist for the Mexico City daily Reforma, Guadalupe Loaeza, wrote Tuesday that President Fox's remarks reflected what she called an "involuntarily" racist attitude. "He was educated like millions of Mexicans, conscious of having been born white, and that it makes him very different from those who are born with dark skin."

Audiences here still get a laugh from performers in black face, or newspaper cartoons that show Africans drawn more like apes.

Mexico's 10 million Indians are not only last in almost every social indicator, including levels of literacy, infant mortality, employment and access to basic services. They still appear on television mostly as maids and gardeners.

Descendants of the African slaves who landed on Mexico's Gulf and Pacific coasts have been all but forgotten by governments and scholars alike.

This week, for the first time in recent history, the Mexican government published the results of a survey on the broader topic of discrimination. Josefina Vásquez Mota, Mexico's minister of social development, called the findings a "crude, painful and startling" picture of Mexican reality.

Ms. Vásquez said that some 40 percent of the people surveyed said they would not want to live next to an Indian community. Nearly one out of three considered it normal that women do not earn as much as men. More than 20 percent said that women were less able than men to fill important jobs. And one out of four said they believed that women were raped because they provoked men.

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