There has been an incipient turn to antiracism in Latin America and in this context we launched a research project by looking at different styles of antiracist activity in four countries: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico. One of our key findings is the variation in the way in which different organisations use the language of racism and antiracism to define or organise their activities. We found cases that explicitly use the language of racism and we give an example from Colombia. The practices of this organisation raise the question of the implications of the explicit naming of racism.

In other examples, we found that organisations didn’t explicitly use the language of racism, even though they are engaged in struggles for land, rights, etc, which clearly had a racialised dimension. We became interested in what the antiracist effects of these ‘alternative grammars’ of struggle could be. We bring examples from Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil which show different inflections of these alternative grammars of antiracism. We end by suggesting that an explicit language of structural racism has distinct advantages for antiracist practice.

About the Speakers

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her research, teaching and publications have developed around the study of racism in Mexico and Latin America. At Cambridge, Monica has established the provision for teaching on race and racism, as well as intersectional and transnational approaches to social issues relating to race, gender and class oppressions. She co-leads the Decolonising the Curriculum Faculty Initiative and is currently the University Race Equality Champion. Monica has just completed three co-related research projects: one on blackness, representation and women’s economic trajectories in Mexico with Dr Emiko Saldivar (UCSB); another one on Institutional Racism the Logics of the Contemporary Mexican State with Dr Juan Carlos Martínez (CIESAS); and a large project on antiracist practices and discourses in Latin America comparing experiences in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico co-directed with Professor Peter Wade (University of Manchester).

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester and recently held a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-2016).  His publications include Blackness and Race Mixture (1993), Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (2010), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2002), and Race and Sex in Latin America (2009). He recently directed a project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Leverhulme Trust, on “Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America”. A edited book from the project is titled Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014). His most recent books are Race: An Introduction  (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism and Race in Latin America (Duke, 2017). With Mónica Moreno Figueroa, he is currently co-directing a project on “Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age”.