White Mexican Artist
In the fall of 2021, the artist Xaviera Simmons, who is a friend, called me to invite me to collaborate on an article about race as part of a magazine issue she was guest editing in conjunction with Art Basel Miami. After some discussion on how to approach the topic, we centered on the subject of Whiteness. Our rationale was that whenever the uncomfortable subject of race is addressed in the art world the burden of the conversation inevitably falls to POC artists. We instead approached White male artists to discuss how race figures in their thinking. We included artists who identify as White such as Matthew Day Jackson and William Powhida, as well as artists who present as White but come from a complex ethnic background such as Michael Rakowitz, who has an Iraqi-Jewish ancestry, and Ishmael Randall Weeks, who is, like me, a Latino white male artist.
The article generated a stir. One white male critic who lives largely banished and unfollowed in the social media gulag as a troll, demanded for us to prove our research credentials and provide an academic definition of Whiteness. It was entertaining to see a gatekeeping whitesplainer demand their right to gatekeep Whiteness precisely when one is writing about it.
However, due to the extension of the article and our role as interviewers, I didn’t have the chance to address my own relationship with Whiteness, generally a topic that has been a white (no pun intended) elephant in the room throughout my life. So, with the full awareness that I will create another opportunity to be reprimanded, lectured to and policed by overzealous race theory gatekeppers, I am hereby providing a belated personal coda to that piece.
Whenever I get into a cab in New York and strike a conversation with the driver, I often enter into a familiar dynamic that begins with them trying to figure out my accent. My ethnic origin, on its face, is difficult to pinpoint. In the past I have been believed to be Spanish, Greek, Argentinian, French, Croatian, Polish, Russian Jew, and even once I was thought to be from India. When I reveal that I am from Mexico, I know that the inevitable “but you do not look Mexican”, will follow. I usually point out that there are not only White, but Black and Asian Mexicans, but I know that the answer will be unsatisfactory.
I am reminded of a comedy skit by Tom Segura, a white Latino comedian, who addresses this topic, talking about how when he checks in into a hotel and gives his last name they think he is Japanese:
Whiteness is not only a social construct but a fluid concept—something that is very clear in Latin America because of the vast mestizaje that occurred in the New World: for instance, a recent DNA test of my family showed that we have, aside from European, 17% indigenous ancestry, including a small portion of Andean, Jewish, and Middle Eastern DNA.
Yet, because I do present as white, it is not unusual for me to be thought of as a tourist in Mexico. “Güerito”, I would often be called in the market as a kid— a term usually given to individuals with fair skin in Mexico. When I worked at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago my coworkers sometimes teased me saying that I was Spanish (read: conquistador).
In Mexico we are inheritors of the colonial race system that was codified in the Pintura de Castas. The top echelon was occupied by the native Spaniard, while the second was held by the Criollo —the first-generation descendant of a Spaniard born in the New Spain. While this racist bureaucratic hierarchy is legally in the past, it implicitly persists in perceptions and practices in business, media, fashion and beyond. In recent years the term “Whitexican” has gained prominence— not always referring specifically to fair-skinned Mexicans, but employed to refer to rich, classist, and/or pretentious Mexicans— formerly known as “fresas”.
In the Mexican art world, the overall professional engagement of the local visual arts sector with the international art market, the dominance of White, wealthy collectors, and the requirement to be proficient in international art lingo (in English, German, Italian, etc) results in a systemic and homogenizing cultural Whiteness. I was reminded of this a few weeks back when I ran into an old artist friend, who is an indigenous Tzotzil; she became a prominent artist in the late 90s by producing works that documented local traditions and joined a group of Mexican artists who exhibited internationally during that period; I had wondered where she had been, because I had not seen her exhibit recently. As it turned out, she had left contemporary art and was instead involved in making traditional folk-art from her region. I recalled how in past art events and activities where we saw each other I could see how it was hard for her to engage with the scene, but the communication gap was more than cultural. Undoubtedly, racism played a not small part in her eventual distancing from the art world.
Being a White Mexican artist in the United States presents other folds. In private conversation, a fellow White Latino artist jokingly commented how White Latinos can code-switch with both White and POC artists; not in dissimilar way in which a bilingual person can equally connect emotionally with speakers of either of those two languages. I felt uncomfortable by the thought because it felt true; and because I felt it was true it also made me feel hypocritical. But even if that were true, I know I still am the “other” to both Latinx and non-Latinx individuals.
Perhaps due to this reason, several artists who share my background do not like to be defined as a Latinx, Hispanic, or even Latin American; this was the case of Felix González Torres. I felt that way for a time as well: after all, White American artists could present their work without dealing with hyphens attached to their cultural or ethnic family roots: Richard Serra had a Spanish father but he was never described as a Spanish-American artist, and Andy Warhol had Slovak parents but he is never referred to as Slovak-American. Why then, I thought, should my work have to necessarily carry an inextricable Latin descriptor? I recall once being approached to be in a Latino-themed show at a major art space; while this was an important opportunity, I declined because I did not want my work to be necessarily read as only speaking to Latino issues.
On the other hand, my knee-jerk reaction might have partially illustrated the old adage that there is nothing more Latin American than pretending not to be one. This psychological tendency, for lack of a better word, on its face is arrogant and contradictory, but deserves closer understanding. It may partially stem from the resistance to be colonized and be seen as a byproduct of the Western world— that is, to accept oneself as subject of the historical categories created by colonization. I understood that clearly when I was an exchange student in Spain and learned the racist term “Sudacas”, to refer to (mostly) South American immigrants; and encountered how one of my Mexican artist friends, who was trying to emigrate to Spain, had to get a visa as a domestic worker because that was the only legal pathway for her to remain in the country. A Spanish classmate once asked me if it was true that Mexicans are lazy. My whiteness in Spain was no impediment for being discriminated against (incidentally this week, on Substack, Mexican journalist Témoris Grecko wrote about how this kind of systemic racism persists in Spain).
An important exhibition in 2014 in Mexico addressing race was “Teoría del Color” at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, curated by Helena Chávez McGregor, Alejandra Labastida and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The works included international but also Mexican artists, such as Pedro Lasch. Lasch is someone whose work has focused directly on the topics of race, ethnicity, and national identity ( works titled LATINO/A AMERICA, Indianización Global, Espejo Negro, and Abstract Nationalism among others).
I asked Pedro to share his views on the subject. He talked about his self-consciousness about being a White Mexican:
“I have had the same experience with my terribly non-hispanic last name (Lasch). Even while I have made many works about Latino/a identity in the US and have collaborated with Latino/a social and political organizations for decades, I have seldom been included in Latinx exhibitions. In terms of everyday impact, I never liked using a camera while growing up in Mexico because it accentuated the perception of non-Mexicanness and automatically turned me into a tourist in my own land.”
He added: “In daily life in the US and in various places in New York I have received the nickname of impostor, as a joke regarding my non-Mexicanness. I actually have never complained about this in public, because I am fully aware that in comparison to actual discrimination, this would constitute a minimal White privilege grievance, especially when white Mexicans continue to be the gatekeepers for artistic and cultural institutions across the country.”
I often think of one of my father’s first cousins, a prominent history professor at an American University. I knew that he, a hispanophile, had spent his life investigating the genealogy of our family, going as far back as the 13th century. One day I decided to email him, mainly because I was very curious about his research. He immediately replied, and we started a sporadic correspondence that went on for years. He had long and extensive stories from his detailed research which as I recall included visiting small towns in Spain and consulting centuries-old baptismal records. From our exchanges it seemed to me that he was intent to prove that our family descended from some kind of royal bloodline.
About a decade ago, when I happened to be giving a lecture in the city where he lived, I decided to visit him. When I emailed him again, I learned that he was very ill. He also wrote, sounding disappointed, that had learned that our family had descended from “pobres hidalgos”, “hidalgo” being the lowest category of nobility, the one of the main character of Cervantes’ Don Quijote.
When arrived to see him he was on his deathbed. I asked him how he was doing; he replied, nonchalantly, “aquí, esperando la muerte.”
At some point during my visit, when we discussed the family’s genealogy again, he pointed to an old, dusty, and out-of-order PC computer on the corner. “I spent all these years putting our genealogical data onto that thing, and now I can’t even turn it on.”
He passed away shortly afterward. Because I had offered to attempt to retrieve the data, his family gave me the hard drive of the computer to see what could be done. I took it to a few expert forensic data retrieval services, to no avail. I still can’t get the information from that mysterious genealogical black box.
That hard drive makes me think of a much-anticipated book by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins titled The Genetic Book of the Dead, which, as the author describes, is an attempt to read genetic code as a text that documents the environmental and evolutionary history of a species, helping us reconstruct the forms of life and the natural environment of our ancestors.
Today, in the age of DNA ancestry tests, aspects of the data my cousin labored to obtain throughout his whole life are almost instantly accessible online. Over the years, however, my interest in knowing what that genetic story portends has greatly decreased. I have come to realize the misleading, oversized importance, and misplaced magical meaning that we attach to genetic background. I move forward fully aware of the privilege that presented Whiteness offers and publicly acknowledge it; and know that because none of us has any control of our ancestry, we all should instead be measured by our character, the ethical and moral choices in our life, and our willingness to engage productively in humanity. While phenotypical traits are inescapable, we must resist the artificial hierarchies they inspire and how some push us to accept who we are by being told “what” we are. So, these days when I am asked on a cab where I am from, I tend to change the subject. I do not want to see, nor really care about, the contents of my ancestral black box, be it a DNA code, genealogical hard drive or otherwise, and refuse to anchor my identity to what it might tell me. I know my body is a written book containing information generated over millennia that science might read, but my focus and responsibility has to be placed, instead, on my actions— the books my body might write in the future.
such a complex issue, irresolvable, perhaps, as the definitions shift with time and geography, with gender and class also critical in an evaluation, and then, the question, to what end? Certainly to acknowledge the experience of others and of the totality, and perhaps to garner greater nuance of understanding of these issues, one hopes...
Thank you for this interesting discussion on a different side of the topic of race. When one group dominates other groups—a very human tendency—a set of inescapable repercussions is created, extending seemingly forever into the future in a myriad of ways.