From Integration to Participation?

In August 2013, Aeroméxico received some bad publicity. The advertising agency contracted to produce their new TV spot circulated a casting call which specified that none of the actors should be “dark” (morenos) but should rather have a “white complexion” and a “Polanco look” (a coded reference to a wealthy neighborhood in the capital) (De Anda). The airline swiftly apologized, proclaiming their respect for all people, without regard to sex, language, religion, or skin color, and shifting the blame on to the “discriminatory attitude” of the agency they had unfortunately employed (“Aeroméxico, involucrado”).

Although this casting call was unusually explicit, it could hardly have been surprising to viewers of Mexican television, whose advertising (unlike that in the US or even Europe) is overwhelmingly populated by actors who are tall, slender, and light skinned. This is in a country where, as the article on the controversy notes, the majority of the population are of mixed race with some indigenous roots (so-called “mestizos”) and 6.7 million out of a total of 120 million still speak an indigenous language, in spite of 500 years of cultural and linguistic assimilation.

The blogger who called attention to the casting call, posting a photo of it on the web, was Tamara De Anda, herself a veteran of the advertising industry, who was now a presenter on Canal 11's cultural review programme for the capital, Itinerario. And, as we shall see, it was Canal 11 which was to broadcast just a few months later a controversial fiction series precisely on the taboo topic of race in contemporary Mexico. Called, with knowing provocation, Crónica de castas, it was directed by prestigious actor and political activist Daniel Giménez Cacho. And in the promotional materials the protagonists wore their ethnic phenotype (“criolla” [female of European descent], “mestizo” [biracial Spanish and indigenous male]) on their foreheads, written quite literally in scarlet letters (Figure 13). What is important here, then, is that race is at once transparently evident in Mexican audiovisual production (as De Anda says in the piece, surely no one could have failed to notice the absence of darker-skinned actors in advertising until now?) and yet invisible, apparently impossible to address or discuss, except in the unique case of a quality drama on a minority channel.