On Blackness, images and anti-racist work

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the use, production, and readings of images in antiracist work as processes in constant tension with racist logics. Racist logics are deceptive and entrapping, and the visible world is a particularly dynamic arena in which to analyse this. Images, specifically photographs, incorporate a nuanced and productive contradiction between their ability to illustrate, explain and evoke, on the one hand, while also ensnaring, on the other, partly through alluring and providing pleasure. This contradiction means that anti-racist projects may include the possibility of re-inscribing racist discourse and practice. Drawing on empirical examples from Mexico, this article interrogates how photographic representations of Blackness have been entangled with the racist logics and racial projects that feed them. Racialised images that emphasise the physical body of Black people raise questions about how mestizaje, Latin America’s main racial formation, has coded the visual space of representation in confusing ways.

against simply re-inscribing the assumptions that authorize racist discourse and practice.Many of those assumptions, however, have sedimented into various notions of common sense and now also inform counter-hegemonic projects, including those aimed at dismantling racism.(Keeling 2003, 92) Drawing on empirical examples from Mexico, this article interrogates how photographic representations of Blackness have been entangled with the racist logics and racial projects that feed them.The term Blackness 2 in Mexico, and in Latin America more broadly, is ambiguous and often taken for granted in terms of what it relates to, including different orders of things such as the body, the bio-cultural, historically-built disadvantage, exclusion, oppression, and the visible.I propose an understanding of Blackness as the systematic imposition of rejection, denial, and disgust onto a vast group of people, named as Black, who share an ascendency located in the African continent and who are visually coded and socially stigmatised.Blackness is a convenient and deceptive invention that develops historically with sixteenth-century European Christian expansion, slavery and colonialism and the structural processes of dispossession, exploitation and oppression that ensued and that frame the ideological apparatus that sustains such invention.Blackness always appears in reference to whiteness.In the nineteenth century, Blackness was legitimated scientifically as part of an arsenal of racial hierarchies and categories, including Indigeneity and Asianness, that continue to sustain power relations of advantage and disadvantage, determined by whiteness.By the mid-twentieth century, Blackness had been reframed in social struggles to bestow dignity and rights while simultaneously working in tension with discourses and practices of race and racism which reinforce processes of dehumanisation of people considered Black.
All racial characterisations involve the imposition of visual codes, which are in themselves arbitrary and constantly challenged by human diversity.There is a strong interconnection between notions of race, scientific racism, and visibility.Predictions of what "races" look like have had an impact (Poole 1997), and colonial history has linked Blackness with enslavement (Vinson and Vaughn 2004), Indigeneity with tropes of untamed cultures (D'Argenio 2018; Stepan 2001), and Asianness with exoticism (Chang 2017).Suren Lalvani (1996) proposed that the invention of photography coincided historically, and was closely linked, with notions of modernity and scientific racism to give particular weight to the visible.Such linkages have cemented what Martin Jay (1988) termed as "ocularcentrism", the privileging of the visual, throughout history.So for example, Hight and Sampson (2002, 1) argue that "images produced a dynamic rhetoric of racial and ethnographic difference between white Europeans and Americans and non-European 'races' and 'places.'The photographers (…) envision their subjects as objects of both racial inferiority and fascination".
In Latin America, the main racial formation is mestizaje which is premised on racial and cultural mixture, a disavowal of racism and a taken-for-granted approach to racial difference, specifically to Blackness, in at least two areas.On the one hand, using racial terminology like "Black" and "Blackness" has encouraged the social acceptance of problematics around race, particularly in regions where debates on the existence of racism are not fully settled and where racial categories do not necessarily align with how people see themselves.On the other hand, the terms "Black" and "Blackness" have supported organising and actions challenging racism, encouraging racial awareness and pride, and sustained wider social struggles against inequality and exclusion of people who have been systematically racialised in disadvantage. 3 Noticeably, however, images of the bodies of people who have been categorised as Black are constantly used to assert Blackness, without much attention to how the visual coding of Blackness, within Latin American racialised visual regimes, can also "authorize racist discourse and practice (…) and also inform counter-hegemonic projects" (Keeling 2003, 92).The use of images of Black people is not without its tensions or traps, sometimes emerging easily as mere stereotypes and, at others, creating friction with the context of mestizaje, which imposes a framework for organising social relations and reading the visual world that values cultural and racial mixture as processes of whitening.The stereotyping is evident when we look at how any racialised group, for example, Black and Indigenous peoples, is commonly portrayed with an overreliance on the physical body.
Racialised images that emphasise the physical body of Black people in Latin America raise questions about how mestizaje has coded the visual space of representation in confusing ways.In its neoliberal multicultural version, discourses of mestizaje maintain the logic of whitening homogeneity through racial mixture alongside the impetus for opening up to racial diversity and recognition of Indigenous and Black peoples, as well as other racialised minorities in a context of entrenched violence and growing confrontation (Hooker 2020), and alongside ongoing debates around the legitimacy of "race" as a biocultural concept (Wade 2022).Racism is now recognised more widely in the region and there is an incipient "turn to anti-racism" in Latin America (Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2022;2024;Wade and Moreno Figueroa 2021), where we observe the expansion of anti-racist practices, policies, laws, and organisations from approximately 2010.The anti-racist work we studied in the research project Latin American Anti-racism in a "Post-Racial" Age, LAPORA, led by myself and Peter Wade, reflects the many challenges and contradictions that understandings of "race" and racism bring into practice. 4Not only can we analyse these antiracist initiatives, or initiatives that can be retrospectively read as anti-racist, but the assumptions about what we should be fighting against.But also, we can see how these assumptions are replicated on the racialised terrain of representation, which at times can be read as careless and at others as naïve.
In the cases we studied for the LAPORA project, we observed a constant use of racialised images, and an unquestioned and unchallenged mobilisation of the image of people as "Black", as in the example above (or as "Indigenous" or "Asian").
In what follows, first, I discuss understandings of Blackness, race and the visual and the notion of unjust embodiments.Second, I discuss debates around the demands of Black people wanting to be worthy of being seen.Third, I explore a case study of the annual calendars of the collective Huella Negra.The final section discusses the oppressive entrappings and deceiving tensions of intentional or unintentional anti-racist images and I conclude with reflections on lessons for anti-racist practice.

On unjust embodiments: "That's what they want, that's what we give them"
Eduardo Añorve Zapata, an artist and journalist from the Costa Chica region 5 , who acted as an advisor to LAPORA, told me in an interview about the attractiveness of Blackness in the region and how academics, photographers, and even the locals want to find someone who is "really Black": This has been a request from those who come from outside: "Hey, I want to take pictures.""Ah, there's that woman.""No, no, no, no, I want someone else." "Look, look at this one 's hair, look, it's tight [i.e. tightly curled]."This one is legitimate."Look at the nose."This one is legitimate.That demand is met.For example, they would say, "Hey, we need them to come to dance the artesa." 6 "Ah, we're going to use so-and-so because she is so black, she shines."And the population also tries to show they are black.Many photographers, those who come from outside, have this prejudice.They want to show that there is indeed a difference and that there are real black people.So, they look for the guys who they presume are more African, which they are not, but well, they come close.What do the [activist] movements do?They reproduce exactly the same."That's what they want, that's what we give them."You see the posters, "let them see."And they reproduce the stereotypes: "look at this one, she has the waist."And they put her there, don't they?To reproduce the stereotypes, but she probably doesn't want to be that, she wants to be white, she wants to have straight hair.(Eduardo Añorve Zapata, Costa Chica, 2016) Añorve Zapata notes the indexicality of "race" imposed on human bodies by an external gaze with fixed notions of a "black body", but also an internal gaze infused by racial logics.Visitors go to the area looking for the ultimate "Black" amongst people who move in the ambivalence of multicultural mestizaje: wanting to rescue Blackness, aspiring for whiteness.Añorve Zapata's assertion of Black women wanting to be white gives us another perspective, not unsurprising but different from the women of the case I will present in the next section, who want to be seen with their darker skin colour, as Black women.This tension occurs in a region where Blackness is being promoted to satisfy this multicultural mestizaje project that upholds difference.However, this difference is considered in a constrained way, as if to satisfy the exoticism of Mexico's national project and safeguard its whitening mission.Thus, it is evident how images on websites, Instagram posts, and those collected through fieldwork can show that the concern with the visual is not only about affirming Blackness and combating stereotypes.It is also about satisfying the desire to be seen as worthy, while changing the visual narrative of what it means to be Black.
Anti-racist workers, academics, artists, and image producers in Mexico, although not exclusively, seem heavily invested in a formula that assumes that change will ensue if we simply replace negative representations of Black people, Indigenous people, women, the elderly, youth, and fat, disabled, trans and queer people.The assumption is that producing "truthful" and "critically-denouncing" images that show the reality and hurt of racism, and following those portrayals with positive ones, will make racism disappear.The bet is that the pedagogical effect of images will change the perceptions of white and mestizo majorities and replace their denial, fear, and disgust with respect, consideration, and love.Caroline Pedwell (2021) argues, thinking of the links between habits and social transformation, that there is an overreliance on the notion that images will be emotive enough to move people to change, but they cannot possibly do so, at least not in a significant way.Images do not guarantee change for their audiences, and images also reify notions of "race" that continues to pervade our imaginations and code our visual understandings.Such notions of "race" rely on the body and certain fixed physical features that define what Blackness, Indigeneity, Asian-ness, whiteness, and mestizo-ness should look like.This becomes further complicated when we bring an intersectional lens into the discussion.In a 2021 conference panel I was chairing, I asked Tito Mitjans Alayón, a Black Cuban trans-masculine academic and activist, if it was possible to imagine what a world without "race" would look like.They responded as follows: I have never seen fat Black women as protagonists … For example, during the [Women's Day] 8M rally, I see posters and stickers with images of people who I perceive as Black women, but they have very specific bodies, not like yours or mine.So, for me, it is very difficult to imagine a world where "race" does not matter.The new representations of non-white racialized bodies being incorporated are still based on the same colonial matrix.When we think of the Black elites, like Obama and Michelle, what are they?He is a heterosexual man and a political leader, while she is "the wife," the representation of the perfect Black woman, the perfect mother, and the perfect worker.She has it all.(…) I feel that these representations are unfair, (…) because if we measure Black bodies through the perspective of whiteness, we will always have incomplete bodies.We will never be able to fully embrace our humanity.(2021) For Mitjans Alayón, even those positive representations of Michelle and Barak Obama emanate from the same place as the negative ones, from what they call a reduced or narrow imagination.This means that even these new incorporations of the non-white body start from a perspective that is an unfair representation, which constructs the Black body as incomplete.It is an unjust embodiment.Exploring new representations is an exercise that deals with the sediments of racist and oppressive intersectional discourses.I understand unjust embodiment to be an ongoing conversation between oppressive regimes and the creative practices that allow us to challenge them.How does this unfair embodiment get entangled with what anti-racist images might be able to do?

Demanding to be seen
In 2016, Emiko Saldívar and I conducted a series of 25 interviews for a sociology-based project on Black, Indigenous, mestizo and white women's social and economic trajectories in the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, Mexico.Two of them were interviews with self-identified Afro-Mexican women whose photographic images happened to be featured on the cover of a book and one self-identified mestiza who was involved in the book's cover discussions.The book shall remain anonymous; it contains 43 fictional short stories about the everyday lives of people living in one of the coastal towns of the region.None of the women portrayed on the cover appear in the book's content.The coincidence of our fieldwork with the book's publication and the willingness of these women to be interviewed about their trajectories caught our attention.
The Black and white book cover shows a beach with three young, Afro-Mexican women, two with darker and one with lighter skin tones, posing naked.We can't see their faces, just their different types of curly hairfrom wavy to kinky.They have their backs set at different angles to the camera, seemingly gazing out to sea: one is kneeling on the sand, one standing sideways, and the third one walking away.Inside the book, there is a pack of eight removable postcards: four featuring individual Black women posing mostly naked, also with their backs to the camera, with either wet hair or having some part of their bodies in a river or the sea, and with long seethrough veils wrapped around some parts of their bodies.Two are lighterskinned, one darker-skinned and the fourth is a silhouette in high contrast.A fifth postcard shows three women naked on a beach with waves breaking nearby, standing holding the veils in between them, seemingly evoking Canova's The Three Graces. 7Two other photographs only have details of a woman's body, one revealing a breast, and the other a torso and breast.
The final postcard is a graphically intervened photo that shows from behind three women lying face down on the sand; their skin tones go from lighter to darker.The lighter-skinned one, with her long wavy hair, is seen covered with drops of water; the next darker body, with shorter curlier hair emanates a kind of steam that when rising becomes fine lines of spider-like figures; the darkest body is barely visible dissolving into more intensely packed steam-like lines, making up figures that flow into the air.
The women who participated in the book project told us that they wanted their photos to depict the complex lives of the diverse Indigenous, Black, and mestizo population living in the region -which is how the author presents the book's short stories.We also learned about the evolution of the cover image, from an initial concept featuring dark, bare feet being engulfed by a crashing wave, intended to symbolise life on the coast and proposed by the author, to the final image described above, based, according to the author, on an editorial decision to enhance the book's appeal and sales.The book's editorial team decided to hire a male mestizo photographer who came from Mexico City to take the images.Rosa, one of the interviewees, said that the photographer had told her they wanted "the shape of a woman that would be known to be from the coast, he was looking for nice hips, a dark complexion, as dark as possible".Rosa and Florecita, another participant, explained the photographer sometimes seemed annoyed, telling them they were fat.They realised that someone had manipulated the photos to enhance their hips and erase their back rolls, and then presented them with the images.It wasn't hard for them to accept the changes.They were all very pleased they participated in the project and, although they went on restrictive diets and sought beauty treatments afterwards, they said they all "calmed down with time and returned to living a normal life".
We quickly became uncomfortable with the whole case.I felt conflicted about the book's images and listening to the interviewees.From my perspective it was akin to a betrayal of Black feminist work and of critical antiracist perspectives since, from where I was standing, these women were reproducing basic stereotypes that hypersexualise and objectify Black women, as well as hierarchies of pigmentocracy or colourism.However, I realised that my discomfort was not allowing me to hear other parts of this story, how they were telling me they were happy with how their bodies looked, and with their involvement in the project, manipulated photos and all.More than 2,000 photos were taken, and the women participated in choosing them for the cover.But they wanted more of their images to be included, so they decided to print a selection of photocards to go inside the book.Rosa explained: But after that, we began to love ourselves so much … and we said, "how come we are not all going to be in the book's images?"We were women who were willing to pose and who were not afraid to show ourselves, so when they suggested printing postcards so that at least one of each of us would appear, we were very pleased.That way, no one would be offended, and it would be a form of compensation.(Rosa, Costa Chica, 2016) Another of the interviewees, Laura, confirmed how much she liked the experience and how she had benefitted from it, and the opportunities that came later for her: I had to sunbathe a lot, but apart from that, it was a very pleasant experience.It didn't cause me any conflict to walk around naked because afterward, (…) two people have already painted me, and other artists have taken pictures of me.So, it's like being a nude model is a part of me now, and people who like Afro women are looking for me, right?(Laura, Costa Chica, 2016).
What happens when these images circulate outside the reach of the sitters' explanations or the author's intentions?Can explanations or intentions ever be preserved?What Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez (2022) has conceptualised as the mestizo gaze is clearly present in this case, not just in the recreation of the widespread racist imaginary of darker-skinned women living on the coast -where they lead an idle life by the seaside -but also in what is chosen to be photographed and how the constant disembodiment and objectification is confused with representing them anonymously in the book.If the mestizo gaze is an assemblage of racialised representations that aims to materialise the agenda of the racial project of mestizaje, as Ortega Domínguez proposes, and if at the centre of this agenda is the deployment of anti-Black racism as the arbiter that guarantees whitening and mestizo national life (Moreno Figueroa 2022), then these images pose interesting questions: Is this "wanting to be seen" a set-up?Can these photos be re-read as anti-racist?Would that be a trap?How much do these images give, and how much do they take away?
It could be argued that these women contributed to the continuation of the stereotype of hypersexualised Black women.And it could be argued that this is the result of how mestizaje, even before its multicultural version, has developed in Mexico alongside a lack of intersectional feminist awareness that would resist the objectification of the normative thinner and able female body or its curvier exoticised version.However, it could also be argued that these women are thirsty for other, closer-to-home representations of Black women, longing to see themselves in the arid mestizo landscape that still does not fully recognise Black people's presence in Mexico.As they talked about their excitement at finally seeing women like them on a printed page, I could also understand the emptiness that underpins this feeling and appreciate that they were referring not just to a relatable representation, but also a sense of validation, of showing oneself as worthy to be seen.This has been, and remains, a powerful idea for minoritised people, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, fat, disabled, LGBQI+ and trans people who look for dignified mirrors of their lives, not just any representation.As Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Mara Viveros Vigoya (2022) have discussed, reclaiming a connection to one's body and wanting to participate in the benefits of femininity and beauty is already a critique of beauty standards and a claim to occupy the category of woman.This is shown in the example above, even if our claim is further complicated by their approval of the photographic modifications made to their bodies for the images.Accessing a previously restricted space of femininity is already disrupting the racialised canon of gender and we can extend this claim, intersectionally, to other canons of social acceptability.
Tito Mitjans Alayón (2022, 20-21) -citing and adding to the Combahee River Collective 8 -wrote: if Black women [Black trans-women, Black femmes, Black lesbians, Black marikas, Black transmasculine and non-binary people] were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
The challenge that the Black women on the book cover pose to us is that their search for freedom is a process that requires action, that requires doing and practice, and in such a way that it can be reflected on, assessed, and learned from, to move to the next point.I do not want to present this case as one where we could easily critique these women for their apparent lack of Black feminist credentials.Thanks to the book's project, these women's experiences of companionship amongst themselves, self-care, and pride in their negatively racialised bodies, were strongly deployed.They are reclaiming a space in which to be shown, as white and light-skinned mestizo women are shown in mainstream media, shaping how physical attraction is socially configured.
Are these images, and the process that produced them, anti-racist?I could argue they are deploying an alternative grammar of anti-racism (Wade and Moreno Figueroa 2021).While neither they nor the book's author or publisher, are claiming an anti-racist stance or even mentioning racism, these women's experience and their proudly stating they are worthy to be seen have conveyed to themselves collectively, and to the local audiences engaged by the book and photos, a racialised awareness of their exclusion from public visual space.In this sense, this event, these images, can be considered anti-racist, always located at a particular point in time.However, are they directing us towards a horizon "that allows us to balance what is possible now against a clear overall direction and perspective on what is important" (Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2022, 195)?Are they using a vision of radical transformation?The answer might be "no", if we stop there, but "possibly", if this moment (the experiences generated around the making of this book cover) is read as an ongoing trial-and-error experience, that is, the development of a racial literacy that people engage with in their everyday lives.This temporal process is best illustrated with the following case.
The case of Huella Negra: how can you expect someone who is Black to value their Blackness?
Huella Negra (Black Footprint/Step/Trace/Mark) is an Afro-Mexican anti-racist organisation that participated in the LAPORA research project. 9In their social media 10 they describe themselves as "dedicated to the promotion and visibility of Afro-descendant culture in Mexico, mainly in the Costa Chica, as well as its legal recognition and the defence of the rights of Afro-Mexican people".They do this work largely using photography-based initiatives.Their case illustrates the challenges of developing an anti-racist practice and how it could be considered as a process of developing racial literacy in a constant battle with the racist racial formation the organisation is embedded in.Anti-racist workers experiment and try things out while confronting the unjust embodiments of the colonial matrix, as Mitjans Alayón calls them.
Huella Negra and its members (a group that has fluctuated from fifteen to four people) belong to the generation of young Black, Afro-Mexican, and Afro-descendant activists now in their twenties and thirties.While the collective originates in the Costa Chica, the members are mostly based in Mexico City.Hugo Arellanes, leader and main photographer in the collective, told me in an interview that he was tutored in his teenage years by Rev. Glyn Jemmott Nelson, a Trinidadian Catholic priest active from around 1986 until 2007 in the Costa Chica region.Father Glyn promoted Afro-descendant diasporic unity and was concerned with the lack of recognition and acceptance of Afro-Mexicans, whom he also called Afro-mestizos.Father Glyn asked questions such as "How can you expect someone who is Black to value their blackness?"(Graves 2004).Arellanes was strongly influenced by this search for valuing Blackness, while always being conscious of his Afro-Indigenous descent, or more precisely, his Amuzgo and Afro heritage.He became well known for mobilising positive images of Black people in his photographic artistic practice, and through his commercial practice, whereby he takes racial-affirming photos of Black, Afro-Mexican, and Afrodescendant activists (including myself).
Hugo Arellanes initiated the project of a Huella Negra photographic calendar.The first edition in 2013 had a local and experimental edge, featuring unnamed, able-bodied young Black men and women, with normatively slim bodies, posing with scant clothing in natural settings in the Costa Chica region.This was in the context of multicultural mestizaje, described by Añorve Zapata, above.In 2014, the calendar took an interesting turn.It showcased unnamed Black young, normatively slim, and able-bodied people.They now posed in regional work-related contexts (e.g.fishing); or with cultural references indicative of the region and of what is now identified by local Black organisations as Black or Afro culture (e.g. a Devil's Mask -a regional dance prop); or were mostly young women in natural settings (beaches, fields, rivers).It also showcased international political references with one young woman by a wall mural of Nelson Mandela.The choices of this calendar marked an incipient shift towards a racialised and political cultural awareness, linking various landscapes and cultural markers with Afro-descendants.
The 2018 calendar represented a more conscious political standpoint.Arellanes explained to me that this calendar emerged as a response to controversies around the 2016 Module on Intergenerational Social Mobility, a survey run by the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (INEGI). 11The results indicated a strong link between skin colour and levels of education, occupation and economic prosperity in ways that negatively affected darker-skinned people.Huella Negra wanted to offer more positive referents for Afro communities by portraying young urban Black Afro-descendants, living and working in Mexico City for professional purposes.In this calendar, each image features the sitter's full name and a short bio, highlighting their studies, work, and achievements.Celebrating their Afro-descendance, all the sitters exude pride and certainty about their place in, and contributions to, Mexican society, a remarkable stance in a country with strong anti-Black sentiment (Moreno Figueroa 2022).The political antiracist project is much clearer than previously: the images demonstrate worthiness and reliability, and challenge an anti-Black rhetoric of laziness and uselessness.Nevertheless, these portraits could have an ambivalent tension.They showcase aspirational and dignified Afro-descendant figures, especially those struggling to recognise their ancestry, but they also, I argue, seem to engage non-Afro-descendant people by presenting palatable images of Black people who are "ok", who work, participate, give service, and who deserve respect perhaps defying the official discourse about who is worthy of upward mobility.This ambivalent tension might also be linked to the issue that some of the sitters would not be straightforwardly identified as Black or Afro-descendant by many Mexicans.This makes sense when Arellanes explains he was trying to move away from the focus on the typical phenotype (Moreno Figueroa 2022) and also aimed to include all sorts of people who would recognise their Black or Afro heritage, thus showcasing multiple types of Afro-descendance.The photographs overall seem to call more strongly for the self-recognition of Afro-descendants themselves -who might have mestizo and Indigenous family lines -but the images also call for external recognition and validation by mestizo, white and probably Indigenous peoples.
The 2019 calendar delves further politically by focussing on older people and Black ancestry.It has no bios but uses snippets of poems and reflections rejecting the claim that there are no Black people in Mexico.The calendar was inspired by the story of La Negra Mora, a female colonel who participated in the 1910 Mexican Revolution and was the great-great aunt of one of the members of Huella Negra.Learning about her and realising the silences about Black ancestors within families, Huella Negra decided to focus on their members' grandparents' lives and portray them in ways that supported the quest for people to recognise their Afro ancestry.The older men and women are named in the images and, while one man is seen in action, throwing fishing nets into the sea, most of the sitters stare directly at the camera in everyday settings like their homes, holding their baby grandchild on their lap, fully engaged in their work, singing back to the camera, or proudly holding the catch of the day.Two calendar pages depict older photographs, one of a group of men in 1920s revolutionary attire, and another of a young woman possibly from the 1940s, identified as the granddaughter of La Negra Mora.In this edition, there is a strong anti-racist political project that not only asserts the right to be represented but also affirms presence and continuity.While the sitters do not necessarily look confident in front of the lens, there is a clear sense of stability and older age grounding people in their roots.There is less ambiguity here, as we can see a clear project of directing the gaze at Afro-descendant people, their heritage and self-identification, not the approval of the mestizo and white gaze.However, the pull for recognition remains, and the need to be seen and listened to, alongside selfencouragement as conveyed by the text used to close the calendar: "We won't be silenced, no more invisibility.(… .)Our voices resound, they will be heard.They are obliged to listen to us sing".
The choices of Huella Negra through time are very telling of the political context in which they developed.The 2013 calendar images are very much in sync with the images of the 2015 book cover I discussed earlier.However, while Huella Negra has a nascent racial literacy coming from a context that wanted Black people to see themselves, the book discussed above and its mestizo photographer appears to lack racial and intersectional literacy.The 2018 and 2019 editions of Huella Negra's calendars demonstrate the ongoing development of a political stance and a much clearer racial literacy that aims to challenge anti-Black racism.
While these images and the calendar as an anti-racist action could be considered one that is "improving" through time and developing a racial literacy, the trap appears again.Notions of improvement imply a sense of lack and deficiency, going against what Arellanes himself argues for his photographic practice.For him, these are artistic and activist experiments where he's trying out new ideas, which may or may not work in specific contexts, and may or may not respond to debates or conversations around the images he produces.They are better read as testaments of a particular moment, carrying with them the possibility of an oppressive entrapment in the intersectional sediments of racist discourse and, in Mexico, the racial logics of mestizaje.

The racial complacency around images
The allure of images can be fascinating, as they possess a certain poignancy.Images, particularly photographs, and the visual worlds they present and create in relation to our informed gazes, can produce oppressive entrappings and deceiving moments, and they can also open dynamics that haunt us.All that is silenced and invisible in a photograph is also puzzling, awakening curiosity.We know that photographic images as "visual signs constituting meaning" (Hall 1999, 310), are "always pointing somewhere else" (Kuhn 1995, 12), with their ensnaring-like capacity carrying with them webs of complexities and contradictions.Photographs work as flexible and permeable illustrative platforms to organise and re-create our experiences, whether social, personal, material, or political (Moreno Figueroa 2008).Photographs become the scenery where social relationships act out.Photographs are not only a "trace" of the subject depicted, a sign to be decoded, or a ghost to search for, but they also speak, as our examples above clearly show, to situated "ways of seeing", to our own informed gaze.However, this understanding of photographs is fragile, from the obstinate belief they are testament of the "truth", to the seemingly obvious acceptance they can be manipulated indicating that there is a standpoint, intention, which in turn becomes a multiple-middle-discourse mediating and channelling our gaze, a potential oppressive entrapping.Social life owes much to images and the entrapping moments they allow, be they inspiring, tortuous, amusing, or terrifying.Can you think of beauty without seeing, fatness without the assumptions of normality, racialisation without correlating what we see to the figments of one's imagination (Ellison 1965), or aging without the body marks, the skin's texture?
Mestizaje, or any other racial formation, has a particular discursive apparatus embedded in the everyday and in the framing of social and cultural imaginaries.Artworks, images, photographs, can be thought of as material vehicles and thinking devices that come to be socially validated as such.This happens when images proposed as anti-racist, in explicit or alternative ways, aim to work against the grain of the wider racist framework.However, as Keeling reminds us at the start of this article, racist assumptions that have sedimented into common sense "now also inform counter-hegemonic projects, including those aimed at dismantling racism" (Keeling 2003, 92).The issue is that the relationship that is established between artworks and audiences, which makes them both appear as such, also produces something that makes the artwork appealing.The yearning for representation might play a key role here, the wanting to be seen as worthy for public display.So anti-racist work enters a minefield where the issue is never just "combatting stereotypes" but trying to do so while relying on the stereotypes or on a constrained image.
There is a growing complacency about images that can slowly creep in.People may be enthusiastic about understanding the power that images have over society and individuals, but we may not fully comprehend how complex and challenging this might be.Focussing on the desire to understand the power of images -which comes with anti-racist work, for example -can sometimes distract from the difficulties and complexities of analysing and interpreting them.
Once I was with some friends and I made an unnecessary ironic comment about white women cyclists, their fit, thin, flat-chested bodies, holding their trophies on a TV programme, remarking on what I presumed was their lack of femininity.I share this event, predominantly based on a visual judgement, as an oppressive entrapping moment and I put what I said up for scrutiny to signal the pervasiveness of racist logics from which no one is exempt.Although the images on the TV did not directly cause me to make the comment, my attraction to the image and my subsequent judgment and objectification of the white female cyclists' bodies demonstrate how everyday situations can lay out a hegemonic set-up.The racist and sexist comment is rooted in such hegemonic set-up, where moving images with sound, and our visual and auditory abilities are informed and charged with value and meaning within pre-existing social frameworks.Our ability to see, listen, and feel can deceive us into believing that the situation is not threatening, that we can separate the acts of seeing and listening from the process of evaluating and making judgments.I view the relationship we establish with antiracist imagery as potentially entrapping and deceiving, where we can easily succumb to the mechanics of maintaining oppressive social relations.We approach images with curiosity that can blind us to or make us forget for a moment the fact that other logics are at play, which is part of the hegemonic set-up itself.The belief in objective reasoning and detached observation might mislead us into thinking that there are no issues with how we arrive at our conclusions.
Images hide and escape; why images are made, where and how they are read, often goes unnoticed, yet they remain powerful signs.Images recreate the idea that we are masters of the meaning of representations.We can ask, for example, thinking of race and its strong link with the visible body, if the visibility of the body is what entraps us?Is entrapment a function of the body itself or of our own imaginations of what bodies should be?Are visual regimes, with their legacies of "vision-oriented subjectivities that have been cultivated, desired, and dispersed within the contexts of modern empire formation and decolonization" (Jay and Ramaswamy 2014, 1), to blame for laying the traps of the visual?Vision and "race" have long been intertwined, as Poole (1997) argues, with practices of comparison, relating, and typifying.The material nature of photographs as "image objects lent support to an emerging idea of 'race' as a material, historical, and biological fact" (Poole 1997, 15).The mechanics of image-making and modern racial thought have converged in forms of comparison and equivalence, setting the ground for the tensions of imagemaking, use, and consumption that we experience today.Images exist within webs of relations -they are a relationship themselves -and the making, curating, and circulation of photographs, within particular contexts, give them powerful moments of interaction.These webs of relations, in turn, are embedded in oppressive logics that seem to give images a life of their own.To effectively challenge someone's already-informed gaze, we need more than a particular image; our awareness can be sharp at times but can weaken at others.In my ironic comment about white women, I too walked straight into an entrapping and deceiving racist and sexist interaction.Was it my personal fault?Did I stop thinking, or did I tap into my own irrationality?Was it simply my lack of constant vigilance over every word, step, or thought?I am not making a lame excuse, nor claiming that falling prey to oppressive moments is in our nature.Nor am I blaming images and absolving myself of responsibility.We need to consider that awareness of certain issues surrounding the power of images is not enough.While images fascinate and lure me, they also haunt me, and social configurations "click" at certain moments.And the racist moment occurs, the sexist remark is expressed.Snippets of violence are distributed.
Although I reacted and apologised, I remained trapped momentarily.How did this process happen?It is possible to argue that one consequence of oppressive social systems is that everyday mistreatment reinforces social relations while constraining individuals to internalise oppression (Moreno Figueroa and López Chávez 2023).We learn what is at stake in social regulations, and part of it includes monitoring social relations to enforce them.So, in this example, I am repeating the message of intolerance for diverse bodies that I have experienced and witnessed.I am communicating what I know "should be the truth", and of course, I claim no exception in this.Such experiences are a significant component of social life for all humans.I am sharing my own story of oppressive entrapment to demonstrate that there is no exemption, that it's not just a matter of knowledge, and that blame, or shame, will not be useful in finding a way out.

Conclusion: searching for critical intersectional literacy and anti-racist moments
In this paper, I have focussed on how much images give and take away, particularly for negatively racialised, gendered, body-diverse, and classed populations.If unjust embodiments become entangled with what images do and if it is the visibility of the body through images that ensnares and deceives us, images cannot be separated from their context of production and reception.They exist only in relation to their making and viewing.Developing critical intersectional literacy seems to be a way forward, as seen in the example of Huella Negra, where change and political awareness have unfolded.
Being aware of how our gaze and all our senses are informed by oppressive social systems is a difficult task.However, guaranteeing this awareness alone is not enough to bypass oppressive social interactions that sustain oppressive social structures, which further reproduce those interactions in an apparent endless loop.Awareness -which is different from education insofar as awareness is a combination of information and emotional intelligence -becomes a site of experimentation and a key element of a critical intersectional literacy.In the personal experience that I shared above, we can observe the moment where an awkward silence, a pause, created space for noticing, for realising that something was off: an anti-racist moment.
The availability of images themselves can also produce relational reactions.The oppressive logic that pervades everyday life can be subtle and not always activated, but at times it becomes apparent.Images have the power to fascinate, provoke, and perpetuate old stereotypes, exclusionary forms, and discriminatory thinking that shape our interactions and thought processes.These oppressive moments can catch us off guard, even if we are scholars, activists, self-proclaimed antiracists, feminists, or individuals who strive to be aware and politicise our lives.Nobody is exempt.It is tempting to think that once you are aware, such utterances won't happen again, but we cannot be certain, as it is highly probable that these moments happen to all of us.Instead, we could focus on how to repair the situation and transform it into an anti-racist or other moment.We cannot stop looking, but we could explore how to increase our levels of awareness, expand our literacy, and set critical boundaries with a radical horizon of social change as a guide.I have written elsewhere: Seeing a particular image -or indeed any image -interacts with the weight of conventions that a photograph has in itself, such as its illusion of truth and its expected revelation of the real.Nevertheless, this does not relieve us from the debate about "bearing witness" by seeing and looking at images (…).Rather, these different cases open the debate to engage with specific contexts and with reflexive spaces where issues of commitment, responsibility and political intervention are at stake.(Moreno Figueroa 2008, 82) In this article, I have discussed the desire of Black people for images and longing to see, but in the final section, I brought in the issue of the impossibility of immunity to the racial logics that trap the world of visibility.I wanted to speak directly to you as the reader and encourage you to grasp that seeing is a social and cultural practice and to consider what is at stake when looking.I have explored intentional and unintentional anti-racist interventions, such as the book cover and postcards, and the calendars of Huella Negra.Both examples are embedded in logics of political recognition that complicate our understanding of Blackness and Black people in Mexico while attempting antiracist strategies.Both initiatives have different layers of intentionality, with actors seeking outcomes that communicate, stick, affect, and help people, from desiring the lighter-skinned Black female body and selling books, to promoting a dignified and worthy image of Afro-descendants.However, both initiatives entrap us in their ambivalence, their historical and contextual references, the eye of the maker during production, the target audiences which have multiple readings; most importantly, they entrap the image of the sitter.
The photographs capture a version of people that will be read within racialised frames and expectations.As Benjamin argues, putting someone or something at the centre of the act of viewing "may put the object of vision at risk" (2019,101).She relates this to Frantz Fanon's experience of being looked at but not truly seen (Fanon 1991).Benjamin translates this into two key notions: detection and recognition, as processes "easily conflated when the default settings are distorted by racist logics" (2019, 101).Black people can be looked at, to be detected for who they are or who they could be.But can they be truly seen when the set-up relies on swapping one kind of oppression for another?For Benjamin, like Mitjans Alayón, "divesting away from Whiteness in this way too often requires investing in ableist notions of gender, beauty, sexuality, and desire" (2019, 101).None of the examples manages to fully get away from this set-up.Wanting to see the Black person as worthy falls back on the other parameters that make normative bodies acceptable.
Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez, in the conversation I mentioned earlier with Mitjans Alayón (2021), raised the issue of considering how "fixed" or "flexible" these "positive representations" of Blackness are, and to what extent they are or could be part of a strategic moment within a longer trajectory that aspires to dismantle an overall oppressive system of representations.Possibly, we could think about the following step in the strategy: what would be the next "incarnations, transformations, dissolutions of the edges of representation, what are the depths or fissures that allow us to use representations as spaces to ask questions" (Ortega Domínguez 2022)?This becomes a way of assessing where images are at, what processes they are engaging with, and what can result from this process.While we might see a proliferation of positive, self-affirming images of negatively racialised populations, a politics of image diversity, I wonder to what extent there are explicit or alternative grammars of anti-racist image-building going on (Wade and Moreno Figueroa 2021), that consider (or not) the unfairness of a reduced and incomplete imagination, or the awareness of the strategic temporality of a catalogue of images that still hold a radical horizon of social change.Moreover, following Pedwell (2021), to what extent is it possible for antiracist work to repair what the habitual repetition of these images does?How can these images create a new visual field?Might we also consider that there is a risk of oppressive entrapment and tiredness, or a weakening produced through repetition?
In this article, I have explored the use of images of Black people in Mexico through interventions that could be considered anti-racist.I consider antiracist work to be one where the intention for social change is clearly upfront, even if their vision and understanding of what needs to be changed and how to get there vary with different levels of sharpness and explicitness.This exploration leaves me with more questions than clear answers, as I try to hold onto both the desire to be seen as worthy and the intersectional entrapments of visibility.My key concern is to imagine a world where oppression is irrelevant, a non-issue, so that we can identify the strategic moments and images needed.While it might be provocative to suggest that we could start by withholding the urge to show ourselves as worthy to the oppressive gaze, and not use images of our diverse bodies for anti-racist work, it is worth considering if that could be a step, even if the longing to be seen feels unbearably strong.

Notes
1.I want to thank the anonymous reviewers, Peter Wade, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez and Hettie Malcomson for their incisive comments and suggestions for this article.2. Blackness as a term does not have a straightforward translation in the Latin American context, so here I am referring to a collection of interconnected terms current in public debates: negritud and negridad (closest literal translation), lo negro (all things/issues related to Black and Blackness), and afro, (relating to black/blackness and connected to Africa).In Mexico, other close terms are afro-Mexican and afro-mestizo/a peoples or cultures.3.Here I use the terms "racialised in disadvantage" and "racialised in advantage" (or negative and positive racialisation) to include all racial categories in the discussion of racialisation.Racialisation refers to the process that activates the assignment of the category "racial" to peoples, objects, and geographies, and locate them within racial hierarchies.This is pertinent as it is common to designate as racialized only people of colour, while overlooking that those identified as white or white mestizas/os/es in Latin America also undergo racialization, as well as the objects and geographies connected to them.They experience the presumed privileges of a racist and racialized societal structure.I say "presumed" because in societies where racism is in operation, all of its members engage in the dehumanization processes essential for racism's maintenance.