Working against racism: lessons from Latin America?

ABSTRACT It has often been asked if Latin America has any lessons in anti-racism for other regions. This kind of comparative approach reifies and homogenises regions as distinct “cases”, obscuring common ground. In contrast, a relational approach highlights commonalities and suggests that learning experiences in developing anti-racism can be shared across and within different contexts. Examples from Ecuador and Mexico suggest that the historical relation between race and class in Latin America has produced a “racially-aware class consciousness” that could be mistaken as a simple “lesson” for other regions about how to balance a politics of recognition with one of redistribution. A relational approach highlights that this “lesson” also applies within Latin American countries, because this racially-aware class consciousness is not simply a fully-formed given, but instead needs to be activated and developed in progressive directions, pushing against the currents of history and coloniality.

In this article, I explore the idea that Latin America might have some lessons for the rest of the world with respect to tackling racism.For example, the region's history of pervasive racial mixture has supposedly blurred clear racial identifications, creating racial tolerance and tempering divisions based on essentialised racial identities, which suggests that racial mixture is an example to emulate (Wade 2004).Conversely Latin America is also used to challenge the idea that racial mixture and/or the weakly-bounded racialised identities it supposedly entails are an antidote to racism (Wade 2004;Warren and Sue 2011).
I argue that the exercise of comparison and the idea that one region can produce simple lessons for other regions both warrant critical attention.I propose a relational approach that emphasizes connections and shared ground between apparently distinct and bounded "regions" or "cases" (Seigel 2005;Stoler 2001).This approach implies that, while it may be possible to derive useful pointers from Latin American experiences, it is vital to see that these pointers also apply in diverse ways to Latin American contexts themselves, rather than seeing the region as a bounded homogeneous case, which has already solved a problem and can teach others how to do likewise.These pointers represent possibilities found within the region (but not unique to it), which are not fully formed, but have to be developed in a process of struggle against the dominant tendencies of the political-economic context, whether in Latin American countries or beyond (Wade 2022).For example, debates about whether racial mixture undermines or reinforces racism and racial inequality are long-standing and continuing within Latin America itself (Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2024), rather than the region definitively showing the rest of the world whether or not mixture works as an antidote.Talk of simple lessons that Latin America -or any region reified as a homogenous whole -might offer to the world needs to be abandoned in favour of an emphasis on shared histories, shared problems and shared strategies of racism and anti-racism.
A critical approach to comparison reveals that it often depends on treating regions as coherent and comparable "cases".Such comparison suggests that a common issue (racism) has specific regional manifestations, which are different enough to allow light to be shed on one from the perspective of another.This comparative frame can be illustrated by looking at two common types of arguments.First, there are exceptionalist arguments, which contend that one region is very different from (and, for regionalists or nationalists, superior to) all others.Exceptionalist comparisons in the Americas have often opposed Brazil and the United States, in terms of a democratic racial formation versus a racist and segregationist one, with each being considered as a model to be emulated or avoided (Silva 2020, 69).Second, there are analyses that try to isolate the causal factors in historical developments and/or to determine the variables that shape social relations.Here, comparisons between Brazil and the United States have again figured large.Rather than seeing either country as an exception, historians have been interested in analysing the relative roles played by demography, economics, politics and culture in shaping emergent racial formations (Degler 1986;Harris 1964;Hoetink 1973;Marx 1998;Skidmore 1972;Tannenbaum 1947;Toplin 1981).Sociologists have also compared the two countries to develop theories of race relations by analysing the role of specific variables -such as the sharpness of racial group boundaries -in shaping broader patterns of racialised social relations (Bailey 2009;Lamont et al. 2016;Telles 2004).
These comparative studies have contributed a great deal, but I argue that it is productive to take a more relational approach.I build on previous critiques of the comparative method by Seigel (2005Seigel ( , 2009) ) and Stoler (2001), which emphasize the exchanges of ideas, techniques and people between historically connected countries and regions that are often presented as separate and bounded for the purpose of comparison (see also Wade 2004).For the Americas, I highlight the common history of racial formation, rooted in conquest, colonialism, enslavement, displacement and exploitation.This approach reveals that, while we can learn from specific Latin American contexts, it is important to see that, within Latin America, the same learning process is ongoing.That is, the terrain of racism and anti-racism is one shared across different regions and Latin America is not simply a "case" that can offer lessons to other regions that are unlike it, because it is itself embroiled in the same dynamics and issues that affect all the racial formations that have emerged historically as a result of European colonialism and postcolonial struggles.
A relational approach also highlights the consequences of the way Brazil and the (southern) United States have dominated in comparative studies.It draws our attention to the fact that, within Latin America, racial formation and race mixture have been very varied phenomena.Using Brazil as a typical counterpoint case obscures this fact.Also, to typify the United States on the basis of its southern Jim-Crow history is a simplification that reinforces case-like comparisons and neglects the presence in the United States of traits usually considered typically "Latin American" (Daniel 2006, ch. 5;Hernández 2016).
Below, I explore how Latin America has been compared with other regions, before outlining what I call a "racially-aware class consciousness", as a feature of Latin American racial formations in which race and class hierarchies have long coincided.I argue that it affords specific footholds for developing anti-racist work that grasps the intersectional character of race and class.I illustrate this with examples from Ecuador and Mexico.Gender is an inherent component of any race/class intersection (Wade 2009) -as the Mexican example reveals -but given that recent analysis has tended to focus on race/gender intersections, I focus here on race/class intersections, without ignoring gender.I end by contending that, far from being a ready-made lesson that can be applied to other contexts, this racially-aware class consciousness is a possibility that needs to be worked on within diverse Latin American contexts, as well as elsewhere, to achieve its anti-racist potential, because the very same convergence of race and class has traditionally been used as a way to deny or minimize racism.

Previous comparative approaches
Latin America -particularly Brazil -and the United States have long been compared in political and academic circles.From the mid-nineteenth century, nation-building narratives in most Latin American countries highlighted the process of racial and cultural mixture (mestizaje/mestiçagem) that was considered to underlie national formation.These narratives were promoted by elites and supported by many in society, who adhered to the idea that "we are all mestizos" (Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt 2003).Racial mixture was said to produce racial tolerance by breaking down ideas of racial difference (Wade 2017).In these narratives, the United States was a polar opposite, a place where segregation and racial hatred created the very model of a racist society.The lessons drawn from this opposition were predictable: for many Latin American leaders, the United States was an example to be avoided rather than emulated, embodying the definition of the racism that they said their countries had escaped; for many US leaders, Latin America illustrated the dangers of the "miscegenation" they were trying to restrict.By the late twentieth century, although the basic opposition remained, the lessons drawn were different: for example Brazilian Black leaders (and US Black academics commenting on Brazil) began to use the US as a positive model of Black political solidarity and identification, seeing Brazil's racial mixture as a key factor undermining Black identity and solidarity (Hanchard 1994;Seigel 2005).
From the 1990s, a more relational approach was apparently being used by studies arguing that, from the 1980s, Latin America -often Brazil -and the United States had begun to converge (Bonilla-Silva 2004;Daniel 2006;Skidmore 1993).These studies built on the evidence, accumulating since the 1970s, of racism and racial inequality in Latin America (Hernández 2013).They pointed out that the United States was no longer so clearly "bi-racial" (split between Blacks and whites), because of the growing presence of Latinos and Asians.Meanwhile, they argued that Brazil in particular was approximating a US-style Black/white binary, as "brown" people increasingly identified politically as Black and governments accepted this in their shifts towards multiculturalism and the kind of race-based affirmative action that was in retreat in the United States (Guimarães 2018).Critics of these convergence arguments (Sue 2009) said they tended to underestimate differences within Latin America, such as the differences between areas with substantial Black populations and those without.
Meanwhile, rather than arguing for or against convergence, other studies in comparative sociology counterpointed Latin America -almost always Brazil -and other regions -almost always the United States -as cases that could illuminate general theories of race relations (Bailey 2009;Lamont et al. 2016;Telles 2004).For example, Telles (2004) argued that Brazil's ambiguous racial classifications help explain how horizontal racial sociabilityincluding high rates of interracial marriage and lack of marked racial segregation -can co-exist with high levels of vertical racial inequality (see also Silva 2016).In this respect, Telles (2004, 15) said that Brazil "may have some valuable lessons" for the United States about the operation of the more veiled or "post-racial" racism that has superseded the Jim Crow era (Goldberg 2015;Lentin 2014).
However, while apparently moving away from simple contrasts towards relational connections, these studies of convergence and of comparative sociology retained the basic comparative frame of regions as coherent cases, in which one region had characteristics that the others did not and could thus provide a lesson -showing for example that the pervasive racial mixture produced by multiple relations of sex and marriage across racialized difference did not indicate an absence of racism, but were themselves structured by racial and gender hierarchies.
A good example of both the critical use and the limitations of the comparative frame is an article by Warren and Sue, subtitled "what anti-racists can learn from Latin America" (2011), which, in a spirit of transregional exchange and learning, enumerated a number of lessons.Some lessons are underlain by the contrastive comparative framework I am critiquing: e.g.Latin American-style mixture is not a solution to racism or racial inequality; Latin America shows us that colour-blindness, whether institutional or informal, does not ameliorate racial inequality.These lessons have undoubted force, but they also take the entire history of Latin American race mixture as indicating just one thing, rather than being a terrain of debate and struggle about what affordances race mixture might offer for anti-racism, whether in Latin America or beyond.
In one interesting lesson, however, Warren and Sue use Latin America less straightforwardly as a coherent and isolable case.They argue that Latin America demonstrates that liberal, power-evasive versions of multiculturalism do not reduce racial inequalities.This lesson was perhaps already obvious from the post-1960s' experiences of the United States and other contexts, but the authors argue that, from the 1920s, a form of "multiculturalism" had been enshrined in Latin American ideologies of indigenismo (which valorized Indigenous roots) and mestizaje, which made limited and conditional room for Indigenous and Black heritages.As Latin America was "multicultural" avant la lettre, it offered the world an early lesson that multicultural recognition and racialised inequality can easily co-exist.On the other hand, Warren and Sue argue that Latin America may yet teach us that recent re-articulations of multiculturalism (involving for example the kind of ethno-racial affirmative action and rights that the United States pioneered in the Americas) can perhaps open up less power-evasive directions of reform -although they admit that critics disagree (for a recent disagreement, see Hooker 2020).
Although Warren and Sue do not make this argument, I think the lesson indicates that diverse Latin American countries, the United States and other regions have all been tussling with the same issues of the governance of difference in the nation-state -and it is an open question as to who is teaching whom.The lessons suggested by the history of Latin American indigenismo from the 1920s to 1940s bear a family resemblance to the lessons one can learn from looking at the United States in the same period -for example, observing how Black cultural expression was appropriated and commodified, permitting it and also constraining it.The experiments in official multiculturalism that began in Canada in the 1960s and then extended into the United States and Europe were variations on these themes, which in turn fed into Latin America's more self-consciously multiculturalist turn in the 1990s.The scenario is one of a hall of mirrors in which multiple actors are looking at each other and themselves at the same time -and observing how others are looking at them -and adapting their behaviour in the process.
My argument draws on other relational approaches that avoid case-bycase comparisons and instead explore hemispheric or even global processessuch as the cosy relations between neoliberalism, rapacious extractivism and multiculturalism as forms of governance (Hale 2019;Speed 2016); or the riseand-rise of populist regimes that either coopt multiculturalist (and even antiracist) discourses or crush them, but either way with the overall goal of promoting extractivist development, which damages Black and Indigenous (and other subaltern) communities (Hooker 2020;Martínez Novo and Shlossberg 2018;Moreno Figueroa and Wade 2022).Such approaches may use case studies from Latin and North America (e.g. the volume edited by Hooker does) but the intention is not to see what we might learn about antiracism by looking comparatively.
I am not arguing that it is impossible to learn something from Latin American racial formations: my point is that, by treating them as a case -or even as cases -that can be compared to other regional cases and made to generate lessons for anti-racism, we are hiding the fact that anti-racism in Latin American contexts has not yet solved the issues that are being addressed and that these are generic to racial formations in the Americas, the Black Atlantic and the post-colonial world more widely.They are the issues and mechanisms generated by colonial histories, the on-going coloniality of power relations and the race/class/gender hierarchies of capitalism.Latin America's history of race mixture and the mestizo character of most of its nations may provide us with insights about how these mechanisms operate and how to address them, but it is important not to reify and isolate that history and character.For example, the race mixture that is routinely singled out as the defining feature of Latin American racial formations is in fact a constitutive component of all of colonially-rooted racial formations for which this nexus of race/class/gender intersections presents both obstacles to and opportunities for anti-racism (Wade 2022).

Race and class
I argue that race and class intersect in a specific way in Latin American contexts, due to the colonial histories of the region.I contend that this intersection perhaps affords some potentially fruitful footholds -which might appear to be "lessons" -for anti-racist work.However, in keeping with a relational approach, in the final section I insist that (a) this feature is not unique to the Latin American context, insofar as race and class always intersect in some form in any racialised formation; and (b) its potential is not fully realised even in Latin America, where the weight and flow of history are driven by regimes of mestizaje that both create the intersection in the first place and simultaneously privilege class as the dominant component in the assemblage.Latin America's history of white patriarchal conquistador colonialism created hierarchies in which class, colour and racialised identity were strongly interwoven, as highlighted particularly by Latin American scholars of decoloniality (Lao-Montes 2007; Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Quijano 2000) -and also inherently gendered, as emphasized by feminists among such scholars (Lugones 2010;Miñoso Espinosa 2021;Segato 2015; see also the Mexican case study discussed below).Black and Indigenous people have long contested these intertwined hierarchies, confronting the difficulties of addressing a racialised inequality that can appear to be -and can be explained away assimple class inequality: important examples include the struggles of Cuba's Partido Independiente de Color, founded in 1908 and crushed by a white backlash in 1912 (Helg 1995);andBrazil's Frente Negra Brasileira (1931-1938), which suffered a similar if more complex fate (Andrews 1991).
Still today these race-colour-class correlations are very evident (Hernández 2013;Telles 2014;Telles, Flores, and Urrea-Giraldo 2015) and the role of sex/ gender relations in mediating race/class hierarchies also remains (Miñoso Espinosa 2021; Wade 2009).Contrasts are often drawn with the United States (and Europe) where, notoriously, the working class is majority white and is split along racial lines.Even in sub-regions of Latin America where a white settler colonialism supervened in the late nineteenth century with mass European immigration -southern Brazil, Argentina -the basic coincidence of race and class has remained in place.In São Paulo, where the population as a whole is 61 percent white, in the favela of Paraisópolis, that figure drops to 34 percent, reinforcing the correlation between Blackness and poverty (Barbosa de Gusmão 2020).The symbolic race-class correlation is especially strong.In Argentina los negros is a label applied by middle-class people to lower-class people in general, even if many of them are phenotypically rather white (Aguiló and Vivaldi 2023;Alberto and Elena 2016).Across Latin America, racialised terms such as negro and indio are frequently used to attribute low social or moral status to people (Lancaster 1991;Ravindran 2021;Wade 1993, 259-260).
Seeing anti-racist strategies in the same contrastive frame, the US context is often said to be advantageous in that it generates clarity about the existence of racism, racial inequality and racial solidarity.By contrast it is frequently said that in Latin America racism and racial inequality are much harder to separate from class difference and thus easily hide behind it, meaning a sense of racial "groupness" is weaker and anti-racist work is hampered (Cerón-Anaya 2019; Da Costa 2014;Hanchard 1994;Lamont et al. 2016;Sheriff 2001;Sue 2013;Toplin 1981;Wade 2010).
I think there may be potential advantages in the way race and class connote each other in Latin American contexts.Their structural and symbolic correlation can foster a racially-aware class consciousness, in which racism and racial identity are not front-and-centre in the way people make sense of lived experience, nor necessarily in the way they organise and articulate their political mobilisations -but, crucially, neither are they entirely hidden.The specificity of this is important.It is not a matter of activists protesting about racial inequality, as in Cuba's Partido Independiente de Color or Brazil's Frente Negra Brasileira or in the "anti-racism with a class consciousness" promoted by the Argentinian collective Identidad Marrón: 1 these all place racial inequality and discrimination at the front of their agenda.Instead the issue of "race" in racially-aware class consciousness is more infrastructural, part of the furniture, always there and supportive, but taken for granted and not necessarily commented on.
I use two examples from the LAPORA project to illustrate this. 2 Although LAPORA worked in Brazil and although Brazilian material supports the idea of a racially-aware class consciousness (e.g.Burdick 2008;Silva 1998)

Wimbí, Ecuador
The first example comes from the Black community of Wimbí (also known as 5 de Junio) in the northern Pacific coastal region of Ecuador, an area that historically has been heavily Black (Antón Sánchez 2015;Minda 2015;Moreno Parra 2024;Rahier 2014;Whitten 1986). 3The community was first given collective title to about 10,000 ha of land under the 1994 Law of Agricultural Development in a process of titling of "ancestral lands" to subsistencefarming communities, a process consolidated by the 1998 and the 2008 Constitutions, which reiterated the collective character of Afro-Ecuadorian (and Indigenous) community ancestral lands in particular.In that sense, the community had been classified as Afro-Ecuadorian for many years by the state and the various NGOs (some Church-based) that acted as intermediaries in the land-titling process (Antón Sánchez 2015, 18-21, 75-76).By 2017, Wimbí had been for decades involved in disputes over land with oil-palm companies and in protests about ecological damage caused by oil-palm and gold-mining operations.At the time of writing, these land disputes have not been resolved, partly due to the fact that they involved a piece of ancestral community land that had not been part of the official titling process (Moreno Parra 2019).
For Wimbí residents and leaders and for commentators on this case and related problems affecting the local region (such as journalists, government officials, Church and NGO operatives), discourse focused primarily on land rights, access to clean water and forest resources, protection from violence and harassment, and a broad sense of social justice.Racism was almost never mentioned in public and the simple fact that the locals were all Black was only mentioned occasionally in a taken-for-granted fashion in press and media reports, and never in relation to the fact that the oilcompany managers and the government officials who were also involved were mainly mestizo and white people from the Ecuadorian interior.Even a report submitted to the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) by some 40 community organizations in the region, supported by the Church and the local university, only mentioned racial discrimination a few times (Federación de Centros Chachis de Esmeraldas et al. 2020).
I interpret this timid appearance of racial factors as a result of the dominance in Ecuador and much of Latin America of multiculturalist policies and discourses, in which being historically and culturally "Afro-Ecuadorian" takes precedence over being "Black" and talk of historical marginalisation trumps talk of racism.This, of course, is not just a feature of the post-1990s turn to multiculturalism, but builds on a deep history of the official and popular negation and minimisation of racism in the country and the region, which casts a focus on racism as anti-patriotic and even racist in itself (Martínez Novo and Shlossberg 2018; Rahier 2014; Wade 2010). 4 However, an awareness that racism was somehow involved in the complex situation of inequality and injustice faced by local communities became much more evident when, in interview, local leaders were explicitly invited to reflect on racism and the role that the Black identity of the people and the region might play.For example, a Black teacher from the community said, "First they [the community] were owners [of the land] and now they are slaves [of the oil-palm company]".In Latin America, it is not uncommon to hear highly exploitative work conditions being referred to as slavery and, although this may not necessarily directly evoke the historical enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples, in this case the evocation was beyond doubt when she added that "because they were slaves in the past, people want them to go back to being slaves".A spokesman for the local community council said, "They screw us over because we are poor and because we are black", while a colleague of his said, "As a black person, you cannot get ahead: you know this already; it's no surprise", adding that "if you want the black race to progress, they'll kill you".In particular, the oil-palm company was identified as adopting racist views of the locals.The community council president said, "The company says, "We have defeated high-powered people.Can't we defeat these negritos?[demeaning diminutive form meaning 'little black people']".Another member of the council said, "This is how they [the company] want to hurt us [amoratarnos] as blacks; [they say] 'these negritos are going to be bruised by this because we have the [land] titles'".
It is clear that these local leaders were very conscious of the role played by racism in their situation, even if usually they did not make it explicit.The history of Ecuador, with its trajectories marked by enslavement, expropriation of land and natural resources, displacement of Indigenous peoples and the imposition of colonial hierarchies and regimes of control over people and place, meant that the northern Pacific coastal region of the country developed as an assemblage of people, places, resources and techniques in which Blackness, Indigeneity and marginalisation went hand in hand.The region developed over time and into the twenty-first century as a resourcerich but infrastructurally poor area inhabited by people on the lowest rungs of the socio-racial ladder (Rahier 2014;Whitten 1986).There is an underlying process of racialisation linked to the historical geography and moral topography of the country, which created and sustain a structural link between underdevelopment, Blackness and Indigeneity, and which construct an image of the region as a place freely available for exploitation in order to make a profit and contribute to national "progress" as defined by the centres of power and wealth outside the northern Pacific region.Attempts by local communities to counter -or at least derive some benefit from -the processes of exploitation and dispossession they are subject to are inevitably tinged with what can legitimately be called anti-racism, because the economic and political structures that enable and are reproduced by exploitation have an inherently racialised component to them.In effect, struggles to defend land and livelihood constitute, in this context, an alternative grammar of anti-racism, a way of combining words and acts into practices that challenge interwoven structures of class and race inequality in a way that is indirect yet not accidental, and that "makes sense" of them both simultaneously (Wade and Figueroa 2021).

Congreso Nacional Indígena
The Mexican Indigenous organisation, the Congreso Nacional Indígena (CNI), furnishes a second example of a racially-aware class consciousness and also reveals the inherently gendered dimensions that did not emerge from the Wimbí example, in which men's voices dominated. 5The roots of the CNI are firmly in the Marxist-leaning Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and its 1994 uprising (López Bárcenas 2016;Stephen 1997).True to its origins, the CNI is radically anti-capitalist and, in their discourse and writings, there is not much explicit reference to racism.The CNI website and its blog contains some references to "conditions of marginality, racism and discrimination" and "examples of the racism of the Mexican government", but in four years of website posts (2017-2021) the word racism only appeared nine times and "discrimination" on 14 occasions. 6Racism is not absent as an issue, but is usually seen as a capitalist weapon deployed to dominate the working classes.
On the other hand, there is a very strong affirmation of Indigeneity, which is evident in the name of the organisation, in the visual dimensions of its public face, which routinely uses Indigenous iconography, and is explicitly apparent in their declarations about the resistance of "los pueblos indígenas" (Indigenous peoples) and the search for autonomy based on Indigenous lifeways and practices -"el espacio de los indios que somos" (the space of the Indians we are). 7 The uncertain presence of racism is evident in the key phrase they use to talk about their political base -los de abajo (the people at the bottom).On their website they list the diverse Indigenous groups that the CNI represents and at the end they add "Afromestizo and Mestizo" peoples, which could theoretically include all Mexicans insofar as Mexico has been officially defined as a nation of mestizos (López Beltrán, García Deister, and Sandoval 2014). 8However, there is a strong sense in which los de abajo are mostly dark skinned and thus different from the light-skinned middle classes and elites.
These ambivalences were dramatized when in 2017 the CNI formed a sub-group called the Concejo Indígena de Gobierno (Indigenous Governance Council) and, true to the forceful participation of Indigenous women in the CNI (Moreno Reyes 2017;Speed, Hernández Castillo, and Stephen 2013), launched a campaign for an Indigenous woman, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (known as Marichuy), to be accepted as a candidate for the presidential elections (Carlos Fregoso 2024).Her campaign, although it ultimately failed because the requisite number of supporting signatures could not be accumulated, became a cause célèbre in some circles and attracted both positive and negative comment.In a website post on the issue, the CNI proclaimed that "We hear the pain of all the colours that we are, [the people of] the Mexico of below" (escuchamos el dolor de todos los colores que somos el México de abajo). 9"All the colours" is allembracing and even colour-blind in one sense, but the mere mention of colour entrains a recognition of racial diversity (Moreno Figueroa 2022, 107-108).The next words, "que somos" (that we are) imply that CNI's people -who are mainly Indigenous -speak on behalf of those who are los de abajo and suggests that "all the colours" refers to the diversity of skin colour of those who are de facto in the lower strata, who tend to be darker-skinned than those in the higher strata.The link between los de abajo and colour was more explicit in a 2001 EZLN campaign for a "march for those of us who are the colour of the earth". 10 The matter of colour is complicated further when the website post states: It is not only the racism of the political structure that did not allow our proposal to appear on the electoral ballot, because if those who oppose capitalism's destruction of the world shared amongst them slanted, blue and red eyes, public policy and supposed democracy would be made to exclude them.
Here slanted eyes refers to Indigenous people and blue eyes to whiter people, while the reference to red eyes is opaque (it may possibly suggest the unimportant nature of colour, as irrelevant in the face of capitalism's exclusions?).Here, then, racism is both adduced as an inherent part of the political structures of Mexican society and simultaneously relegated to unimportance, because even if los de abajo were a random collection of colours, capitalism would work to exclude them all.
The ambivalence of the CNI/CIG in relation to racism was tested by some of the public reaction on social media to Marichuy's campaign, which also highlighted the imbrication of race and class with gender.Comments included these: "I would vote for #MaryChuy.You can see she has experience in cleaning Mexico".And "That #Marichuy looks like the woman who does the cleaning in my house".And "Who is Marichuy and why isn't she making pozole?"(Marini 2019). 11These comments made abundantly clear the racialised and gendered dimensions of Marichuy's project, yet even they retained some of the original ambivalence in the way they indirectly evoked race by referring to gender and class.
The comments dug a knife into the neuralgic point constituted in Mexicoand elsewhere in Latin America -by domestic service as a powerfully charged intersection between race, class, coloniality, gender and sexuality.Importantly for how race is evoked here, this intersection is not limited to clearly Indigenous and Black women.Instead the meanings that have historically accumulated around this intersection play on the role of domestic service as the route for a dual transformation of subaltern women: first, via "assimilation" from rural into urban, from india into chola, from negra into morena/ mulata; 12 and, second, via "mixture", both cultural, as the woman acquires new habits and knowledge from the families she serves, and sexual, as she is subjected to predation by the men of the household (Radcliffe 1990;Saldaña Tejeda 2013;Wade 2013).Thus domestic service as a category interpellates a range of women from the lower strata of society, who would likely be dark-skinned and who would feel moved -probably to anger, but perhaps also to shame -by the comments about Marichuy.The CNI/CIG example shows that race and class and gender are intimately intertwined.Because of colonial history, they connote each other (as they do in other regions with a history of colonialism).Because of the colonial history of Latin America, with its mainly conquistador patriarchal colonialism that generated a close correspondence between race and class, mediated by sex/gender relations, they mutually constitute each other in a particularly dense entanglement.A term such as los de abajo, while superficially only a class reference -evoking particularly a feminised servant class, as evident in the sexist comments on Marichuy -automatically entrains racialised images of physical traits and cultural habits associated with Indigenous and Black people, but encompassing lower-class mestizos as well.

Conclusion: lessons for social justice
What can we learn from these examples of racially-aware class consciousness?From one perspective, the Latin American experience could be seen as a problem: racism and racialised identities are being "masked" by class -and, in the case of Marichuy, gender -and not given sufficient recognition.Thus strategies need to focus on visibilising and proving the existence of racism and encouraging people to identify more clearly in racialised terms.This has been the tendency of many academic and activist efforts in Latin America in the last few decades, evidenced in the amassing of testimonial and statistical evidence of racial discrimination (Hernández 2013;Telles 2014) and in the movements towards ethno-racial counting in surveys and censuses (Loveman 2014).In the process, the United States has often acted comparatively as an exemplary model, even if it is not a question of simply importing US concepts and categories (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999;French 2000;Hanchard 2003).
From another perspective, these strategies cause other problems, linked to the reification of racial categories and the potential divisiveness of identity politics, which leads to what Gilroy (2000) has called "camp thinking".As we know, such critiques come both from some currents on the political left, which decry the focus on race to the detriment of class, and from the political right, which, now in post-racial mode, sees a focus on racism and racial identity as counter-productive, unfair and anti-patriotic (Lentin 2004(Lentin , 2011)).
On this thorny terrain, the idea of a racially-aware class consciousness arguably has some useful traction, as it holds out the promise of dealing simultaneously with race and class inequalities and identifications, while also paying attention to the gendered operation of the race/class intersection.A concrete example of this is Brazil's Law of Social Quotas (2012), which combined racial and class criteria in affirmative action programmes for the allocation of university places.This to some extent side-stepped the problems that the previous use of purely racial criteria had created around difficulties of defining "Black" in Brazil and controversies about whether it was in principle appropriate to do so (Maio and Santos 2005).In contrast, 2014 legislation for affirmative action in federal employment uses only racial criteria and has reignited controversy due to the re-emergence of commissions needed to determine who is and is not "Black", which were used in some university admissions in 2004 (Guimarães 2018;Lehmann 2018).
In relation to the examples of Wimbí and CNI, it is difficult to say definitively if the presence of racial awareness made any substantive difference to their struggles for land and power.But it seems clear that a key component of the lived reality of these struggles for the people involved was their identities as negro or indio/indígena and the shared, collective character of those identities and the experiences of marginalisation, exclusion and disadvantage that they entailed.It is very likely that such identifications were part of an affective network of solidarity that helped power the struggles.
The idea of a racially-aware class and gender consciousness suggests the possibility of addressing recognition and redistribution at the same time, acknowledging that lack of recognition leads to inequalities of redistribution and vice versa (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and that stigmatising assaults on human worth are inseparable from discriminatory exclusions (Lamont et al. 2016).It helps to inject an awareness of the structural dimensions of power hierarchies into the simple recognition of identities, helping to avoid the problems of reification and power-evasive multiplication of categories identified by many critiques of multiculturalism (Barry 2000;Lehmann 2016), some critiques of intersectionality (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 797-799) and some recent critiques of decolonial approaches (Lehmann 2022).It responds to the observation that in progressive politics people should "derive their identities from their politics rather than their politics from their identities" and that activists should "recognize the need to give progressive new meanings based on political principles to embodied social identities" (Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013, 937).And it thus smooths a path towards cross-racial collaborations, that depend on a common class and/or gender position.Among rappers from São Paulo's periferia (outlying low-income areas), Burdick (2008) found that poverty created solidarity among a multiracial but predominantly Black and dark-skinned population.The facts of class outweighed the facts of Blackness, but far from the latter disappearing or being irrelevant, they nurtured periferia residents' cultural expressions and sensibilities.
So, while it could be argued that the US context can be used to demonstrate to Latin Americans the benefits of solidary racialised identities and clarity about the existence of racism, it could also be argued that Latin America can illustrate to the United States and other regions that there may be productive potential for progressive and anti-racist politics in addressing race and class and gender together, even if this does decentre and even blur the role played by racism and racialised identities.
However, all this comparative toing-and-froing obscures the fact that both regions (and European and other contexts) are juggling with the same dynamics of race and class and gender.It might appear obvious that, in the United States, racial identities are well-defined and racism overt, and that race discursively displaces class, which becomes the silent partner (Ortner 1998).However, is also the case that race suffers from erasure in that region, whether by discursive avoidance (Frankenberg 1993), or by deploying a language of culture to mask race (Gregory 1999, 119) and blur racial identities (Hartigan 1999, 114), or by the post-racial minimisation of racism and demonisation of anti-racism as anti-patriotic and divisive (Bonilla-Silva 2003;Goldberg 2015).On the other hand, in Latin America, we know that racialised identities and to a lesser extent racism are occupying more space in the public political arena -albeit often via the language of multiculturalism with all its co-optative baggage -thus competing with discourses of class difference.
In short, all these contexts are part of a single transnational materialsemiotic assemblage of components that include racialised and classed and gendered ideas, objects and practices, connected and networked in regionally varied ways that are always also connected to each other.In all contexts, the problem is how to balance recognition and redistribution in order to achieve socially progressive outcomes.The possibility of deploying a racially-aware class consciousness to address social inequality and injustice while also acknowledging racism and racial identities is an option that can apply to all contexts.Even if the Latin American context highlights that possibility, it remains a challenge for people within the region to fully learn its "lesson" and to push the possibility towards socially progressive ends, because the race/class intersection and gender hierarchy can be -and have been -used easily to distract attention away from racism.Thus, for Wimbí and CNI/CIG, there is a case for tilting the balance slightly further in the direction of an explicit acknowledgement of the role of racismwithout necessarily placing it front-and-centre of the stage so that simple recognition of racial identities becomes the dominant issue.In the United States (and elsewhere), the challenge is very similar: to keep issues of structural inequality to the fore, acknowledging the role that racism has played and still plays in such structures -which implies that recognition is an inherent part of the solution -without letting recognition politics obscure intersectional structural issues.

Notes
, I use examples from Latin American contexts outside the classic Brazil-United States focus.