Questions on communication and Race in Mexico

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Notes

1 For Rafael Barajas, a.k.a, El Fisgón, an important leftist author and cartoonist for the left wining newspaper La Jornada, states that the roots of the Mexican right wing Party, PAN (Partido Acción Nacional- National Action Party) are pro-Nazis, a lot through the propaganda that Vasconcelos influenced on Gómez Morin, the first leader of the party (La Raíz Nazi del PAN, La Jornada, 09/06/2013). Vasconcelos’ son, the diplomat and consultant Héctor Vasconcelos, argued that indeed Vasconcelos’ worst mistake in his life was the pro-german magazine El Timón, but to his defense it was published in 1940, before the atrocities of Hitler were known in Mexico, and when the news came to the country, Vasconcelos thought were a United States propaganda. Moreover, Héctor historicizes Vasconcelos’s through the “subjective understandings” (to use Wynter’s concepts) that “throughout Latin America there was widespread Germanophilia, a product of German recovery and development starting in 1933, when Adolf Hitler took power,[when] that country was seen as a global counterweight to US power” (Alma E. Muñoz, La Jornada, 23/06/2013).

2 During my undergrad, which I did with a scholarship from the National Public Autonomous University of Mexico at Concordia in Montreal, Canada, I was told I was a woman of color, yet my Mexican passport under the category of skin type said white. When I had to renew that passport in Canada, the consulate didn’t write white but light brown.