Whitexicans, or the racial politics of digital culture in Mexico

Abstract

Abstract This article critically analyzes the term “whitexican,” a neologism (white + Mexican) used to provide satirical and/or critical commentary about the online behaviors of the White, wealthy classes in Mexico. I build on theories of race and language in Latin America to propose reading whitexican not only as a social media vernacular but also as a heuristic to examine more widespread struggles over class, race, and indigeneity as they take shape across new media platforms in Mexico. My analysis presents three related sources of evidence: user-generated content satirized by the Cosas de Whitexicans account, political cartoons that reference the term, and celebrity posts that use the term in anti-racist activism or that express backlash against it. Through this analysis, I demonstrate an emergent vernacular conception of Whiteness connected to yet distinct from US–European contexts and illustrate how online media interactions continue to shape the process of racialization in different national contexts.