Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America by Edward Telles (review)

Edward Telles and a team of researchers offer a bold exploration of two hotly debated questions in the new book Pigmentocracies: What is the effect of the ideology of mestizaje on public opinion in Latin America? What is the comparative value of skin color and ethno-racial category measures for inequality studies in Latin America? To respond, the book uses original 2010 survey data on Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru from Princeton’s Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (henceforward, PERLA). Four country-level chapters form the book’s body, each authored by a set of PERLA researchers according to country of expertise. Telles, PERLA’s principal investigator, co-authors broad introductory and concluding chapters.

Why are PERLA data important? These surveys, in tandem with those of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, are the first to use comparative interviewer-rated skin color measures (via a skin color palette) in representative samples across Latin America. In addition, only in Brazil have there previously been robust, large-sample surveys exploring public opinion on racial issues. Thus, PERLA’s data offer first-ever glances into Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, while providing points of comparison on earlier survey research in Brazil.

In regard to ways in which ideologies of mestizaje affect public opinion, results in Peru, Colombia, and Mexico provide surprising answers. Whereas most scholarship characterizes generalized racial attitudes in those countries as imbued with denials of racism, results reveal that the opposite is actually the case for overwhelming majorities in all three countries—and for all skin colors and ethno-racial categories. Contemporary scholarship has described a general opposition to anti-racism mobilization and public policy redress of minority structural disadvantage in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico; nonetheless, Pigmentocracies survey results reveal majority support for these approaches in all three countries. These findings hold true in regard to Brazilians’ racial attitudes as well, confirming earlier research.

In regard to the relative value of color and ethno-racial category for capturing inequality in core measures of socioeconomic status (SES), Pigmentocracies results throw a curve ball: standard ethno-racial category measures appear distorting compared to skin color for mapping educational inequality in all four contexts, as figures on pages 225 and 228 illustrate. For example, the application of ethno-racial categories reveals white disadvantage relative to mulattos and mestizos in Colombia, and white disadvantage relative to mestizos in Mexico. In Peru, results on education show no significant differences across ethno-racial categories. In Brazil, Pigmentocracies shows how ethno-racial categories obscure significant SES differences between populations of mid-range skin color and those of darker skin color; ethno-racial categories in Brazil also obscure the magnitude of the inequality gap between lightest and darkest skin-color categories.

With these bold findings, how might this book help reorient the field? From the lens of generalized racial attitudes, Pigmentocracies suggests caution in regard to the both the widespread scholarly demonization of ideologies of mestizaje and the indictment of mestizos/pardos/morenos as deniers, avoiders, and obstacles for anti-racism. Second, it suggests that states and science should be interrogated regarding their reliance on standard ethno-racial parsing as a means of capturing social inequality. There are indeed other arguments for parsing a country’s population by ethno-racial categories, but applying them directly and exclusively to monitor social inequality in key SES indexes is not easily supported, based on this book.

Pigmentocracies does have a few drawbacks. All the chapters report recent shifts in public opinion, but their surveys are cross-sectional and thus do not reflect the broader shifts. Certainly there are concrete changes in some states’ ethno-racial practices, but the actual power of these changes to produce major shifts in public opinion is neither supported by evidence nor rigorously theorized. Only in Brazil, where there were baseline surveys from previous decades, could authors explore...