Unveiling the mestizo gaze: visual citizenship and mediatised regimes of racialised representation in contemporary Mexico
Creators: name: Ortega-Dominguez, Maria
Publisher: name: Loughborough University
Year: 2025

description: This dissertation analyses the connections between citizenship, racism, and processes of social inclusion and exclusion as expressed through visual discourses, within media practices, in contemporary Mexico, in relation to representations of indigeneity. Bringing this problem into the terrain of Mexican visual culture, this dissertation argues that processes relating to the production of social and political disenfranchisement are defined by the representations produced by a privileged gaze: the gaze of the mestizo, the mestizo gaze.The mestizo gaze exercises the ‘right to see’ in the public sphere, while it does not have to comply with ‘being seen’, as it is positioned in a privileged place of invisibility. In this context, invisibility is a form of privilege that is enabled by being located in a strategic social position within the dynamics of Mexican racism. In order to study racist discourses in images and in the media, the methodological framework was informed by two approaches: multimodality and critical visual literacy. The data selected involve different kinds of representational artefacts (photographs, text, video, among others) which were subjected to a multimodal discourse analysis to identify and analyse how narratives and discourses about citizenship and racism are assembled and articulated, and how the mediatisation process of said narratives and discourses are enabled.The theoretical framework that informed the research draws from critical race scholarship, media anthropology and visual culture studies, from critical and feminist perspectives, at the intersection of critical media and communication studies. The study engages the relations between citizenship, visuality, race, and media, including theoretical perspectives from Latin America. It draws from the concept of mediatisation, particularly, in the institutionalist and social-constructivist traditions. The data convey a diversity of social institutions and stakeholders that had a significant participation in the production of discourses and representations of citizenship in each case: state representatives, the press, institutions of civil society, indigenous peoples, and other members of civil society. The data present multimodal elements, which allowed to follow and analyse the process of mediatisation.The research considers two cases. The first, is the case of the repatriation of the mummified remains of Julia Pastrana from Norway to Mexico in 2013. The second, is the case of the rape and death of Ernestina Ascencio Rosario in 2007. The cases were highly exposed in influential mass media outlets, both offline and online, in Mexico. These cases sparked discussions about indigenous Mexicans framed around the following topics: civil and human rights in Mexico, citizenship, ideas about ‘race’, gender, age, class, indigeneity and Mexican national identity, as well as conceptions about who has access to justice and under what terms. Moreover, these cases circulated in media and social media outlets that have a national reach. In this way, the research evaluates the role of the mestizo gaze in the production of visuality in the cases and offer some considerations on the operations of racism in the cases and the implications of those operations in terms of the production of citizenship and visuality.