Watching Obama, Mexico Opens a Window on Its Racial Issues

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican media has crowned Barack Obama the "black Kennedy" and interpreted his strong candidacy as a signal that the United States is finally entering the age of racial enlightenment.

Obama has created a buzz in the country's blogosphere and among the chattering classes, who see him as the embodiment of the American dream.

But despite the public accolades, Obama's candidacy has also opened a window onto Mexico's own uneasy race relations and mainstream society's treatment of the poverty-stricken and largely ignored Afro-Mexican community.

"For Mexico there aren't any blacks, they don't exist," said Israel Reyes Larrea, coordinator of an Afro-Mexican civil association on the coast of Oaxaca state.

Reyes said Obama's candidacy is seen as a beacon of hope within the Afro-Mexican community of Oaxaca, which experiences some of the nation's highest rates of migration to the United States.

Many black Mexicans believe an Obama presidency could shed some light on — and help improve — the situation of Afro-Mexicans. An estimated 500,000 Afro-Mexicans, less than 1 percent of the country's population, live mainly in isolated communities along Mexico's coasts.

"We see in Obama the crystallization of a dream," Reyes said.

Outside Mexico's black communities, attitudes towards Obama are as conflicted as attitudes towards race in Mexico, a nation that has enshrined racial equality in its constitution.

"I don't trust black people," said Guadalupe Chávez, a 65-year-old Mexico City housewife. "God help the Americans if (Obama) wins ... He gives me the impression that he only wants to help his race."

Such sentiment was nowhere to be found among younger Mexicans interviewed recently in southern Mexico City.

"In the 21st Century it's absurd to think that the color of a person has so much importance," said Karen Ibarra, a 28-year-old music teacher. "It wouldn't surprise me if Obama won: he's charismatic, young, has innovative ideas and if I was American I would vote for him."

But lurking beyond the positive vision some Mexicans have of Obama lays a more complicated relationship with black Mexicans, a reality captured in jokes, oft-repeated stereotypes and an intense, but unspoken, fixation with skin tone.

"We live in denial," said Rossana Fuentes Berain, an expert on international relations at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. "We would never admit (to racist attitudes). We mask race consciousness with social and class consciousness."

For centuries, Mexico has based its identity on the ideology of the mestizo, the blending of white, Spanish blood and darker-skinned indigenous peoples. But that conception, complain many Afro-Mexicans, fails to include Mexico's minority with African ancestry.

During the colonial period, Afro-Mexicans outnumbered Spaniards by vast numbers and two heroes of Mexican pre-Revolutionary history, José María Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, were of African descent.

But Mexico's African presence has since retreated from the national consciousness. Scholars have pointed to the geographical isolation of Afro-Mexican communities — most were intentionally founded in remote areas as refuges for runaway slaves — as contributing to the community's broader isolation from the rest of Mexican society.

A civil-rights movement like that in the United States never emerged in Mexico, whose laws never institutionalized racism as in the American South. It wasn't until the 1980s that a semblance of a "black pride" movement emerged in Mexico.

Glimpses of Mexico's uncomfortable relationship with race have flashed to the surface in recent years.

In 2005, the Mexican government decided to place the image of a cartoonishly stereotypical black boy on a commemorative stamp.

The figure of Memin Pinguin, complete with oversized lips and nose, is beloved in Mexico as a comic book character many Mexicans have grown up with. Yet despite the protests of African Americans and the increasingly vocal Afro-Mexican community, the Mexican government and the majority of Mexicans refused to concede there was anything inappropriate about celebrating Memin Pinguin.

Writing at the time of the controversy, Mexican columnist Carlos Tello Diaz said that the episode offered a rare, unvarnished look at Mexico's race relations: "We see them as apart from ourselves, we don't identify them as what they are: part of our roots, because we don't see them around us."

The Mexican media has focused on Obama as a symbol of change in American race relations.

Reyes, the head of the Afro-Mexican organization, said he hopes an Obama presidency will lead to better treatment of Afro-Mexicans. Afro-Mexican towns regularly have some of the highest poverty rates in Mexico's poorest states.

"The black towns of Mexico need to be included in the plans of the government, they need to be supported, to be recognized," he said.

Many Obama supporters in Mexico also believe that as a minority, Obama as president would be more sympathetic to the plight of undocumented Mexicans in the United States. Some experts, pointing out that Obama voted for a border wall last year, say that might not be the case.

Whatever Obama may represent to Mexican race relations or the debate over immigration, one thing is certain, Fuentes said.

Mexico would treat Obama has it has past U.S. presidents.

"Whoever sits in the Oval Office will be treated with respect," she said. "Power overshadows everything."

Research assistant Julieta Pelcastre in Mexico City contributed to this article.