untitled

there's something weird about growing up mexican and slowly realizing that some of the beauty standards around you were basically inherited colonial panic.

i grew up getting scolded for playing in the sun too long because “te vas a poner prieta,” like darker skin was something to avoid instead of just… skin.

and honestly, some of this stuff gets normalized so deeply that people joke about it openly.

in mexico, “color cartón” is literally used like a shade category sometimes.

comparing someone's skin to the color of a cardboard box.

people will say it casually too.
almost playfully.

“anda bien color cartón.”
“no salgas tanto al sol.”
“te vas a poner más prieta.”

people laugh.
the family laughs.
kids laugh.

but underneath the joke is still the same centuries-old hierarchy.

lighter is cleaner.
lighter is prettier.
lighter is more desirable.
lighter is treated softer.

and as i got older, i started noticing how normalized proximity to whiteness was around me.

the girls getting blonde highlights and balayages.
the obsession with paler skin.
family members praising babies for being “güerito.”
people treating european features as more elegant, educated, professional, prettier.

i've literally heard family members tell my pale child things like, “ay qué bueno, all colors will look good on you because your skin is white.”

and everyone says it so casually too.
like it's just an innocent compliment.

but what are children subconsciously learning from comments like that?

that whiteness is versatile.
whiteness is beautiful.
whiteness makes things look “better.”
whiteness gives you options.

and by implication, darker skin is being treated like a limitation.

and honestly, i hate admitting this, but i was conditioned to see darker skin as uglier too.

not consciously.
not maliciously.
but slowly.

through comments.
through jokes.
through beauty standards.
through television.
through the way lighter cousins were praised differently.
through hearing people panic over tanning.
through hearing “qué bonita porque salió blanquita.”

and i think people underestimate what that does to a child psychologically.

imagine teaching a child, indirectly and repeatedly, that darker features are something to avoid.

that the sun is dangerous not because of burns, but because it might make you “too dark.”
that lighter skin is cleaner, softer, prettier, more elegant.
that being “güera” is automatically compliment-worthy.
that “mejorar la raza” is somehow normal enough to joke about casually at family gatherings.

what does that do to a child's self-image?

what does that do to indigenous-looking children?
to darker siblings?
to girls who realize early on that the features closest to europeanness get rewarded more?

because eventually kids absorb the pattern.

they start associating whiteness with acceptance.
with beauty.
with worth.

and i think that's one of the cruelest legacies colonialism left behind in latin america.

because people also sanitize colonialism too much when talking about why these attitudes exist.

the spanish did not peacefully “influence” mexico into caring about whiteness.
they colonized it violently.

they invaded indigenous civilizations, dismantled existing social structures, enforced european religion and political systems, extracted labor and wealth, and built an entire racial hierarchy designed to keep power concentrated near whiteness and spanish ancestry.

and because colonial mexico became heavily mixed anyway, the spanish empire became obsessed with classification itself.

they wanted hierarchy.
they wanted purity.
they wanted control.

so they created the casta system.

and the part that honestly disturbs me the most is how methodical it became.

the spanish empire was so obsessed with racial hierarchy that they tried to mathematically map out human beings through ancestry.

mestizo = español + indigenous.
castizo = español + mestizo.
mulato = español + african.
morisco = español + mulato.
albino = español + morisco.
torna atrás = español + albino.

even the names start sounding hostile and anxious over time.

“torna atrás” basically meaning someone had “thrown backwards” racially, like colonial society itself was panicking that whiteness could somehow be contaminated or reversed through mixing.

then there were categories like:

lobo.
zambaigo.
cambujo.
albarazado.
barcino.
coyote.
coyote mestizo.
ahí te estás.
mulata.

and those are only some of them.

the caste system was not some quirky historical chart.
it was a colonial tool.

a barbaric one, honestly.

it attempted to reduce human beings into calculations of blood percentage, appearance, ancestry, and proximity to european identity. your label could influence your opportunities, reputation, marriage prospects, social standing, and treatment under the law.

and what makes it even darker is that the system became more obsessive because racial mixing kept happening anyway.

the spanish empire could not stop indigenous, african, and european populations from 'mixing' together, so instead they tried to classify and control the outcome through increasingly absurd racial categories.

that anxiety shaped generations.

so when mexicans today associate lighter skin with beauty, professionalism, wealth, or status, those ideas did not magically appear out of nowhere. they were reinforced through centuries of colonial hierarchy, media, class systems, and social conditioning.

and lately i've been seeing a lot of conversations online about colorism in mexico, especially from tourists, visitors, and people consuming mexican media from outside the country, and honestly i think a lot of these conversations are missing historical context.

because yes, mexico absolutely has a whiteness problem in media.

you can walk through mexico city and see brown and indigenous-looking people everywhere, then turn on the television and suddenly everybody looks vaguely european. telenovelas, commercials, magazines, politicians, luxury branding, children's books, all noticeably lighter than the average population.

people notice the disconnect immediately.

i think online conversations sometimes lose nuance when everything gets reduced to “mexicans are anti-black,” because colonial caste systems pushed whiteness as the ideal across society as a whole. indigenous features were looked down on too. darker mestizos were looked down on too. entire generations inherited the idea that proximity to europeanness meant beauty, safety, status, and humanity itself.

that does not excuse anti-blackness.
it does not excuse racism.
it does not erase the experiences black people have had in mexico or latin america.

but history gets flattened when people act like these attitudes randomly materialized from modern mexicans being uniquely hateful, instead of understanding how deeply colonialism poisoned entire societies across latin america.

sometimes colonial thinking survives long after colonialism itself.