Mestizo Urbanism: Dinsentangling Whiteness in Latin American Cities

Across Latin American cities, there continues to be strong resistance to the claim that racism and the historical construction of whiteness play any role in the production of the urban space. Deemed antipatriotic, this issue remains widely unaddressed in urban studies. Based on ethnographic and mixed-method research conducted in Bogotá between 2016 and 2022, and secondary literature on other Latin American cities, this paper explores the afterlife of mestizaje as a racial-colonial project based upon “whitenening” (blanqueamiento), from the viewpoint of its materialisation into post-colonial and contemporary cities and their society-space relations and at the intersection of class, gender, regional, and racial lines of difference.

As a racialised fabulation constructed upon a form of white supremacy, mestizaje’s historical and socio-cultural role in Latin America was two-fold: despite its purported claims of universal equality and mixed-race syncretism (based on an ideology that assumed the task of dismantling colonial difference), it became the chief apparatus of social stratification in everyday life, “in both public and intimate spheres” (Wade, 2010). By introducing and discussing the notion of “mestizo urbanism” (Torino, 2024), this paper illustrates how everyday practices and ideologies of mestizaje and whitening have transformed urban spaces in Bogotá and other Latin American cities, thanks to discursive, operational, and normative devices of city-making.

Through the analysis of specific examples, the paper will expose how whiteness is always (re-)constructed –even in the contemporary “multicultural city” (Torino, 2021)– as a spatial system of power and how racial privileges are fixated in the urban space (Alves, 2018; Picker, Murji, Boatcă, 2018) while hiding behind the normalisation of Latin American cities as mestizo ­– that is, theoretically, non-racial. Finally, the paper will suggest the need to divest from the racial hegemony of mestizaje in Latin America’s urban planning and studies, and to unlearn urbanity as whiteness.