Unveiling Latin American White multiculturalism: Black women’s politics in Argentina and Costa Rica

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes theoretical and methodological approaches to researching Whiteness in two countries that embraced Whiteness over mestizaje and adopted ‘late multiculturalism’: Costa Rica and Argentina. We situate our analysis within critical race and Black feminist frameworks, which argue that the construction of White identity cannot exist without the construction of racialized others and that Black women’s experiences and knowledge offer critical vantage points from which to theorize social worlds. We employ a method of juxtaposition to analyze the collision between Black women’s political initiatives and anti-Black racist responses from a White national common sense. The Costa Rican case combines participant observation with critical discourse analysis of press coverage to assess the perception of, and experience of, the first Black woman Vice President, Epsy Campbell, vis-à-vis a White gaze. The Argentinian case includes an ethnographic examination of Black women’s experiences of racism during their participation in feminist organizing. Our analysis reveals the endurance of (foundational) White national ideologies despite the deployment of ‘multicultural’ discourses. We propose the concept of ‘White multiculturalism’ to explain how White Costa Ricans and Argentines simultaneously embrace multiculturalism through progressive policies and rhetoric while maintaining investments in homogeneous Whiteness through everyday institutional and interpersonal practices and interactions.