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• W4379057516 abstract "In 2013, the Official Journal of the Federation of Mexico listed the key challenges facing Mexico's judicial institutions: a lack of public trust due to widespread corruption and systematic failure to prosecute and convict criminals (DOF, 2014). A plan to address these issues ensued. Written by the National Conference on the Administration and Enforcement of Justice, this plan consisted of institutional reforms to be carried out by the Mexican judiciary as well as the adoption of new technologies to standardize forensic practices by the police department. Central to the new measures was the proposed consolidation of national biometric databases; chiefly, the automated biometric identification system (ABIS, for fingerprints), the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), and Caramex, otherwise known as La Cara del Mexicano (the Face of the Mexican), a photographic database of faces (see Gobierno de la República, 2015: Serrano et al. 1999). The general objective was to build a new public security system strengthened by technology with the hope that these new databases would help address the inability of the police to catch criminals at both local and federal levels. However, despite these efforts, international reports such as the Global Impunity Index 2020 suggest that these strategies, implemented to improve the judicial system, had little effect (LeCleroq Ortega and Rodríguez Sánchez Lara, 2020, 9–10). In this article, I argue that the failure to improve public security through the use of new technologies should come as no surprise; that is, despite technological developments, realization of justice in Mexico will only be achieved when attention is paid to everyday discriminatory practices by the police—and society in general—and in particular to the role of “race” within those discriminatory practices. Furthermore, it remains unclear how these technologies might themselves contribute to creating or reshaping how race operates in what I call a cryptoracial society—a society where race is absent from official demographic information, resulting in racial ideas being hidden behind other explanations of discrimination, such as class.1 I argue that in cryptoracial societies, which include other Latin American, European, and some Middle Eastern and Asian societies, the relevance of race and racism in talking about and understanding difference remains hidden, despite race's centrality. In such contexts, new technologies (for example, CODIS, ABIS, or Caramex) can then further obscure the role of race, particularly in policing practices, by introducing a false sense of objectivity. Ultimately, racial differences can be created in myriad ways through scientific and anthropological theories, measurements, categories, ideologies, and political projects (Loveman, 2014; Teslow, 2014). What I hope to show here is that race is produced through technology even in contexts where race as a category is absent from surveys and institutional discourse and is thus essential to reckon with if the issues across policing and the judicial system in Mexico, such as racism, police brutality, disproportionate use of preventive incarceration, and limited access to fair trials, are to be adequately addressed. Therefore, in this article, I will examine two technologies that are currently in use in the creation of racial and ethnic identities and explore how and why these particular identities overlap with the identities of those subjected to biased policing in Mexico. To do so, I will first outline the contours of the unequal realization of justice across Mexican society before laying out the racial myth of mestizaje that shapes Mexican cryptoracism. The literature on policing and justice access in Mexico identifies a wide variety of biases responsible for the unequal treatment and criminalization of specific groups. Here, I will focus on three of these factors, which are interlinked: the current rule of law in Mexico, the differential persecution of petty crime, and racism. As a result of these factors, various international reports and academics identify at least five populations who are subject to criminalization. On the one hand, there are the poor, young, Brown men who are the majority of the imprisoned population, which suggests unequal treatment in the judicial process (Gutiérrez Vargas, 2021; Pérez Correa, 2014). On the other hand, there are women, Indigenous people, Afrodescendants, and LGBTTTI individuals, who face significant disadvantages in accessing justice due to historic processes of structural discrimination.2 The first factor, the current rule of law, is shaped largely by the war on drugs. Made official by the federal government in December 2006 (see Herrera Beltrán, 2006), the war on drugs began a continuous criminalization of poor, young, Brown men that has only increased in the intervening years (Gutiérrez Vargas, 2021). According to José Gutiérrez Vargas (2021, 202), this criminalization is a consequence of the creation of a new rule of law based on a national security policy made in agreement with the United States. The subsequent focus on the war against terrorism and narcotraffic also disproportionately affected this population because the lack of opportunities makes organized crime their best, or only, option. Consequently, this group has become the main target of institutional violence by the army, the police, and the penitentiary system. I argue that this group is not only marked by poverty but is also subject to racial profiling. The second factor, differential persecution of petty crimes, refers to the criminalization of specific populations in relation to the kind of crimes persecuted (Pérez Correa, 2014). Studies conducted in 2013 and 2021 show that half of the crimes investigated and sentenced relate to petty crime, mostly robberies (México Evalúa, 2013, 2021). The decision to focus on these crimes is not always based on the relevance of the crime but, rather, is based on the ease of solving a specific case, on the quality of the investigation, and on the materials and knowledge available to the forensic investigators. As a consequence, the criminal system ends up disproportionately targeting the poor, who usually commit these crimes, leaving other prevalent and high-profile crimes (for instance, corruption) unsolved. The criminalization of the poor in Mexico has deep historical roots. As Pablo Piccato (1997) shows, at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Mexican president Porfirio Díaz began his modernizing project, civilization and progress were contrasted against less “civilized” populations: “the other Mexicans … wearing traditional clothes, less groomed, unavoidable as servants, beggars, drunks or petty offenders” (141–42). This contrast between the elite and the poor, the civilized and the uncivilized, was thus instantiated on Indigenous populations, which in turn has given shape to enduring stereotypes emphasizing the relationship between criminality, class, and race (136). Thus, even though class is an important factor of inequality in Mexico, there is also an ethnoracial element to discrimination that has not been studied until recently (Gall, 2021; Telles, 2014; Telles and Paschel, 2014). As neither race nor ethnicity have been openly used as demographic labels, poverty alone has often served as the explanation for past and present discrimination. As a result, discrimination based on ethnicity or race is a topic that still tends to be subsumed under the narrative of class (Gall, 2021). This is true even when there is evidence of historical structural discrimination suffered by racialized groups, as is the case for Indigenous people as well as Afrodescendants and Afro-Mexicans (Pichardo Ramírez, 2020). Today, several studies show that people with Brown skin suffer from structural disadvantages in every aspect of life (Color de piel, n.d.; CONAPRED, 2012; INEGI, 2017; Moreno Figueroa, 2012; see also https://racismo.mx). In the case of Mexico, much of this cryptoracism results from the racial myth of mestizaje (mixture or hybridity), which refers to the idea of two or more “pure racial types,” or more recently “populations,” mixing to form a new one. This myth shaped how Mexicans imagined the national population and subsequently influenced scientific theories and technologies. In contrast to the ideas of racial purity favored in Europe (see, for example, de Gobineau, 1915), understandings of race in many countries of Latin America, including Mexico, stem from this idea of mixture (Hartigan, 2013; Wade et al., 2014). The myth of mestizaje is anchored in earlier colonial times and the arrival to the “New World” of European conquistadores, imagined mainly as men, who had intimate relations with Indigenous women (Gutiérrez Chong, 2019; Navarrete and Jones, 2020). The sexual encounter of different “types” of humans (see Figure 1) led to the creation of a complex set of “human types” categorized according to the different mixes they represented. The resulting complex casta system had the mestizo at the core (Carrera, 2002). Thus, the idea of mestizaje and mestizo became central to the Mexican national ideology (Loveman, 2014; Olarte Sierra and Díaz del Castillo, 2014; Wade, 2017; Wade et al., 2014). Various intellectuals recovered this myth during the twentieth century and created the idea of a mestizo population. This idea was then reproduced through the anthropological, sociological, and, more recently, genetic work of various scientists, as well as different technologies (Lomnitz, 2001, Loveman, 2014; García Deister and López Beltrán, 2013). The next section explores how all of these factors come together in two such technologies3 used in policing. The first technology I discuss is the criteria for self-identification offered as part of the National Survey of Imprisoned Population (Encuesta Nacional de Población Privada de la Libertad, or ENPOL). This survey was designed to generate statistical information on the demographic and socioeconomic profile of the imprisoned population in Mexico and the prosecution and detention process (INEGI, 2021). Using categories like language, ethnic identity, physical characteristics, and skin color to define Indigeneity, the data can determine instances of discrimination and racism. In the survey, Indigeneity is defined not only through traditional linguistic criteria, in which speaking an Indigenous language is proof of having an Indigenous identity, but also through self-ascription, an innovation that can have positive consequences in the judicial process because it allows, in theory, for the provision of a culturally adequate defense (Pichardo Ramírez, 2020). Allowing people to self-identify as Indigenous even if they would not count as such under the usual criteria (for instance, the use of traditional clothes, the reproduction of cultural traditions, and the possession of an Indigenous language) can help foster a less essentialized understanding of Indigenous identity and challenge stereotypical views that the loss of traditional customs is the loss of Indigeneity. The second technology I discuss is Caramex, a photographic database created to produce “more realistic” composite sketches of Mexican faces to be used by experts (peritos) involved in identifying criminals. Created by renowned physical anthropologists working at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the database was later implemented in the Mexico City Attorney General's Office (then, Procuraduría General de Justicia del Distrito Federal, today, Fiscalia General de Justicia de la Ciudad de México). The use of the images is mostly restricted to the investigators involved in a case and is intended to be used to support the localization and final apprehension of suspects. However, these images sometimes appear in public spaces (Figure 2). There are two motivations for the creation of this database. On the one hand, it is part of the general plan, initiated in the 1990s, to standardize Mexico's judicial system. As such, it is intended to standardize and improve processes of criminal identification by generating photolike composites instead of drawings. On the other hand, it is a way to improve the portraits of “Mexican faces”—a task that other composite systems, like Identi-Kit and Photo-Fit, were not able to perform (Nieves Delgado, 2020)—an improvement that is achieved by studying the facial diversity of the Mexican population. I argue that the process of constructing and populating the database to represent the diversity of the Mexican population is informed by racial ideas of mestizaje. To collect photographs for the database, researchers went to the places the historical processes of mestizaje allegedly took place and where characteristics of each of the original three “types” (European, Indigenous, and Afro) are still found. For example, it is assumed that communities located on the coastlines of the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico have more African features (Serrano et al., 1998, 62), whereas the northern states, whose populations are allegedly of a higher socioeconomic status, retain more European characteristics (see Martínez Casas et al., 2014). There is also a commonly held belief that certain areas in Mexico, such as the Jaliscan Highlands, have a higher percentage of blond people. These people are often contrasted with, for example, the “very typical Mayan population” of Brown people in Yucatán (Nieves Delgado, 2020). The sampling process to create the photographic database follows these assumptions. In this case, the design of the technology relies implicitly on a racial story that portrays Mexico as a racially admixed country of European, Indigenous, and African people who met 400 years ago and created a population that is racially different to anyone else. As a result, the “Mexican face” is understood to be something specific to this mestizaje process. The use of this photographic database and its success is then taken to testify to such difference. Interestingly, the use of Caramex requires a lot of tinkering on the part of the expert. Experts are constantly uploading new pictures from the Internet to finish their composite sketches. This incorporation of random images throws into question the racial stability of the Mexican face. In this sense, Caramex shows that technologies can both reproduce and contest racial stereotypes. This insight can open new ways to interrogate technologies and their effects in policing. Moreover, it invites us to reconsider the myths underlying the construction of the Mexican national ideology and to question old stereotypes about the diversity found in the territory. These two technologies illustrate how race and racism are produced and justified in policing practices in Mexico. Broader criteria for self-identification as Indigenous can contribute to building a nonessentialist understanding of Indigeneity and more culturally adequate judicial processes. Caramex can also question the assumed racial homogeneity of the Mexican and make more explicit the stereotypes at play in our ways of seeing, especially within policing practices (i.e., those of the poor, Brown/Indigenous criminal). At the same time, Caramex can corroborate these same stereotypes and expectations. By helping to create allegedly more objective and realistic portraits, it can foster the instantiation of criminality in a Brown/Indigenous-looking face. Similar analyses can be done with other technologies involved in the justice system, like CODIS and ABIS. Does the idea of mestizaje also play a role in how these databases are produced? The CODIS database in the United States, for example, has significant disparity in the number of profiles of Black people compared to White people (Murphy and Tong, 2020). If the CODIS database in Mexico suffers from a similar disparity in profiles from Brown, Indigenous, and Afrodescendant people compared to White people, it could be another source of racial bias in the judicial system and another tool for the criminalization of vulnerable populations. Several studies corroborate the many ways discrimination is enacted (see Color de Piel, n.d.; INEGI 2017). It is not a surprise that the pervasive lack of opportunities for those in structurally disadvantaged positions can lead them to commit crimes. And, in a feedback loop, it is those located towards the poorest, darkest side of the racial spectrum who are then criminalized (including disproportionate stop and searches, disproportionate use of preventive incarceration, and limited access to good legal aid and fair trials). In other words, structural racism leads to the criminalization of poor, racialized populations. For this reason, it is the poorest, not the most dangerous, individuals who populate prisons in Mexico (Azaola and Bergman, 2007, 112). While Mexicans may proclaim, “We are all mestizos,” it is clear from these studies that we are not all the same. As Peter Wade argued, “The idea of a common mestizo identity for the nation creates a ground for racial democracy, but simultaneously provides a space within which blackness, indigeneity and whiteness are hierarchically valued” (2017, 17). In Mexico, whiteness is at the top of this racial hierarchy and, in general, whiter features are considered more desirable (Arceo-Gomez and Campos-Vazquez, 2019; Villareal, 2010). Thus, part of the deep inequality suffered in the country comes from a racialized way of seeing that systematically favors whiteness. This way of seeing has historical origins and pervades current society. There is a pressing need to debunk old racial stereotypes that inform the ways we see ourselves and others, including a serious consideration of how technologies used at the different stages of the judicial process can create and reproduce racial inequalities. The incorporation of new criteria for self-identification in the ENPOL survey can build an understanding of Indigeneity not as an essentialized identity but as one that can flow and change over time. Similarly, looking closely at facial diversity in Mexico can help to destabilize ideas of racial homogeneity. In reflecting on our assumptions about human diversity and its role in racial profiling and discriminatory practices in Mexico and other cryptoracial societies, this research has shown that the implementation of these two technologies and their ability to improve or bias the judicial process can significantly influence vulnerable groups’ lives. Ensuring these technologies do not reinforce racial inequities will support efforts to realize justice in Mexico. I would like to thank the experts who shared insights on their work. These insights made possible the publication of Nieves Delgado (2020), which contains an extended version of the discussion on Caramex. I also want to thank Mark Whittle and the editors for their comments on previous versions of this article." @default.
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• W4379057516 date "2023-05-01" @default.
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• W4379057516 title "Policing in Cryptoracial Societies: The Case of Mexico" @default.
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