In the last chapter, I discussed immigration. In this chapter, I will talk about how Mexican travelers perceived racism in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. Historically, Mexicans consider Americans to be racist. Mexicans find peculiar Americans� obsession with giving an exact label to people's ethnic background. Mexican's also find odd that one drop of non-Anglo-Saxon blood, would make an individual a person of color. Mexican's are racist too, but in a different way. Mexicans know that the great majority of the population is Mestizo. This is mixed race. Well they take great pride in being the descendants of the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Mixtec, and the Toltecs. They also discriminate and marginalize the indigenous people of the country. In the 19th century, Mexicans condemned the fact that Americans maintained slavery. Mexicans deemed hypocritical that a nation that proclaimed itself to have liberty and justice for all, would deny civil liberties to African Americans. Those were the views of Lorenzo de Zavala in 1831, when he travelled to the United States. Ironically, one of the main motivations and urgency for Anglo settlers in Texas to gain independence from Mexico, was that Mexico abolished slavery as soon as it declared its independence from Spain in 1821. Anglo settlers wanted to keep slaves. After slavery in the United States ended in 1865, Mexicans traveling to the United States recognized that much of racism persisted. For instance, in 1903, when diplomat and writer, Federico Gamboa lived in Washington, he sarcastically noted that it looked like all low level government offices were staffed with African Americans or with people of color. He wondered sarcastically if people of color were preferred in such trades before or after Lincoln's presidency, when slavery was abolished. In 1905, Gamboa criticized American condemnation of the massacre of Yaqui Indians perpetrated by the Mexican government in Sonora and Sinaloa. Gamboa did not deny the barbarism of this massacre. He however, condemned American criticism by arguing that Mexicans did not put their own indigenous peoples in reservations or tolerate the lynching of African Americans, such as those organized by free citizens of the United States. Even in the 20th century, Mexicans continued to see Americans as racist. Carlos Fuentes in the 1970s asked if the United States was ever an innocent nation. And some of the examples he used to formulate this question were slavery, segregation, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. In 1991, Octavio Paz argued that despite of all its progress, the United States were still far from being a multi-racial democracy. To him, American racism was based on distrust, suspicion, and horror towards the other. In summary, Mexican intellectuals were and are well aware that racism exists in Mexico too. They recognize that Mexicans discriminate against Mexican indigenous, and people who are not from the West because they are culturally the other. But there are two differences from racism in the United States. First, in Mexico racial discrimination was never as deliberate state policy. This means that before the law, and for the Mexican state, race does not matter. Second, Mexicans do not hold a moral superiority belief before the rest of the world. Mexico has had enough internal problems to deal with since it gained its independence to have any motivation to present itself as a role model to other countries. I can't leave this chapter without touching on one other interesting view. That is Mexicans fascination with blacks. Mexican elite travelers see blacks as the other, and they're fascinated by their otherness. They like their facial features, their dancing, and their music that they find exotic. Justo Sierra, while in New York, goes to a music show where the singing of an African American woman sounds to him like a mixture of eroticism. The cooing of a dove and the velvet roar of a panther. Antonia Rivas Mercado, a wealthy Mexican philanthropist, visits the Ziegfeld falice in the 1920s and is seduced by the dancing of black women that she feels is contagious to everyone in the audience, white people included
