Blanqueamiento

Blanqueamiento, Branqueamento, or whitening, is a social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries to "improve the race" (mejorar la raza) towards a supposed ideal of whiteness. The term blanqueamiento is rooted in Latin America and is used more or less synonymous with racial whitening. However, blanqueamiento can be considered in both the symbolic and biological sense. Symbolically, blanqueamiento represents an ideology that emerged from legacies of European colonialism, described by Anibal Quijano's theory of coloniality of power, which caters to white dominance in social hierarchies. Biologically, blanqueamiento is the process of whitening by marrying a lighter-skinned individual in order to produce lighter-skinned offspring.

Peter Wade argues that blanqueamiento is a historical process that can be linked to nationalism. When thinking about nationalism, the ideologies behind it stem from national identity, which according to Peter Wade is "a construction of the past and the future", where the past is understood as being more traditional and backwards. For example, past demographics of Puerto Rico were heavily black and Indian-influenced because the country partook in the slave trade and was simultaneously home to many indigenous groups. Therefore, understanding blanqueamiento as it relates to modernization, modernization is then understood as a guidance in the direction away from black and indigenous roots. Modernization then happened as described by Wade as "the increasing integration of blacks and Indians into modern society, where they will mix in and eventually disappear, taking their primitive culture with them". This kind of implementation of blanqueamiento takes place in a societies that have historically always been led by 'white' people whose guidance would carry "the country away from its past, which began in Indianness and slavery" with the hopes of promoting the intermixing of bodies in order to have a predominantly white-skinned society.

The formation of mestizaje emerged in the shift of Latin America towards multiculturalist perspectives and policies. Mestizaje has been considered problematic by many U.S. scholars because it sustains racial hierarchies and celebrates blanqueamiento. For example, Swanson argues that although mestizaje is not a physical embodiment of whitening, it is "not so much about mixing, as it about a progressive whitening of the population".

...
Wikipedia