Tenoch Huerta and Mabel Cadena proud of their roles in “Pantera Negra 2”

Lecture on Racism and stereotypes in Mexican cinema in San Miguel de Allende as part of the Guanajuato International Film Festival

Published July 30, 2022

The inclusion of brown people in Mexican cinema continues to pose a challenge within the industry.

Hitmen, murderers, rapists and criminals are characters in which brown-skinned performers were pigeonholed in Mexico, where 80 percent of the population has such a characteristic.

That’s why the participation of Mexicans Tenoch Huerta and Mabel Cadena in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, with key superpowered characters (Namor and Namora, respectively), surprised many.

In the framework of the twenty-fifth edition of the Guanajuato International Film Festival, actor Ianis Guerrero celebrated the participations and representation of his fellow performers in the Marvel Universe.

“It is a tremendous pride, it seems to me that they are giving a collective message of the change of society very important,” said the star of We the Nobles.

Black Panther (2018), which grossed one thousand 346 million dollars in theaters around the world, was the first Marvel film with an Afro-descendant protagonist who also personifies a superhero.

During the talk Poder prieto: Racism and stereotypes in Mexican cinema, in San Miguel de Allende, the Afro-descendant actress Khristina Giles was also present, who spoke about the case of Huerta y Cadena.

“They are the clear example of work, it is a gap that opens us and Tenoch commented on it, it is that those neighborhood children see that you can dream and that you can get there, that is what dignified representation is about, even if the media and television have told you that you could not,” Giles said.

Guerrero and Giles presented an analysis that takes as a reference 11 films of a platform released in 2019 and that measures the participation of brown people in these films.

According to the analysis, only five feature films were starred by brunettes, and of those in two the characters are engaged in illicit activities.

“I want to stop being the chacha, being the whore, all this comes from the creation of the scripts, it’s a structural problem,” Giles said.

“When I entered this fight for racism I wondered if I was brown enough, a producer told me that he saw me as a güero. In 15 years of career, all the casting directors and all the roles I’ve played have connotations that only give a brown person,” Guerrero shared.

The collective Poder Prieto was born in 2020 with the purpose of changing the narrative and racist practices that have been normalized in the audiovisual entertainment industry.

“In all these years I have not played a character with a bachelor’s degree, with a master’s degree, who speaks several languages, a person with money and I have not seen any brunette like that on television, and if there is they represent them as rude people,” Guerrero said.

The actor, who has worked in series such as Club de Cuervos and Señorita 89, said he will continue to fight for access to good characters who do not look at his skin color.

“In my specific case, if they don’t give them to me, I create them, I write them, I produce them and I direct them, because the reality is that it is very difficult, it is also a process and the industry is changing little by little,” he added.

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