Brown skin color in mexican cinema. Analysis of contemporary class discourse

Abstract

Racism and classism are categories used in the representations of actions and characters in Mexican films and other audiovisual works throughout their history, which is found in relation to many of the social problems - discrimination, exclusion, lack of social mobility - that continue to be experienced in the country. The work carries out an analysis of the social representations of classism related to a dark skin color, in a sample of Mexican films from the decade between 2011 and 2020, some of them identified by film critics as classist. The chosen methodology combines the textual analysis of specific scenes (studying film language such as the positioning of the camera, the location of the characters, photography, art direction or sound) and of characters (physical-physiological, psychological and sociological), comparing those with dark skin and light skin and the situations, times, spaces and a whole series of categories. The results indicate that the representation of skin type (brown/white) is related to that of social class (high/low), so all the characters analyzed in the dark skin group are presented as being of middle-low social class.