Roosbelinda Cardenas

Until recently, little anthropological attention had been placed on whiteness or the social, cultural, and financial advantages of racial privilege in Latin America. Outside progressive academic and anti-racist activist circles, the terms blanquitud and branquitude are often met with puzzlement, if not open disdain. Although the approach to whiteness varies across Latin America, and studies of racial privilege are more developed in some countries than in others, there is still insufficient, though growing, scholarship on whiteness in the region. To this end, we propose to gather an international group of scholars working in and on different countries in Latin America with two major objectives: first, to develop the anthropological studies of whiteness in the region and complicate hemispheric approaches to race and whiteness more broadly; and, second, to promote the interdisciplinary, transregional, and intergenerational dialogues that will enable and support these studies. To achieve these objectives, we envision three major activities: 1) Group discussions of key topics in this emergent field, organized along five thematic roundtables; 2) Panels to share the challenges of doing research on whiteness and disseminating results outside of scholarly circles; and 3) Research clusters with dedicated time to outline new research directions.