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What might happen to California if we adopt Prop 54 and its race privacy?  

The history of Mexico provides an advance look. 

Race was a central issue in Mexico’s 1810-1821 war for independence from Spain. Mexican freedom fighters demanded the abolition of the Spanish caste system of legal segregation and discrimination. 

The February 1821 peace plan of Iguala that led to the war’s end included a clause which read, “All inhabitants... without distinction to their being Europeans, Africans, or Indians, are citizens... with the option to seek all employment according to their merits and virtues.” 

A law of the first congress of free Mexico declared equality of all citizens, “irrespective of which ever of the four corners of the world from which they come.” 

The spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Mexico quickly met up with the spirit of Ward Connerly—author of California’s Prop 54. 

The Mexican Congress followed its equality law with a statute that prohibited mention of race in any government document, or in the records of the parish church. 

A second statute barred congressional delegates from speaking disparagingly of anyone’s race or ethnicity. This law was interpreted to mean no one should speak of race, either positively or negatively. However, mention of Indios was still being made in Congress, so one congressman proposed that congressmembers be prohibited from uttering the word “Indio” in debate. Congress decided members should only use the word by saying “those who are called Indios.” 

As Connerly appears to draw strong support from the well-to-do, so too, was the congress that passed race privacy in Mexico a thoroughly wealthy group, and almost exclusively European in physical appearance. As supporters of Prop 54 claim to be following Dr. King, so, too, did the congress of Mexico declare its initial race privacy law was “in honor of Iguala,” the plan with the equality clause. 

The liberal African American Dr. King pushed equality before conservatives got around to the race privacy ploy here, and it Mexico was the “precursor of socialism” in his country, the African and Indigenous Vicente Guerrero, who used his position of Commander-in-Chief of the Mexican army to push the equality clause in the Plan of Iguala. 

One effect of the silence on race laws in Mexico is that standard histories typically leave out discussion of either the equality or privacy legislation. 

Did race privacy keep race out of Mexican politics? A case in point is the 1828 presidential campaign of General Guerrero, during which the opposition put out anonymous fliers and unsigned editorials that warned against Guerrero “the black,” “the mulatto,” and “the Indio.” 

Guerrero had acknowledged his roots during the war with Spain, but he was merely “citizen Guerrero” during his political campaign, and his lieutenants complained about the opposition injecting race. 

“Can you imagine, the General was actually called a black!” wrote one Guerreroista journalist. 

Meanwhile, the General made sure there was wide distribution of an unsigned pamphlet he wrote which called upon the Indios to participate in politics and through majority rule reclaim their rightful domination of the country. 

Guerrero came to office amidst a near race war of riots and one large pitched battle. Three months into office, he issued his nation’s presidential slavery abolition decree, and three months after that he was overthrown, money for the uprising coming heavily from Campeche slave plantation owners. 

How has race privacy in Mexico affected the disadvantaged? 

This is hard to answer, because race has only been taken in the census three times since independence. 

We can note a near disappearance of a once sizable minority. A census taken by Spaniards just before independence showed African-mestizos were 10.1%, pure Africans 0.1%. A 1950 census reduced the descendants of the few hundred thousand enslaved Africans of colonial times to only 1 1/2 percent. Afro-Mexico amalgamated away in the manner of the Hungarian-Americans, or the Polish American Grabowsky family that is now the Garbers. 

The handful of overtly African Mexicans remaining have been too few to push for the due credit their ancestors deserve for contributions to nation’s culture, such as “La Bamba” song of slaves in Veracruz who came from the Angolan town of MBamba in that country’s district of Bamba. 

If being Prop 54rd help white wash out Afro-Mexico, the silence hasn’t quite worked with the Native Mexican. While the Indigenous were 60.1% in the Spanish census, their number was down to around 12% a decade ago in a count which defined Indians as those who spoke primarily Indigenous languages in their younger years. 

It is an economically depressed 12% and not much better off are the many extended family members who speak adequate Spanish but lack job histories and skills. 

Prop 54 is feared by many in the education community who feel that race privacy will hurt many programs for disadvantaged students, and Mexico has a long history of education failure in regard to the Indigenous. 

For instance, in 1833 Congressman Juan Rodriguez Puebla, an Indio, offered an amendment to Mexico’s first Federal Public School bill to have early grade instruction in Indigenous languages in those villages where nobody spoke Spanish. The amendment was voted down by opponents who declared that reference to “Indios” was a 

backward step; because, in modern Mexico “it is class not race” that counted. 

Regarding the substitution of “class” for “race,” advocates pushing Prop 54 should think twice. Mexico took the bait and the nation became notorious enough for its class revolutions that in 1871 certain pundits in Europe blamed the Paris Commune on a philosophical infection of ideas from revolutionary Mexico. And this reputation was before the great social revolution of 1910. 

It is said in Mexico that the spirit of “class not race” has helped interracial marriage flourish. And the saying in Mexico is, “Anybody with enough money can marry my daughter." 

However, the romances have been selective and Mexico is said to have ended up with a “pigmentocracy” in which the richer and lighter tend to marry each other and rule. Meanwhile, oppressors in Mexico who in colonial times used race to blame the victims, switched to blaming the downtrodden for not speaking Spanish or speaking it poorly.  

The modern underclass includes the Indian beggar women huddled with their emaciated children on the sidewalks of the nation’s cities as well as the day laborers who speak little or no Spanish and work for starvation wages. It is thus no small irony that we seem to be developing in California an underclass of Spanish speakers who speak little or no English. 

In intellectual life, if Mexico’s racial amnesia is a guide for a Prop 54ed future here, then discourse in California will lose focus. Mexican intellectuals have long lamented their “identity crisis." Octavio Paz describes the people of his nation wandering in a spiritual “labyrinth of solitude.” 

Samuel Ramos is said to have begun the school of lament in his 1934 “Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico” in which Ramos blaimed a lack of identity for tendencies of mistrust and poor self-confidence. A more recent work on identity is Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s, “Mexico Profundo: Una Civilizacion Negada." The civilization denied is that of Native Mexico. 

Bonfil Batalla’s book is said to have inspired the Indigenous uprising of the Chiapas Zapatistas. The Indigenous rebellion has not spread from Chiapas, in part because no other state is sufficiently Indigenous. In Chiapas, more than other places in Mexico, there is open practice of Indigenous culture, people proudly wear Indigenous clothing, speak Indigenous languages and read magazines and books in Indigenous languages. 

Chiapas was part of Guatemala when Mexico passed its race privacy laws. 

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Mexico has changed since the 1994 uprising. The Zapatiastas of Chiapas appear to have convinced a many Mexicanos that there may be a softer way to settle dispute than class conflict. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to race is being discarded. 

People are now acknowledging Indio roots, and owning up that grandmother’s kinky hair is from her African heritage. Rock groups in Aztec dress and feathered headdress blare electric guitars. Classes in Náhuatl flourish. In little squares in Mexico City, young activists are joined in Aztec dancing by office workers and shoppers who reach into black garbage baggies filled with rattles and bells and proceed to prance to an Indigenous beat. [possible place to end] 

The Ballet Folklorico de Mexico adds more specifically Indigenous dance to the world renown repertoire of Afro-Spanish-Indigenous numbers. Ethnologist/sports enthusiasts are teaching the pre-Columbian basketball game, which is no easy sport in that you must move the ball with parts of the body other than hands or feet. 

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Ventures into race politics after the decades of silence have had strange effects. There was, for example the death threat in the 1999 governor’s election in the state of Guerrero. In 1994 a group living on the Guerrero coast where Afro-mestizos are a still numerous responded to the Zapatistas of Chiapas with a news conference announcing “If the Indios are organizing the blacks should, too.”  

The organized blacks of Guerrero voted for the left-wing Party of Democratic Revolution and won many local offices. In 1999 the ruling Party of Institutional Revolution in Guerrero ran “a black” for governor, Rene Juarez Cisneros. Disputed results gave him the election. There were protests at the state capital. 

On pavement at the capital square a grafitti read, “QUE MUERA, NEGRO ENEMIGO No. 1 DE GUERRERO, USURPADOR,” (Death to the Black, Enemy #1 of Guerrero, Usurper). In the corner of the scribble were the letters “ERP,” Popular Revolutionary Army—an openly violent self-proclaimed left-wing organization that might be but provocateurs. The ERP called for race murder, despite many a “black” Guerreroense working prominently in the opposition to the disputed governor. 

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In California, race privacy may appeal to some individuals who do not want attention drawn to the disproportionate representation of European looking Californians at the top of the socio-economic chain. And some thoroughly interracial individuals may say good riddance to the “nuisance” of filling in a multitude of race and ethnicity squares on forms. But the test case of Mexico shows that race privacy gained little that could not have been gained by other means, created some new problems, and made some older problems difficult to address. 

Perhaps, then, the Mexican experience is one reason the California poll shows Latinos significantly more opposed to Prop 54 than African Americans.