Semiotic whitening: Whiteness without white people

Abstract

In the borderlands of south Texas, the Mexican and Mexican American social practice of naming includes the use of English-language names and nicknames, anglicized pronunciations, and English-language spellings and “misspellings,” all of which potentially index at least two historically informed perspectives: (1) the hegemonic “white gaze”; and (2) a localized, interrogating gaze. In this article, I focus on local naming practices to advance an approach to what I call semiotic whitening—the indexical linking of any phenomenon to the idealized norms of whiteness—to better understand how whiteness works from the perspective of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in a geographic region (informed by colonial and white supremacist histories) where few white folks reside.