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In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the analysis of racism has often followed a 'strategic essentialism' that mobilises absolutist languages of race, in order to make inequalities visible. The majority of this academic production attributes a strong explanatory weight to national ideologies of mestizaje as a matter of 'white privilege', imposed over 'brown' or 'indigenous' populations. An alternative emancipatory Mixed-Race Thought, as defended in this article, consists in underlining what I call a 'significant indeterminacy' when thinking about racial differentiation: a dynamic that seeks to capture mixture, ambiguity and movement as fundamental elements of racial identification. This perspective understands racial positions and the hierarchies that organise them not only by their more distinctive, 'essential' elements, but also through their indeterminate ones. To substantiate my argument, I draw on unpublished ethnographic field diaries elaborated by different anthropologists in Mexico between 1940 and 1960 in rural and indigenous localities, which allow an examination of the 'racial project of mestizaje' from the lived experience of those who were, in principle, its main addressees: the country's indigenous-language-speaking rural inhabitants. This evidence invites a better recalibration of the relationship between mestizaje ideology and racism, by showing that this indeterminacy was not necessarily imposed by the ideology of mestizaje, but could also be organic and even instrumental to local racial identifications. In the conclusion, I argue that a more radical understanding of racism should take into account the 'significant indeterminacy' of race, and that it is from these interstitial, contradictory spaces that transversal coalitions and causes can perhaps be imagined.

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