Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature a guest writer. This week, we’ve asked De Los contributing columnist Alex Zaragoza to fill in. If you have not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you can do so here.
With any reality TV dating show, you watch with a wince, bracing yourself for the cringe, the delicious drama or the straight up offensive moments that set off the group chat and time lines. That’s the draw. Reality TV is meant to reflect our world as a sort of funhouse mirror, but anyone who tunes in knows that the genre tends to cast back a very white world.
It was no different when I tapped into “Love Is Blind: Mexico,” one of the latest of Netflix’s cultural expansions of their series “Love Is Blind,” which now has versions in several countries, including Brazil and the United Kingdom.
For the uninitiated, the series sets up single men and women to date blindly, getting to know each other via pods separated by a wall that looks like an installation in the Miami Art Basel toilets. They don’t get to see each other at all, nor can they describe their looks, until they become engaged. As they live together and eventually make it to the altar, they must decide if they want to say “I do” and prove that love really is blind.
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I was excited to see a reality dating show as exquisitely messy as the “Love Is Blind” franchise featuring a full cast of the wildest weirdos Mexico has to offer. Bring on the fresas, the paisas, the buchónas, the Edgars and everything in between. What we got instead was a group of mostly white, metropolitan fresas using words like “dateando” and “shockeada” in full “osea” voices as they navigate the blind dating experiment. (Warning: There are some spoilers below.)
Still, some fans have denied a lack of diversity on the show, with one TikTok user calling the criticism ignorance from Mexicans in the U.S., noting the casting actually displays an accurate representation of what Mexicans in Mexico look like, and how we come in all colors and flavors. It’s frustrating because these arguments are more often made for the purpose of educating people that Mexicans can also be blonde and blue-eyed. As if we’ve never seen a telenovela. The casting of this series seems to be more concerned with this level of diversity, and the criticism exemplifies the false belief of colorblindness and mestizaje that permeates Mexican culture.
Seriously though, they couldn’t find one dude from el rancho to give these hijos de pápi with manos de abogado a run for their money? I need a sombrerudo in a silk Versace shirt fighting over a Karol G lookalike, stat!
It wasn’t just in the casting where colorism reared its ugly head. When Iraís Ramírez, a 30-year-old lawyer, laid eyes on her second-choice suitor, hot doctor René Ángeles, something felt off. She looked stunned. “Shockeada,” if you will.
In her confessionals, she remarked that René has the face of a “chico malo” and looks like someone who parties. Yes, he has a nose ring and pierced ears, but the man is a doctor, standing there in a suit looking fine as hell. She was more concerned about his looks than the fact that he has zero savings and preferred to spend freely without concern for a financial safety net.
That Ramírez is very fair skinned and Ángeles has a darker complexion made many fans believe the dater’s immediate ick was rooted in colorism, and called her out for it on social media.
“I agree that it was coded [language],” said Eva de la Riva López, a professor of psychology at Oakton Community College in Illinois who has written on anti-Blackness and colorism in Mexico. “It is the Mexican equivalent to ‘He looks urban.’ ”
Throughout the series, contestants would also casually comment on their partner’s skin tone and note their preference of color. In one episode, digital marketing manager Willy Salomón, 34, tells spin instructor Francesca Oettler how much he likes her “piel apiñonada,” or lightly tanned skin. Fernando Hernández, a 27-year-old operations manager, also noted his preferences for “morenas” with black hair when talking to two separate contestants, including the woman he’d end up with: financial advisor and single mom, Karen Torales.
But just as in the U.K., where female dating show contestants have a tendency to describe their ideal man as “tall, dark, and handsome” when they mean someone who looks like Jacob Elordi (white, tall, with brown hair), it was clear Fernando didn’t mean a Black woman when he communicated his preference for “morenas.” And while Torales does have darker skin than the majority fair-skinned cast, she wouldn’t be considered Black, which reads as an implicit erasure of Black Mexicans.
Skin tone preference is rooted in anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Fairness of skin gives people a closer proximity to power. This we know. What I was most saddened by was how fully I was expecting it on the show. The second I hit play I hit a “countdown to racism” clock in my head. These supposed “preferences” are casually embedded into every conversation within Mexican culture.
“I think that most Mexican/Latinx [people] see it as a form of personal preference,” de la Riva López said. “One can note that contestants like ‘morenitas,’ but not morenas, or ‘apiñonadas,’ but not ‘prietas.’ This is coded language for fair-ish in the skin tone spectrum. We need to reckon with our colonial past in order to deconstruct how it affects our present. Until we do, we will continue with our euphemisms of power veiled as personal preferences.”
The social caste system has long affected Mexico, enabling a preference for lighter skin tones in all facets of society and erasing Black, Indigenous and other non-dominant racial and ethnic populations for not fitting in the country’s long held idea of Mexicans being a mestizo race, i.e. mostly light-to-tan skin with European features and dark hair. Those who don’t fit that description suffer in economic status, educational opportunities, career possibilities, policing, violent crimes, sexualization, etc., and are viewed as less beautiful and desirable. That will inevitably affect someone on a reality TV dating show trying to find love.
Black contestants on reality TV dating shows in the U.S. have long struggled when they are meant to compete for the affections of people who clearly have no interest in dating Black people, perpetuating cycles of racism in the genre and strongly implying to viewers that white people are the most desirable and deserving of love. It gets far more complicated in a country that refutes the existence of structural racism and strongly believes it is post-racial, despite countless studies and anecdotes that have proven otherwise. So, could love actually be blind considering all of this?
“If someone is willing to examine their prejudices, there is an opportunity for growth,” de la Riva López said. “In the same way, if viewers watch this show critically, they can have deep conversations about colorism.”
Otherwise, the psychology professor adds, perpetuating systems of oppression continues.
“As long as we lack adequate representation, the message is loud,” de la Riva López said.
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(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
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