In this panel, we seek to interrogate the relevancy of the term “white supremacy” in addressing different forms of racial and labor regimes that emerged in Latin America over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By bringing together scholars of Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, this panel situates such regimes within their local, regional, and transnational contexts while providing a space for a broader discussion with historians of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands about the merits and limitations of “white supremacy” as a theoretical and methodological framing.

The three panel participants will interrogate “white supremacy” as a category of analysis within their respective research fields. Kevan Antonio Aguilar interrogates how discourses of whiteness and indigeneity affected the Mexican government’s reception and relocation of political refugees of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Building on 19th-century Latin American immigration and whitening policies, Romina Green Rioja explores how the Chilean government’s decision to recruit European settlers to live on Indigenous Mapuche lands complemented and altered Chilean race politics. Through the historical analysis of Black women’s critiques of racial hierarchy between periods of democratic rule and military regimes (1946 - 1988), Cassie Osei explains why deployment of slippery terms like “white supremacy” in Latin America may be less important than what Black and Indigenous Latin Americans have articulated about their experiences of racial subjugations themselves. Along with comments from Tony Wood, the panel encourages a robust discussion among panelists and the audience to discuss the broader implications of examining "white supremacy" within different Latin America and Caribbean contexts.