About advertisements...

Instead of trying to translate my last post, which was in Spanish and for my class, I'm just going to give a more informal overview... or short rant.  Our topic was "Race and Ethnicity", and I think almost all of us wrote about the advertisements, billboards, commercials, etc. that we've seen here in Peru.

WHY IS EVERYONE WHITE??

That's pretty much how we feel about it.  It's true, the vast majority of the people seen on billboards or in commercials is white, or lighter skinned.  Another student and I were walking from the university to the street where we get on the micro, and as we neared the big commercial center, Plaza San Miguel, we noticed this.  We pointed to one advertisement after another, "There's another one!  They're all white!"  A good number of billboard models, particularly for some of the bigger companies or department stores, are blond as well. 

Why does this bother me?  It's not at all representative of the majority of the population of Peru, or of the people it's trying to sell products to.  According to the CIA World Factbook, the demographics of Peru are as follows: 45% indigenous (Amerindian), 37% mestizo (of mixed Spanish and indigenous blood), 15% white, and 3% black, Chinese, Japanese, or other.  That is, 85% of the population is not white.  And people belonging to this 85% majority rarely appear in commercials, on billboards, etc.  It doesn't make sense to me.  (Well... unless you're looking at the history of Europeans in the Americas and how racism still affects the world today... complicated social/economic/ethnic stuff.)

Peru has a long history of ethnic diversity with a great variety of ethnic groups, reflected in the number of languages spoken in Peru today (I believe my professor said 68 languages).  And things got a lot more complicated once the Spanish arrived and conquered in the 16th century.  You know how in the U.S. there's a question on certain kinds of forms about ethnicity, where you mark "Caucasian/white", etc.?  I think my professor said they did away with that a long time ago here... people tended to lie.  Mestizos said they were white and indigenous people said they were mestizo...  And anyways, very few of us "caucasians" are actually from the Caucas region in Georgia (the country), nor are we "white" when compared with, say, a blank piece of paper. 

This is just from my perspective as a foreigner.  Maybe in the U.S. today we're trained to be sensitive to issues like this- we have to represent our diversity (and be politically correct), can't exclude anyone.  Besides, how exactly do you define who's "white" and who isn't- where's the dividing line?  I think it can depend on a lot of individual factors.  Before I came here, I thought to myself, "Maybe I'll learn to speak Spanish so well they'll think I'm Peruvian."  Well, first, I really don't look Peruvian at all.  I'm even a little bit whiter than most white Peruvians, and sometimes people assume I don't speak any Spanish.  Now I wonder if it would be better to be taken as a foreigner or as a white Peruvian.  It probably depends, but I don't know the answer.

Ok... I could talk more, but I think I'm done, for now at least.