Election of Jimena Navarrete as Miss Universe and its meaning for Mexican women

As soon as Jimena Navarrete was elected as the new Miss Universe 2010, my Mexican friends started celebrating and showing their pride through social media websites. I even got text messages about the election.

I'm glad for my friends they have a reason to celebrate.

But I have the feeling this is bad for Mexican women and for Latinas in the United States. Personally I see beauty pageants as offensive shows of chauvinism, materialism and sexism, they place women as objects. They can be fun to watch, indeed but for many women they can send the wrong message.

Jimena Navarrete. Photo by Miss Universe.

Usually a “Miss Universe” has to have the proportions of a Caucasian and or Greco-Roman woman, regardless of her skin color. She must be tall, skinny and with certain features. She cannot be curvy, short, have big eyes or full lips like most of non-European women. 

Thus, beauty pageants may affect the self esteem of many women who are the pillars and foundations of our families, our communities, societies.

Jimena Navarrete is a beautiful woman indeed, but she doesn’t necessarily look nor represents the physical beauty of most Mexican women, whose majority descend from Indigenous peoples and the mixture with African, Arab and Europeans. Her physical features are more acceptable in the Mexican media because she looks "whiter" than most Mexican women.

Sadly, the image of Jimena Navarrete will be used by millions of non-White girls in Mexico, the U.S. and the so called ‘Latin’ America region as an example of how they should look. At least for a few months or years to come. This is bad enough for the people of Mexico and for Latinas in the U.S.

Here I need to mention that Mexico is a very racist society, a very discriminating and elitist nation controlled by European descendants, where the majority of people are of Indigenous and African heritage but where being White is an asset. This racism is result of hundreds of years of Hispanic colonialism, and it creates a bigger problem: self loathing discrimination of Brown people against their own.

Now please watch this other video I recorded a few months ago, during a community celebration of the Mexican immigrant community in a Washington, DC, suburb:

There you have it, people who ignore their roots are easy to be manipulated and controlled.

So as long as we let racist TV shows like Miss Universe -run by a racist and corrupted White man- our communities will fall into these messages of mental and spiritual manipulation. The people of Mexico, and other immigrant communities have to deal with this type of content in a daily basis.

Mexican media as most of the media across the Americas, is controlled by European descendants with an obsessed and racist mentality, which reflects the reality of politics and economics. This is exported to the U.S. by television stations in Spanish-language like Univision, Telemundo and Sur, mostly. This media openly discriminates against Natives and Afro descendant peoples, condemning them to second class citizenship.

Racism in Mexico against non-Whites is such, that even the official demographics deny the presence of Native peoples and classify them as European descendants or Mestizos, the same way we are called Hispanics in the U.S. As a result, most Natives peoples in Mexican urban areas won’t accept their heritage and they will honor their minimal European roots, instead.

This is exactly what happens in the United States among Indigenous and Black peoples who prefer being labeled as Latinos or Hispanics, something that is promoted from the U.S. government because of misinformation and White supremacist views. This way they force Indigenous communities (including mestizos or mixed Natives) to embrace the racist idea that we all descend from Spaniards, just because we speak Spanish.

Our women

Fake beauty pageants like Miss Universe tell young women all around the world that basically they are ugly, unless they modify their looks in order to look like "beauty queens", or at least close enough to European standards. Remember the racist and TV sitcom Ugly Betty.

These young women will be one day your mothers, wives, partners, friends, sisters, daughters and they will probably pass this on to their children -our future.

Watch this video, please. This man is in charge of the Miss Venezuela pageant and he is a judge in the "reality" show Nuestra Belleza Latina (Our Latina Beauty) produced by the U.S. TV station Univision.

Osmel Sousa says "I know the proportions of a pretty woman by memory, short women are not harmonious, [...] the Negritude, Black women in Venezuela are not beautiful, [...] if they are not pretty they cannot participate in this pageant." Sousa is an openly gay man, by the way.

Why do I care

I'm gay and I do enjoy the beauty of women, sometimes I do cross-dressing as well. But I care about people, especially peoples of Native heritage like myself. I dislike the way our communities are forced into poverty and being dependable.

This is how is being done for the past centuries by colonial European rulers. After failing in their genocidal plans of ethnic cleansing, they divided and brainwashed our Indigenous ancestors by telling them that our ancestors died completely. They forced them their languages, religion and ways of living with boarding schools and today through their media.

Indigenous peoples were told that by mixing with other races we become less Natives, that we can “improve our race” so that we become Latinos, Hispanics, they say that Mestizos are not longer Indigenous. We must try to “pass” as Whites in order to succeed in life.

Now it’s our duty to educate our children that our women are beautiful, that all of us are beautiful with all the things that make us who we are, that we are not just a body that allow us to be alive in this world but also spirits and minds that create the extraordinary individuals we grow to become.

This is important, because this way we learn to respect ourselves not because of our exterior features, but for what we are. Because if we don’t respect ourselves and others, no one else will.

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