Pigmentocracy and the performance of whiteness in contemporary photography: Yvonne Venegas's San Pedro Garza and Dana Lixenberg's United states

I am writing about how whiteness works in the United States and Mexico, by looking at portraits by one photographer in Mexico, Yvonne Venegas and one photographer in the United States, Dana Lixenberg. I understand whiteness as something that goes beyond a skin tonality and that does something in the world. I analyze symbols and poses in portraiture to interpret how whiteness is performed and, also, how (through cultural, social and economic schemes of whiteness, by the photographer) the subject is called back into whiteness. I found that whiteness is performed similarly in both cultural contexts I examined, and although mestizaje in Mexico and slavery in the United States defined race relations in distinctive ways, whiteness must be studied as something that goes beyond a pigment and more in alignment with social and economic class perceptions. I propose study of pigmentocracy as an interlocking skin-color/class system in which skin tones are perceived based on social and cultural prejudices and linked to particular socioeconomic levels. In this system, perceptions of class and skin color work as self-reproducing and interdependent power apparatuses and dispositifs.