Semiotic whitening: Whiteness without white people

Abstract In the borderlands of south Texas, the Mexican and Mexican American social practice of naming includes the use of English‐language names and nicknames, anglicized pronunciations, and English‐language spellings and “misspellings,” all of which potentially index at least two historically informed perspectives: (1) the hegemonic “white gaze”; and (2) a localized, interrogating gaze. In this article, I focus on local naming practices to advance an approach to what I call semiotic whitening —the indexical linking of any phenomenon to the idealized norms of whiteness—to better understand how whiteness works from the perspective of Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in a geographic region (informed by colonial and white supremacist histories) where few white folks reside.