“Whiteness studies” established itself as a field of study in the United States in the 1990s. But can the conceptual frameworks developed in that context be applied to Latin America and other world areas? From colonial legacies of Iberian rule, to national myths of mestizaje, to the tendency to foreground class and downplay race in sociological analysis, the political, historical, and cultural dimensions of race in Latin America differ significantly. Accordingly, Branquitudes/Blanquitudes positions itself as a regional conversation that both dialogues with and departs from the Anglophone canon. The plural in the title signals something important: There is no singular, objective whiteness to investigate. Rather, the volume’s essays show how whiteness operates differently across time, space, and scale: as ideology, as privilege, as aspiration, and as embodied practice.

Several chapters draw on history to understand how whiteness took root and operated before it acquired a name. Patricia Martins Marcos analyzes Portuguese colonial contexts to argue that whiteness existed long before the concept of “branquitude” emerged. Mário Augusto da Silva shows how Black intellectuals in Brazil from 1945 to 2000 made whiteness visible through critique, even as mainstream scholarship ignored it. Critical thinking about whiteness in Latin America, he shows, didn’t simply appear following the arrival of theory from the global north: it had long been cultivated by Black thinkers themselves. Patricia de Santana Pinho tracks the trajectory of “branquitude” in Brazilian scholarship between 2000 and 2025. Her chapter isn’t only a history of a concept: It gives us a map of an emergent field. She shows how affirmative action debates, the Movimento Negro, and shifting political winds have pushed whiteness studies onto the center stage of Brazilian academia.