Season 1
03 Defensiveness, mestizaje and masculinity
In the third episode, Sebastián Frías talks with Mónica and Fabiola about defensiveness, privilege and how difficult it can be to recognize racism when we believe that we are already "on the right side".
About the episode
In this episode we talk with Sebastián Frías about a key but difficult topic: defensiveness. Why is it so difficult for us to open up to change? What are we really standing for when we resist talking about racism, privilege, or masculinity? Sebastián reflects on how fear, loneliness and the need for validation lead us to react from moral superiority or silence. Together with Mónica and Fabiola, we explore how miscegenation and the idea of "being a good person" can become obstacles to talking about racism in Mexico.
We also talked about what we need to transform that defensiveness: active listening, recognition of privilege, and spaces where we can let our guard down and be vulnerable. This is an episode that invites us to let go of the need to be right and open the door to collective learning.
About the speakers
Sebastián Frías
Sebastián Frías is a program officer at the W. K. K. Foundation in Mexico. Sebastián specializes in the design and execution of community-driven multi-sectoral and private-public strategic partnerships and initiatives aiming at improving family economic security through entrepreneurship, ecosystem and value chain development, alternative financing, and capacity building.
WebsiteAbout the hosts
Mónica Moreno Figueroa
Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa is a Black, mixed-race Mexican woman who has lived in the United Kingdom for over 25 years. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In 2010, she co-founded the COPERA Collective, an initiative dedicated to making racism in Mexico visible and transforming it from a collective, emotional, and structural perspective. Through COPERA, she promotes public campaigns, media interventions, training programs, and consulting services to advance an anti-racist agenda.
Her research explores the lived and intersectional experience of race and racism in Mexico and Latin America, with a particular interest in anti-racism and its impact within and beyond academia. She also works on feminist theory, intersectionality, and the emotional effects of oppression. She is an expert in qualitative methods and visual methodologies and is known for fostering interdisciplinary collaborations that link critical thinking with social action.
She is currently leading the creation of the Global Racisms Institute for Social Transformation (GRIST), a space for research, collaboration, and action aimed at imagining and building anti-racist futures from a global perspective.
Website
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo
Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo is a Mexican, mestizo and white woman, researcher and lecturer on issues of gender, racism, and discrimination, and social communicator. She is the founder and director of the communication agency 11.11 Cambio Social, founding partner of Comparte una Ola A.C., member of the COPERA collective and the REIR Network.
She works on issues of anti-racist communication, gender and discrimination, strategies and new anti-oppressive and anti-racist narratives, and family trees, ancestors and processes of collective healing. She is currently doing a postdoctoral degree at the Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Psychology at the UAEM.
WebsiteThe Structure Within podcast was conceived by Mónica Moreno Figueroa and produced by Fabiola Fernández Guerra Carrillo and Arfaxad Ortiz. The opening credits are voiced by Gabriela García.
