This paper intervenes in the discussion about the relationship between discrimination and racism in México. Moita- Lopes and Baynham (2017: vi) say that the great navigations of the 15th and 16th century give birth to the beginning of globalization and that these discourses are based on the prefiguration of 'perfect and pure 'language, race (white), gender (male), sexuality (heterosexuality), religion (Christianity). These essentialist orders related to race was re-described by a cinematography event in 2018. A set of photographs of one of the actresses circulated in well-known magazines and provoked racist reactions and comments.
Drawing on photographs in fashion magazines examples, we discuss the benefits of approaching racism from this multimodal socio-semiotic perspective as an alternative to long-ingrained ideologies of discrimination and racism which permeate many social practices and which obscure much of the meaning-making that exists before and independent of discourse analysis. The production of the photographs is analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis tools (Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001) to explore how the audiovisual text (re) produces specific stereotypes (ed) meanings at the interplay of several semiotic resources.
