Rosa mexicano: the social optics of a colour neologism

Abstract

The phrase ‘rosa mexicano’ or what is now called ‘Mexican Pink’ in English, began to be used in Mexico in the 1950s and has now been adopted as a representative colour for the Mexican nation state. A government agency like the CPTM (Consejo de Promoción Turística de México), or ‘The Council of Promotion of Tourism’, and the urban planning and administration unit of Mexico City, called by the acronym CDMX (Ciudad de Mexico), validates the phrase as a symbolic colour-name of the state and the culture of its peoples. The CPTM also endorses the Pantone Matching System colour ‘magenta’ #E50087 as this specific memorable colour, now called rosa mexicano or “Mexican Pink” as the appropriate colour of the ‘ancient Mexican peoples’. But despite such institutional and public endorsement, could we safely say that the term has indeed, gradually or otherwise, come to represent a semantic marker for the experience of a very geographically local variant of pink. Here we examine if the phrase rosa mexicano, or ‘Mexican Pink’ can be accepted as a true symbol of a long existing, recognisable colour and its visible social preference for people in Central America and Mexico in particular. In cognitive experiments of colour identification, the phrase rosa mexicano elicited a response in the spectrum between red and purple corresponding to a Hue value between 310 to 335 in HSB colour space. In contrast normal ‘pink’ or rosa or its JND fucsia, or what is called ‘fuchsia’ in English, are clearly perceived as less intense variations. We finally suggest that the socio-optically constructed neologism rosa mexicano, which has been adopted in the common Spanish Castilian variant of most of Mexico’s urban and to a large extent a rural population of speakers, indeed represents a statistically significant category close to the specifically stronger or warm pink which appears as a typical colour range used in Mexico since pre-Colombian times. The phrase thus capitalises what sociologists like Bourdieu and Alexander called habitus formation. A culturally elite, high energy and high-financial verbal formulation of this compound phrase, with a header ‘rosa’ and the adjective qualifier ‘mexicano’, originating as it did in art, fashion and a more aesthetics-based commercial culture, gradually binds in with a cognitive-memorial colour of the wider, rural and mestizo (mixed) segments of Mexico’s stratified social culture.