Julián Quiñones’ rise from being targeted with racist chants in Guadalajara in 2024 to being celebrated as Mexico’s World Cup goal-scorer on home soil less than two years later has reignited an old, uncomfortable debate: who gets to be considered Mexican—and w
On a March night in Guadalajara in 2024, Club América were winning El Clásico Nacional. Julián Quiñones, their star player, had scored and headed toward the sideline. Then a shout at Quiñones—who is Black—rang out from the stands: ¡Puto negro! Moments later, monkey noises were heard in the stands.
Cell phone videos captured the scene. Commentators analyzed it the next day. Officials condemned it, investigations were announced, and for a few days the Mexican game went through its ritual of shock. Then the season continued—another match, another transfer rumor, another refereeing controversy. The incident slid into the vast archive of soccer’s weekly dramas.
Less than two years later. the same sport pulled the story back into the open. only this time the crowd sounded like a different country. On 11 June. Quiñones scored Mexico’s first goal in the 2026 World Cup—an opening triumph in a tournament played on home soil for the first time in four decades. Tens of thousands rose to their feet. Television commentators chanted his name. Images of the striker draped in the Mexican flag flooded social media.
The culture that had publicly denigrated him now hailed him as a national hero.
This week, Quiñones returned to the same stadium in Guadalajara where the racist chant had been heard in 2024. Before Mexico’s second group-stage game against South Korea on Thursday. crowds wearing Mexico jerseys and oversized sombreros gathered outside the hotel housing the national team. When Quiñones appeared. they shouted in unison: “¡Quiñones. hermano. ya eres Mexicano!”—“Quiñones. brother. now you are Mexican.”.
It sounded like an embrace for the Mexican national, but it also felt tentative. The chant is usually reserved for foreigners who have shown an affinity with Mexico, not for Mexican passport holders like Quiñones.
Those contradictions—so close in time, so distant in spirit—are landing with force on a question Mexico has struggled to face through its own national identity: who has the right to be Mexican?
The puzzle is tied to expectations about appearance and belonging. and to how surprise reveals what people were never saying out loud. Karma Frierson. who teaches Black studies at the University of Rochester and has written about Black culture in Mexico. said the discourse around Quiñones’s goal. and the fact that he is Black. included a kind of shock.
“This surprise speaks to the expectations people still have about what a Mexican person looks like. So, you have this dissonance,” Frierson said. “You know that the player, by virtue of wearing the jersey is of that nationality, but you never imagined that person would look a certain way.”
Quiñones’ biography sits at the center of the debate. He is 29. He was born in Colombia, arrived in Mexico in 2015, and forged his career in Liga MX. He became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 2023 and was first called up to the national team that same year. Now his inclusion on the World Cup squad raises the same race question Mexico has tried to avoid for much of its modern history: who gets defined as Mexican. and who gets left outside.
The future of Mexican soccer—its talent pipelines, its migration roots, its families—also points beyond the country’s borders. For much of the 20th century, Mexico’s national team was primarily built from players developed within Mexico. Today, the pool of Mexican talent extends across a transnational landscape shaped by migration and family networks.
It is possible that the most important soccer recruiting ground for the Mexican federation is no longer a state within Mexico. but rather in California or Texas. A new generation of Mexican-American players is emerging north of the border, including more Black players. Two promising young prospects for Mexico’s program were born in the United States to Mexican mothers and African American fathers: Antonio Leone and Da’vian Kimbrough. both born in California. who have represented Mexico’s youth teams.
Other recent stars have come from farther south. Giovani and Jonathan dos Santos played on the national team in recent years; their father was the Afro-Brazilian footballer Zizinho and their mother is Mexican. Melvin Brown, of Jamaican descent through his paternal grandfather, represented Mexico at the 2002 World Cup.
None of these players fit neatly into a visual stereotype often associated with Mexican nationality. The point isn’t just that the national team is diversifying; it’s that Mexico is being forced to look at race in the mirror of sport.
Historically, Frierson said, Mexican society doesn’t talk about race.
“The promise of mestizaje was that there is no race because we are all one race,” she said.
Mestizaje—the idea that Mexico emerged from the fusion of Indigenous and European peoples—became a founding myth of the modern Mexican state. After the Mexican revolution. it offered a narrative for a fragmented nation: mixing instead of difference. a single people instead of multiple peoples. Versions of the ideology emerged throughout Latin America and were held up as a contrast to the racial order of the United States. which openly grappled with segregation and racial classification while many Latin American countries embraced mixing as a dissolving force.
The promise was seductive. The reality proved more complex.
Discrimination and racism against Black people in Mexico are still prevalent, but often dismissed. When South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010. Mexico’s largest broadcaster Televisa featured characters in blackface and afro wigs wearing animal skins and wielding spears. In 2018, on major broadcaster TV Azteca, reporter Carlos Guerrero appeared in blackface during a broadcast of a Liga MX game. The networks received criticism, but many people brushed the incidents off as jokes.
Black players in Liga MX have accused rival teams of racist insults. Colombian striker Darwin Quintero. who played for América. and Panamanian defender Felipe Baloy. who played for Santos Laguna. have made accusations of that kind. In 2021. Ecuadorian Félix Torres. a defender for Santos Laguna. left the field in tears after reporting alleged racist insults from Germán Berterame. then a player for Atlético de San Luis. While the Mexican Football Federation investigated those incidents. officials said they could not be corroborated and no disciplinary action was taken.
Quiñones, for his part, mostly shrugged off the 2024 racist incident in Guadalajara. In an Instagram statement at the time. he spoke out against online harassment of his daughters—“you can say whatever you want to me. but don’t mess with my daughters”—and said he was “mentally strong enough to handle any kind of insult. especially when it’s about my skin color. which is the most frequent type of message I receive”.
Frierson said having a Black player excel at a home World Cup may help bring race to the forefront of Mexican culture in a way it hasn’t before.
At the same time, Mexican players who travel to the United States to play are also bringing new perspectives back home. Jonathan dos Santos, in a 2020 interview while playing for LA Galaxy, said he felt comfortable in the U.S. because he didn’t receive racist taunts.
“It’s truly sad to hear the insults, the racism. I’ll never understand it,” he said at the time. “I think many countries have to learn from the United States regarding the respect shown to athletes.” He also said he experienced racism in Spain, where he played for Barcelona and Villarreal.
Opening up a discussion about race in Mexico’s national sport could lead to a broader exploration of Mexico’s own history. which includes roots in Africa. During the colonial period. hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to New Spain. and their descendants built communities throughout the territory—especially in Veracruz and along the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. They participated in the formation of Mexican society from its very beginnings. Vicente Guerrero and José María Morelos were both heroes of Mexican independence with Afro-Mexican roots. though that heritage is not often mentioned.
“Blackness is incorporated into the very fabric of the nation,” Frierson said.
Seen from this perspective, it’s not only that Mexican soccer is becoming more diverse. It’s that race in Mexico is becoming more visible.
Soccer, at times, can reflect a country back to itself in real time. A national team represents not just a country, but an idea of the country. The World Cup is one of the few remaining spaces where nations are publicly showcased. Every starting lineup announcement, every anthem, every goal becomes a debate—sometimes conscious, often unconscious—about who belongs.
Mexico is changing beyond the stadium too. Digital nomads from Europe and the United States are setting up shop in Mexico City. opening trendy coffee shops and stores that resemble those in other international capitals. People from Haiti. Cuba and South America have settled in the country at unprecedented levels. some discouraged from migrating to the U.S. And some Mexicans who had been living in the U.S. for decades are now returning home with their American families, either voluntarily or after deportations.
Those shifts show up in who wears the jersey. The World Cup squad includes a player born in Spain, Álvaro Fidalgo; another born in Alaska, Obed Vargas; one born in Argentina, Santiago Giménez; and Quiñones, born in Colombia.
For Quiñones, that means challenging expectations many still hold about what a Mexican is supposed to look like. Mexican diversity has always existed, but soccer has a unique ability to bring that reality to light.
A player scores a goal. The crowd rises. Cameras search for a face. And for an instant, a nation contemplates itself—not necessarily as it imagined itself, but as it has been all along.
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