A dozen years after President Barack Obama released his Hawaii birth certificate to refute claims he was born outside the United States, Mexico is living its own controversy over candidates’ race, ethnicity and identity.

A top opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, is emphasizing her rise from humble Indigenous roots to successful business executive. Some have accused her of not being Indigenous enough.

Then there’s Enrique de la Madrid, who trails in the polls. The opposition candidate is “güero” — White. He’s a Harvard graduate, an ex-Cabinet minister, and one very confused guy.

“They tell me I’m too White,” he says in a campaign video. “What’s the problem with being White?”

Perhaps not since the Mexican Revolution has the subject of national identity been so central to a presidential campaign. “There never really was an identity politics here,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister. “It didn’t exist before. It does now.”

What changed? Mexico is one of many countries that began to re-examine their ethnic and racial histories after the outbreak of the “Black Lives Matter” protests in the United States.

Perhaps more critically, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has transformed politics here. The veteran leftist has made himself one of the hemisphere’s most popular leaders by promising to tackle his country’s deep inequality. He has focused his presidency on the poor and downtrodden — “el pueblo bueno.” The good people.

His rhetoric encompasses not just class but ethnicity. His party, the National Regeneration Movement, is known by its Spanish-language acronym MORENA — also a word for “brown-skinned.” He dismisses those who oppose him as “fifis,” people of European ancestry who live in posh neighborhoods.

López Obrador’s critics accuse him of using polarizing language to divide the country. Supporters say he’s simply recognizing the discrimination against darker-skinned Mexicans that’s lurked below the surface for decades.

But now his narrative is being upended by a woman who rides a bike around Mexico City, wearing an embroidered Indigenous dress and firing back at the president in the same earthy language he uses.

Gálvez, the daughter of an Otomi Indigenous teacher, has catapulted into the lead for the opposition coalition with a rags-to-riches life story. She went from a girlhood selling tamales on the street to a career as an entrepreneur.

That could be a problem for López Obrador because the top two candidates in his own party’s primary aren’t that “morena” at all. (The president is ineligible to run for reelection). Both Sheinbaum, the former Mexico City mayor, and Marcelo Ebrard, his former foreign minister, are of European ancestry.

Gálvez “flipped the whole thing around on López Obrador,” said Castañeda, who served with the candidate in the conservative government of President Vicente Fox. “The whole identity issue, she turned it against him — like a boomerang.”

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Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist at Columbia University who studies Mexican culture, said the controversy over the candidates’ origins — Jewish, Indigenous or other — reflects a fundamental concern: “Who can truly be a Mexican?”

It’s a question that has flared throughout Mexican history.

In 1910, the long-ruling dictator Porfirio Díaz was overthrown by Mexicans frustrated by his deference to American investment and European culture — Italian architecture, Viennese waltzes, truffle-dusted French cuisine.

“Mexico for the Mexicans,” the revolutionaries cried.

But who were the Mexicans? The victors faced the task of unifying a country of scores of Indigenous groups, as well as descendants of Spaniards and other Europeans.

They built a one-party political system that celebrated a unified Mestizo identity. Mexicans were hailed as the “cosmic race” — a blend of Indigenous and European ancestries. They prided themselves on having none of the racism of the United States.

In reality, the Indigenous were often marginalized, consigned to Mexico’s poorest communities. “Indian” was long a slur indicating backwardness. The small Afro-Mexican community was largely not recognized. To this day, many of the elite in Mexican politics, business, academia and media are light-skinned.

Still, attitudes have been changing, thanks to activists, academic studies and government programs. The 1994 Zapatista rebellion in southern Mexico thrust the injustices suffered by Indigenous groups into full view. More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a new conversation about discrimination.

“People began to say on social networks, ‘They are talking about the racist system in the U.S., but when are we going to talk about race in Mexico, which is much more invisible?” said Montserrat Ramos, who leads Basta Racismo — roughly, We’re Fed Up with Racism.

While discrimination is still common, Mexicans increasingly see Indigenous heritage as a point of pride. Even as fluency in original languages has declined, many here are choosing to describe themselves as Indigenous — nearly one-fifth of the population, according to the 2020 Census.

“The fact that a candidate like Xóchitl identifies herself as Indigenous is, in itself, quite interesting,” said Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a Mexican sociologist at the University of California San Diego. “That’s not something we would have seen 10 years ago.”

López Obrador has helped promote that cultural shift. A native of Mexico’s poorer south, he launched his career in the 1970s leading the Tabasco state office of the national Indigenous institute.

López Obrador celebrated his presidential inauguration in 2018 with a traditional cleansing ceremony in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main plaza. He knelt in a cloud of incense as Indigenous healers waved bouquets of herbs.

“We are going to give special attention to the Indigenous people of Mexico,” López Obrador told the crowd.

The president has maintained his popularity with a fiery nationalism, championing hard-working Mexicans victimized by corrupt elites. He’s used his daily news conferences to vilify opponents as fifis and allies of the oligarchy.

“MORENA has to a large degree pitched itself as standing for the quintessential, true Mexican nation,” Lomnitz said — a nation with a racialized identity.

Gálvez is messing with that idea. The senator has seized media attention and risen in the polls by highlighting her story of growing up with an Indigenous father and Mestizo mother in Hidalgo state, working her way through a public university and becoming an engineer.

The governing party hasn’t figured out quite how to respond. López Obrador has branded Gálvez a “puppet” of rich business executives. His supporters have questioned whether the candidate, who served as Mexico’s national commissioner for Indigenous affairs from 2003 to 2006, is actually Indigenous.

The historian Lorenzo Meyer sparked an uproar by saying in a radio interview that it “doesn’t make much sense” to describe Gálvez as belonging to Mexico’s Indigenous people. If she weren’t middle-class, he said, “she wouldn’t have become an entrepreneur or engineer.”

A cartoonist close to López Obrador depicted the senator in traditional Indigenous clothing, with a feather in her hair, speaking broken Spanish and referring to the “land of Coparmex,” the Mexican business owners association. Gálvez demanded to know what made the cartoonist the arbiter of how Indigenous she was: “Does he have an Indio-meter?”

The attacks on the candidate echo some Mexicans’ reactions to the Zapatista rebellion nearly three decades ago, said Federico Navarrete, a historian at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Critics said those guerrillas couldn’t be Indigenous because they had become politically active and were armed.

“It’s an old anti-Indigenous discourse, mobilized against Xóchitl Gálvez,” he said.

“Now, those who are using anti-Indigenous racism are from MORENA. It’s a paradox.”

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Gálvez isn’t the only one whose identity is being questioned.

In early summer, rumors began to ping around the internet that Sheinbaum was born in Bulgaria and was thus ineligible to be president. Fact-checkers debunked the reports, which were seen as an effort to tap into antisemitism and xenophobia.

In late June, she posted her Mexico City birth certificate on Twitter. “Enough with the speculation, already,” she tweeted. She recorded a video in which she showed off the document and played a song she said she found on Spotify: “Claudia, the Mexican.”

Sheinbaum’s maternal grandparents fled Nazi persecution in Bulgaria, according to the recent book “Claudia Sheinbaum: Presidenta.” She grew up in a secular Jewish family in the Mexican capital and earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering.

In late July, the “birther” issue erupted again. Fox, who was president from 2000 to 2006, circulated a meme on Twitter: “Sheinbaum is a Bulgarian Jew. Marcelo [Ebrard] is a French fifi,” it said. “The only Mexican is Xóchitl!”

Fox, who belongs to the National Action Party, or PAN, was roundly condemned, and he apologized. Among those who criticized his post was Gálvez. “All of us born here, no matter where our forebears were from, are Mexican,” she tweeted.

How much these questions of identity will affect the presidential election in June is unclear. López Obrador’s popularity and MORENA’s dominance across the country have made the party the favorite. The opposition, meanwhile, has been divided and tarred by the past failures of the PAN and two other parties in the coalition.

Pardo-Guerra said the discussion of ethnicity and race has obscured the fact that Sheinbaum and Gálvez are successful members of the middle class and political establishment — whatever their origins or political beliefs.

The country’s top politicians all come from “very elite circles,” he said, “populated by the same kind of people.”