Indian Books gone wrong......

Absolutely. In fact, it's very difficult to find a book on the subject that is unbiased. 

Most books tend to portray natives as either naieve innocents living in some sort of primordial, peaceful Eden, at one with nature; or as primitive savages. Those two views have been with us since Europeans arrived and seem to simply reinvent themselves over and over again. There's only a rare few books out there that just treat the history dispassionately and present it all without judgement, as one would expect from a book on, say, Roman Britain or ancient China or almost any other historical topic. The few that are like this are almost always devoted to urban civilizations in Mesoamerica or Peru.

I know nothing of Mexican soap-operas and too little about the culture, the stereotypes, the images of Otherness, etc. in modern Mexican society. However noticing or ignoring a skin-color difference can be a cultural constraint. For instance, it could be that certain complexions are markers of beauty in Mexican society, so the Mexicans perceive those actors in leading roles as handsome, beautiful, not necessarily whiter. It could be that the difference in color is actually noticed by many individuals but not made meaningful, not voiced (as I notice that - let's say - the brown of the drawers is lighter than the brown of the door, but I don't assign any meaning or importance to it, so if I'll be prompted to describe the room I'm in, probably I'll leave such detail out of my description). It could be that those uttering the difference in color actually do so because their own culture is hypersenstive about skin-color issues (racism). It could be that such a remark is actually a mirror of own society and culture, so we might miss to understand the Mexican society in such terms.

Therefore the question of insideness vs outsideness can be actually be rephrased as the perspective of the inside culture vs the perspective of the inside culture reflected through an outside culture. What I don't like about several approaches in this thread is that the insiders are presented as part of a culture, while the outsiders as somewhat independent observers. The other becomes "savage", "primitive", "pure", "cruel", "noble", etc. mostly because of a cultural bias in the society of the observer, not only of the observer himself. This is a reason for why I agree with your call to read and study the books, no matter how biased they are. Even if we might not learn much about others, we might learn a lot about our societies.

Also we prefer the outside view in cases when our access to the inside view is limited, either because the insiders are no longer in existence or because the cultural gap is too large to be easily bridged (a 21st century urban civilization vs a tribe in Amazonia, etc. - notice my cultural bias too). But if we're to look at societies like French and German, I think we'd prefer French scholars for most French issues and German scholars for most German issues.