Mauritius is often referred to on the international scene as a rainbow society or, even better, as a example of good interethnic coexistence. Without implying that this might be a mere slogan or a nonsense, one can think that this way of formulating things doesn’t really show the complexities that are really at work in the Mauritian society, allowing it to have precisely this relative stability for which it is known. This relative stability is mainly due to a series of behavioral strategies made up of mutual avoidance, controlled ignorance, meaningful silences and linguistic taboos, aside with « politically correct » commonplaces which Mauritians generally use when dealing with interethnic issues. This article tries to address these issues in its attempt to describe ethnicity in Mauritius. Adopting a constructivist approach to ethnicity, it gives priority in its analysis to discourses on ethnicity rather than ethnicity itself. Those discourses have been identified here at three levels : macro-social, meso-social and micro-social.