Mixed Race Studies

Early Afro-Mexican Settlers in California

C-SPAN: Created by Cable
2015-05-20

Host: California Historical Society

Professor Carlos Manuel Salomon, author of Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California, talked about Mexicans of African descent who were some of the first non-Indian settlers in California. Many came from Sinaloa and Sonora, Mexico, with the Anza Expedition in 1775, and helped to shape the character of California, building and establishing pueblos and ranches that grew into towns such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, and San Jose. Several became wealthy landowners and politicians, including Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California.

Watch the video (01:21:44) here.

Mexico’s hidden people

Cable News Network (CNN)
2015-07-10

Abby Reimer, Special to CNN

Photograph: Mara Sanchez Renero

(CNN)—An estimated 200,000 Africans were brought to Mexico under slavery, which ended in the country in 1829. Yet Afro-Mexicans remain a marginalized and often forgotten part of Mexico’s identity.

Photographer Mara Sanchez Renero first learned about Afro-Mexicans as a teenager, when she traveled to the Costa Chica region in southern Mexico. The black community there told her they were descendants of Africans shipwrecked off the Pacific coast in 1900.

But it wasn’t until she traveled back last year that she realized what little she knew. There, traditions and customs rooted in Africa — such as “La Danza del Diablos,” or the dance of the devils — have survived.

“I didn’t know there was that much African culture in Mexico,” Sanchez Renero said. “They didn’t teach me that in school.”

Sanchez Renero dug deeper into Afro-Mexican history and culture, ultimately deciding to tell the story of Afro-Mexicans through a series of photographs called “The Cimarron and Fandango.”…

Read the entire article and view the photographs here.

Black Mexicans face considerable hurdles

Compton Herald
2015-06-05

Alexis Okeowo

Mexicanos negros (black Mexicans) face considerable hurdles; Afro-Mexicans are marginalized and excluded to the point that it is impossible to find any mention of them in official records

The first town of freed African slaves in the Americas is not exactly where you would expect to find it — and it isn’t exactly what you’d expect to find either. First, it’s not in the United States. Yanga, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. The second thing that is immediately evident to vistors who reach the town’s rustic central plaza: there are virtually no blacks among the few hundred residents milling around the center of town.

Mirroring Mexico’s history itself, most of Yanga’s Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants. Mexico’s independence from Spain and new focus on building a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race, drove African Mexicans into invisibility as leaders chose not to count them or assess their needs. Now many blacks want to fight back by improving the shoddy education and social services available to them and are petitioning for the constitution to recognize Afro-Mexicans as a separate ethnic group worthy of special consideration…

Read the entire article here.

Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans

University Press of Florida
2006-05-30
304 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2942-9

Nicole von Germeten, Associate Professor of History
Oregon State University

Celebrating the African contribution to Mexican culture, this book shows how religious brotherhoods in New Spain both preserved a distinctive African identity and helped facilitate Afro-Mexican integration into colonial society. Called confraternities, these groups provided social connections, charity, and status for Africans and their descendants for over two centuries.

Often organized by African women and dedicated to popular European and African saints, the confraternities enjoyed prestige in the Baroque religious milieu of 17th-century New Spain. One group, founded by Africans called Zapes, preserved their ethnic identity for decades even after they were enslaved and brought to the Americas. Despite ongoing legal divisions and racial hierarchies, by the end of the colonial era many descendants from African slaves had achieved a degree of status that enabled them to move up the social ladder in Hispanic society. Von Germeten reveals details of the organization and practices of more than 60 Afro-Mexican brotherhoods and examines changes in the social, family, and religious lives of their members. She presents the stories of individual Africans and their descendants—including many African women and the famous Baroque artist Juan Correa—almost entirely from evidence they themselves generated. Moving the historical focus away from negative stereotypes that have persisted for almost 500 years, this study is the first in English to deal with Afro-Mexican religious organizations.

A Student Traveling Through Costa Chica Picked Up A Camera to Let Afro-Mexicans Tell Their Story

Remezcla
2015-02-25

Andrew S. Vargas

It’s Black History Month once again, and while it seems like every other day of the calendar year has been dedicated to some cause or another, the concept of Black history is particularly relevant to us as Latinos. With historically documented African populations from Buenos Aires up to Veracruz, including just about every country along the way, a new generation is starting to realize that our African heritage has been systematically erased from our national narratives over the centuries…

…One young filmmaker and anthropology student of Afro-Salvadoran descent, feeling sympathy for the plight of invisible Afro-Mexicans, took it upon himself to make a very independent documentary exploring Afro-Mexican identity in the coastal communities of La Costa Chica — a region spanning the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca that has the highest concentration of Afro-descendants in Mexico. Titled Así Somos: Afro Identities in the Coast, the short doc admittedly features an extremely raw and unpolished style, but director Andy Amaya does a fairly good job of letting his subjects speak for themselves as they reflect on experiences with discrimination, their Afro-linguistic heritage and labels like ‘negro’ vs. ‘afromexicano’…

Read the entire article here.

Student Blog: Why questioning the existence of Afro-Mexicans is problematic

Baker Institute Blog
Insight and analysis from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University
2014-08-25

Sharae DeWitt
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Race has been closely tied to Mexican identity since the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The national ideology is centered on mestizaje, referring to the mixing between Spaniards and indigenous peoples. According to this belief, true “Mexicanness” is linked to being mestizo, or someone who is exclusively of Spanish and indigenous descent. Some Mexicans believe in fact that racism in the country has been erased due to the mestizo heritage, but this belief overlooks the exclusion of African heritage and those of African descent living in Mexico from the country’s history and ideology.

Mexican society has all but ignored the historical presence and economic contributions of Africans, despite the fact that Mexico imported about 200,000 African slaves during the colonial period. Throughout Mexico’s history, Africans were viewed as the lowest race within the colonial caste system. Intellectuals and government leaders debated the economic merits and capabilities of Africans. In the end, Afro-Mexicans lost touch with their African roots as the ideal of mestizaje stipulated assimilation, and Mexico’s national identity was built around this concept. The black presence in Mexico was essentially written out of history after the war for independence and during the revolution, with the government only classifying people as white, Indian or mestizo…

Read the entire article here.

For dark-skinned Mexicans, taint of discrimination lingers

McClatchy DC: Watching Washington and the World
2013-08-22

Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff

MEXICO CITY — Flip through the print publications exalting the activities of Mexico’s high society and there’s one thing you rarely find: dark-skinned people.

No matter that nearly two-thirds of Mexicans consider themselves moreno, the Spanish word for dark.

Mexico has strong laws barring discrimination based on skin color or ethnicity, but the practices of public relations firms and news media lag behind, promoting the perception that light skin is desirable and dark skin unappealing.

The issue came to the fore this month when a casting call for a television spot for Mexico’s largest airline stated flatly that it wanted “no one dark,” sparking outrage on social media and, ultimately, embarrassed apologies.

“I’d never seen anything that aggressive and that clear, all in capital letters: ‘NO ONE DARK,’” said Tamara de Anda, a magazine editor. “I decided to go with it.”…

…But the distance between legalities and practice is substantial, said Mario Arriagada Cuadriello, a doctoral candidate in comparative politics at the London School of Economics. He is an editor at Nexos, a leading cultural and political magazine.

When Arriagada published an article in this month’s issue about widespread discrimination in Mexico, he received a flurry of responses.

“People wrote to say that if you are light-skinned, you get better treatment in restaurants,” he said. One person told him that in an exclusive area of the capital, residents ask that their dark-skinned domestic servants not walk in the common gardens “because it is anti-aesthetic and makes the areas ugly.”

One of Mexico’s most prominent intellectuals from the early 20th century, Jose Vasconcelos, held up the mestizo, or person of mixed Indian and European blood, as part of a superior “cosmic race” with greater spiritual values…

Read the entire article here.

(Re)mapping the Borderlands of Blackness: Afro-Mexican Consciousness and the Politics of Culture

Duke University
2013
233 pages

Talia Weltman-Cisneros

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

The dominant cartography of post-Revolutionary Mexico has relied upon strategic constructions of a unified and homogenized national and cultural consciousness (mexicanidad), in order to invent and map a coherent image of imagined community. These strategic boundaries of mexicanidad have also relied upon the mapping of specific codes of being and belonging onto the Mexican geo-body. I argue that these codes have been intimately linked to the discourse of mestizaje, which, in its articulation and operation, has been fashioned as a cosmic tool with which to dissolve and solve the ethno-racial and social divisions following the Revolution, and to usher a unified mestizo nation onto a trajectory towards modernity.

However, despite its rhetoric of salvation and seemingly race-less/positivistic articulation, the discourse of mestizaje has propagated an uneven configuration of mexicanidad in which the belonging of certain elements have been coded as inferior, primitive, problematic, and invisible. More precisely, in the case of Mexicans of African descent, this segment of the population has also been silenced and dis-placed from this dominant cartography.

This dissertation examines the coding of blackness and its relationship with mexicanidad in specific sites and spaces of knowledge production and cultural production in the contemporary era. I first present an analysis of this production immediately in the period following the Revolution, especially from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, a period labeled as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” This time period was strategic in manufacturing and disseminating a precise politics of culture that was used to reflect this dominant configuration and cartography of mexicanidad. That is, the knowledge and culture produced during this time imbedded and displayed codes of being and belonging, which resonated State projects and narratives that were used to define and secure the boundaries of a unified, mestizo imaginary of mexicanidad. And, it is within this context that I suggest that blackness has been framed as invisible, problematic, and foreign. For example, cultural texts such as film and comics have served as sites that have facilitated the production and reflection of this uneasy relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. Moreover, this strained and estranged relationship has been further sustained by the nationalization and institutionalization of knowledge and culture related to the black presence and history in Mexico. From the foundational text La raza cósmica, written in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, to highly influential corpuses produced by Mexican anthropologists during this post-Revolutionary period, the production of knowledge and the production of culture have been intimately tied together within an uneven structure of power that has formalized racialized frames of reference and operated on a logic of coloniality. As a result, today it is common to be met with the notion that “no hay negros en México” (there are no blacks in Mexico).

Yet, on the contrary, contemporary Afro-Mexican artists and community organizations within the Costa Chica region have been engaging a different cultural politics that has been serving as a tool of place-making and as a decolonization of codes of being and belonging. In this regard, I present an analysis of contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural production, specifically visual arts and radio, that present a counter-cartography of the relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. More specifically, in their engagement of the discourse of cimarronaje (maroonage), I propose that these sites of cultural production also challenge, re-think, re-imagine, and re-configure this relationship. I also suggest that this is an alternative discourse of cimarronaje that functions as a decolonial project in terms of the reification and re-articulation of afromexicanidad (Afro-Mexican-ness) as a dynamic and pluri-versal construction of being and belonging. And, thus, in their link to community programs and social action initiatives, this contemporary cultural production also strives to combat the historical silence, dis-placement, and discrimination of the Afro-Mexican presence in and contributions to the nation. In turn, this dissertation offers an intervention in the making of and the relationships between race, space and place, and presents an interrogation of the geo-politics and bio-politics of being and belonging in contemporary Mexico.

Contents

• Abstract
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Mapping Blackness Elsewhere: Mestizaje, Anthropology, and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.1 Mestizaje and the Mapping of Blackness Beyond the Borders of Modern Mexicanidad
  • 1.2 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran: The Production of Knowledge and the Anthropological (Dis)placement of Blackness in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
  • 1.3 Recuerdos del Jarocho: The Museumification of Blackness
  • 1.4 The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Dis-placement of Blackness
• Chapter Two: Forjando Patria: Framing and Performing Blackness in the “Golden Age” of Mexican Culture
  • 2.1 Memin Pinguin: Dis-locating Blackness
  • 2.2 Angelitos negros: Absorbing Blackness and Saving the National Family
  • 2.3 Al son del mambo: Discovering and Modernizing the Primitive Place of Blackness
  • 2.4 On Framing Blackness and Popular Culture as a Racialized Regime of Representation
• Chapter Three; Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
  • 3.1 Articulating the Place of Blackness in the Costa Chica
  • 3.2 Understanding Cimarronaje Cultural as a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and as a Place-Making Narrative
  • 3.3 Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness
    • 3.3.1 El Centro Cultural Cimarron
    • 3.3.2 Naufragio and the Work of Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
    • 3.3.3 Cimarron: La Voz de los Afromestizos
  • 3.4 Conclusions: Cimarronaje as a Decolonial Project
• Chapter Four: Towards a Re-mapping of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
  • 4.1 México Negro and the Encuentro de los Pueblos Negros: From Pluri-versal Networks to Social and Political Action
  • 4.2 Nomenclature, Identity in Politics, and the Re-thinking of Afro-Mexican Consciousness
• Conclusions
• Figures One-Six
• Bibliography
• Biography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 2: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 3: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 4: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
• Figure 5: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
• Figure 6: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez

Read the entire dissertation here.

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita González (review)

Latin American Music Review
Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013
pages 288-291
DOI: 10.1353/lat.2013.0019

Alex E. Chávez, Visiting Assistant Professor
Latin American and Latino Studies Program
University of Illinois, Chicago

Anita González, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality. With photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-0-292-72324-5.

In a mixed-race country like Mexico, being “black” means being part of an ethnic group, but in addition to the unstable inhabitations of racial identities, the richness of expressive culture therein also has much to do with carving out senses of community. With this understanding, González explores the cultural negotiations of Afro-Mexican identity in terpsichorean traditions throughout Mexico—with specific focus on Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. She elaborates on various quotidian dance practices embedded with an African cultural subtext of influence that demonstrates how socially and historically constituted ethno-racial constructions are voiced through performance. Taking cues from methodologies in performance, theater, and dance studies, she homes in on the communicative potential of the gesticulant. Moreover, she incorporates ethnography and relies on photographs to illustrate the dance forms.

Although there is existing scholarship that privileges broader socio-historical questions concerning the African diaspora in Latin America, studies focused on African-derived expressive forms in Mexico are few (Cruz Carretero, Martínez Maranto, and Santiago Silva 1990; McDowell 2000; Pérez Fernández 1990). In her efforts to show how Afro-Mexicans have been instrumental in cultural life in that country, González skillfully attends to the mobile history of ethnic encounter and exchange among Africans, indigenous groups, and the Spanish that has informed the hybridity of expressive forms and subjectivities over time. This approach in some ways gestures toward the types of analyses offered in Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997) and John Chasteen’s National Rhythms, African Roots (2004) in their own interrogations of the complicated nexus of performance, nation, and racial formation in Cuba and South America, respectively.

Mexico’s own fraught ideologies of mestizaje and mexicanidad constitute an officialized discursive field that has promoted a unified national culture by way of de-emphasizing localized and pluri-ethnic productions of subjectivity; and as it pertains to González’s study, this ideological scaffolding has obfuscated—if not entirely excluded—the African component. In this regard, apart from considering phenotype, González suggests that racial identities are also defined by geographic locale to the extent that “most Afro-Mexicans are unaware of the historical circumstances that explain their presence in Mexico,” which places particular importance on the cultural negotiations of social location as such (37).

At the core of Afro-Mexico lies González’s ambition to present a “diversity of perspectives about blackness” (103). She succeeds in this ambition as it relates to the dance forms in question. And by returning to the issues of archetype and stereotype repeatedly, she opens the door for considering the iterative relationship between racialization and performativity. Yet bringing the implicit connections between everyday life and institutionalized racial knowledges to the surface early in the book would have served in demonstrating more clearly how expressive culture fits within the arch of broader racial ideologies with implications for understandings of embodiment, performance, and the viscosity of race.

Nonetheless, the unique contribution of the book emerges from González’s own position of expertise as an artist and dancer so that when she contends that “the bent body posture and looseness of the upper body” in certain forms have aesthetic roots in African dance (66), her own bodily knowledge is involved in making that statement. Dances, she argues, consist of gestures within musical phrases. Possibilities for storytelling exist therein that “express social outlooks” (46). These stories unfold at different levels, from personal to communal, from political to mythical—often simultaneously. Her analysis likewise operates on several levels—form and content of the dance, musicality, historical roots, and ultimately the playing out of contemporary politics, since many of the dances are “theatrical scenarios that include attacks, public whippings, sexual overtones, and other disreputable acts” (40). Still, her descriptions in some ways beg for a more in-depth ethnographic rendering of these expressive flows to illustrate how they communicate beliefs and ideas, the very representations that become myths about blackness over time and how they unfold in relation to larger and contested understandings of nation and racial formation. Afro-Mexico is premised on the contention that in a society where ethno-racial identities are disputed, myths contain within them…

Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico

Duke University Press
April 2012
292 pages
43 photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5132-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5121-4

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolás has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town’s residents, however, call themselves morenos (black-Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolás, focusing on the ways in which local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, as well as of community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness—both their own and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor do they deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.