{"id":15272,"date":"2011-07-31T22:02:42","date_gmt":"2011-07-31T22:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15272"},"modified":"2013-08-17T18:43:22","modified_gmt":"2013-08-17T18:43:22","slug":"racial-ideologies-racial-group-boundaries-and-racial-identity-in-veracruz-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15272","title":{"rendered":"Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ethnic and Racial Studies<\/a>
\nVolume 5, Number 3<\/a> (November 2010)
\npages 273-299
\nDOI: 10.1080\/17442222.2010.513829<\/a><\/p>\n

Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo\/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on blackness in the western Caribbean cities of Port of Veracruz<\/a> and Boca del R\u00edo<\/a>, which lie in the Mexican<\/a> state of Veracruz<\/a>. Specifically, it looks at the racial-based and color-based identification of individuals of African descent, societal construction of the \u2018black\u2019 category, and the relationship between national and racial identities. This article relies on data from participant observation conducted over the course of one year and 112 semi-structured interviews.<\/p>\n

…Blackness in Mexico<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico and Peru were the largest importers of African slaves in Spanish America (Palmer, 1976). Most scholars estimate that approximately 200,000 African slaves reached Mexico\u2019s shores, although the number may be higher since many slaves were imported illegally (Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, 1944). When the slave system collapsed in the early 1700s, the biological integration of the population increased as the African-origin population increasingly mixed with the Indian and Spanish groups (Cope, 1994). After 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, legal distinctions pertaining to race were terminated (Gonz\u00e1lez Navarro, 1970). By this time it was generally assumed that the black population had \u2018disappeared\u2019 through biological integration with the broader population.<\/p>\n

Mexico\u2019s early-20th-century post-revolutionary ideology further solidified the narrative of the disappearance of Mexico\u2019s black population. This ideology promoted the mixed-race individual (mestizo<\/em>) as the quintessential Mexican (Knight, 1990; Vasconcelos, 1925). In doing so, however, it not only glorified the mestizo, but sought to assimilate the Indigenous (Knight, 1990) and African (Hern\u00e1ndez Cuevas, 2004, 2005) components of Mexico\u2019s population through integration. The erasure of the African element in Mexico continued in the following decades through the Eurocentric re-interpretation of particular aspects of Mexican culture (Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005).<\/p>\n

The supposed disappearance of the African-origin population was first questioned in the 1940s when Gonzalo Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n (1946, 1958) studied what he defined as a \u2018black\u2019 population in the Costa Chica region of Mexico\u2019s southern coast. Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n\u2019s pioneering study set the stage for the re-emergence of the issue of blackness in Mexico. In the past few decades, there has been a surge of scholarly work on the topic, much of which has focused on the historical experience of Africans and their descendants (Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, 1944; Alc\u00e1ntara L\u00f3pez, 2002; Bennett, 2003; Carroll, 2001; Ch\u00e1vez Carbajal, 1997; Garc\u00eda Bustamante, 1987; Gil Maron\u00e3, 1992; Herrera Casas\u00fas, 1991; Mart\u00ednez Montiel & Reyes, 1993; Mart\u00ednez Montiel, 1993; Motta S\u00e1nchez, 2001; Naveda Ch\u00e1vez-Hita, 1987, 2001; Palmer, 1976; Rout, 1976; Vincent, 1994; Vinson III, 2001; Winfield Capitaine, 1988) and the African contribution to Mexican culture (D\u00edaz P\u00e9rez et al., 1993; Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hall, 2008; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005; Malcomson, forthcoming; Mart\u00ednez Montiel, 1993; Ochoa Serrano, 1997; P\u00e9rez Montfort, 2007; for more general overviews and\/or discussions of Afro-Mexicans, see Hoffman, 2006a, 2008; Martinez Montiel, 1997; Muhammad, 1995; Vinson III & Vaughn 2004); less attention has been paid to the contemporary experience of Mexicans of African descent. When the contemporary experience is addressed, most scholars focus on the Costa Chica region (Aguirre Beltr\u00e1n, 1946, 1958; Althoff, 1994; Campos, 2005; D\u00edaz P\u00e9rez et al., 1993; Flanet, 1977; Guti\u00e9rrez \u00c1vila, 1988; Hoffman, 2007a; Lewis, 2000, 2001, 2004; Moedano Navarro, 1988; Tib\u00f3n, 1961; Vaughn, 2001a). However, Hoffman (2007a, 2007b) argues that the Costa Chica represents an exceptional case in Mexico, and that identity formation in this region is not based on negotiation with state-sponsored institutions due to their limited presence in the area…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2010) pages 273-299 DOI: 10.1080\/17442222.2010.513829 Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,459,125,8,103,6940],"tags":[4633,702,6169,3625,461,20753,7064],"class_list":["post-15272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-mexico","category-slavery","tag-afro-mexicans","tag-christina-a-sue","tag-christina-alicia-sue","tag-christina-sue","tag-ethnic-and-racial-studies","tag-mexico","tag-veracruz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}