{"id":20570,"date":"2012-02-13T00:20:04","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T00:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20570"},"modified":"2012-03-14T00:51:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-14T00:51:33","slug":"writing-africans-out-of-the-racial-hierarchy-anti-african-sentiment-in-post-revolutionary-mexico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20570","title":{"rendered":"Writing Africans Out of the Racial Hierarchy: Anti-African Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary Mexico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing Africans Out of the Racial Hierarchy: Anti-African Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary Mexico<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cincinnati Romance Review<\/a>
\nVolume 30<\/a> (2011): Afro-Hispanic Subjectivities
\npages 172-183<\/p>\n

Galadriel Mehera Gerardo<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of Latin American History
\nYoungstown State University<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the past two decades scholars have examined Mexican racial ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have paid particular attention to the positivist ideas propagated by Porfirio D\u00edaz\u2019s<\/a> cient\u00edficos<\/a><\/em> in the late 19th century and the creation of the seemingly nationalist, antiimperialist concept of mestizaje most associated with post-revolutionary scholars in the early to mid 20th century (Castro, Hedrick, and Minna Stern). Most studies focus on the inaccurate, racist portrayal of indigenous people by the Mexican nationalist intellectuals of this era. They often note the influence of U.S. and European scientific racism, particularly Social Darwinism, on Mexicans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They rarely emphasize the absence of Africans in Mexican intellectuals\u2019 discussions of race, however. The absence or near absence of Africans in early- to mid-20th century Mexican discussions of race indicates as much about the attitudes of Mexican scholars as their emphasis on the indigenous past. Likewise, excluding Africans from the Mexican racial narrative was as significant to the creation of Mexican national identity as Mexican scholars\u2019 depictions of native peoples. Mexican intellectuals \u201cwhitened\u201d the imagined Mexican, simultaneously writing Africans out of Mexico\u2019s history while challenging North Atlantic ideas about race and racial supremacy by promoting the mixing of European and indigenous peoples, offering what they believed was a distinct, nationalist vision of the racial hierarchy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article concentrates on three Mexican scholars and their discussions of Africans (or, in some cases, lack thereof) in their most significant essays. The first two\u2014Jos\u00e9 Vasconcelos<\/a> and Manuel Gamio<\/a>\u2014emerged among Mexico\u2019s most important intellectuals of the revolutionary period. The third\u2014Octavio Paz<\/a>\u2014became Mexico\u2019s most influential literary figure a generation later. While he criticized many of the previous generation\u2019s ideas, he embraced aspects of Gamio and Vasconcelos\u2019s arguments. Moreover, in The Labyrinth of Solitude<\/em>, widely considered the definitive work on Mexican character, Paz continued both the trend of integrating indigenous people as a means of ultimately eliminating them, and of \u201clightening\u201d Mexico\u2019s racial stock by avoiding acknowledging the presence of people of African descent in Mexico\u2019s population and history.<\/p>\n

This study consciously focuses on three individuals who at various times in their lives worked for branches of the Mexican government (usually educational) and in some cases even founded government institutions based on their ideas. Despite their antiimperialist, nationalist mentalities, all three spent periods of time living in the United States, often seeking refuge when their ideas fell out of favor with their own government. Both their experiences in the U.S. and the influence of North Atlantic ideas on their educations are significant for understanding each of these men\u2019s assertions about race, and particularly their decision to render invisible Afro-Mexicans by writing them out of treatises on Mexico\u2019s future. In contrast to the cient\u00edficos<\/em> who worked during the Porfiriato, these 20th century Mexican intellectuals considered themselves nationalists and intended their visions of the Mexican people\u2019s future to counter the white supremacist ideology supported by Social Darwinism and embraced by U.S. intellectuals. Yet in ignoring the historical presence of Africans throughout Mexican history, Mexican intellectuals reified the North Atlantic vision of a racial hierarchy with Anglo-Europeans and Anglo-Americans at the top and Africans and indigenous Americans at the bottom. Many recent scholars have pointed out the racism inherent to the concept of mestizaje<\/em>. However, these critiques have focused on Mexican intellectuals\u2019 treatment of indigenous people. Emphasizing the exclusion of Africans\u00a0 from the racial narratives underlines the nuances of Mexican racism in the first half of the 20th century. It also suggests how firmly entrenched North Atlantic ideas about race had become in Mexico by the 20th century.<\/p>\n

Anti-African Sentiment<\/strong><\/p>\n

The history of Africans in Mexico spans as far back as the history of Europeans there. Africans took part in the conquest of Mexico and were present throughout the colonial period. Often they held significant intermediary roles as overseers, skilled craftsmen, and merchants. Both free and enslaved Africans could be found in colonial Mexico. As the colonial period progressed, Spaniards imported more African slaves to work as unskilled laborers in the semi-tropical sugar-producing regions around Veracruz<\/a>, Acapulco<\/a>, and parts of Guerrero<\/a> and Oaxaca<\/a>. Because more male than female slaves were imported, interracial unions regularly occurred in the colonial period, particularly between indigenous women and African men. As a result of the decline of slavery combined with racial mixing, by the time of independence only a small portion of Mexico\u2019s population was considered \u201cblack,\u201d although a significant portion of the mixed-race population likely had some African heritage (Meyer 164-6)…<\/p>\n

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

Writing Africans Out of the Racial Hierarchy: Anti-African Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary Mexico Cincinnati Romance Review Volume 30 (2011): Afro-Hispanic Subjectivities pages 172-183 Galadriel Mehera Gerardo, Assistant Professor of Latin American History Youngstown State University Over the past two decades scholars have examined Mexican racial ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,459,1196,8,103],"tags":[4633,2343,9606,9610,9609,9608,9607,1868,2591,20753,9611],"class_list":["post-20570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-mexico","tag-afro-mexicans","tag-afromexicans","tag-cincinnati-romance-review","tag-g-mehera-gerardo","tag-galadriel-gerardo","tag-galadriel-m-gerardo","tag-galadriel-mehera-gerardo","tag-jose-vasconcelos","tag-manuel-gamio","tag-mexico","tag-octavio-paz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20570","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=20570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}