{"id":35038,"date":"2013-12-15T02:11:01","date_gmt":"2013-12-15T02:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35038"},"modified":"2013-12-15T02:11:01","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T02:11:01","slug":"afro-mexico-dancing-between-myth-and-reality-by-anita-gonzalez-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35038","title":{"rendered":"Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita Gonz\u00e1lez (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita Gonz\u00e1lez (review)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Latin American Music Review<\/a>
\nVolume 34, Number 2, Fall\/Winter 2013<\/a>
\npages 288-291
\nDOI: 10.1353\/lat.2013.0019<\/p>\n

Alex E. Ch\u00e1vez<\/a><\/strong>, Visiting Assistant Professor
\nLatin American and Latino Studies Program
\nUniversity of Illinois, Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n

Anita Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a>, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality<\/a><\/em>. With photographs by George O. Jackson and Jos\u00e9 Manuel Pellicer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-0-292-72324-5.<\/p>\n

In a mixed-race country like Mexico, being \u201cblack\u201d 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, Gonz\u00e1lez explores the cultural negotiations of Afro-Mexican identity in terpsichorean traditions throughout Mexico\u2014with specific focus on Veracruz<\/a> and the Costa Chica of Guerrero<\/a> and Oaxaca<\/a>. 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<\/a>. Moreover, she incorporates ethnography and relies on photographs to illustrate the dance forms.<\/p>\n

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, Mart\u00ednez Maranto, and Santiago Silva 1990; McDowell 2000; P\u00e9rez Fern\u00e1ndez 1990). In her efforts to show how Afro-Mexicans have been instrumental in cultural life in that country, Gonz\u00e1lez 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\u2019s Nationalizing Blackness<\/em> (1997) and John Chasteen\u2019s National Rhythms, African Roots<\/em> (2004) in their own interrogations of the complicated nexus of performance, nation, and racial formation in Cuba and South America, respectively.<\/p>\n

Mexico\u2019s own fraught ideologies of mestizaje<\/a><\/em> and mexicanidad<\/em> 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 Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s study, this ideological scaffolding has obfuscated\u2014if not entirely excluded\u2014the African component. In this regard, apart from considering phenotype, Gonz\u00e1lez suggests that racial identities are also defined by geographic locale to the extent that \u201cmost Afro-Mexicans are unaware of the historical circumstances that explain their presence in Mexico,\u201d which places particular importance on the cultural negotiations of social location as such (37).<\/p>\n

At the core of Afro-Mexico<\/em> lies Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s ambition to present a \u201cdiversity of perspectives about blackness\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the unique contribution of the book emerges from Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s own position of expertise as an artist and dancer so that when she contends that \u201cthe bent body posture and looseness of the upper body\u201d 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 \u201cexpress social outlooks\u201d (46). These stories unfold at different levels, from personal to communal, from political to mythical\u2014often simultaneously. Her analysis likewise operates on several levels\u2014form and content of the dance, musicality, historical roots, and ultimately the playing out of contemporary politics, since many of the dances are \u201ctheatrical scenarios that include attacks, public whippings, sexual overtones, and other disreputable acts\u201d (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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita Gonz\u00e1lez (review) Latin American Music Review Volume 34, Number 2, Fall\/Winter 2013 pages 288-291 DOI: 10.1353\/lat.2013.0019 Alex E. Ch\u00e1vez, Visiting Assistant Professor Latin American and Latino Studies Program University of Illinois, Chicago Anita Gonz\u00e1lez, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality. With photographs by George O. Jackson and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,5,21,8,103],"tags":[4633,16550,16549,2277,16548],"class_list":["post-35038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-mexico","tag-afro-mexicans","tag-alex-chavez","tag-alex-e-chavez","tag-anita-gonzalez","tag-latin-american-music-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35038","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=35038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}