December 8, 2015, inaugurated a new period in Afro-Mexican history. For the first time since September 16, 1810, when Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla declared Mexican independence from Spain, the federal government counted its African-descended population as such. According to the intercensal survey completed by the INEGI in March of that year, 1.4 million citizens identified themselves “in accordance with their culture, history, and traditions” as “Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant.” As 1.2 percent of the national populace, these numbers appear small, particularly in comparison to the 25.7 million people who self-reported as indigenous, the only other ethnic group that the government chose to include.Footnote 1 In a few coastal areas typically thought to have historical ties to African slavery, this demographic visibility was more pronounced. On March 28, 2017, Excélsior explained that least 10 percent of the residents in 100 communities – including 69 in Oaxaca, 16 in Guerrero, and 12 in Veracruz – claimed an African heritage (See Map 0.1).Footnote 2
Map 0.1 Map of Mexico.
Activists saw the INEGI’s data as a necessary step to rectify the structural inequalities that the descendants of enslaved Africans encountered daily. Not looking for an enumeration of historical offenses, national newspapers described the findings with a vision toward future social justice initiatives, such as better public education, and the possibility of amending the Constitution of 1917 to give African-descended Mexicans the same institutional protections as the indigenous communities whose cultural presence the state had always counted. Scholars, artists, and public intellectuals believed that social recognition validated the humanity of African-descended Mexicans.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, in an interview for La Jornada, Sergio Peñaloza Pérez, President and founder of the grassroots organization Black Mexico, México Negro, somberly noted that this newfound visibility was merely a step in the right direction: the INEGI’s statistics, he clarified, “do not truly reflect how many we are, because many preferred not to assume this identity thanks to the historical discrimination that we have endured.”Footnote 4
In the United States, remarks were equally positive but often tinged with exasperation. On January 27, 2016, in the Huffington Post, Krithika Varagur published “Mexico Finally Recognized Its Black Citizens, But That’s Just The Beginning.” In response to what many academics and activists perceived as the state’s erasure of African-descended identities, she wistfully asked “Why has it taken so long?” before continuing with the more hopeful query, “What’s next for Afro-Mexicans?” her article was as much the dutiful reporting of the INEGI’s data as a political statement about Mexico’s insufficient constructions of blackness, which she characterized as “a still tenuous identity.” Like Peñaloza Pérez, she condemned the fragmented state of Afro-diasporic identity in civil society. Too many citizens, she lamented, “use labels like ‘criollo’ (creole) or ‘moreno’ rather than the ones black Mexicans tend to prefer. Peñaloza, for instance, describes himself as ‘afrodescendiente (of African descent), negro (black), or afromexicano (Afro-Mexican).’”Footnote 5
These responses to the INEGI’s statistics point to the demographic, social, cultural, and spatial politics of African-descended identities in Mexico, the subject of Finding Afro-Mexico. The black body buoyed the socially visible and politically active form of diasporic subjectivity that Peñaloza Pérez and Varagur desired. Conceived through some combination of physiological, ancestral, and sociological attributes, the racialized body has often been reduced to a biological typology that scholars and policy makers can count, whether to surveil and oppress African-descended peoples, to study them, or both.Footnote 6 However, the INEGI’s groundbreaking work – and the turn-of-the-century grassroots mobilizations that advocated for it – signified a stark about-face from the cultural and regional constructions of blackness that Mexican intellectuals, political officials, and cultural producers had crafted in the two centuries between Mexican independence and the publication of the intercensal survey.Footnote 7 To tell this history of how blackness became Mexican after the Revolution of 1910, this book integrates the political and cultural dimensions of the African Diaspora into Mexican nation-state formation and vice versa.
Finding Afro-Mexico contends that the celebratory refrains penned since the INEGI published its results have been erected on a false premise. The activists, scholars, and reporters who celebrated this newfound demographic visibility incorrectly assumed that Mexican nationalists uniformly sought to silence – if not erase – the country’s African heritage through mestizaje, a postcolonial project to craft a modern Mexico through the racial and cultural fusion of indigeneity and Spanishness.Footnote 8 The recuperation of blackness, however, was a much more piecemeal process than they have described. This history reveals the social, demographic, cultural, and spatial dimensions of racial visibility and invisibility that are all too often lumped together, represented by the racialized body. At the turn of the twentieth century, tropes of black disappearance left intellectuals, like sociologist and lawyer Andrés Molina Enríquez, assuming that African-descended peoples were, as he stated in 1909, “insignificant” to the course of Mexican history.Footnote 9 Yet, by the 1930s and 1940s, when the specter of global fascism placed the Revolution’s populist aims in conversation with the New Negro Movement, Afro-Cubanism, and other similar initiatives to refashion African-descended identities in the Atlantic world, enslaved Africans, often symbolized by Gaspar Yanga, entered the national narrative as patriotic rebels who foreshadowed postrevolutionary conceptions of social justice. These transnational dialogues provided a select but immensely well connected set of Mexican anthropologists, artists, and composers with the ethnographic methodologies to perceive and to discuss the similarities between the cultural expressions found in Mexico’s coastal regions and those of African-descended peoples in the United States, Cuba, and other American nations.Footnote 10 In other words, the descendants of colonial Mexico’s free and enslaved black populations slowly became visible, first culturally and spatially, then socially and demographically. For the first time since independence, ethnographers could study African-descended peoples and cultures, as anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán had in the decade preceding the 1958 publication of Cuijla: Esbozo etnográfico de un pueblo negro, the first book dedicated to blackness in postrevolutionary society.
The radicalization of Afro-diasporic politics in the 1960s, however, has cast aside Mexico’s cultural and spatial visions of its African heritage. It has imposed what Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant call “imperialist reason,” a foreign brand of diasporic authenticity, on Mexican history and society.Footnote 11 Characterized by the socially visible, racially conscious communities of the Anglophone world, an Afro-diasporic ideal-type has prevented Mexico from entering global conversations about blackness on its own terms.Footnote 12 As such, I ask, how did Mexican intellectuals and cultural producers construct African-descended identities as Mexican? By highlighting how Mexicans and their colleagues abroad discussed the nation’s African heritage – rather than how they did not discuss it – Finding Afro-Mexico illuminates an alternative history and politics of racial formation and diasporic consciousness-raising to the ones activists and scholars heralded after the publication of the INEGI’s data.
The intellectual and cultural histories I tell in Finding Afro-Mexico reveal the transnational interdisciplinary dialogues among the historians, anthropologists, writers and poets, composers, and artists in Mexico, the United States, and Cuba who selectively integrated the African Diaspora into Mexican nation-state formation and Mexico into the African Diaspora. Their constructions of Mexico’s African heritage expose the ontological boundaries of modern Mexican mestizaje and Afro-diasporic politics. The potential for blackness to be cultural or demographic, Mexican or foreign, visible or invisible gave postrevolutionary intellectuals, cultural producers, and policy makers the opportunity to articulate their global visions, ideological projects, racial fantasies, and democratic yearnings more freely than they could through other racial categories. While indigeneity had to be conceived locally, where communities could negotiate with or rebel against the state, blackness first and foremost lived among abstractions, articulated to cast a positive light on state racial policies: it fed Mexico’s claim to be free of the racism plaguing the United States. Blackness offered no specter of social or political revolution. No one had to write about it, and consequently every discussion of it was a radical act, pushing the boundaries of what and eventually who was Mexican and Afro-diasporic.
The African Diaspora in Mexico
The INEGI’s 2015 intercensal survey concluded a century-long project to document Mexico’s cultural and racial diversity. In 1910 Francisco I. Madero led the charge to overthrow Porfirio Díaz, a dictator who had ruled Mexico since 1876. His goal was political, to create electoral democracy, but he unleashed a social revolution that transformed the relationship between civil society and the state. Calls for popular political participation, social justice, and the cultural representation of the people – whether male or female, urban or rural, indigenous or mestizo (racially mixed) – abounded. As anthropologist Manuel Gamio proclaimed in 1916, the histories and cultures of every community needed to be studied so that government officials could design policies to integrate each region of the country respectfully and efficiently into a modern unified nation-state.Footnote 13
Although Mexicans gave primacy to indigeneity in their postrevolutionary ethnographic and historical accounts, they schematically wove African slavery into their narratives. Historians and social scientists constructed blackness and indigeneity in tandem. After all, the origins of the Atlantic slave trade could not be divorced from the precipitous decline of the indigenous population across the New World in the decades after Christopher Columbus set foot in the Caribbean, and Hernán Cortés, in Mexico. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese colonial economies could not have prospered without African slavery. Free and enslaved blacks and their mixed-race progeny frequently worked in sugar production and silver mining, but they were also ranchers, artisans, urban service workers, militiamen, and sailors, among countless other occupations.Footnote 14 From 1521 to 1640, Africans outnumbered Europeans in colonial Mexico. The urban settings of Veracruz, Guadalajara, and Mérida housed at least as many African-descended individuals as Spanish settlers. In 1646, while the Atlantic slave trade turned its attention to other parts of the New World, there were approximately 35,000 Africans and another 116,000 African-descended individuals residing in Spain’s most valuable colony.Footnote 15
By the nineteenth century, the place of blackness in Mexican society had entered troublesome terrain. With the resurgence of the indigenous population, the expansion of a racially mixed caste population, and a preference for free wage labor throughout the colony, slavery had fallen out of favor. Manumission – whether through the benevolence of slave owners and abolitionists, religious or political decree, or self-purchase – accelerated. Slavery only continued as a viable institution in sugar producing regions, like Veracruz, where the economic reverberations of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) created the opportunity for a race-based plantation economy to expand. When Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo called for Mexican independence on September 16, 1810, approximately 624,000 people, or 10 percent of the population, were of African descent.Footnote 16
During and after the wars of independence (1810–21), liberal elites proclaimed that all Mexicans should be defined by their vice or virtue, not their racial heritage. First professed by Father Hidalgo on that fateful September day, abolition blossomed into a fundamental component of Mexican nation-state formation: it signified the idea that all citizens must be treated equally under the law. Two African-descended generals, José María Morelos y Pavón and Vicente Guerrero, reasserted Hidalgo’s emancipatory sentiments respectively in 1813 and 1829. In between, wartime mobilization and other presidential decrees created new pathways to freedom.Footnote 17 For liberals, slavery and caste were intrinsically bound together as a sociological problem in need of extirpation – and blackness, its most pernicious social and demographic incarnation, needed to disappear. If a postcolonial fantasy rooted in national unity and racial harmony were to become a reality, then the new nation’s African heritage could only remain as a subject of historical inquiry buried in Spanish colonial archives.Footnote 18 As historian Peter Guardino explains for the state of Oaxaca in years leading up to and during the wars of independence, “Afromexicans had a symbolic weight that was much larger than their demographic weight.”Footnote 19 By the end of the nineteenth century, most liberal intellectuals and policy makers assumed that mestizaje, driven by the invisible hand of progress, rendered blackness socially and demographically invisible.Footnote 20
This liberal dedication to a race-blind society has shaped how academics search for African-descended peoples to investigate and how activists advocate for these historically ostracized communities. The claim that there are no longer any African-descended people has regularly been the point of departure for historical, ethnographic, and cultural inquiries into modern Mexico’s relationship to the African Diaspora. As such, it has become fashionable to lament the state of black identity in modern Mexico.Footnote 21 Defining “nonblackness” as a pillar of mestizaje, sociologist Christina A. Sue concludes that state racial policies, theoretically ensconced in doctrines of racial harmony, guarantee “the marginalization, neglect, or negation of Mexico’s African heritage.” A spate of scholarly accounts contends that African-descended peoples embraced – and continue to embrace – racial identities affixed to indigeneity to downplay their African heritage. Presuming archival and demographic sources do not exist, most historians choose to remain in the comfortable confines of the colonial period or, at best, continue to abolition, when liberal scripts destined African-descended peoples to social and demographic obscurity.Footnote 22
The historical and historiographic lacuna between abolition in 1829 and the emergence of popular organizations, like Sergio Peñaloza Pérez’s Black Mexico, at the end twentieth century casts Mexico’s African-descended peoples as historical spectators consigned to colonial slavery, just as the nation’s founders dreamed.Footnote 23 With the discussion of blackness reduced to the dichotomy between colonial visibility and postcolonial invisibility, mestizaje becomes nothing more than a euphemism for black disappearance. The possibility that it could also nourish democratic theories of nation-state formation built on popular suffrage, social justice, ethnic heterogeneity, and cultural pluralism vanishes.Footnote 24 Accordingly, the peculiarities of blackness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico and their relationships to the broader African Diaspora meet the same fate.Footnote 25 If African-descended communities continue only to be buried in the colonial past or to be ahistorically bound to contemporary ethnographic observations, then the cultural and political meanings of blackness remain fixed. The burden of diasporic consciousness-raising is left to academics and social activists from other regions of the Black Atlantic.Footnote 26
Census data – the clearest window into the state’s classification of the national populace – similarly points to the elision of blackness as a modern Mexican social reality just as it provides a rich source base for inquiries into colonial slavery.Footnote 27 Sociologist Mara Loveman explains that national censuses allow states “to acknowledge or champion the presence of some types of people within the nation, while rendering others officially invisible.” In isolation, demographic recordkeeping does not establish political legitimacy, even if it helps the state codify certain social categories as legitimate and visible and dismiss others as dangerous, unmodern, foreign, or insignificant. As a historical outlier, twentieth-century Mexico offers a unique point of entry into questions about the relationship between racial formations and diasporic identities in the Western Hemisphere. Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Venezuela – like Mexico – historically rejected biological concepts of race and instead employed cultural indicators like language, religion, and clothing to categorize its citizenry. Yet, until 2015, Mexico stood out as the only Latin American state always to recognize indigenous communities and never to distinguish its African-descended population.Footnote 28
Although scholars, policy makers, and activists cannot retroactively rectify blackness’s demographic invisibility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we can adjust the methodological and theoretical tools we use to study it. We have typically framed our cultural and social analyses of postindependence Mexican history in relation to the relative power of the pre- and postrevolutionary state. For the twentieth century, we ask, was the postrevolutionary state democratic? A modern Leviathan? Or, something in between?Footnote 29 The myriad relationships between local communities and the state have been the main points of departure for evaluating Mexican history and society. This approach presumes a social visibility – whether via self-identification, state-sponsored classification, or both – that the state failed to grant African-descended Mexicans until 2015. Thus, the descendants of enslaved Africans as well as more recent African-descended migrants from the Caribbean, many of whom fled Cuba’s wars of independence (1868–98), were incapable of using their ancestry to shape the political and social boundaries of nation-state formation; they could not enter the historical annals as racially conscious political actors in the same way that indigenous communities could.
To place the history of Mexican blackness, in all its political, social, and symbolic incarnations, in conversation with these examinations of democracy and authoritarianism, I contend that we must give primacy to the interplay between cultural expressions and intellectual currents. Of course, we cannot ignore local histories of community formation. Afro-diasporic organizations, such as Peñaloza Pérez’s Black Mexico, were instrumental in giving African-descended individuals state recognition for the first time since independence.Footnote 30 Understanding how Mexican intellectuals, cultural producers, and eventually local activists recovered the nation’s African heritage expands our understanding of the state’s racial policies, especially those focused on indigenous integration after the Second World War, when historians and anthropologists traditionally describe assimilationist and developmentalist policies as supplanting the postrevolutionary state’s pluralist agenda.Footnote 31 As such, I reframe questions about nation-state formation by examining the ways in which the Mexican state, if it wanted to be democratic or at least have the trappings of democracy, had to continuously refashion existing identities, like indigeneity, and introduce new ones, like blackness, into the nation’s social fabric.Footnote 32
Mexico in the African Diaspora
Afro-diasporic methodologies have similarly sidelined modern Mexico’s cultural and spatial visions of blackness. Postcolonial Mexican history forces us to consider a diasporic politics framed more by liberal racelessness than by the maintenance of a racial consciousness rooted in specific histories of migration and political exclusion.Footnote 33 After all, African-descended individuals, including independence-era leaders like José María Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, embraced assimilationist rhetoric and, in the name of egalitarianism, promoted homogenizing acts such as the abolition of caste categories.Footnote 34 The possibility of a politically charged racial consciousness, the lynchpin of Afro-diasporic methods, manifested itself more acutely within the social anxieties of the nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives who wanted to whiten the nation than with the political motivations of the African-descended peoples who wanted rid themselves of slavery’s stigmas. The liberal ideologies Mexico’s founding fathers articulated were not seen, either at the time or subsequently, as some variation on W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” or as a south-of-the-border version of Uncle-Tom-ism looking to curry favor with the lighter-skinned elite.Footnote 35 Rather they were an alternative vision of postemancipation society, one built on the political equality theoretically bestowed when vice and virtue unseated race and caste.
The mapping of blackness in Latin American nations points to the methodological limitations cast by a political fixation on social visibility. Historian George Reid Andrews deconstructs the time-honored practice to divide Latin America into its African-descended regions, which are etched into Afro-diasporic geographies, and its predominately indigenous areas, which are not. Demography grounds his approach: at least 5 percent of the nation’s populace must identify or be classified as African-descended to be part of Afro-Latin America. Accordingly, he includes Mexico in 1800, when it was a colony with race-based census data. The liberal rejection of racial categories forced him to state that there was “No data” in 1900. In 2000, there was an insufficient number of visible African-descended people to be included.Footnote 36 The tacit assumption that certain communities, regions, or nations can leave and even reenter the African Diaspora hovers over the history of blackness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico just as it does throughout Indo-Latin America.Footnote 37 This is especially apparent when we consider that colonial Mexico’s place in the Afro-diasporic world goes unquestioned but postrevolutionary Mexico’s is open to debate.
To query “Who is black?” is to be at odds with Mexican racial formations throughout most of the twentieth century.Footnote 38 However, black social and demographic invisibility neither suggests that Mexicans were unaware of diasporic movements in other American nations nor assumes thatAfrican-descended identities were antithetical to postrevolutionary nation-state formation. Finding Afro-Mexico shows that Mexican constructions of blackness were in constant dialogue with cultural and political projects such as the New Negro Movement and Black Nationalism in the United States, Afro-Cubanism, Haitian negrism, and Brazilian modernism.Footnote 39 The multiple disciplinary registers and cultural genres that rendered black identities socially visible in other countries also invigorated the postrevolutionary ethnographic mapping of African-descended cultures and then African-descended peoples.Footnote 40
Mexico’s unique relationship to slavery in the United States helps us understand the nation’s steadfast adherence to black social and demographic invisibility. When cotton producers in Texas declared their independence in 1836 and subsequently sought annexation to the United States, the contrast between Mexican abolition, on the one hand, and US slavery and racial discrimination, on the other, hardened.Footnote 41 This hallmark of Mexican nationalism diverged slightly from the rest of mainland Spanish America, where the leaders of independence and the liberal intellectuals and statesmen who followed them affixed their respective claims of racial harmony more to the condemnation of the Spanish caste system than to US westward expansion. In this regard, Mexico’s mid-century racial comparisons foreshadowed the more well-known rhetorical flourishes condemning US segregation articulated by Cuba’s José Martí in the 1880s and 1890s, Mexico’s José Vasconcelos in 1925, and Brazil’s Gilberto Freyre and Arthur Ramos in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 42
The perceptibility of blackness in Mexico had a different foil than in nations, like the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, where black bodies have been a point of departure for scholars, activists, and policy makers. In regions where black social visibility has gone unquestioned, its opposite has been invisibility: exclusion from politics, history, and culture. As African American novelist Ralph Ellison proclaimed in his prologue to Invisible Man in 1952, “I am invisible, understand, simply, because people refuse to see me … When they approach me they only see my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.”Footnote 43 Drawing on Ellison, philosopher Charles W. Mills defines African American history and society in relation to the invisibility – in other words, the dehumanization – that has been thrust onto the black body. “For blacks,” he writes, “the body thus necessarily becomes central in a way it does not for whites, since this is the visible marker of black invisibility.” In Mexico, the opposite was true until 2015. The Mexicans who grappled with the legacies of slavery described blackness in a manner more akin to what Mills calls “invisibly visible”: its social and demographic absence facilitated its transformation into a culturally visible, universalized symbol of racial egalitarianism, social justice, and national modernity.Footnote 44
Historicizing Mexican Blackness
To understand contemporary Mexican constructions of blackness in all their vicissitudes, the intellectual and cultural histories of black identity need to be told. Mexico’s unique vision of its African heritage, however, makes this narrative more difficult to recount without imposing racial vocabularies, politics, and ontologies from elsewhere in the diaspora onto Mexico’s past, present, and future. As such, Mexicans concerned with tropes of diasporic authenticity have selectively embraced and rejected negro for its emphasis on phenotype not ancestry.Footnote 45 For some scholars and activists, the term Afro-descendant has the potential not only to overcome the pernicious nomenclatures of Spanish colonialism but also to unite communities of African descent through their common history of exploitation and exclusion.Footnote 46 In certain communities, especially in the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz, terms like mulatto, moreno (dark-skinned, brown, or indigenous), and jarocho (a colloquialism in the region surrounding the city of Veracruz) are used in daily conversations to reference blackness in racial, cultural, or spatial terms.Footnote 47 Neologisms – such as afromestizo, which signifies a racially mixed person or culture predominantly of African descent – have gained academic appeal in Mexico and, to a lesser degree, the United States. Moreover, Mexico lacks a clear genealogy of racial vocabularies that, for instance, mirrors the linear progression from Negro to Black to African American in the United States. Even the increasingly common fusion of blackness and nationality – African American, Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, etc. – has not acquired the grassroots support seen elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.Footnote 48
For the sake of clarity, I use the racial vocabularies found in my sources, along with their contexts and connotations, as accurately as possible. The frequency with which Mexican scholars, cultural producers, and policy makers looked abroad, especially to the United States and Cuba, to corroborate their empirical observations further complicates matters. These polyglot dialogues bridged national mythologies, political ideologies, and cultural imaginaries. The racial terminologies used by Mexicans and foreigners concerned with blackness in Mexico were palimpsests reflecting the diasporic visions and perceived daily realities of nations where African-descended identities were socially identifiable as well as the dictums of Mexican nationalism that nourished black cultural and spatial visibility alongside black social and demographic invisibility.Footnote 49 In this context, the term African American is especially problematic, since Mexicans, like almost all Latin Americans, consider themselves to be Americans. Without an alternative elegant way to distinguish African-descended peoples in the United States from those in Mexico or other parts of the Western Hemisphere, I use African American solely to describe African-descended US citizens.Footnote 50
Because the intellectuals and cultural producers I analyze moved between disciplines and across multiple regional and national spaces, so do my sources. Anthropological, musical, historical, and literary texts written by a small but influential group of Mexicans and their colleagues provide the most extended discussions of blackness in Mexico. Newspaper and magazine articles as well as archival repositories dedicated to specific institutions and individuals provide me with the intellectual genealogies, transnational networks, and disciplinary debates necessary to enliven these published documents. Of course, Mexico’s relationship to the African Diaspora was not one-sided; it was part of the nation’s intellectual and artistic engagement with political and cultural movements on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, archives dedicated to prominent African Americans – like W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Katherine Dunham – help explain the cultural and political convergences and divergences between Mexico and the African Diaspora.
My sources, their authors and intended audiences, and their spatial orientations are exceptionally varied. I found no archival folders or boxes dedicated specifically to blackness in twentieth-century Mexico, let alone a national archive tasked with the singular purpose of preserving it. I had to trace the intellectual and cultural networks found in letters, footnotes, and institutions to connect these disparate ideational threads. A few Mexicans, all of whom were men and none of whom were of African descent, stand out for their devotion to the subject. Most of them arrived at the subject through other pursuits. Artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904–57) participated in the New Negro Movement and in archeological expeditions to determine whether the cultural expressions he investigated were indigenous, African-descended, or some combination thereof. Composers Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) and Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (1898–1967) moved between modernist and indigenist networks as they used jazz to recognize and modernize the nation’s African-descended melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. Marxist José Mancisidor (1894–1956) moved effortlessly between fiction and nonfiction to craft a national narrative that celebrated slave revolts and venerated the abolition of slavery and caste. Only two of the individuals I analyze in Finding Afro-Mexico consciously set out to integrate blackness into the nation’s historical narrative and cultural landscape: Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908–96), an anthropologist who scholars and activists universally consider to be the founder of Afro-Mexican studies, and poet Francisco Rivera (1908–94), the official chronicler of the city of Veracruz.
Aguirre Beltrán, Baqueiro Foster, Chávez, Covarrubias, Mancisidor, and Rivera are at the center of Finding Afro-Mexico, because they constructed blackness as Mexican more coherently than their colleagues, who only referenced it while they researched other aspects of the histories and cultures of Mexico or the African Diaspora. As members of the generation born just before the 1910 Revolution, these six intellectuals and cultural producers came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, when modernist ethnographers and artists across the Atlantic world rejected the nineteenth-century racial hierarchies that justified the colonization of Africa and Asia and that proclaimed the absolute superiority of Western civilization.Footnote 51 Accordingly they shared a steadfast belief that the study of Mexico’s African heritage would make the postrevolutionary state socially just, culturally pluralist, and politically inclusive. With the exception of Rivera, all of them also worked with major state institutions, ranging from the INBA to the INI, as they undertook their respective projects to refashion blackness, indigeneity, and mestizaje. Most importantly, they embodied Mexico’s cultural conception of race. Blackness, they argued from their disparate spatial and disciplinary positions, had its roots in a history of cultural production and consumption, not a history of biological race; it could be enjoyed, studied, and constructed by anyone, even individuals like themselves who did not claim to possess any African ancestry.Footnote 52
The first part of Finding Afro-Mexico traces the historical, cultural, and ethnographic visions of blackness from independence to the early 1940s. It culminates with the state’s selective embrace of black cultural and symbolic visibility during the socialist policies of the Lázaro Cárdenas presidency (1934–40). Chapter 1 describes the historical, archeological, and cultural currents that rendered blackness socially and demographically invisible after independence. A hallmark of nineteenth-century liberalism, the trope of black disappearance left Mexican nationalists without a coherent ideology on which to construct blackness prior to, during, and immediately after the 1910 Revolution. In sum, this chapter establishes a political and historiographic foundation for the evolution of Mexican blackness after the 1910 Revolution. In the 1930s, as the next two chapters detail, Marxism, modernism, and antifascism provided new political and aesthetic platforms to render blackness Mexican. Chapter 2 treats the Marxist historians who placed enslaved Africans and their descendants in the national pantheon. Black insurgency, Mancisidor and his compatriots claimed, helped lay the foundation for Mexican independence, postcolonial racial egalitarianism, and the Mexican Revolution. Chapter 3 turns to cultural sources – many of which had direct ties to Mancisidor, Covarrubias, or Chávez – to show the transnational manifestations of this black radical tradition.
The second part of Finding Afro-Mexico examines how the racialization of culture in specific local and regional spaces set the stage for blackness to become socially and demographically visible after the Second World War. Chapters 4 and 5 highlight the innovations in anthropology and ethnomusicology that provided the theoretical and methodological rigor necessary for Mexicans to find African cultural retentions in contemporary society.Footnote 53 Chapter 4 traces Mexico’s entrance into Afro-diasporic cultural politics. Mexican, Afro-Cubanist, and African American interests converged during the Second World War, when Mexico transformed into an ideal site for the inter-American study of indigenous and African-descended peoples and cultures. These antifascist conversations inspired Aguirre Beltrán and Covarrubias to construct the nation’s African heritage for the first time. To examine the ascription of race and culture to space, Chapter 5 turns to Baqueiro Foster’s investigations into the music of Veracruz, especially the musical genres encompassing “La bamba.” This case study reveals how Mexican composers and Afro-diasporic performers, namely, Katherine Dunham, defined Veracruz’s soundscapes as Afro-Caribbean.
After the Second World War, social visibility slowly began to define blackness in Mexico. In this context, Chapters 6 and 7 and the Conclusion foreground the multiple relationships between Mexican nationalism and Afro-diasporic methodologies in Cuba and the United States. Chapter 6 discusses popular culture, especially Rivera’s poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His local response to the everyday forms of nation-state formation demonstrates how little the elite constructions of blackness detailed in previous chapters permeated the public sphere. Reading the same Afro-Cubanist ethnographers and writers who helped Baqueiro Foster and Dunham Africanize “La bamba,” Rivera adopted an Afro-Cuban vernacular to denounce the pace of postrevolutionary progress and assert the port city’s musical and historical relationship to the African Diaspora. While music of Veracruz detailed in Chapters 5 and 6 tied regional cultural expressions to what is now called the Black Atlantic, the ethnographic and artistic constructions of blackness examined in Chapter 7 consider the political stakes surrounding the black body in Mexican nation-state formation and the global dimensions of African American activism. In part by focusing on the intellectual and cultural networks surrounding Aguirre Beltrán and Covarrubias, Chapter 7 explains how African Americans and Mexicans looking to make blackness socially visible articulated two disparate definitions of what and who was authentically African-descended. Finally, the Conclusion traces the evolution of blackness in Mexico – its spatial orientations, histories, and relationships to culture, society, and the black body – in the years leading up to the 2015 intercensal survey. It uses the transnational histories detailed throughout Finding Afro-Mexico to examine recent debates about the legacies of the long 1960s, post-racial societies, Afro-diasporic methodologies, and the politics of racial comparison.
