Chapter 5 traces Mexico’s entrance into Afro-diasporic music and dance by exploring how “La bamba” acquired an African heritage. In the decades following the 1910 Revolution, this popular song, and the musical genres affiliated with it, gradually lost its affiliation with indigeneity. In the 1930s and 1940s, composer and ethnomusicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster stated to classify “La bamba” as African-descended and composed Huapangos based on his ethnomusicological research. Mexico’s celebration of black music, including Baqueiro Foster’s arrangement of “La bamba,” set the stage for African American dancer, choreographer, and ethnographer Katherine Dunham to situate “La bamba” with the Afro-Caribbean world once she bought the rights to Baqueiro Foster’s composition and used it to choreograph the ballet Veracruzana, which her Afro-diasporic dance troupe performed across the world. In tracing this cultural history, this chapter argues that the racialization of “La bamba” was a spatial process: as Mexican, Cuban, and African American intellectuals attached the song to Veracruz, the state most associated with the history of the African slave trade, it also became more African and less indigenous.

Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.