Mexico is commonly viewed as a mestizo country, the successful result of the intermixing of its pre-Hispanic Indians and their Spanish conquerors. In fact, mestizo as an ideology has been an official doctrine of the post-revolutionary Mexican state that began moving toward consolidation in the 1930s. The Indian and Spanish contribution to the creation of Mexican national identity is an unquestionable reality. But a third component of that identity has less often been taken into consideration: the presence and representation in Mexico of people of the African Diaspora.
Africans arrived in the Mexican territory during the 300-year colonial period between 1521 and 1821. Their coming was mainly a result of the slave trade and the increasing labor needs of Spanish colonists. Africans were scattered throughout the territory, although heavily concentrated in labor intensive work areas such as sugar estates, silver mines, obrajes (sweatshops), and domestic urban services. The total number of African slave laborers that arrived from 1521 to 1817, when the slave trade was abolished, is generally estimated to be around 200,000.
Today, even for many Mexicans, the historical presence of African peoples in Mexico is largely unknown and ignored. Nevertheless, recognizable communities of Afro-Mexicans persist and endure in the country. Only recently, partly as a result of the celebration of the quincentennial of the arrival of Columbus, has the "Third Root" (the African component of Mexican society) begun to be recognized. Communities of people of African descent are relatively small, rural, and to some extent isolated. Although figures purporting to represent the number of people of African descent in the country are not very reliable, estimates are that around 1 percent of Mexico's total population of 80 million can be identified as being of African origins.
Black Girl with White Flower
Mango Creek, Belize
Black girl, white flower
AFRICA'S LEGACY IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Photograph by Tony Gleaton
cat #311 9.5x 1992
"When I arrived in Mexico about two decades ago to begin research
on the early history of Africans and their descendants there, a young
student politely told me that I was embarking on a wild goose chase.
Mexico had never imported slaves from Africa, he said, fully certain that
the nation's peoples of African descent were relatively recent arrivals."
COLIN A. PALMER
African Mexicans are often identified as Afromestizos: like people of African descent everywhere, the process of mestizaje is evident, although their distinctiveness phenotypically is unquestionably African in origin. The communities of African peoples in Mexico are also characterized by a distinctive culture and by African "biological remembrances," to use Rene Dubos' term as a way to allude to shared physical or physiognomical characteristics.
Mexicans of African descent are geographically concentrated in two areas along the central coasts of the country: in central Veracruz on the Gulf coast, and along the Pacific coast in the area known as Costa Chica, located in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. The communities of Mata Clara and Coyolillo are two examples of towns in Veracruz with relatively large African Mexican populations. In the Costa Chica region several settlements have a strong African presence, including the state of Guerrero's Huehuetan, San Marcos, Cuajinicuilapa, Maldonado, San Nicolás, and Cruz Grande, and the state of Oaxaca's Tacubaya, Lo de Soto, Santo Domingo, Corralero, and Pinotepa Nacional.
Maroonage, "The condition of living as a fugitive slave," is one of many factors that contributed to community coherence and therefore to the maintenance of distinctiveness in Mexican communities of African descent. Maroonage in New Spain, as in other places in the Americas, was a constant and important phenomenon throughout the colonial period. As early as 1523, maroons were reported in the area of Oaxaca, where they had fled to escape slavery.
The flight of freedom-seeking Africans often led to the establishment of communities in places of difficult access, where the maroons resisted the attacks of armies and slave owners who sought to recapture them. Generally, these communities were eradicated, but occasionally they succeeded not only in surviving but also in getting official recognition as legal towns. Extensive research on the African Diaspora in other areas of the Americas has demonstrated that maroon communities were not unusual. Indeed, they were important elements in the New World reproduction and maintenance of distinctive African peoples and cultures. In Mexico there are at least two notable examples of this kind of developmental process, where Africans acting in their own interest transformed themselves into viable communities. In each of these places, people of African descent managed not only to resist and defeat military attacks but also to negotiate successfully with the colonial Mexican state: they obtained their freedom and the recognition of their towns from royal officers.
San Lorenzo de los Negros (later named San Lorenzo Cerralvo and now called Yanga) is one of the most celebrated and famous cases. In 1570 in the area of Cordoba and Orizaba in central Veracruz, a slave revolt was led by an enslaved African named Yanga (also known as Naga or Nanga). After unsuccessful attempts to defeat him, Spanish authorities finally decided to negotiate their demands in 1608. The community was then physically moved several times, and in 1655, was established in its current location. In 1932, the town was renamed in honor of Yanga.
El Returno de Odysses
The Return of Ulysses
Nicaragua
Young man on boat
AFRICA'S LEGACY IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Photograph by Tony Gleaton
cat #340 14x14 1992
'`History has not been kind to the achievements of African peoples in Mexico. It is only within recent times that their lives hare been studied and their contributions to Mexican society illuminated. Suffice to say, contemporary Black Mexicans can claim this proud legacy and draw strength from it, even as they become a shrinking part of their country's peoples." COLIN A. PALMER
The case of Mandinga (later named Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Morenos de Amapa or Pueblo Nuevo de la Real Corona) is a similar one. In 1735, enslaved Africans in the area on the borders of the modern states of Veracruz and Oaxaca held several major uprisings. Eventually, some of the runaway slaves moved to an old maroon sanctuary located in the mountains in the margins of the Amapa river. In that place, African maroons established six communities, including Palacios de Mandinga. As in the case of San Lorenzo de los Negros, former slaves living in Mandinga successfully struggled to gain their liberty and achieve recognition as an established settlement.
The picture that emerges from the study of these two cases is one of a strong African community that exhibited what may in retrospect be viewed as contradictory tendencies.
It may be argued, however, that these actions directly aided the development of maroon communities. Over time, these communities evolved from groups of runaway slaves, composed almost entirely of adult males, highly mobile and dependent upon marauding for their survival, to more settled and independent heterogenous bodies seeking alternative economic and political strategies to survive. Were they trapped in this contradiction? How imperative was it for these African people to forge a wider solidarity with other freedom-seeking peoples in order to survive as individuals and as a group? How, in fact, did their arrangement with the Spanish authorities work in reality? Was there, for example, any possibility for the existence of an "underground" network to circumvent the arrangement?
In other cases, such as in the Costa Chica region, maroons joined pre-existing communities of people of African descent where they remained safe by reason of their isolation. Examples include Cuajinicuilapa, San Nicolas, and Maldonado in the modern state of Guerrero. There, maroons coming from Huatulco and the sugar estates of Izucar joined free Africans and slaves who were settled in the cattle and cotton estates.
Throughout the colonial period, maroon communities became mixed towns that included Indians, Spaniards, and mestizos. Such diversity has contributed in many ways to the physical persistence of communities of African descent in Mexico. Yanga, for instance, cannot today be strictly called a community of African descent. Yet the earlier form of this community has played a crucial role in the area. Its very name and the existence there of a statue of Yanga can, in objective terms, contribute to a recognition of a history involving the African "Third Root;" the statue is a physical reminder of the African origins of an important sector of the population. Yet the monument only externalizes the memory in geographical space. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to see greater retrieval of the experiences of African people as a meaningfully recognized aspect of Mexican history and national identity.
Recently, local authorities in Yanga have attempted to manipulate this past, organizing a carnival in celebration of the "foundation of the first free town of the Americas." African diplomats of the Ivory Coast have been honored guests at this celebration, which features a parade characterized by local distortions of "Africanness." Observed at the carnival in 1989, however, was a group of Afromestizo dancers from the community of Mata Clara: their presence was the most legitimate aspect of this imagined and reconstructed past.
Sin Título
Untitled
Quibdo, Choco Columbia
Black boy in water with boat
AFRICA'S LEGACY IN SOUTH AMERICA
Photograph by Tony Gleaton
cat #405 9x9 1994
Our institution, the African Diaspora Research Project of Michigan State University, shares with researchers in many parts of the world an interest in facilitating greater understanding of the past, present, and future of African peoples in Mexico and throughout the Americas as well as in India, the Middle East, and other locations. One of the underlying objectives we all hold is to create stronger recognition of the historical memory and ongoing experiences of African peoples as significant and valued roots in national identities in these diverse locales. We also continue to work to uncover the sociocultural, political, and economic dimensions that are so critical to understanding aspects of identity formation among peoples of African descent themselves.
Historically, what does it mean to develop a definition of self and community as a group and as individuals of African descent‹ in the particular demographic configuration of colonial and contemporary Mexico? The Mexican experience may provide insights into the nature of race and class factors in identity formation in other subpopulations of the African Diaspora.
RUTH SIMMS HAMILTON AND JAVIER TÉLLEZ
Dr. Ruth Simms Hamilton is professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs Programs at Michigan State University and Principal Investigator and Project Director for the university's African Diaspora Research Project. Her work at the university and her studies of Africa and the African Diaspora have earned her a number of awards and honors, including the 1987 Distinguished Faculty Award of the Michigan Association of Governing Boards and the 1991 Distinguished Scholar Award of the Association of Black Sociologists. She has served on the Study Commission for the U.S. Policy Toward Southern Africa and is a Trustee Emeritus of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. This article is based on research she has conducted with Javier Téllez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University and a research assistant with the African Diaspora Research Project; the article originally appeared in Conexões, the publication of the ADRP, and is reprinted with permission of the ADRP and Michigan State University.'`The most important aspect of my portraits," says Los Angeles-based artist Tony Gleaton, "is the giving of a narrative voice by visual means to people deemed invisible by the, greater part of society and, in so doing, crafting an 'alternative iconography' of beauty, family, love, goodness. . . one that is parallel to but outside the bounds of European-based art, one that is inclusive, not exclusive." Mr. Gleaton's photographs are in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and many other institutions, and his work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Mexico. The images shown here are from his project entitled Tengo Casi 500 Años [Almost 500 Years]: Africa's Legacy in Mexico, Central and South America. A selection of Mr. Gleaton's photographs is on view in the Exposition Park museum through 1997.
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This page is part of the "AFRICA: One Continent. Many Worlds." web site. All photographic images and text contained within these web pages ARE COPYRIGHTED and may not be commerically reproduced, or utilized in any manner, without the prior written consent the owner. Reprinted from TERRA Volume 34, Number 5; September/October 1997, Africa's Legacy in Mexico. All artwork on this page is courtesy of Tony Gleaton, © Tony Gleaton. Page by Aida Pavletich |