Afro Mexico

[Oshun_Auset]

The 2nd president of Mexico, Vicente Guerrero was an Afro-Mexican...



Here are some links to Afro Mexican info...
http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/libAfroMex.htm


Mexico Fails to Acknowledge Its Los Negros History
Lorenzzo Covarrubias
http://www.dailynexus.com/opinion/2001/518.html

Mexico has definitely changed since the 1990s. It joined a powerful commercial block with the United States and Canada, known as the North American Free Trade Agreement. Its people elected a president from an opposition party, something that had not happened in 70 years. And, to boot, the country's indigenous populations rallied behind an insurgency in the state of Chiapas, which sought, among other things, the respect for indigenous customs and rights.

For our purposes, the one change that over time may affect the country profoundly, was a constitutional amendment which, for the first time, established Mexico as a plural society. The amendment was designed to give voices to the different ethnic groups throughout the land and to give breathing space for the numerous non-Catholic religious groups. It was also a smoke signal to the stifling one-party rule of the past to open up the political system before it crashed under its own weight.

One effect, though, that can significantly alter the social and ethnic relations of the country, is the painfully difficult, yet steady, emergence of a group long forgotten by all constituted groups that make up the official Mexican mosaic: Los Negros, Mexico's official, yet unrecognized, third cultural and racial root.

Mexican blacks have had a long and storied history in the country. Yet it is a story that is denied, not shared and officially obscured. It is that amendment that is acting as a resource for localized responses to this major oversight of Mexican history. Groups of AfroMestizos (or AfricanoMexicanos, as I prefer to know them) have started to organize and to demand a stronger acceptance of their historical role in the shaping of the country's Mexican-ness, or national character.

Over the last few years, museums have begun to pay attention to this forgotten group. And, more importantly, museums emphasizing the African Mexican experience are appearing, and even more are planned. One is in the town of Cuaji, in the Guerrero and Oaxaca border, which finally incorporates the regional black history in its description of what is known as the Costa Chica, an area between Acapulco and Puerto Angel/Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast.

But why has it taken so long for Mexico's blacks to finally begin to be recognized as the country's third root? Wasn't it enough to let the numbers speak? For example, 200 years since the conquest, New Spain (Mexico) had doubled the size of Africans over Europeans. And, despite the country's excuse toward slavery as something the Spanish did, from the 1500s to the 1700s, Mexico was the principal destination and port of entry for African slaves in the entire New World!

Part of the reason for this historical and racial amnesia rests in at least two reasons. One is Mexico's unique form of mestizaje, an idealized form of racial and cultural mixing that states that Mexican people are the result of European and indigenous mixing. This official stance, long taught in elementary schools throughout the country, unequivocally left out the peoples of African (or Asian) descent.

Another cause, I believe, is this country's own trajectory of blacks. The United States had such a virulent, racially motivated slavery system, that Mexico is content to let the United States keep the grand prize. If Mexico were to emphasize the key, yet tragic, role that Africans had in the economic development of the country, attention might be diverted from that other North American country which still cannot come to terms with this crucial past.

Mexico's third-root movement, though not yet strong or long enough to reshape Mexican history completely, is beginning to be noticed. The Mexican government's "Culture Office" of sorts, has officially funded a program to bring out the AfricanoMexicanos' hidden past. Local researchers from universities in Guerrero (and Veracruz in the Caribbean coast, the other region with strong black legacies), are creating an African Mexican studies discipline of sorts - finally, after the Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran proposed it in the 1940s!

Our own UCSB is in the middle of it too. Dr. Seth Fisher, from the Sociology Dept., with several other members of the Black and Chicano studies units on campus, attended a binational conference on issues of ethnicity, poverty and blackness in the port of Acapulco. Myself, I'm toying with the idea of a course on the AfricanoMexicano historical and cultural experience, surely to open up vast stores of hidden knowledge that will definitely have a positive effect on ethnic issues affecting us today.

La Tercera Rar'z, as the movement is known, has a long and difficult road ahead. Cultural and historical concepts, and the reality they socially construct, are slow to change. Countless Mexicans (and Mexican Americans/Chicanos) have no idea of this part of Mexico's path. The common and popular view is that in Mexico no hay negros. If we have darker than usual skin, we blame it on the hot sun or on some group of unusually darker indigenous group.

We have been denied the knowledge of that other integral past of our history, the Third Root. Plurarity is a process, not a given. Welcome home, tercera ra'z.

[Oshun_Auset]

http://www.mumia.org/wwwboard/messages/354.html

AFRICAN HERITAGE STRONG IN MEXICO

By Michele Gibbs

In the current political cauldron that is Mexico, another force has boiled to the surface. "Los Pueblos Negros," whose power is not in arms, but in their continued cultural and physical survival as home for a distinct people, have formally convened for the first time in their history.

For three days this spring, the small farming village of El Ciruelo [The Plum, pop: 1,000] on the Costa Chica of Oaxaca hosted more than 200 other Afro-Mexicanos representing 30 neighboring settlements for the "Primer Encuentro de Pueblos Negros." They met to consider the following questions:

What is the origin and history of your community? What festivals are celebrated in this community and how are they organized? In what ways does a Black identity live in your community? What are the daily relations of Blacks with others?

A key figure in convening these pueblos is Father Glyn Jemott, a 51-year-old Black priest from Trinidad based in El Ciruelo for the past twelve years. He itemizes the goals of the meeting in this way: "We are here to relate our common history as black people, to strengthen our union as communities, to organize and open realizable paths to secure our future, and to resist our marginalization in the life of the Mexican nation."

The African presence in Mexico has been a recorded fact since well before Columbus. The giant Olmec heads carved from stone, dated at 700 B.C, bear witness. The first successful maroon rebellion in the Americas has been attributed to an African named Yanga who established an independent state in the l6th Century in what is now Jalapa in the mountains above Vera Cruz, Mexico.

Widely dispersed during the colonial period, Africans, both slave and free, worked in sugar production, mining exploration, and the emerging factory system in the major cities of New Spain. Their physical presence and cultural influence were widespread, generally acknowledged, and distinct.

By the l9th Century, however, the black population was significant only along the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, specifically Vera Cruz and the forty-five fishing and farming 'pueblos negros' of Oaxaca and Guerrero. In fact, popular idiom refers to this population as "Las Coste Fas" (the coastal people). Thus, Diaspora geography supplanted ancestry in the official imagination.

Ironically, relative isolation and the need for self-reliance have worked to preserve many pre-colonial cultural patterns among this people. The 'corridos' - improvised songs chronicling local events - reflect oral traditions inherited from Africa. The African imprint can clearly be seen in the masks worn for the Dance of the Devil performed during Holy Week every year. Circular family compounds are still common. And every day, down on the docks and in the smallest fishing villages, methods of work centuries-old prevail.

The abolition of the juridical color-caste system after Mexico won its independence from Spain created a new contradiction. In the name of progressive cultural pluralism, Mexico declared itself a mestizo nation. The practical result of this official national consciousness, coupled with the mystique of the "Indian," has been to consign the Afro-Mexicano to near invisibility.

Although the work of committed ethno-historians (notably Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran) has kept alive awareness of Mexico's Tercera Raiz (third root) in academic circles and art historians such as Robert Farris Thompson have documented contemporary African cultural survivals in Mexico, the ongoing lives of these communities remain opaque to the popular gaze. Worse, the estimated 600,000 Afro-Mexicanos, who are not counted separately in the statistics as a group in this country, have been prevented from knowing of each other.

Now, the people themselves have raised their voices to declare their own reality to Mexico and the world. This, more than anything else, makes it a landmark meeting.Corcuera Morga, one of the Conference organizers, said:

"It isn't defensible that government statistics say the Black race doesn't exist. Yes, we are here; and well-represented. To be forgotten is worse than racism."

At the conclusion of the Encuentro, participants pledged to continue the tasks of information-gathering in their home communities, expanding contacts, and preparing for 'stage two' of the process when they reconvene next year in San Jose Estancia Grande, Oaxaca. Interestingly enough, this cry for recognition and respect parallels recent demands from the Garifuna, an Afro-Carib people of maroon origin inhabiting the coast and off-shore islands of Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. The formal petition of the Honduran Garifuna (est. pop.: 300,000) for recognition as an autonomous culture, preservation of ancestral land rights, proportional representation and collective entitlements from the Honduran government is the first collective action on their part as well.

From Oaxaca, it looks like the links between us are getting stronger.