It could be called a revelatory moment, learning about the presence, history, and culture of Black people in Mexico. For Jorge Gonzalez, a college course on the ethno-history of Oaxaca first gave him answers to questions that had been tugging at him for a long time.
“There was a day where we talked about the African presence in Mexico, and I had never heard of any of that. It blew my mind and a lot of things started connecting for me…(It) explained why one of my aunts has very kinky hair, and there are Black features in some of us,” he says. “I started realizing that the Black presence has been around since colonization, since Cortez arrived to Mexico, and has played a fundamental role in shaping the culture, from the very depths of what it means to be Mexican and everything that has to do with Mexican pride.”
Gonzalez has been studying the African diasporic presence in Mexico since the early 2000s, tracing his own family’s roots in Sahuayo, Michoacan, Mexico in the 18th century when it was majority Black, to the recent government recognition of Afro-Mexicans on the country’s 2020 census (for the first time in at least 200 years, according to Minority Rights Group). On Feb. 26, he’ll discuss “Afro-Mexicanos: Mexico Officially Recognizes its Black Citizens” at 6:30 p.m. at the Shiley Special Events Suite at the Central Library in downtown San Diego (registration is free). Gonzalez, who is the director of the Afro-Mexican department at the WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park, is also the author of “The (Re)construction of Blackness in Costa Chica, Oaxaca: NGOs and the Making of an Afro-Mexican Ethnic Group”; his work has been published in “Converging Identities: Blackness in the Modern African Diaspora”; and he shares African diasporic global music when he’s spinning tracks as DJ Mafondo. He took some time to talk about his lecture, why its taken so long for Afro-Mexicans to be recognized and acknowledged in their own country, and how this recognition is a step toward dismantling anti-Black racism in Mexico. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: The human rights organization, Minority Rights Group, notes that Mexico had a larger enslaved African population than other countries in the Americas, with more than 200,000 people and outnumbering the Spanish population until the early 19th century. While there appears to be a period where the Black population was documented, that stopped in the 1800s. What happened? Why has it taken more than 200 years for the country’s government to recognize its Black citizens?
A: Just like in the United States, integrationist theory and integrationist movements were real in Mexico. They were trying to centralize a nation state. In the 1940s, a lot of anthropologists of the time were ing the government and thinking, ‘How do we create a nation state? What is it going to require">a mix of Indigenous and Spanish]. It was a national project to sell this idea that we’re all one people, we’re all one race. That Mexicans, all of a sudden, were categorized to one specific race, and that left out the African presence because the makeup was European and Indigenous, period. That is, to this day, very problematic. That project worked. In fact, a lot of what I’m going to share in my presentation talks about all of the erasure that happened. A lot of the famous Mexican scholars in the ‘40s and ‘50s were creating that erasure. One of the grandfathers of Afro-Mexican history [Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran] was involved, as well. He pretty much went to do an ethno-history of the first, Black community of this town called Cuajinicuilapa, or Cuaji, for shot. He basically told the Mexican government that by the 1960s, within 20 years, the Black population would disappear, that they would blend in with other races. He was wrong. These Black communities are still there today. The result has been, because of that erasure, because of not giving them the ethnic rights the Indigenous population was able to obtain, the Black population has never gotten their own funding or their department or policies in place. This was, in large part, because of what this anthropologist was claiming at the time, that there’s no need to document the ethnic history of these communities because it was a matter of time before they were erased. It was systemically done, this wasn’t by accident. It was a complete racist approach to centralizing and creating a nation state by erasing this history.
Then, when UNESCO got involved, they put a lot of pressure on Mexico to be part of this xenophobia and racism conference that took place in Durban [World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001], and Mexico ed for the first time. They sent a delegation to come back with information on, ‘Where are we going wrong? What’s missing with our country"> (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd&cid=1ffe15d6-eb53-11e9-b4d2-06948452ae1a'; cnx.cmd.push( function() { cnx( { playerId: "8b64ff35-2d21-481e-88ae-8562dded85bd" } ).render( "11982501ceb44352bd1e95848c612274" ); } );
Q: Can you talk a little about Gaspar Yanga and Vicente Guerrero? Who were they and why are the significant to Afro-Mexican history, and Mexican history in general?
A: Yeah, 1609, Gaspar Yanga liberated the first Black, free community of the Americas, from what we know. He created this town called San Lorenzo de los Negros, which was the original name. About 300 to 500 people went up the mountain and lived there free and even had a legal document with the Spanish monarch at the time, that they wouldn’t interfere or get in their business. They had a legal document that claimed their freedom, to be in autonomy. That town, today, is called Yanga. He was a revolutionary of his time. He was able to build alliances with Indigenous populations in Veracruz and did a few revolts, which stopped a lot of the trade that was starting to occur between Veracruz and the colonization that was happening in Mexico City, at the time. He was able to deliver votes, he was able to, essentially, tax a lot of merchandise that was going through the area, and he was able to build a small economy through some of these revolts that he did and things that he gained as a result. To this day, there’s a monument of him in the town of Yanga. We see Black, marooned communities in Colombia, you have them in Brazil. Slave revolts were pretty prominent. Yanga was one revolutionary that there’s documentation, but there were other revolts happening in Oaxaca and on the Pacific side, as well, that are not documented to the extent that Yanga was. This narrative that comes out of this free slave and revolutionary, that’s something very common from the Americas and in the Caribbean. We start seeing the Haitian Revolution, first, and it created a whole ripple effect. Then, there was a lot of communication happening that oftentimes we don’t think about. The slave trade also provided a lot of information that appeared all the way up until the 18th century.
Vicente Guerrero became the first Black president of the Americas, similar to what we thought Obama was, but he was like the original Obama. He was of African and Spanish descent, he was originally a geologist by trade and became president in the 1820s, and was our Abraham Lincoln. He helped write the constitutional rights and abolish slavery, which was huge. This was before the United States. You had a huge underground railroad coming to the south; a lot of people talk about it going north, but the underground railroad went south, as well. He fought to protect northern frontiers before the annexation of Mexico. Vicente Guerrero was also in the military and later became president. He was also of Indigenous descent and spoke other indigenous languages.
Q: You also curate Afro-diasporic music as DJ Mafondo? Can you talk about this contribution from African descendants in Mexico—with examples like “La Bamba” and son jarocho music—that people may not be familiar with, and its roots in resistance?
A: The common history of when Africans came to the Americas, they were taking their drums away, so stomping became second best. They were adopting a lot of musical influences where they were coming from. Oftentimes, people think that they were coming straight from Africa; a lot of the Africans that came to the Americas were coming also from Spain. They had lived in Seville and they had learned Spanish to learn to communicate with the Spanish nobility at the time. They also learned their musical guitar styles, so there’s a lot of influences that they brought with them. A lot of that got transferred to what we now know as bossa nova, capoeira. There’s music influences all around the Americas, like bachata or Cuban music, which is son, or bomba in Puerto Rico. And, Mexico has son jarocho, it was a call-and-response, very similar to rap. It’s traditionally in a circle, so it’s a very community-based music. It brings community together and towns together, it’s usually done through celebrations during baptisms, during the day of the saints in different towns in Mexico. They talk a lot about everyday life in being in the country. A lot of folks in Veracruz, specifically, “jarocho” means people of a mixed Black descent, that’s essentially what jarocho means. It had a very negative, derogatory meaning. It was a name that the music was given.
Chileans of African descent from Chile were being transferred all the way to what we now know as San Francisco, and some of them stayed behind and this music influence, called la chilena, stayed in Oaxaca. So, they adopted that music, as well. It was also African diasporic music that now, to this day, lives in Mexico. Mariachi is also connected to Black history; there’s Black history in son huasteco, which is another very indigenous style of indigenous music. In reality, a lot of these musical styles are Afro-Indigenous, actually. They’re not necessarily 100 percent African, they’re Afro-Indigenous, for the most part, and utilizing European instruments. This music was, again, [referred to very] derogatorily back in the colonial times, and during the folklorization of Mexico in the ‘40s, they started to document it as folk music. What’s unique about it now, it has a very strong presence here in the United States. “La Bamba” is one song that became very globally famous that traces its roots this way.
Q: The 2020 Mexican census was the first time since the independence of the country that included people in Mexico who self-identify as Black, with 2.5 million people on record (with about a 50-49 split between women and men), according to the global affairs thinktank, the Wilson Center. Can you talk about the typical criteria for recognition and the challenges that has created for Afro-Mexicans? (There’s reporting about Afro-Mexicans speaking Spanish, as opposed to an indigenous language, that historically excluded them from recognition, and the idea of a mestizaje society and how that also has excluded Blackness.)
A: I have always liked to call them ethnic markers, identification markers. In order to become an ethnic group in Mexico, they have to very much fit the description in how they identify Indigenous people in Mexico, so that’s wrong, first and foremost. I think that was a difficulty Mexico was having, as a whole, because it was questioning the parameters and the measuring tool that they were using to measure who should be considered an ethnic group, in general. Oaxaca was the first state to actually recognize the Afro-Mexican population, I believe, in 2005, if I’m not mistaken. That took a long time for that to happen. What was interesting was they were included under the Indigenous community, so they pretty much added just a sentence to the constitutional rights of Indigenous people in Oaxaca, but as you know, based on what I said earlier with this anthropologist, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, who’s considered the grandfather of Afro-Mexican studies, at the time when he wrote this book on the ethno-history of this community, he did recognize that there was a specific differentiation in the way they spoke Spanish, but that didn’t mean that they spoke a different tongue. So, that was one thing that disqualified them from becoming an ethnic group, that they didn’t speak a specific tongue from Africa, that derived from Africa. Two, the food. There was some uniqueness to the style of food, but the gastronomy at the time that he was seeing was very mixed. Another cultural marker was that these dishes were not African, essentially. So, language, food, and then you have religion. They didn’t practice their own indigenous, or African-derived religion. It was all under disguise in the other religious practices within different saints, but there was a lot of what he called assimilation, and that’s what essentially ended up disqualifying the Black population from becoming an ethnic group back in the day, when Aguirre Beltran and Mexico were going through differentiating the various ethnic groups in Mexico. I mean, Jewish people got their own census, and the Indigenous people got their own census, but not the Black population because these ethnic markers that were being used didn’t qualify the Black population as being a separate ethnic group. Rather, they were part of the mestizaje, they were part of the new race that was being constructed at the time.
So, language, religion, and then the phenotype. That was the other thing, that there was a strong phenotype that claimed that there was evident that there was a strong Black population of African descent, but because of the fast-paced mestizaje that they were foreseeing happening, that these communities would eventually disappear and there would be no need to categorize someone as a particular ethnic group and they were now becoming part of this mestizaje.
The same can be said about music. They weren’t playing music that derived from Africa, it was already very blended, or there’s a hegemony already happening with their music style. There was a lot of mixing already with different influences, so that also disqualified them.
Q: Why is it important to you to do this kind of work, and what kind of difference does this sort of official recognition make?
A: I mean, it’s paramount, the recognition. For one, it really combats racism in Mexico, which is very prevalent. It’s not only in Mexico, but throughout Latin America, so to have a language to call racism for what it is, is something that Mexico has been very focused on since the 1950s. Accepting that there were Indigenous groups in Mexico that were not going to become part of the mestizaje equation, that they will continue to seek autonomy and be there and have their own customs, has been important.
So, part of the recognition that the social movement in Mexico has been fighting for is to really get a head count, first and foremost, to understand the disparities that are happening in these communities and to be able to provide from the federal government to put clear numbers behind the needs of these populations that are underfunded and in Mexico. Even though they’re underfunded, Indigenous communities have their own clinics, their own offices where they can file claims and whatnot; in Black communities, you have none of that infrastructure. So, by getting a headcount and understanding what the disparities are—the amount of women, the amount of kids—it’s very important to start measuring how vulnerable these communities are in the long term. I think, ultimately, bringing to the attention of the Afro-Mexican population in Mexico is an issue that stems from its history. It means to really rewrite history and to create constitutional reforms all over. There are demands left and right that are happening as we speak, to change that perception that Mexico is not only a composition of indigenous and European, but there’s also a strong African presence that shows up in our daily lives—in language, food, in our ethnic makeup of who we are as a people in Mexico. Calling out what racism is in Mexico right now, there isn’t a language, it’s always based on class and folks don’t take it seriously, so it also allows xenophobia to exist. There are several documented cases of people getting deported because they’re Black and they don’t believe they live in Mexico, so they get deported. Those human rights are being taken away in Mexico for decades and they don’t really get to the national news. In Oaxaca, they get some attention now because that was the state where ethnic rights became a reality, but at the national level there’s a lot of work to be done there. There are some senators who are of Afro-Mexican descent, they’re lifting all of these issues up and it’s very important because it’s systemic.
