Mixed Race Studies

“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 4 (2011)
pages 633-663
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-1416657

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

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The Cosmic Race in Texas: Racial Fusion, White Supremacy, and Civil Rights Politics

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 2 (September 2011)
pages 404-419
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar338

Benjamin H. Johnson, Associate Professor of Global Studies and History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

In the early twentieth century, a number of Latin American intellectuals embraced racial fusion and predicted that it would one day undo the white supremacy represented by the United States. These ideas influenced Mexican American civil rights advocates in Texas in the 1930s and 1940s, who found the embrace of hybridity to be a realistic description of their own racial backgrounds and an effective rejoinder to Jim Crow’s emphasis on racial purity. Attacking the consensus that an aspiration for whiteness drove these civil rights claims, Benjamin H. Johnson finds deep ties between Mexican American and Mexican political cultures and concludes that borderlands histories can take a transnational approach without obscuring the influence of nation-states or denying the emancipatory potential of claims to national belonging.

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today,” proclaimed José Vasconcelos in 1925, “are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for a new period: the period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.” Vasconcelos wrote these words in Mexico as his four-year tenure as the secretary of the nation’s public education system came to a close and as his quest for an elected position (first the governorship of the state of Oaxaca and then the presidency) began. They appeared in La raza cósmica, an enormously influential work that circulated across the hemisphere. Whereas the U.S. intellectual and civil rights crusader W. E. B. Du Bois had prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century, Vasconcelos confidently predicted its erasure. The struggles of a country such as Mexico, which had just emerged from a decade of revolution and civil war, were for Vasconcelos at the center of global dynamics, as they heralded the rise of the cosmic race of his title, first in Latin America and then across the globe.

Although Vasconcelos was not well known in the United States, where his predictions would have surely struck both the architects and victims of a particularly brutal phase of white supremacy as ludicrous, he did have a profound influence there. His ideas, and the postrevolutionary political and social order of which they were a part, provided Mexican American civil rights leaders in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly those involved with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a reflection of their own racial self-conception and a set of arguments with which to critique white supremacy.

This article examines the connections…

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Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California

University of Oklahoma Press
2010
256 pages
5.5″ x 8.5″, Illustrations: 7 B&W Illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806140902
Paperback ISBN: 9780806142371

Carlos Manuel Salomon, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
California State University, East Bay

The first biography of a politically savvy Californio who straddled three eras

Two-time governor of Alta California and prominent businessman after the U.S. annexation, Pío de Jesus Pico was a politically savvy Californio who thrived in both the Mexican and the American periods. This is the first biography of Pico, whose life vibrantly illustrates the opportunities and risks faced by Mexican Americans in those transitional years.

Carlos Manuel Salomon breathes life into the story of Pico, who—despite his mestizo-black heritage—became one of the wealthiest men in California thanks to real estate holdings and who was the last major Californio political figure with economic clout. Salomon traces Pico’s complicated political rise during the Mexican era, leading a revolt against the governor in 1831 that swept him into that office. During his second governorship in 1845 Pico fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States.

Pico faced complex legal and financial problems under the American regime. Salomon argues that it was Pico’s legal struggles with political rivals and land-hungry swindlers that ultimately resulted in the loss of Pico’s entire fortune. Yet as the most litigious Californio of his time, he consistently demonstrated his refusal to become a victim.

Pico is an important transitional figure whose name still resonates in many Southern California locales. His story offers a new view of California history that anticipates a new perspective on the multicultural fabric of the state.

Culture: The face in the mirror is mestizo

San Antonio Current
San Antonia, Texas
2006-02-22

Elaine Wolff, Current Editor
Plaza de Armas

A two-day roundtable takes a big eraser to identity lines

“I’m looking for the mestizo eye, the mestizo subjunctive, the mestizo soul,” says author John Phillip Santos as we wander through Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin-American Portraiture at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He pauses before “Retrato de un Matrimonio,” by 19th-century painter Hermenegildo Bustos. Husband and wife have light brown eyes and dark brown hair, but where she is decidedly European in appearance, with pale skin and delicate features, his ancestry seems more indigenous: broad cheekbones and a chiseled nose. The work reflects “mestizo compassion,” suggests Santos.
 
“Compassion” is not a concept frequently associated with “mestizo,” a word that has spent much of its 600-odd-year history wielded as either a derogatory description for the children of European and Native American unions, or as a battle cry in the Chicano identity movement.

Circa 1523, in a creation myth that is equal parts fact and mystery, La Malinche—the mysterious Mexican Pocahontas—and Hernán Cortés founded the mestizo race with their first-born son, Martin Cortés, who would return to Spain with his father to further serve the aims of colonial-era Europe. Mexican and Chicano ambivalence over the legacy of La Malinche illustrates the problem with fully embracing mestizo identity: It means embracing the white conqueror father as well as the subjugated, but re-ascendant, indigenous mother. While La Malinche is celebrated by some as the mother of the Mexican people, she is alternatively known as La Chingada—the fucked.

In a sense, embracing the Virgen de Guadalupe—a mestiza Virgin Mary—is embracing an alternative mestizo birth, a virgin who conceived a new race without being defiled by the “other.”
 
But for Santos and an increasing number of Latino scholars, mestizo is the face of an optimistic future. “We are all mestizo. Our heritage is global. It quarrels with borders; it quarrels with demarcations,” he says, echoing his mentor, Virgilio Elizondo, the San Antonio priest who wrote The Future is Mestizo in 1986. Elizondo and Santos are two members of the organizing committee for the “Revealing Retratos,” Taller Popular, a private, two-day conference that will be held this weekend at SAMA and Trinity University, and includes such participants as Henry Estrada of the Smithsonian Latino Center, author and artist Ito Romo, Sandra Cisneros, and Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. A public conference will follow April 22 at SAMA…

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Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Auditorium of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York
Monday, 2011-09-12, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

Discussant: Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU

Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. She teaches extensively on these topics. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group) and Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación (INAH, UNAM, CEMCA and IRD), and has two forthcoming chapters in Contesting Recognition (Palgrave) and Cultures of Colour (Berghahn Books).

Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this paper presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. Mestiza is a racial category that emerges as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. Mestiza refers to those who represent Mexicaness and, therefore, those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism. Mestiza is then seen as term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implies possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. Such setting has given way to a process of racial and racist normalization that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the commonly spread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because we are all ‘mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status.

The title for the CLACS Fall 2011 Colloquium Series is Contemporary Racisms in the Americas. This colloquium will explore emergent racisms in the Americas as integral to the multicultural and what some have called “post racial” present defined within larger processes of economic and cultural globalization and transnational migration. It will also deepen the understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racism as major obstacles to the construction of intercultural relations, racial and economic justice, and democracy. In this way, it will complement the themes covered by the seminar on Racisms and anti-racist strategies in the Americas. It will become an opportunity for students to benefit from latest contributions to the analysis of racism in the hemisphere and develop a thematic and methodological comparative perspective. It will also become an opportunity for a larger audience to benefit from the information and analysis of cutting-edge scholarship which is also preoccupied with the construction of anti-racist strategies.

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Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. About Black Experience in Latin America

Black in Latin America
Public Broadcasting Service
April 2011

Gates discusses his new project in this interview from the PBS site.

First, could you talk a little bit about this project?

I conceived of this as a trilogy of documentary series that would mimic the patterns of the triangle trade. There would be a series on Africa which was called Wonders of the African World in 1999. And then there would be a series on black America called America Behind the Color Line in 2004. And then the third part of the triangle trade was, of course, South America and the Caribbean. The triangle trade was Africa, South America, and the continental United States and Europe. That’s how I conceived of it. I’ve been thinking about it since before 1999. But the first two were easier to get funding for. Everyone knows about black people from Africa, everyone knows about the black American community. But surprisingly, and this is why the series is so important, not many people realize how “black” South America is. So of all the things I’ve done it was the most difficult to get funded and it is one of the most rewarding because it is so counter-intuitive, it’s so full of surprises. And I’m very excited about it…

The series reveals how huge a role history can play in forming a nation’s concept of race. Although each of the countries you visited has its own distinct history, did you find any commonalities between the six countries with regard to race?

Yes, each country except for Haiti went through a period of whitening, when they wanted to obliterate or bury or blend in their black roots. Each then, had a period when they celebrated their cultural heritage but as part of a multi-cultural mix and in that multi-cultural mix, somehow the blackness got diluted, blended. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be “blackish” — really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. In other words, the poverty in each of these countries has been socially constructed as black. The upper class in Brazil is virtually all white, a tiny group of black people in the upper-middle class. And that’s true in Peru, that’s true in the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s obviously an exception because it’s a country of mulatto and black people but there’s been a long tension between mulatto and black people in Haiti. So even Haiti has its racial problems…

…How do you feel the race experience differs between Latin American nations and the United States?

Whereas we have black and white or perhaps black, white, and mulatto as the three categories of race traditionally in America, Brazil has 136 kinds of blackness. Mexico, 16. Haiti, 98. Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. But these are very real categories. In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it’s almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. Color and race are defined in strikingly different ways in each of these countries, more akin to each other than in the United States. We’re the only country to have the one-drop rule. The only one. And that’s because of the percentage of rape and sexual harassment of black women by white males during slavery and the white owners wanted to guarantee that the children of these liaisons were maintained as property…

Read the entire interview here.

Racial Ideologies, Racial-Group Boundaries, and Racial Identity in Veracruz, Mexico

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 5, Number 3 (November 2010)
pages 273-299
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2010.513829

Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness. This article begins to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on blackness in the western Caribbean cities of Port of Veracruz and Boca del Río, which lie in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Specifically, it looks at the racial-based and color-based identification of individuals of African descent, societal construction of the ‘black’ category, and the relationship between national and racial identities. This article relies on data from participant observation conducted over the course of one year and 112 semi-structured interviews.

…Blackness in Mexico

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mexico and Peru were the largest importers of African slaves in Spanish America (Palmer, 1976). Most scholars estimate that approximately 200,000 African slaves reached Mexico’s shores, although the number may be higher since many slaves were imported illegally (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944). When the slave system collapsed in the early 1700s, the biological integration of the population increased as the African-origin population increasingly mixed with the Indian and Spanish groups (Cope, 1994). After 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, legal distinctions pertaining to race were terminated (González Navarro, 1970). By this time it was generally assumed that the black population had ‘disappeared’ through biological integration with the broader population.

Mexico’s early-20th-century post-revolutionary ideology further solidified the narrative of the disappearance of Mexico’s black population. This ideology promoted the mixed-race individual (mestizo) as the quintessential Mexican (Knight, 1990; Vasconcelos, 1925). In doing so, however, it not only glorified the mestizo, but sought to assimilate the Indigenous (Knight, 1990) and African (Hernández Cuevas, 2004, 2005) components of Mexico’s population through integration. The erasure of the African element in Mexico continued in the following decades through the Eurocentric re-interpretation of particular aspects of Mexican culture (Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005).

The supposed disappearance of the African-origin population was first questioned in the 1940s when Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946, 1958) studied what he defined as a ‘black’ population in the Costa Chica region of Mexico’s southern coast. Aguirre Beltrán’s pioneering study set the stage for the re-emergence of the issue of blackness in Mexico. In the past few decades, there has been a surge of scholarly work on the topic, much of which has focused on the historical experience of Africans and their descendants (Aguirre Beltrán, 1944; Alcántara López, 2002; Bennett, 2003; Carroll, 2001; Chávez Carbajal, 1997; García Bustamante, 1987; Gil Maronã, 1992; Herrera Casasús, 1991; Martínez Montiel & Reyes, 1993; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Motta Sánchez, 2001; Naveda Chávez-Hita, 1987, 2001; Palmer, 1976; Rout, 1976; Vincent, 1994; Vinson III, 2001; Winfield Capitaine, 1988) and the African contribution to Mexican culture (Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Gonzalez-El Hilali, 1997; Hall, 2008; Hernandez-Cuevas, 2004, 2005; Malcomson, forthcoming; Martínez Montiel, 1993; Ochoa Serrano, 1997; Pérez Montfort, 2007; for more general overviews and/or discussions of Afro-Mexicans, see Hoffman, 2006a, 2008; Martinez Montiel, 1997; Muhammad, 1995; Vinson III & Vaughn 2004); less attention has been paid to the contemporary experience of Mexicans of African descent. When the contemporary experience is addressed, most scholars focus on the Costa Chica region (Aguirre Beltrán, 1946, 1958; Althoff, 1994; Campos, 2005; Díaz Pérez et al., 1993; Flanet, 1977; Gutiérrez Ávila, 1988; Hoffman, 2007a; Lewis, 2000, 2001, 2004; Moedano Navarro, 1988; Tibón, 1961; Vaughn, 2001a). However, Hoffman (2007a, 2007b) argues that the Costa Chica represents an exceptional case in Mexico, and that identity formation in this region is not based on negotiation with state-sponsored institutions due to their limited presence in the area…

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Racial mixture and civil war: The histories of the U.S. South and Mexico in the novels of William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes

Michigan State University
2008
266 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3331903
ISBN: 9780549837800

Emron Lee Esplin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

A Dissertation Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English

This dissertation is an endeavor in inter-American literary criticism with three primary arguments. First, I argue that the affinities and differences between the histories of the U.S. South and Mexico require us to redefine the terms “America” and “American” according to their original hemispheric context and to adopt a transnational approach when studying American literature. Second, I claim that the ways in which race and racial mixture are viewed in the Americas—specifically, the discourse of miscegenation in the United States and the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico–are national not natural. These discourses are connected to lengthy colonial and national histories and to specific moments of crisis in the formation of U.S. and Mexican national identities that took place during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Third, I argue that William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes participate in these discourses of racial mixture when their novels both replicate and challenge the essentialisms of miscegenation and mestizaje, respectively.

In my introduction, I develop a historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies that I follow in chapter one by laying the historical groundwork for comparing the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution and in chapter two by examining how the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje which grew out of these conflicts disparately favor(ed) whiteness–miscegenation through overt segregation and mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture and private desires for assimilation. Chapter three explores how Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! , and Go Down, Moses and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Gringo viejo repeat the essentialist underpinnings of miscegenation and mestizaje by describing so-called racially mixed characters as fragments. Chapter four examines how Light in August and Gringo viejo challenge the discourses by assigning violence to whiteness. Chapter five analyzes how Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz offer fictional portrayals of both miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s African past. I conclude the project by offering a critique of current hybridity theory and by arguing that Go Down, Moses and La muerte de Artemio Cruz demonstrate the impossibility of positive hybridity.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION: METHODS FOR INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES
• CHAPTER 1: WAR IN THE TWO SOUTHS: PRESENT PASTS AND CIVIL WAR IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL MIXTURE BORN IN CIVIL WAR: CREATING THE NATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 3: RACIAL MIXTURE AS FRAGMENTATION
• CHAPTER 4: ANCESTRY, BLOOD, AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE FATHERS
• CHAPTER 5: BLACK, MEXICAN, AND BLACK MEXICAN
• CONCLUSION: POSITIVE HYBRIDITY?
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Afro-Mexican presence in Guadalajara at the dawn of independence

Purdue University
December 2010
85 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1490649
ISBN: 9781124557854

Beau D. J. Gaitors

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Beau D. J. Gaitors In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Scholars often characterize the Afro-Mexican experience through depictions of a large presence during the colonial period and a rapid decline after Mexican independence. Prior studies emphasized miscegenation and racism as causes of the disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Mexican society. This thesis addresses the presence and subsequent disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Guadalajara. Census records show that the Afro-Mexican population in Guadalajara was significant, one-fourth of the population, at the end of the colonial period. However, records also show that the Afro-Mexican population experienced a substantial decline to only two percent of Guadalajara’s population at the dawn of independence. This thesis asserts that the “disappearance” of Afro-Mexicans was a result of integration, especially in the residential and occupational spheres of Guadalajara. The two percent of Afro-Mexicans recorded in the census illustrates that Afro-Mexicans continued to integrate into society and did not simply disappear. Afro-Mexicans became Mexicans through social incorporation into the city through residential, occupational, and marital integration.

Table of Contents

• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN NEW SPAIN
• CHAPTER 3. THE GROWTH OF GUADALAJARA TO 1791
• CHAPTER 4. RESIDENTS OF GUADALAJARA 1791-1822
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Tables

• Table 1. Afro-Mexicans in Guadalajara, 1821-1822, by Cuartel
• Table 2. Marriage within Race (Major Groups)
• Table 3. Afro-Mexican Marriage Across Race
• Table 4. Race in the System of Education
• Table 5. Distribution of Afro-Mexican Occupational Positions

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 1810, standing on the balcony of the Palacio Real in the city of 

Guadalajara, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the independence of the Mexican nation. In this proclamation he also declared that the independence of Mexico, known as New Spain in the colonial period, would be accompanied by the emancipation of all slaves in the nation.1 More specifically, Hidalgo stated that all slaveholders should emancipate their slaves within ten days of the decree. These enslaved individuals constituted several different racial and ethnic groups, including Native American and African. Native Americans were taken captive during wars and employed as slaves by the Spanish especially in Northern New Spain. In contrast, the vast majority of Africans arrived in New Spain alongside Europeans either as enslaved laborers or free conquistadors, creating a sizeable population of Africans within New Spain. African descendants remained in many regions of New Spain throughout the colonial period; however, centuries of assimilation and integration rendered the African presence in Mexico miniscule at the dawn of independence.

Today when people are asked, “What is a Mexican?” individuals rarely visualize a person of African descent. Despite a considerable presence in the history of Mexico, Mexicans of African descent, or Afro-Mexicans, have been essentially invisible in the history of Mexico. Afro-Mexicans, like many other marginalized groups in other nations, have been constantly neglected in contemporary national narratives or given brief references in national histories despite the prominent historic role they played. Afro-Mexicans have experienced varying degrees of invisibility in the contemporary portrayal of Mexican history and national identity. The neglect of the Afro- Mexican in the national history directly impacts the present-day position of people of African descent in Mexico. The inability of individuals to immediately and quickly point to the significant contributions and the presence of Africans in the history of Mexico makes it easy to assume that African descendants do not have a space in present-day Mexico. More specifically, the neglect of the African presence in the narrative of Mexico makes it easy for people to imagine Mexico as a nation without strong ties to African heritage and blood. Yet, in the last fifteen to twenty years, Afro-Mexicans have struggled to gain a representative space in the Mexican self-portrait, causing many scholars to reevaluate and reconsider the presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Although individuals have reconsidered the varying degrees of invisibility of the African heritage in Mexico, there is still a lack of momentum in recovering the African links to Mexico in the present day.

The process resulting in the invisibility of Afro-Mexicans is not simply a contemporary issue; it is steeped in the historic construction of the Mexican identity. Centuries of miscegenation and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups led to the creation of a multi-racial society in Mexico. Theories emerged to account for the image of the Mexican nation and its interracial heritage. Individuals in power constructed the Mexican identity with great influence on the perceptions of citizens. In the 1920s Mexican intellectuals, most notably José Vasconcelos, began to promote the idea of a cosmic race, “la raza cósmica,” in Mexico. This theory sought to promote a collective group identity that went beyond race and ethnicity in Mexico. Individuals of Spanish descent, Native American descent, and African descent populated the vast region that made up Mexico. However, these three groups had many variations within themselves. There were numerous indigenous groups that populated the region that would later become Mexico. People of African descent had a significant role in populating Mexico in the colonial period. Some were born in different regions in Africa and brought to the New World, while others were born in the Americas. Furthermore, the African position in the colonial system varied, as some Africans were enslaved while others were free. Just as with the African case, there were Spaniards who were born in the New World, known as criollos, and Spaniards born in Spain, known as peninsulares. Throughout the colonial and post-independence periods the indigenous, African, and Spanish groups constituted a multiracial and multiethnic society. Contributing to this mixed landscape were the sexual relations between these individuals, resulting in the birth of mixed-race individuals who inhabited colonial Mexico.

The concept of the “cosmic race” necessitated the erasure of specific group contributions in the construction of the Mexican state in order to create a homogenized Mexican national identity. This new identity was intended to go beyond the multiple distinct groups and mixed groups in Mexican society. The new Mexican identity would theoretically represent the diverse groups as equal participants in the construction of the Mexican nation. These diverse groups would be represented as part of a collective that provided the building blocks to construct the Mexican nation. Yet, the emergence of a homogenous identity resulted in a substantial disappearance and neglect of some groups that participated in the construction of Mexican society. Individual groups were subsumed into the collective identity of the Mexican nation as their contributions were bulked into a single framework of progress.

Although specific groups were brought into a collective identity, they found it difficult to ignore their distinct differences. With this in mind, specific groups presented themselves as both Mexican and their unique group identity. When the cultural contributions to Mexico were acknowledged, the focus was on Spanish and indigenous groups as the primary participants in the construction of Mexico, while the contributions of Afro-Mexicans were relegated to the margins.

Although Afro-Mexicans have been relegated to the margins, their presence in Mexico cannot be so easily overlooked. There are locations in Mexico that hold populations of African descendants in large numbers. Coastal regions and port cities such as Costa Chica, Guerrero, and Veracruz, reflect the significant presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Despite the presence in these regions, the potential for the representation of Afro-Mexicans is limited. The concentration of Afro-Mexicans in these regions encourages the social invisibility of African presence within the greater Mexican nation. More specifically, it is readily assumed that people of African descent have resided solely in these areas. However, Afro-Mexicans were also present on a large scale in other areas of Mexico, especially in urban centers such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. Many Afro-Mexican slaves found their way to various locales in colonial Mexico as a result of slavery and the migratory patterns of slaveholders…

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Without Impediment: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Colonial Mexico

The Americas
Volume 67, Number 4 (April 2011)
E-ISSN: 1533-6247; Print ISSN: 0003-1615

Jake Federick, Assistant Professor of History
Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin

On April 18, 1773, in the town of Teziutlán in the eastern mountains of Mexico, Captain don Raphael Padres participated in the baptism of his godson in the local church. He stood watching as Father Francisco Flandes leaned over the baptismal font to daub oil on the head of Joseph Philipe. As the priest performed the sacrament, reciting the script of baptism, the boy’s parents, don Cristóbal Hernández and doña Isabel Pérez, followed along. After anointing the child, Father Flandes turned to the militia captain to inform him of his responsibilities as godfather, explaining the spiritual kinship that Padres now had with the boy. After the rite was completed, the priest recorded his actions in the church’s book of baptisms. He noted the boy’s age and that he had been legitimately born the previous day. He also listed the names of the boy, his parents, the godfather, and the godfather’s wife, doña Josepha Fernández. The priest also pointed out that all the adults were españoles (of pure Spanish ancestry).

Two years later, on July 4, 1775, Captain Padres once again stood at the baptismal font in the Teziutlán church. The priest presiding over the rite this time was Pedro Francisco Gómez, and the child was five-day-old Mariana Paula. She too was legitimate, the child of Manuel Castillo and Antonia Vásquez. According to the book of baptisms, Manuel and Antonia were de razón (an abbreviation of gente de razón), which meant literally that they had the power of reason but in the eighteenth century the term was used to describe non-natives. Padres was described only as being from the local parish; no racial information was recorded. On this occasion, for some reason, the priest did not feel that it was necessary to note a casta (racial category) for young Mariana or her parents…

Read or purchase the article here.