Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico

Abstract

Readers familiar with Laura Lewis’s acclaimed Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (2003) may be surprised to find that her new book is not another foray into colonial Mexican history but an anthropological, ethnographic study of a present-day Mexican community. This should not really be surprising, as Lewis is an anthropologist by training and academic appointment, and indeed this monograph is based on her doctoral dissertation. It is based on it but is far more than a mere revision of it, being rather the product of over a decade of fieldwork and two decades of study and labor: Lewis’s first fieldwork stay in the community upon which she focuses was in 1992.That community is San Nicolás, one of the larger of the dozens of “African-descent communities” in the Costa Chica, on Mexico’s Pacific coast (p. 2), and Lewis’s subjects are the San Nicoladenses, who “self-identify as morenos (black Indians) and reject labels such as ‘black,’ ‘Afromexican,’ and ‘Afromestizo’ ” (p. 2). The book is thus a lengthy exploration of racial identity, built up through a rich reconstruction of the identities of San Nicoladenses, which “rest on a complex calculus of race, history, and custom. That calculus is situational, which makes it fluid and conciliatory rather than bounded and antagonistic” (p. 305).In the course of her research, Lewis soon discovered that many San Nicoladenses also live in the United States, adding migration to that complex calculus of identity. Amid such fluidity and mobility, an attachment to “homeplaces” holds the community of San Nicolás together, albeit in ways that sometimes seem tenuous; as Lewis puts it, “the instability and hybridity of migration and mixed racial identities actually make places that are as constant as the ground right before an earthquake” (p. 13). Following a chapter that weaves oral and archival sources into a brief history of the region, Lewis devotes four chapters (chapters 2 – 5) to aspects of race and identity in San Nicolás, especially the concept of “morenoness” (as she calls it). The perspectives of San Nicoladenses are her primary target, but they are deftly placed within the comparative context of the views of multiple types of outsiders — including, in one fascinating chapter of “intellectual history,” the influential interactions and impact of mid-twentieth-century scholars Mel-ville Herskovits and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. In the face of outsiders’ attempts to place San Nicoladenses in various black and mixed-race categories, the locals themselves have maintained a sense of moreno as including “Indianness” but excluding white roots. The result — as one chapter resoundingly concludes — “undermines the dominant national discourse of mestizaje” (p. 83). Gender is a constant theme in the book, and Lewis is always clear on how her own identity as a woman determined the relationships she developed with San Nicoladenses (most obviously, but not exclusively, with women in the town). However, gender comes even more to the fore in the final three chapters (chapters 6 – 8, which are followed by a conclusion). The first of these details how profoundly gender permeates life in San Nicolás, while the next two chapters show how issues of modernity and migration remain colored by the gendered organization and lives of San Nicoladenses. As Lewis takes us, along with the people she has studied, to the edge of the present and before a tentative future, she maintains a narrative richly textured with research and detail yet poignant and engagingly clear in its composition.This is not a book about colonial Mexico, as I remarked at the beginning of this review, and yet Lewis’s profound grasp of the complexities of ethnoracial identities in the colonial period seems to inform her analysis of San Nicoladenses today. Likewise, her understanding of the “situational” and “fluid” character of identities in San Nicolás speaks to the nature of mixed-race identities in colonial times. For that reason alone — if not for the fact that this is simply a superb book about Mexico — colonialists as well as modernists, historians as well as anthropologists, scholars of the past as well as ethnographers of the present will want this book to spend significant time on their desks and to find a permanent place on their shelves.