Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution by Theodore Cohen

Abstract

The erasure of Afro-Mexicans from Mexico has been key to the construction of a national identity that cast Mexico as a mestizo nation. Since the earliest days of colonization, both free and enslaved Africans inhabited New Spain and were employed in work tied to the global capitalist economy. Africans were concentrated in ports and cities, in western Oaxaca, in the eastern city of Veracruz, and on sugar estates. But when nineteenth-century state crafters “proclaimed that all Mexicans should be defined by their vice or virtue, not their racial heritage (9),” they erased African-descended people from the national narrative. Consequentially, Afro-Mexicans ceased to exist as a sociological category.Cohen employs the traditional methods of intellectual and cultural history with a transnational conceptualization that ties African-descended people to Mexico. This lens allows him to connect a vast community of Black intellectuals and artists outside of Mexico to mestizo intellectuals. This detective tale takes Cohen to twenty archives in Mexico and the United States, collecting little-studied ephemera to piece together a history of Afro-Mexicans during the modern period. Given the removal of the category Afro-Mexican from government documentation, such as censuses, shortly after abolition (1829), the type of archival sources required for social history is in short supply. Hence, much of the story concerns representations of Afro-Mexico, or dialogues among Black intellectuals from outside Mexico about race in Mexico. The book demonstrates how a sociological method that places national histories within broader diasporic exchanges brings a new range of sources, ideas, and people into view.The critical conjuncture of the 1930s is a good entry point. With Mexico joining anti-fascist forces, the government of populist Lazaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) fostered a conversation among artists and intellectuals that placed mestizaje at the heart of what it meant to be Mexican. At the same time, intellectuals and artists associated with the New Negro Movement, such as dancer Katherine Dunham and poet Langston Hughes, looked to Mexico as a place of refuge from Jim Crow segregation. This period began a process of Black reappearance in Mexican conciousness that culminated in the federal government’s count of Afro-Mexicans in 2015, the first-ever official attempt to pin down how many Mexicans recognized being descended from Africans.Anthropologists played a central role in the re-emergence of Black Mexico. Manuel Gamio, one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals, began his career as José Vasconcelos’ student. Vasconcelos’ book La raza cósmica (Los Angeles, 1925) casts Blacks and indigenous peoples as inferior to Europeans. Rather than isolate indigenous groups on reservations as the United States did, he proposed that Mexico would find progress and liberation through racial mixture. As the director of the Secretary of Education (1921–1924), Vasconcelos had the power and resources to connect indigenous communities to the state and to foment a sense of national pride. Rural schools, for example, became sites of national consolidation in remote regions. Gamio would come to favor a pluralist Mexico, which acknowledged indigenous difference, while Vasconcelos favored a mestizo nation, where indigenous peoples would be assimilated.Gamio rejected his mentor’s recommendation of indigenous erasure through assimilation. After following Vasconcelos to the University of Chicago, Gamio studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, where he would receive his doctorate in 1921. At Columbia, Gamio used modern ethnographic methods in the service of a project “rooted in black inferiority, biological evolution, and national homogeneity (47).” Although he would not agree with Mexican caricaturist Maurice de Zayas that Africans had “no history,” Gamio nevertheless erased Afro-Mexicans from the national narrative.In the postwar period, many African Americans turned to Mexico as a model for a less rigid and oppressive system of race relations. In the early 1940s, W.E.B Du Bois joined Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortíz in championing the egalitarian potential of Mexico. The struggle against fascism had empowered African Americans, leading intellectuals to envision an abolishment of racial hierarchies. Herskovits in 1940 “placed Mexican racial formations at the vanguard of racial equality across the world” (128).1 Ortíz would base the International Institute of Afro-American Studies, which he founded and directed, in Mexico City, on Kerskovitz’s insight.Finding Mexico will frustrate those seeking a fine-grained analysis of Black communities or a discussion of major Afro-Mexican intellectuals. The very history of Afro-Mexican statistical erasure makes it difficult—but not impossible—to study Black communities. Precisely for this reason, a transnational methodology proves especially useful. This book is required reading for understanding the twentieth-century African diaspora in Latin America.