Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias: Conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos novohispanos: Siglos XVI y XVII

Abstract

Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias must be lauded as one of the first publications by the Centro de Estudios Históricos of El Colegio de México regarding Africans and Afro-descendants in Mexico. This in itself is a historical event in a realm where until 1946 the African presence and persistence was largely negated and thereafter minimized through the mestizaje (miscegenation) fallacy. In Mexico, the official story states that the African presence in Mexico was insignificant and that African genes and cultural endowments disappeared through mixing.The work, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, seeks to analyze the representations of the “black and mulatto group” in the imaginary of New Spain, a colonial Spanish region in the Americas that included present-day Mexico. The thesis of the study is that “at times [blacks and mulattos] appear loyal to their masters, always cun ning, violent, rebellious and even comic and vivacious. They form a prism where different realities, often ambiguous and even contradictory, are reflected” (p. 17). The author points out that she is not concerned with “the ‘real’ condition of blacks, but the ideas and prejudices relative to them” (p. 22). Her work aims to “uncover the manner in which different cultural figures cross and overlap in practices, representations, or productions” to show that “there is no practice or structure that is not produced by the contradictory and clashing representations by which individuals and groups make sense of their own world” (p. 22).The analysis is divided into five chapters. The first is “a review of the origins, modalities and changes of slavery from antiquity to modern Europe” (p. 24). Chapters 2 and 3 consider the legal realm: “legislation, particularly on the prohibitions imposed on blacks and mulattos during the XVI and XVII centuries,” and “the diverse postures witnesses and those who reported a crime had toward a committed offense or a fight provoked by blacks and mulattos” (p. 24). Chapter 4 looks into “the sphere of the symbolic and emotional beyond ‘institutional’ postures,” while chapter 5 deals with the literary and iconographic black and mulatto image (p. 25).The work, like an important portion of domestic and international academic works about Africans and Afro-descendants in Mexico, rests on a Eurocentric framework. The history of thinking, the sources and critical tools for analysis utilized in Imaginarios ambiguos disregard Afrocentric theory, such as that proposed by Cheikh Anta Diop and Molefi Kete Asante. The Afrocentric idea introduces Africans and Afro-descendants as cultural agents and not as mere subjects. This is of particular importance to a work that deals with Africans and Afro-descendants as its central topic of study. Imaginarios ambiguos produces an artificial group of “negros and mulattos” for the sake of studying a random number of colonial documents, isolating a portion of Afro-descendants from other Africans and Afro-descendants in New Spain and the rest of the Americas. This runs contrary to current tendencies in Africana studies.Úrsula Camba Ludlow states that there are no previous systematic studies regarding the representations that the viceregal society made of blacks and mulattos as naturally strong, inclined to excesses, but also arrogant, audacious, and ordinary (pp. 17 – 18). While this may be so in the case of the particular New Spain documents studied from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Richard L. Jackson has carried out a systematic study of the black image in Latin American literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia in 1576 to the 1970s. Imaginarios ambiguos would have gained a deeper insight by considering the additional points of view of Jackson and the current Africana approaches to the study of African diaspora issues.Imaginarios ambiguos mistakenly identifies as “black and mulatto” some of the declarations that appear in the Spanish documents studied. It fails to recognize that the Spanish legal profession utilized standardized arguments and many of those were the product of Eurocentric prejudices regarding Africans and Afro-descendants. The nonwhite voices in the Spanish colonial legal and literary documents at best were the product of Spanish ventriloquism. The Spanish stories regarding Afro behavior need to be analyzed with a lens capable of looking beyond their face value.Pages 82, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, and 95 are mistakenly blank where print is missing; also, the cover began to unglue during the first reading.