La Negra Angustias: The Mulata in Mexican Literature and Cinema B. Christine Arce (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “Soldadera de Michoacán” (1910) by Agustín Casasola (1874–1938). Sepia-toned enlarged print from original photo negative. National Museum of Mexican Art Permanent Collection, gift of Pilsen Neighbors. Photo by Michael Tropea/Archivo Casasola, Fototeca of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. [End Page 1085] The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was arguably one of the most important peasant uprisings of the twentieth century, and as such, altered the trajectory of Mexican cultural production, even generating its own literary genre called the novelas de la revolución [revolutionary novels]. The novel La negra Angustias [The Black Woman Angustias], written by Francisco Rojas González in 1944 and awarded the National Literature Prize the same year, is curiously not one of the hallmark novels of the Revolution. At least it does not register along the order of Mariano Azuela’s touchstone novel Los de abajo [The Underdogs] (1915) or El águila y la serpiente [The Eagle and the Serpent] (1928) by Martín Luís Guzmán, and it is generally not included in the bibliographies of Mexican literature courses. La negra Angustias recounts the story of a black soldadera, or rather, Coronela of the Zapatista army who not only fights for justice for the poor and rural peasantry, but also deplores the violence enacted upon women. Aside from being a novelist and short-story writer, Rojas González was trained in ethnography and collaborated on several books about indigenous culture. Furthermore, he wrote another novel, Lola Casanova (1947), which similarly showcases a strong female protagonist who is based on the legend of a white woman taken captive by a hostile indigenous tribe of Seris in Northern Mexico, her acculturation into Seri society, and her subsequent rise to power. However, La negra Angustias is exceptional due to its powerful mulata heroine, and yet, paradoxically typical. This article engages the representation of race in the novel by Francisco Rojas González and the eponymous film directed by Matilde Landeta five years later. In order to illustrate how blackness is figured in both the novel and film (both negatively or positively), I will examine a few salient moments where the representation of race is seminal through the deployment of classic tropes like that of the Amazon in addition to an uncanny recognition of racial difference on behalf of the female protagonist. Through an interpretation of these instances, I explore the contradictions inherent in the unconscious interventions made by these cultural producers by suggesting that the shadow of race-relations in the North and the Caribbean uniquely impacted the development of racial difference in the film. Finally, I claim that the ironic absence of blacks in the national imaginary, despite their persistent presence in the arts, reveals the fractures of racial identity in Mexico. Cedric Robinson and Luz María Cabral, in their remarkable article, “The Mulatta on Film: From Hollywood to the Mexican Revolution,” compare North American filmic representations of mulattas with that of Mexican cinema and claim that blackness in both the novel and the film gets lost in the rhetoric of Mexican nationalism and class struggle (16). Indeed, the protagonist’s mixed-race identity becomes submerged in the post-revolutionary quest for crafting a cohesive Mexican national identity and the five-hundred year struggle over agrarian reform. However, the powerful rhetoric of mestizaje did not only affect Afro-Mexicans through the flattening of regional and racial identities; it also impacted indigenous communities through the creation of the National Indigenous Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista or INI) in 1948 that inaugurated a social program of cultural and linguistic assimilation for indigenous peoples that was only recently dismantled in 2003.1 Nonetheless, I suggest that in this case an attentive reading of both the novel and the movie reveals striking evidence to the contrary. That is to say that blackness is figured prominently in the novel and the film, but becomes disfigured by its racist representations as well as its subordination to class struggle, becoming mired in revolutionary disenchantment and the filmmaker’s privilege of a more feminist perspective. What...