Posted on 07/04/2004 8:14:56 AM PDT by Max Combined
Ignored by society, black Mexicans deny their history
EL CIRUELO, Mexico -- They call each other negro and sing and joke about living in an all-black community. But ask the villagers here about their African ancestry, and they respond with blank stares.
They are not, they insist, the descendants of African slaves. There was never slavery here, even in ancient times.
They have undeniably African features -- black skin, tightly curled hair, broad noses. And though the fact has been largely ignored in Mexico's history books, historians know that the back-breaking labor of Mexico, as in much of the Americas, was once done by African slaves.
A handful of historians and anthropologists have studied the tens of thousands of negros living in remote enclaves of Mexico -- no one knows exactly how many -- in villages founded as early as the 1500s by fugitive slaves.
Mexico's blacks have been forgotten by time and ignored by the government and much of society.
"How can you expect someone who is black to esteem his blackness?" asked the Rev. Glyn Jemmott, a priest in the entirely black village of El Ciruelo. "Blacks have been invisibilized in Mexico."
Around the turn of the 17th century, Mexico imported more African slaves than anywhere else in the New World. But countless Mexicans are unaware of that history or that there are blacks in the country.
The Mexican census does not acknowledge them, treating all Mexicans as one race.
It does enumerate people who speak indigenous languages, though, meaning Indians get more recognition than blacks, who speak Spanish.
The small group Mexico Negro is fighting to have a racial breakdown added to the census before the 2010 count, but members are not optimistic.
The movement has not exactly taken off. One leader, Sergio Peñaloza, said it needs "a titanic fight" to change the mind of the government and instead has few people and no money.
The government designed the census without racial categories in an effort to combat racism by counting everyone as simply Mexican, said Claudia Suarez, coordinator of a joint program between Mexico and the United Nations for the development of indigenous people.
The few leaders among the country's blacks say it is just another way to ignore them.
A series of stories on racism that ran in the national newspaper La Jornada in June never mentioned Mexico, instead describing slavery and racism in the United States with an essay and a photo montage of a U.S. flag, Klansmen and a lynching.
"Mexico has convinced itself that its racial mixing created a new race in which everyone is equal," said Jemmott, a leader in Mexico Negro.
Mexicans closely note different skin tones But Mexicans, like most people in Central and South America, are hyperaware of subtle differences in skin tone, rattling off the colors of their family members the way Americans might name their occupations.
Antonio Añorve, for example, looks like a typical mestizo -- or mix of indigenous and European blood -- with brown skin and straight, dark brown hair.
His father is whiter, of Spanish ancestry. Añorve's mother clearly has African blood; "la negrita" they call her and the cafe in Cuajinicuilapa that is her namesake.
Ana Laredo is black, but she says that in her town of El Ciruelo, every other generation is blanco, meaning they have lighter skin but otherwise African features.
"There is no doubt in anyone's mind who is black and who isn't," said Bobby Vaughn, a cultural anthropologist who has studied black Mexicans for a decade, "and there is a general recognition that the blacks are at the bottom of the social scale in many ways."
Suarez acknowledged that the government has no programs geared toward blacks.
"They are considered part of the population of Mexico," she said. "They are not considered indigenous people."
While the indigenous people in Mexico speak traditional languages, blacks in Mexico speak only Spanish, their African languages forgotten, like much of their culture.
And while Mexican museums and government programs celebrate indigenous languages and cultures as a vital part of Mexican history, those of blacks have disappeared.
Sparse infrastructure heightens isolation
Most of Mexico's blacks live in about two dozen villages along Costa Chica, a rural stretch of Pacific coastline about 160 miles southeast of Acapulco.
A smaller group lives in Veracruz, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
In Costa Chica, there are roughly 30,000 to 40,000 blacks, Vaughn estimates.
The area is divided between Oaxaca and Guerrero, two of Mexico's poorest states.
In the lowlands of picturesque coves and verdant fields, the residents are mostly poor blacks. Up in the hills, toward the blue and green mountains, there are equally destitute indigenous villages.
The beaches are coated in garbage and trampled by pigs and chickens. The fields are reduced to charred stumps, burned by increasingly desperate farmers.
In a country in which virtually everything connects through Mexico City, Costa Chica has no roads to the capital and no commercial airports.
The rest of the nation is most easily accessible by driving several hours northwest to Acapulco on a rough two-lane highway dotted with speed bumps.
The largest of the majority-black towns is gritty Cuajinicuilapa, where many of the 8,000 residents proudly direct visitors to the Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas.
The modest museum is one of the only official places in Mexico that acknowledges the country's African ancestry.
But take the narrow roads south toward the coast, and the pride vanishes.
`Third race' exhibits little cultural pride
Fishermen in the lush, cliff-ringed cove of Punta Maldonado say their fishing methods, using nets or hooks attached to reels instead of poles, did not originate in Africa.
Widows struggling to feed their families by selling fruit and small fish to their poor neighbors in El Ciruelo deny that they are descended from slaves.
Housewives in San Jose Estancia Grande and Santiago Tapextla say their ancestors did not come from Africa, that their families have always lived right here.
Then how did blacks come to live in Mexico?
"Quien sabe?" many answer. "Who knows?"
Although Mexico claims that its "raceless" society means there is no racism and that blacks are better off than in the United States, Jemmott and others in his group say Mexico is committing the worst kind of racism: ignoring the very existence of blacks.
When the police pull over black motorists, they are sometimes forced to sing the national anthem to prove they are Mexican, said Jemmott, "because `Mexico has no blacks.' "
Jemmott, a priest from Trinidad, said the open racial strife in U.S. history is almost preferable because "blacks knew where they stood and who they were from the beginning."
Peñaloza with Mexico Negro said he was astonished during a recent trip to Cuba to see how much black culture is celebrated there.
"The value of the negro is different in Cuba than the value of the negro in Mexico," Peñaloza said. "We are the third race."
Jemmott, known as Padre Glyn, was working as a missionary in Mexico City when he learned about the blacks of Costa Chica.
He asked to be moved to the parish and arrived 20 years ago to find a self-loathing so ingrained that a black man did not believe Jemmott was a priest.
"Blacks are not priests," the man told Jemmott. "Blacks are not fit to be priests. I've never seen a black priest."
Many of the residents of Costa Chica are illiterate, and they say they are struggling to ensure their children get a decent education.
In the black village of San Jose Estancia Grande, residents say the five mestizo teachers and the principal at the primary school let their children run wild, often leaving classes unattended during the day while the teachers drank at the cantina.
When the government did not respond to their complaints, the townspeople took action on their own, telling the teachers to leave and not came back.
Maria Irma Vargas, a single mother of two girls, said the government finally promised the town new teachers. They would not arrive until the end of a weeks-long teachers strike that had kept all the children in the region out of school for much of May and June.
Vargas blamed laziness for the teachers' lack of interest in their students, but Jemmott saw something more sinister.
"The kids here are considered by the teachers to be largely unteachable," the priest said.
Orlanda Baños, a third-grade teacher who lives and works in El Ciruelo, said she and other teachers do believe their students have a bright future.
"There are many intelligent children," Baños said, and she added that she hopes they will leave and go to the United States, where there are more opportunities.
Vargas, who has a fourth-grade education, said she is ashamed of the lack of education and the poverty among blacks.
Asked if she has pride in her culture, she replied, "No."
Historians see shreds of African customs
Only tatters of African culture remain in Costa Chica.
One remnant is the Danza de los Diablos, the devils dance, performed at the beginning of November with gruesome black masks with several-foot-long beards and horns and long, pointy ears that vaguely resemble those of rabbits.
The ritual coincides with the Day of the Dead, which melds Catholic and Aztec traditions to celebrate and try to communicate with the souls of the dead.
No one interviewed in Costa Chica could explain the origins of the dance, but anthropologists have linked it to Africa.
Although los negros are mostly devout Catholics, many also believe they have an animal counterpart whose illness or death causes the person to also become sick or die.
A man in the village of Corralero had his arm bitten off by an alligator in May, and men in the village responded by killing five alligators.
Then, Jemmott said, rumors started that five people had died in nearby Santiago Tapextla.
Elias Bongmba, a religion professor at Rice University, was raised on the West African coast, where many of the slaves in the New World came from.
He said the belief in animal doubles is similar to what he saw in Cameroon.
"In the area where I grew up, there's a common belief that someone can transform themselves into a double ... an animal of the choice of the individual," Bongmba said.
Only certain people were believed to have this power, which they could use to frighten others, hunt or escape from dangerous situations.
If they were hunting large game and the animal charged, for example, some people were said to be able to turn themselves into birds.
"They would use that power, and then just fly away," Bongmba said.
Songs and dances are vital part of community
Ana Laredo buys small fish from fishermen, then tries to sell them in El Ciruelo. She would like to have a job but says no one will hire her because she is black, a complaint echoed by others.
Mexico does not ban discrimination in employment, and classified ads are replete with requests for applicants who are young and beautiful.
Laredo, like the other residents of Costa Chica, does not know how her ancestors arrived in this steamy coastal area.
Historians do know that slaves were brought to work on cattle ranches. Some fugitive slaves may also have escaped from ports and sugar mills.
As the rainy season started in June, residents of Costa Chica were busy planting, and music was scarce.
But they say dancing and singing are common, and that townspeople tell one another stories through the singing of corridos.
The sometimes impromptu narratives of daily life are derived from oral traditions in Africa, said Luz Maria Martinez in the article "Mexico's Third Root," written for the Smithsonian Institution.
Though the custom has survived, the original songs have not. There are none that tell the history of slavery or of Africa.
A corrido performed for visitors by two young children, though, acknowledges the color, if not the ancestry, of the forgotten people of Costa Chica.
"All are painted black," the song in Spanish goes, "black boyfriends and godfathers, cousins, brothers and fathers-in-law."
No you ignoramus the way my family got here, the legal way. And illegal immigration is NOT how the vast majority of immigrants are using to get here. That may be in your racist fantasy world but not in the real world.
As all Mexicans?
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