African Mexicans try for a lasting identity
The goal: Finding roots while overcoming bias
April 11, 2002
BY LAURENCE ILIFF
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
SAN NICOLAS, Mexico -- Dark-skinned Mexicans along the southern Pacific Coast have long sensed that their roots are distinct from the mixed-race majority dominated by European and Indian blood. But until relatively recently, many had only a sketchy idea why. "A popular story says we came from a stranded African ship," said Jorge Zapata, 38, a schoolteacher from the Costa Chica, or "small coast," south of Acapulco. "It's a nice story. But as it turns out, the truth isn't so nice because we came in chains as slaves and were the first ones to drown."
Now, African Mexicans along the coast are discovering their roots, countering negative stereotypes, and trying to find their place in Mexican history.
Government-issued textbooks describe coastal residents as festive dancers who happily raise cattle and corn. Crude drawings depict the physical characteristics of African Mexicans without offering much history. Zapata, who worked in California in the early 1990s, said the books are clearly offensive, so he offers his preteen students a crash course in "negritud," or "blackness," to counter official stereotypes. He has also helped establish a museum to explain the arrival of Africans in Mexico and to instill pride in their heritage.
The Spanish conquistadors, alarmed by the death of Indian laborers to disease and overwork, brought up to a half-million African slaves to Mexico from the 1500s to the 1800s to work in mines. Some escaped and formed runaway slave communities in towns along the Costa Chica, which was set in thick jungle. Mexico abolished slavery in 1821. In some ways, blacks in Mexico today are following in the footsteps of the Indian rights movement that was re-energized after the 1994 Mayan uprising by the Zapatista rebels and their charismatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos, residents said. Indeed, most blacks have Indian blood from intermarriage. An important factor in black identity in Mexico, leaders said, has been immigration to the United States by poor coastal residents who must confront their racial identity in the United States.
Likewise, visits by black Americans during the last decade have given blacks in Mexico a sense of camaraderie. "I feel very much at home here," said Ron Wilkins, a black American activist, teacher and photographer visiting from Los Angeles. "I've met black families who are very conscious and very committed to seeing black people become more visible and become empowered and take their place in the 21st Century."
Wilkins, who has exhibited his photos of African Mexicans in the United States, said he is impressed by the lack of racial and social tension within Black Indian communities.
"One of the things I come here to learn more about is that despite the racism in the larger Mexican society," people in Mexico "seem to get along and live together at a level of harmony that is very hard to find in the United States," he said.
Black and Mexicans in the United States need to learn that they have more in common than they might think, he said. For example, Mexicans in Texas participated in the Underground Railroad to shuttle black slaves to freedom in Mexico, Wilkins said. African Mexicans, a blend of black, Indian and white blood, are not counted in the official census. Though their presence is heaviest on the Pacific and Gulf coasts where the slave trade was focused, historians have said African blood is common throughout the population.
Every year since 1996, African Mexicans have held an Encounter of Black Mexico, featuring regional dances, music and roundtable discussions about black life.
In late March, the event was held in San Nicolas, a dusty village with dirt roads and homes with mostly dirt floors. Many people in the village migrate to the United States to work. Before hundreds of visitors, schoolchildren performed the Apache dance, a mix of Indian and African traditions, and the Dance of the Devils, which in part is a reminder of the poor treatment slaves received at the hands of their oppressors.
"My color may be white, but my roots are black," said Maria de Jesus Marin, 24, who participated in a roundtable discussion on black women. "The racism here continues as always, because it's still the black women who wash clothes and clean up after the white women." Marin works as a teacher's assistant at a school in El Ciruelo. The school was established by the local Catholic parish because many schoolchildren can't afford to travel to the nearest government school, she said. But outside of African-Mexican communities, ignorance of black life remains, as does discrimination, residents said.
"When I left here and went to Mexico City for the first time in 1982, I realized that people looked at me differently, as if they were suspicious of me for some reason," said Guadalupe Jaime Noyola, 41, who splits his time between San Nicolas and North Carolina. "When I am in the United States, I feel better because no one hassles me."
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