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Friday, August 28, 2009

Uncovering the Long History of Blacks in Mexico—Part II

Alva Moore Stevenson


Africans have been in Mexico at least since 1510. Those who were imported as slaves resisted their oppression, as in other parts of the Americas. In my last article for VidaAfroLatina.com, I wrote about one of the most famous, Gaspar Yanga, who led an uprising and escape from a sugar plantation in Veracruz in 1570.

Yanga went on to negotiate peace and freedom for his community of escaped slaves. It’s the only known example of a fully successful attempt by a maroon colony to have free status sanctioned and guaranteed by law. Yanga’s efforts represent an exceptional legacy upon which Black Mexicans continued to build.

The import of African slaves had all but ceased by the mid-16th century. Spanish colonizers in Mexico were confronted with an increasingly mixed-race society due to miscegenation. Castas, people of mixed blood, not only blurred and crossed racial lines, but economic lines as well. To reinforce their identity as the elite class, Spaniards in Mexico instituted a caste system as a method of social control. This was an ordering of racial groups according to their limpieza de sangre, literally cleanliness of blood.

In other words, people’s place in society was determined by their proportion of Spanish blood. But the castas largely ignored this caste system. Afro-Mexicans such as Vicente Guerrero played critical roles in Mexico’s independence of August 1821. Of African and indigenous ancestry, Guerrero was born of the peasant class and worked as a mule driver. He became commander in chief of the Mexican army during the last three years of the war for independence which lasted from 1810 to 1821. He was a member of the three-person junta that ruled Mexico for part of the post-war period from 1823 to 1824. And he was president of the country from 1829 into early 1830. Guerrero believed in ending privileges and he promoted equality for all races and social and economic classes. The Mexican government, during his presidency, abolished slavery in 1829.

Martha Menchaca, author of “Recovering History, Constructing Race,” discusses the reasons behind the northward migration of Afro-Mexicans and other non-White Mexicans in the early 19th century in her book. She writes, “Blatant racial disparities became painfully intolerable to the non-White population and generated the conditions for their movement toward the northern frontier, where the racial order was relaxed and people of color had the opportunity to own land and enter most occupations.”

In the period up to 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Black Mexicans and African Americans crossing back and forth over Mexico’s northern border experienced great social fluidity.

California was a part of Spain from 1769 to 1821, and from 1821 to 1848 it belonged to Mexico. Like the castas in 17th and 18th century Mexico City, early Black Californians ignored social strictures related to race.

This racial ambiguity made possible the success of the Afro-Mexican Pico family. Of Spanish, African, indigenous and Italian ancestry, Pío Píco was the last Mexican governor of California. He served in that position in 1831 and again from 1845 to 1846. A consummate politician and “revolutionist,” Pio Píco was also a wealthy landowner, military commander and also served as a Los Angeles city councilman in 1853. His brother, Andres, represented California at the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga in 1847, ending the Mexican War in California. He also served as state senator in 1851 and from 1860 to 1861.

Members of the Camero, Moreno and Quintero families, and other Afro-Mexican families, were landowners as well as skilled tradesmen. Such families lived not only in California, but across the Southwest. Afro-mestizos comprised part of the population that founded the towns of Nacogdoches, San Antonio, Laredo and La Bahía in Texas, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Los Angeles and Santa Barbara in California.

In contemporary Mexican society, the caste system no longer functions openly. But Afro-Mexicans remain largely marginalized and are concentrated at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

Bobby Vaughn, a scholar of Afro-Mexican studies, says that issues of race in Mexico have “been so colored by Mexico’s preoccupation with the Indian question that the Afro-Mexican experience tends to blend almost invisibly into the background, even to Afro-Mexicans themselves.” The national focus on Mexican identity as a blend of Spanish and Indian heritage effectively excludes Afro-Mexicans.

Since the mid-1990s, Afro-Mexicans from 30 African-descendant areas are meeting in what is called an Encuentro de Pueblos Negros, a gathering of Black towns. The annual event is led by Father Glyn Jemmott, a Trinidadian Catholic priest and an advocate for Afro-Mexican communities. According to Jemott, the residents of these towns are striving “to relate our common history as Black people, to strengthen our union as communities, to organize and open realizable paths to secure our future, and to resist our marginalization in the life of the Mexican nation.”

Their movement parallels similar ones involving African-descended peoples in Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.


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