The Afro-Mestizo connection: scholars team up to study Southern Mexico's African roots - Faculty Club

Acapulco has been billed as "the resort that never sleeps." It's the playground of the wealthy, home to the glittering "Golden Zone" shopping district, nightclubs and restaurants too numerous to count--and, just outside the city limits, a group of 98 percent Black towns that are experiencing a cultural awakening.

What's that you say? Black folks--or, as they're known locally, Afro-Mestizos--in Mexico?

"That is not the social reality we associate with Mexico. And I was born in Mexico--I know Mexico well," says Dr. Francisco Lomeli, a professor of Chicano Studies and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "This was completely new to me," he adds.

By "this," Lomeli means the history of Southern Mexico's Afro-Mestizos, to use the term from Mexico's colonial past that indicates African, Native and European ancestry. But Lomeli and his colleagues at UCSB's Black Studies and Chicano Studies departments are learning more about this remarkable population every day.

In the process, they're teaming with their counterparts at Acapulco's La Universidad Autonoma de Guerrero to create a truly international scholarly exchange that's rewriting the book on accepted notions of race, class and national identity in Mexico.

Indeed, these scholars are telling the stow of "the third root," says Dr. Mafia Herrera-Sobek, Luis Leal Endowed Professor of Chicano Studies at UCSB and chairwoman of the department. "We've always known we had two roots (in Mexico): the Indian and the European. But now we're learning that the `third root'--that Mexico has not acknowledged in its political ideology--is that we are also African."

The average visitor to Mexico's Costa Chica, or "little coast," probably would be astonished to learn about Mexico's "third root"--or "third race," as the phenomenon is sometimes called. Dr. Sethard Fisher, the eminent UCSB sociologist and former chairman of the Black Studies department, certainly seems to have felt that way when he discovered the secret of the Costa Chica during a conference in Acapulco in the late 1980s.

But what Fisher discovered as he toured the dusty back roads and tiny backwater towns of Guerrero state was a people who had not waited for academia to discover and document them, according to Raymond Huerta, UCSB's coordinator for affirmative action and a member of the committee that has been working to explore the Afro-Mestizo connection almost from the start.

Indeed, participants in Fisher's initiative say despite the grinding poverty that translates into startling rates of out-migration from the region, the people of small towns like Cuajinicuilapa and San Nicolas were aware of their history, had preserved their heritage in the form of centuries-old traditions and were actively working to tell their story when academics discovered them.

For example, Cuajinicuilapa--often called by its nickname, Cuaji--is a sleepy town of 10,000 in Guerrero state. It has something the United States has yet to establish, notes Dr. Gerard Pigeon, a UCSB professor of Black Studies. It has El Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas, a museum dedicated to the history and culture of Black people in Southern Mexico.

"That's really something to consider," Pigeon says. "Nowhere in the United States is there a museum of the African American that tells the story of slavery. And this is in a small village.

"They're (the people of Guerrero) teaching us (scholars) more than we're teaching them," he adds. "They've shown us a great deal, and they've done a lot in terms of what the French call Negritude, re-emphasizing and embracing Black presences (in Mexico)."

KEEPING ORIGINS ALIVE

The museum at Cuaji has devoted an entire wall to a massive map of the coasts of Europe, Africa, and North, Central and South America. Swooping black lines denote the major trade routes traveled by slave ships. There are major embarkation points all along the coast of Central America, which is so narrow at points that one could imagine throwing a rock from the Atlantic coast and hitting the Pacific Ocean. Other routes sweep all the way around Cape Horn to the northern reaches of the former Spanish dominions: the Pacific coasts of Mexico and California.

As the Afro-Mestizos tell the tale, their ancestors were runaway slaves who struck away from the coasts--with their large haciendas and enormous sugar and coffee plantations --and fanned out into the southern mountain ranges to establish tiny maroon communities, chiefly in the Pacific coast states of Guerrero and Oaxaca.

These communities--today's Afro-Mestizo towns--have kept alive the stow of their origins through a variety of means, but one of the most striking, according to Pigeon, is traditional dance, whose mingling of African, European and indigenous elements is so unusual as to constitute an anthropologist's or ethnomusicologist's dream.

Pigeon's short film on the Afro-Mestizos documents three of those dances. "La Danza de la Tesa," for example, might easily be mistaken for an Indian canoe dance--"tesa" is a contraction of "artesa," the Spanish word for an indigenous canoe--if one didn't note the African style footwork or know that West Africa is renowned for its canoe dances as well.