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Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 101; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-8897828

1527-1900

Jorge E. Delgadillo Núñez,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Finding Afro-Mexico is a nuanced and well-argued intellectual history about the many ways in which Afro-Mexican history and cultural expressions acquired a more diasporic register over the course of the twentieth century. One of the book's main arguments is that Mexico followed its own path toward the recognition of the Afro-descended population in 2015, a path that was a product of the specificities of Mexican history and that cannot, and indeed should not, be reduced to US racial understandings.The book is divided in two main parts. The three chapters that comprise the first section put forth a powerful, and well-deserved, criticism of the fixation in literary scholarship and social science research on José Vasconcelos and the so-called erasure of Afro-Mexicans. In this first part Cohen offers a more historically precise contextualization of Vasconcelos's work and character. The book situates him as a reactionary and peripheral personage during most of his career rather than as the central figure or the influential ideologue portrayed by most of the recent scholarship. The first chapter outlines the origins and development of a narrative of Black disappearance that was very influential during the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. According to Cohen, this narrative would leave future intellectuals and cultural producers without a framework for constructing Blackness as Mexican. Chapters 2 and 3, for their part, focus on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals, following the tenets of historical materialism, reinscribed Blackness in Mexican history. Notable here were Andrés Molina Enríquez, Alfonso Teja Zabre, and José Mancisidor, who for the first time vindicated the likely African origins of important Mexican figures such as José María Morelos, Vicente Guerrero, and Emiliano Zapata. They also nationalized the story of Yanga, making it a precursor of Mexican resistance to Spanish colonial rule. This interpretation would later result in San Lorenzo de Cerralvo, Verarcruz, the town that Yanga first established, being renamed after him.Finding Afro-Mexico, undoubtedly, is at its best when focusing on postrevolutionary Mexican history and culture in the second part of the book. In these four chapters, Cohen situates Mexican intellectuals as part of a larger network of international scholars who tried to recover the African heritage of the American hemisphere. One of Cohen's main points, presented in this last portion of the book, is that because of the radicalization of Black nationalism in the United States and the emergence of the African diaspora paradigm in US universities during the 1960s, international scholars began to project foreign notions of race onto Mexican history. This in turn led those scholars to dismiss Mexican efforts to give back visibility to its African-descended population and to erroneously assume, and reiterate, that the Mexican state purposefully erased Afro-Mexicans from the history and culture of the nation.Before that happened, however, Mexico was considered to be at the forefront of intellectual efforts to recover the continent's African roots. In addition to situating Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán's pioneering work within an international intellectual context, Cohen recovers the names of lesser known figures such as Miguel Covarrubias, who tried to give back visibility to Afro-Mexicans even before Aguirre Beltrán published his first book on the subject. Chapter 5 turns to the ways in which Blackness was reinscribed into Mexican arts—namely, music and dance. The author traces the transnational networks that allowed Mexican and foreign intellectuals such as Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, Otto Mayer-Serra, and Curt Lange, among others, to recognize the African influences in Mexican vernacular music. This chapter also highlights the work of African American artists such as Katherine Dunham in disseminating the knowledge about African-derived artistic expressions found in Mexico. The remainder of the book analyzes poetry, film, and graphic arts to show how Blackness was reinserted into Mexican culture.Lamentably, the first section of the book contains many factual errors that might distract readers from crucial arguments. For example, Miguel Hidalgo did not declare Mexican independence on September 16, 1810 (p. 1). Moreover, authorities kept counting Afro-Mexicans as such in different types of records long after 1810, contrary to what the opening sentence implies (and is restated again on page 29, where Hidalgo's surname is also incorrectly spelled as Castillo instead of Costilla). Similarly, Hidalgo published his decree abolishing slavery in November 1810, not in November 1811, when he had already been executed (p. 32). Ultimately, San Lorenzo de Cerralvo surely was one of the first free Black towns in the Americas but not the first one (pp. 41, 63). More importantly, perhaps, the discourses about Afro-Mexicans in nineteenth-century Mexico were more complex than the narrative of disappearance portrayed in the first section.Once the reader gets past these caveats, however, Finding Afro-Mexico reveals itself as a relevant contribution to the field. Because of its extensive research in 20 archives, the wide variety of sources used, and the nuanced and compelling arguments presented, Finding Afro-Mexico is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject that should attract interest from students and scholars alike.