Africa in Mexico: The Editor's Notes

This special section is installment number two of a project we initiated in the 2004 Winter issue of Callaloo, which we devoted to the life and culture of Coyolillo, an Afromestizo pueblo northwest of Xalapa, the capital city of the State of Veracruz, Mexico. The main goal of our project is two-fold: to bring to our readers' attention sites of the African Diaspora with which they may not be acquainted; and to help expand and refine the concept of the diaspora itself by encouraging and promoting research on contemporary groups of people of African descent that have, to date, been largely ignored. The almost erased African presence and nearly silenced black voices in Mexico in general—and in the States of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Guerrero in particular—are such concerns. Like the inaugurating number on the subject, this special section returns to the people of the State of Veracruz—this time to people in coastal communities south of the City of Veracruz.

As we traveled into each of the coastal towns—Alvarado, Mandinga, and Tlacotalpan—we immediately realized how vastly different those communities are from Coyolillo, which, despite the people's unremembered racial past, is decidedly an Afromestizo pueblo. Regardless of the occasional and brief visits of outsiders to the pueblo, and in spite of the efforts of a number of its adult males to find sustaining labor in the United States and in other parts of Mexico, Coyolillo, a relatively isolated village, is a self-contained community that remains cohesive. The three communities represented in this special section of Callaloo are, on the other hand, open towns that have long depended on tourism and small-scale seafood commerce with other regions of Mexico. Perhaps it is these commercial transactions, with their inevitable social exchanges, including inter-marriage with persons who come from other regions of Mexico, that account for the disappearing racial markers that immediately identify southern Veracuzanos as Afromestizos. As some of our interviews indicate, however, a few of the Afromestizo cultural markers persist in, for example, cuisine, music, and dance in southern Veracruz, and this persistence is reinforced by the Afromestizos' continuing contacts with Afro-Cuban entertainers, whose African-ness is central to their own way of being in the world. As we made our rounds from community to community, we discovered that a number of the people in Alvarado, Mandinga, and Tlacotalpan are more cosmopolitan and more formally educated than we had expected. To our surprise, not a few of the inhabitants in these three costal communities could recall select elements of their racial past, however fraught, more often than not, with historical inaccuracies. By the time we had completed our interviewing process south of the city of Veracruz, we concluded that what the people in Coyolillo and in the coastal towns had in common is not a mythologized or historicized Africa as homeland but an invented Cuba as their point of origin. Unlike Afro-Brazilians, Haitians, Afro-Cubans, and U. S. African Americans, coastal Afromestizos seem to have disremembered Africa, the true origin of their non-Indigenous and non-European ancestors. For a number of these southern Veracruzanos, Cuba, they tell us in their interviews, is their ancestral home.

Moreover, like the people of Coyolillo, the majority of the inhabitants of the coastal communities south of the City of Veracruz have even forgotten—or perhaps were never taught—the country's colonial past, when enslaved Africans were brought directly from Africa to Mexico—to the Port of Veracruz, to be exact—and sold, for example, in Veracruz, Xalapa, Córdoba, Mexico City, and other locations in the country. Do contemporary Afromestizos in the three coastal towns represented in this issue of Callaloo know that between 1519 and 1829 (the year that the second President of Mexico, "El Negro," Vincente Guerrero, abolished slavery) that 200,000 or more Africans were brought into Mexico to work as enslaved...