"Todos Somos Primos"/We Are All Cousins: The Editor's Notes

Mexico had an extensive Black population, which eventually assimilated into the dominant majority Mestizo population by the eighteenth century.

—Ellen Simms

The majority of [blacks] had diluted their blood by union with the aborigines and whites, thus giving rise to the mixture of bloods that form the biological basis of Mexican nationality.

—Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán

The attempts to maintain a pigmentocracy failed in Mexico and eventually the Negro became a part of the hombre mezclado of the country.

—Edgar F. Love

In the Introduction to the 2001 edition of his Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, Patrick J. Carroll revises his 1991 position regarding contemporary academic interest in the presence of people of African descent in early Mexico. Originally, he wrote that

Afro-Veracruzanos represent a largely forgotten people who have received less attention than other groups that contributed to the emergence of colonial New Spain. This study attempts to add to the handful of post-World War II works that include, among others, the ground-breaking investigations of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, the overview of Colin Palmer, the comparative perspective of Gerald Cardoso, and the regional Veracruz inquiries of Adriana Naveda Chávez-Hita and Gilberto Bermúdez Gorrochotegui.

Carroll's 2001 Introduction retracts this position with the judicious observation that since "1990 not only has the number of studies on blacks in colonial Mexico proliferated, but the level of their sophistication has increased as well." While acknowledging the importance of earlier work by earlier historians and other scholars, Carroll was referring to new studies by such scholars as Matthew Restall, Ted Vincent, Brígedo Redondo, Susan Kellog, and others who are investigating topics similar to theirs. What he was also acknowledging is the fact that most of the current scholarship to date on blacks in Mexico deals with the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. What is lacking is a comparably rigorous and comprehensive critical discourse on the descendants of those Africans in Mexico from 1829, the date of emancipation, to the present, 2004. Fortunately, some of the work of such scholars as Alfredo Martínez Maranto, Bobby Vaughn, Richard Fantina, Miguel Angel Gutiérrez Avila, Daniel Althoff, Gabriel Moedano Navarro, and a few others is now directing our attention to the multiple facets of contemporary Afromestizo life and culture.

As scholars address the life and culture of contemporary Afromestizos, they, as new historians of the present, should acknowledge and utilize the history of these people of African descent, whose ancestors first entered Mexico in 1519 when the Spanish arrived. Otherwise, misstatement is inevitable if the working scholar is not forever cognizant of the past and its temporal continuum with regard to the present and future. It is the failure to draw upon his vast working knowledge of the past that mars Bobby Vaughn's otherwise provocative comments about the presence of blacks in contemporary Mexico. Having done extensive study of the life and culture of contemporary Afromestizos in Costa Chica as well as in other regions of Mexico, Bobby Vaughn attempts to account for the paucity of not only specialized studies on, but also general interest in, contemporary Afromestizos when he writes that

The presence of people of African descent in Mexico . . . has scarcely raised an eyebrow neither in Mexico nor in the larger world. Part of this is due to the fact that their presence is largely unknown outside the rural regions where the majority of them live. Their numbers are small, and they have not generally made a point of making their presence widely known.

When he asserts that the majority of the people of African descent in Mexico live in rural areas, Vaughn is mistaken. Perhaps he means that the persons who may be identified as such by their color, hair, phenotype, kinship and cultural practices, or the community to which they belong. In other words, Mexicans of African descent live all over the...