Chocolate and Corn Flour
History, Race, and Place in the Making of "Black" Mexico
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Duke University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-xvi
I have had overwhelming institutional support for this project, beginning with the American Bar Foundation, which funded my initial trip to the Costa Chica in 1992 while I was a Dissertation . . .
Introduction
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pp. 1-14
In the summer of 1992 I perched on a low wall in the quiet and dusty central plaza of San Nicolás Tolentino, an agricultural village in a historically black region of Guerrero, Mexico. Pigs, chickens . . .
Chapter One: The Lay of the Land
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pp. 15-53
San Nicoladenses use the terms white, moreno, and Indian in reference to the three broad “types” of Costa Chicans, which is why I use them too. As discussed in the following chapter, that . . .
Chapter Two: Identity in Discourse: The “Race” Has Been Lost
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pp. 55-83
Many colonial ranchers on the Costa Chica were absentee landlords. Those likely to live there, such as Mauleón, who also oversaw royal tribute, combined official and unofficial functions. Yet . . .
Chapter Three: Identity in Performance
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pp. 85-117
I now turn to three narratives that together express the exclusion of whiteness through the symbolic entanglement of Indianness and morenoness in the formation of place and identity. The . . .
Chapter Four: Africa in Mexico: An Intellectual History
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pp. 119-153
This chapter explores “the Africa thesis,” as John McDowell (2000:9) terms the ascription of Africanity to coastal belt morenos. I begin by reconstructing an intellectual genealogy that began . . .
Chapter Five: Culture Work: So Much Money
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pp. 154-188
Scholars of other African diaspora populations have worked within the particularities of American histories and experiences, offering stellar examples of the nexus of ethnicity, race, and nation . . .
Chapter Six: Being from Here
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pp. 189-230
Culture workers find positive value in San Nicolás principally around the abstract qualities of Africanity or blackness. But for San Nicoladenses such qualities are either negative or not engaged . . .
Chapter Seven: A Family Divided? : Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces
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pp. 231-265
Until the 1970s many San Nicoladenses lived in the fields during planting and harvesting seasons and did not attend school. Sebastián therefore lamented that he wanted to learn to read and . . .
Chapter Eight: Transnationalism, Place, and the Mundane
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pp. 265-303
Doña Cata sang this traditional song to me in 2002 as her “goodbye.” She was getting too old to dance, sing, and travel, she said. Before she died in 2007 she told me that she had taught a lot of young . . .
Conclusion: What’s in a Name?
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pp. 305-322
San Nicoladenses’s identities rest on a complex calculus of race, history, and custom. That calculus is situational, which makes it fluid and conciliatory rather than bounded and antagonistic. But . . .
Notes
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pp. 323-340
Bibliography
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pp. 341-362
Index
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pp. 363-370
E-ISBN-13: 9780822394778
Print-ISBN-13: 9780822351320
Page Count: 400
Illustrations: 45 illustrations
Publication Year: 2012
