Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of "Black" Mexico

Chapter Five: Culture Work: So Much Money

| chapter Five | Culture work so muCh money 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 and, more broadly, of what KevinYelvington (2006a) calls transnational “dialogue.” This is exemplified by J. Lorand Matory (2006), who draws Africans deeply into the picture. Indeed, research on people of African descent in other Latin American contexts displays a remarkable diversity of experience (e.g., Candelario 2007; Daniel and Haddow 2010a, 2010b; Godreau 2002a, 2002b; Goldstein 2003; Gordon and Anderson 1999; Miles and Holland 2006; Pineda 2006; Price 2006; Rahier 1999, 2008; Sheriff 2001; Wade 1995, 2006a; Yelvington 2006a). Recent Mexicanist and Mexican scholars have also produced meticulous work (e.g., Hoffmann 2006a, 2007; Lara 2007; McDowell 2000; Motta 2006), yet culture workers seem not to engage this scholarship. Indeed, when Andrés Manzano complained in 2007 that he was identified as “white” by the Detroit teachers and accused Father Glyn of using “Anglo-Saxon” racial logic, it appeared that there was new discord among the concerns and thought processes even of Costa Chican intellectuals like Manzano and Father Glyn, such that Manzano—once Cuaji’s munici- 156 | chapter Five pal president—became more like a local community member as he encountered models that conflicted with his personal identity and family history . Cultural promotion and organizing does not always involve whites. But it does involve “white” discourses about race. Culture workers thus emphasize morenos’ African descent or their blackness, operating with “a terrible (and terrifying) international lingua franca” of U.S. origin, such as the onedrop rule (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999:43; Daniel 2003; Hoffmann 2006b; Wade 2006a). This muffles San Nicoladenses’ voices and, in the process, complicates the moreno-Indian relationship as well as Indian identities. Because several of the first Third Root researchers (Malinali Meza, Miguel Angel Gutiérrez, María Cristina Díaz) conducted their work in San Nicolás, San Nicoladenses were subject to much of the earliest contemporary talk about African roots. In this chapter the intellectual genealogy previously outlined becomes something of a metaethnography, one of interactions among culture workers, including social movement leaders, regular community members, and me. Culture workers intend to draw “Afromexicans” into Mexico, but for San Nicoladenses being Afromexican makes them different while inventing and valorizing the past in ways mostly meaningful to outsiders (Lewis 2000; Torres and Whitten 1998). Outsiders thus ignore parallels between research and national interests that might explain the relatively sudden emergence of “blacks” on the national landscape. As noted, intellectuals such as Clavijero and Vasconcelos never romanticized blacks the way they did Indians. Instead, they deliberately excluded blackness from their ideal image of a mestizo nation. Recent attempts to reevaluate morenos as “blacks,” “Afromexicans ,” or “Afromestizos” sometimes follow a template that adheres to official state multiculturalism, which pays lip service to celebrating rural people for their customs but does nothing to ameliorate their living conditions . Like Indians, then, Afromexicans become a kind of exotica drawing outside interest. Ironically, erasures of the past thus reemerge in a different form: one that is not, of course, avowedly racist but one that nevertheless effectuates a newly configured separation of blackness from Mexicanness because it imputes an identity that local morenos do not claim, thus once again distancing them from the mainstream. “Why should we be ‘Afromexicans’ if culture work | 157 whites don’t call themselves ‘Spaniards’?” an exasperated Don Domingo once remarked to me. “[Whites] say they’re Mexicans and that we’re not from here.” “Well,” he continued, “they’re not from here either.” When Ernesto showed me the “African” center of San Nicolás, he emphasized that it was “of the people.” But “the people don’t support culture workers; what they do doesn’t interest them. They don’t want it,” Don Domingo said. For Rosa, peoplewere not interested “because they just want to get on with their lives.” Because rights to land, and the construal of a special relationship to it, are not the basis for recognition, culture workers emphasize distinctions allegedly founded, as they have been since Aguirre Beltrán’s day, on culture and “blood,” which often seep into each other. Because of this, thick descriptions of the Costa Chica’s peoples of African descent have been sidelined in favor of essentialisms aimed at reinventing blackness as part of a political and antiracist process of minority...