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

Chapter Six: Being from Here

| chapter six | Being from here 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 at all. The meanings they ascribe to being moreno and to being from San Nicolás rest on modes of being and acting that are tied to their village, and they distinguish principally between “inside” and the home, and “outside” and the streets. These poles map particularly onto gender roles, which become increasingly fixed as people age. During the life cycle the freedom San Nicoladenses ascribe to maroons, to Mexico, and more generally to themselves becomes strongly linked to men, such that women become almost entirely “enclosed” (encerrada), while men are “of the streets” (de la calle). Together these associations constitute the placement of the body and the embodiment of place by establishing the acceptable boundaries around which individuals operate to maintain the social and spatial norms of community life. In general, a criollo is born in the village or to moreno San Nicoladenses. For this reason, even first-generation resident Indians are still sometimes referred to as outsiders and their parents’ handling of rituals questioned. But not belonging can also be 190 | chapter six ascribed to moreno San Nicoladenses who do not, for instance, engage in reciprocity, or to women who wear shorts, smoke, and drink outside of dances and other ritual contexts, unlike a typical woman from San Nicolás (Lewis 2004). During my longest stretch of fieldwork I was out and about while my son’s father stayed home, shopped, cleaned, and cared for him. Because we were married, parents, and not Mexican, evaluations of our behavior were more flexible and curious than judgmental. But my son’s father sometimes joined groups of men for rounds of beer, and he never cooked. In turn, I cooked, shared food—the primary gift in the reciprocal exchanges among friends and family—and socialized mostly with women. “People don’t have problems with you,” Sirina once remarked when I began to go to San Nicolás alone,1 “because you’re very respectful, don’t flirt with anyone , and don’t give any man an excuse to come after you.” After my years of coming and going, learning proper comportment, and developing godparenthood (compadrazgo) ties with numerous families, people said that I was “from here now,” urging me to buy land and to build a house. Thus belonging is a flexible concept that applies to most morenos and can also apply to outsiders if San Nicoladenses deem them deserving. papa nico, kids, and Freedom San Nicoladenses often refer to freedom in their everyday discourses about how Mexico is and, by extension, about how they are. This characterizes their approach, for instance, to Mexican independence, when the village is conflated with a Mexico that Indians freed, to maroonage, and to Papa Nico’s willfulness. It also characterizes the rearing of male children especially . Thus the words on a reliquia hanging on a young boy’s neck read “everyone is free to do what they want.”2 Papa Nico in particular symbolizes childhood and freedom. He is said to have been stubborn as a youngster—his mother would hit him when he refused to come eat—and he liked to play, especially with small bulls, in keeping with the cowboy culture of the region. The saint holds a soup plate in one hand, with a dove soaring out of it. The released dove signifies the saint’s “discipline,” I was told, which I interpret as a kind of sacrifice, as the saint was vegetarian and San Nicoladenses deem animal protein an essential , if luxury, part of their diet.The dove also signifies a love for freedom, as San Nicoladenses believe that especially young animals want to be free but also keep birds, in particular, as pets. Papa Nico’s childhood story is thus an being From here | 191 allegory about San Nicoladenses themselves, including about the relationship between mothers and boychildren, who are allowed to roam when they are young and who, as teens, are not “ordered about” (mandado). As in English, children under the age of seven or so are kids or chivitos (baby goats).3 “They don’t yet have complexes,” Jaime once noted of a toddler who defecated in public, meaning that they are not self-conscious about their persons. They are...