by Aran Shetterly
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I sat in the shade under a palapa and waited for the boat taxi to carry me from the small town of Zapotalito across Lagunas Chacahua to the even smaller town of Chacahua, which sprawls among the mangroves at the edge of Mexico's Pacific coast. Just off the rickety wooden pier, frigate birds dive-bombed pelicans, hoping to scare a fish loose.
The boat came into sight and moments later the whir of the engine reached my ears. About 30 feet from shore the pilot cut the power, lifted the prop, and coasted to the beach. A man hopped out, barefoot, wearing old yellow surf shorts and a t-shirt. A full afro ballooned from beneath his baseball cap. I tossed my backpack into the boat and centered myself on the cross thwart as my chauffer polled us toward deeper water. Turning to look back at Zapotalito, I watched him lower the outboard into murky water. “Where are you from?” I asked.
“Cuba.”
“Cuba? How did you end up here?”
The man laughed. “A slave ship was wrecked off the coast. Some of the slaves made it ashore. We've been here ever since.”
He pulled the cord, the motor roared, and I held my hat as the boat picked up speed and headed into the lagoon's labyrinthine channels, leaving me to wonder how a Cuban slave ship had arrived along Mexico's west coast.
A little known population
Few people, including most Mexicans, realize that a significant black Mexican population lives along Mexico's “Costa Chica” which runs just east of Acapulco down to Huatulco, in the state of Oaxaca.
If one does think of African-Mexicans it tends to be of Veracruz on the country's Gulf Coast.
Mexico's Caribbean port of call, Veracruz is known for its carnival, Cuban danzón, and a 16th century African freedom fighter named Yanga who established a free black town in the mountains there.
And yet, the black population on the west coast is significantly larger, though less well researched or understood due, at least in part, to its geographic isolation.
According to American scholar Bobby Vaughn, “While the population of contemporary black Mexicans is very small in Veracruz as compared with the Costa Chica, the discourse on blackness in Veracruz is pervasive.
Veracruz is envisioned in the popular Mexican imagination as a black state, and while this is due in part to the slave legacy in Veracruz, this imagination stems more from a nineteenth century Cuban cultural exchange.”
Spanish Mexico's history as an importer of slaves is often overshadowed by the vast numbers of Africans sold as laborers in the Caribbean, the United States and Brazil.
Until 1650, however, there were more African slaves in Mexico than anywhere else in the Americas. More surprising still, Vaughn claims that the population of Spaniards living in Mexico didn't surpass that of Africans until 1810.
This history is studied by only a handful of amateur and professional scholars curious about the part Africans have played in Mexico. Many Mexicans know that the country's second president, Vincente Guerrero, was of African descent. So too was José María Morelos, the national hero who fought and died for independence from Spain. Even so, the everyday reality of what it means to be black along the Costa Chica goes largely unexamined by non-black Mexicans, and by many black Mexicans as well.
Unacknowledged roots
As I wandered the paths of Chacahua, I saw people of all shades, from light tan to dark chocolate. I saw straight hair and afros and everything in between. Nearly all, however, even those who could pass as mestizo (the most common term for the mix of indigenous Mexican (the most common term for the mix of indigenous Mexican and Spanish) identified themselves as “moreno” or “negro”.
When I asked about the history of the town and its people I was told, “You have to talk to the old timers.”
As dusk settled, I spotted an old woman sitting in a chair in her neatly raked dirt yard. Her simple, stick house stood behind her and off to one side a cook fire smoldered.
“Where did the people of Chacahua come from?” I asked her.
“Well, there was a plane crash in the 1950s,” she said.
Was this answer a non-sequitur, or a modern version of the slave ship story?
“But why is your hair like it is?”
She reached up and touched the white ends of her afro. “I don't know why my hair is like this. I am Mexican.”
A matter of consciousness
When Father Glyn Jeemott listens to these stories told by black Mexicans to explain (or not explain) their presence in Mexico, a pained look crosses his face.
“It's not only ignorance,” he says. “They are holding onto a myth that was handed down to them as a way of rationalizing and reshaping the past. The sick joke is that they accept it. But,” and here he concedes a possible subversive quality to the myths, “when a black man shrugs his shoulders, how much is indifference and how much is survival?”
Jeemott is from Trinidad. He was ordained a Roman Catholic Priest in 1977. He came to Oaxaca City in the early 1980s and shortly thereafter visited Pinotepa Nacional, a municipal capital in the southwest corner of Oaxaca State.
When he saw all the black people living there, he realized that it was where he was meant to minister. “I had to be here,” he says. Padre Glyn, as he is known to his parishioners, was sent to be the parish priest in the tiny, dusty village of Ciruelo. He brought not only his faith, but a belief in pan-African identity and social justice. He has committed the last 22 years of his life to the spiritual needs of his parishioners and to nurturing incipient calls for economic justice in these impoverished, isolated, rural communities.
To further these last two objectives, and to raise general awareness about Mexico's black population, he created an organization called México Negro or, Black Mexico. The moniker emphasizes the “Africanness” of the people, rather than their blending. “Blackness” it asserts, exists in Mexico.
“The question of justice is basic in this. Mexico cannot deny equality and recognition,” he says. He explains that there are no government statistics for the black population, no option to claim this identity in the census (and therefore no way to determine, with any real accuracy, the size of the population). This, he says, is a, “judgment on Africa and ‘Africanness' that is not being reconciled [with the Mexican identity].”
The conventional story of modern Mexico's founding emphasizes the mix of Spaniards and indigenous Mexicans that forged the “mestizo” identity. Father Jeemott believes that the duality of this myth makes it easier to exclude all those who do not fit the model; to make them invisible, sometimes even to themselves.
A wry smile curls the corner of his mouth as he wisecracks about national hero José María Morelos, “[he] can't take off his bandana because it will show his curly hair.”
“The indigenous people of Mexico have said, ‘There is no Mexico without us.' The blacks haven't been able to say that.” Jeemott believes that there is an internal cohesion to the indigenous cultures that develops internal leadership.
Jeemott hopes México Negro will help create the kind of unity that produces leaders who will continue and extend the work he has started. Every March the organization puts on an encuentro of the pueblos negros. People from the area are invited to celebrate their heritage and to spend three days discussing local problems such as health care, education and garbage collection.
“There is a future”
Gerardo Carranza has six brothers and sisters and all of them slipped across the US border to find work. “No me gusta irme de mojado. Nunca. –I don't want to be a wetback. Not ever–” he says, by way of explaining why at twenty-two he still lives in the town of Huehuetan, Guerrero where he was born.
Carranza was accepted to Morehouse College (a historically black college) in Atlanta, Georgia, but it seems the scholarship he received has been rescinded. He says he's not interested in “awakening that dream” again. Instead Carranza, who is the local president of México Negro, focuses his energy and attention on his small Guerrerense pueblo where he says, “you can see there is a future.”
For an outsider the hopeful signs are not easy to identify. The streets are narrow, lined by crumbling stick and mud constructions. An old woman squats in an open door, a small display of old carrots on sale before her. The few modern houses are clearly the fruits of relatives laboring north of the border. In fact, Carranza's family home is one of the nicest in town. Even so, his parents still work the fields every day.
One of the signs of hope Carranza sees is a small arrangement of cinderblocks. The walls stand about four feet high and vines are beginning to crawl over them from the inside.
“That's the library,” he says, noting that for about $700 dollars more he could get it finished. Then he would have to fill it with books and computers. It's a difficult battle, he says. There are no jobs, so the kids don't see the point in studying. The town's resources are controlled by the municipal seat, a mestizo town that, according to Gerardo, has no interest in Huehuetan's future.
So he's trying to organize a sort of secession that would allow his town and a couple of others to form their own municipality and govern themselves. He believes that if Yanga could create an autonomous town for black people in Mexico, why can't the citizens of Huehuetan do the same?
“There are a lot of things this town can do,” says Gerardo. “In ten years, I'll still be here organizing the people.”
Mexican first
Not everyone agrees with Father Glyn's efforts to develop his parishioners' identification with their black roots. Some Mexican academics argue that he's “inventing identity.” What they are suggesting, it seems, is that the “Africanness” of the people is purely historical, and that today everyone is mixed and should identify as Mexican.
Near Ciruelo, across the Oaxaca state line in Guerrero, is the town of Cuajinicuilapa. There brothers Eduardo and Jorge Añorve Zapata counter Father Glyn's pan-African approach, identifying themselves as “afromestizo.” This term, rather than drawing attention first to being black, instead locates identity in the Mexican “mestizo” model. We are but one more ingredient in the Mexicanmix, it asserts. But first, we are Mexican.
These critiques of Father Glyn's approach are, at least in part, a rejection of “foreign” ideas. Even after nearly a quarter of a century in Mexico, he's still an outsider and his worldview challenges the way some Mexicans – and even some of the Mexicans he hopes to help – see themselves.
A practical approach
Back in Ciruelo, Elena Ruiz has little patience for abstract discussions about identity. There's a more urgent problem to solve: local employment.
A striking, dark-skinned woman with straight hair, Elena grew up in Pinotepa Nacional and experienced her share of discrimination. Her worry now is that without any new local industry many of the black towns might just disappear.
There's a steely determination in her eyes when she says, “This is our country too. We were born here. We feel completely Mexican.”
At 52, she has five children, two of whom are working in Los Angeles. Here, as it does all over Mexico, immigration tears at the town's social fabric. More and more young men and women leave. The money they send back builds nice houses for relatives and introduces flashy US styles, but it does little to create a permanent source of employment.
To her mind, there's no time to wait for government help or recognition. Elena started a sewing workshop with the hope that she and other women could make blouses and purses to sell at the market in Pinotepa. Unfortunately, they have run out of the minimal resources needed to keep the project going.
Each year on International Women's Day Elena organizes a road race for the women of the town. They go out to the highway and run the three kilometers back to the center.
It's almost as if the race is a kind of homecoming. Go out to the road and instead of running away, run back to who you are and where you are from.
