MEXICO’S FORGOTTEN NEGROS

It’s springtime when I meet Juan, the fair complexioned mestizo owner of a travel agency in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas. I ask him about the former slave chapel of San Nicolas behind the Cathedral just across from his office on the zocalo.* Juan’s response,“Tomas, there have never been any black slaves in San Cristobal.”

I then opened my journal and read to him the words I copied from the historical notice posted at the entrance to the chapel.

Alrededor de 1615, el obisbo Juan de Zapata y Sandoval fundo´ la ermita de San Nicolas de los Morenos para la confraria negra de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnacion, la cual, en contra de lo acostumbrado en el caso de iglesias para negros y mulatos, se hizo en el centro de la ciudad. Fue el primer templo formal de la ciudad.

Around 1615 the bishop Juan de Zapata y Sandoval founded the hermitage of San Nicolas of the dark ones for the confraternity of Our Lady of the Incarnation, which, contrary to custom in the case of churches for Negroes and mulattos, he placed in the center of the city. It was the first formal temple of the city.

Juan, an intelligent man who once lived in La Jolla California, still insists that, “There never were any negros in San Cristobal.” Juan’s disturbing response is, regrettably, all too typical and misinformed.

Africans were brought to Mexico 500 years ago as slaves to replace the indigenous population decimated by Spanish conquest and disease. Blacks have been in Mexico ever since, though their presence has been virtually ignored and underestimated until recent times.

“The black population is not well known,” says Sagrario Cruz, an anthropology and history professor at the University of Veracruz, which offers the multidisciplinary program Africa en Mexico.

She has documented distinct populations of slaves, maroons, black Seminoles and U.S. blacks, both free people and

runaway slaves, who settled in the country before and after Mexico abolished slavery in 1829.

Two recently released documentaries from Mexico, The Forgotten Roots and African Blood, in Spanish with English subtitles recount the strong African heritage that has endured centuries of neglect in Mexico.

The films show most Afromestizos or Afro-Mexicans are concentrated in the state of Veracruz on the Gulf Coast and in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca on la Costa Chica (Little Coast) region on the Pacific Coast. La Costa Chica is a 200 mile long coastal region that begins just south of Acapulco and ends in Puerto Angel, Oaxaca. Together with Chiapas they make up the three poorest states in Mexico.

In Veracruz, on the Caribbean coast, African culture and heritage persist most strongly in dance, music and song. They even have a museum celebrating Mexico’s African heritage. However, on the Pacific Coast, African culture and tradition have been largely forgotten and lost to posterity.

After Chiapas my next stop in my search for the African diaspora is La Costa Chica on the Pacific coast of the state of Oaxaca.

In the city of Pinotepa I call the Revd.Padre Glyn Jemmott. Padre Glyn is the Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad West Indies, who since 1984 has served as vicar to several Afro-Mexican towns on la Costa Chica.

I met Padre Glyn the year before at a symposium on Black Mexico at the University of California San Diego. He invited me to visit him in La Costa Chica. I gladly accepted his offer.

Early the next morning I travel by taxi to meet Padre Glyn in the nearby village of El Ciruelo. As the taxi cruises into town I can see from the complexion of the people that I have arrived in black Mexico. The driver drops me off at village church where Padre Glyn gives me a warm welcome.

Padre tells me dozens of Afro-Mexican communities lie in La Costa Chica, barely subsisting from farming and fishing.

Over the next few days Padre Glyn drives me to several of these communities where I meet many of his parishioners. In the lakeside town of El Corralero I attend mass and listen to the Padre’s homily on the pride of Afro-Mexicans.

Padre Glyn estimates the Afro-Mexican population of Mexico at 3 to 10 percent depending on who is counting and who acknowledges African ancestry.

The federal government does not count blacks as a separate minority. Instead Afro-Mexicans are largely ignored by government services, marginalized by racist attitudes and relegated to lives of poverty and illiteracy, living on La Costa Chica on the fringes of Mexican society.

According to Professor Cruz, “The problem of the loss of cultural identity, along with that of racial discrimination, is that even some black people will deny their own racial heritage.”

The spurious practice of mejorando la raza, literally bettering the race by marrying someone lighter-skinned than oneself, is alive and well in Mexico.

For example when I meet Pedro, a handsome young Afro-Mexican man in the lobby of one of Pinotepa’s finer hotels, he initially denies his African heritage.

After I explain to Pedro that I am an African American researching the African diaspora in Mexico he grudgingly admits to having a black grandparent.**

As I bid adios to black Mexico, Presidente Vincente Fox apologizes to black Americans for saying “Undocumented Mexicans living in the USA don’t take jobs away from Americans, they do jobs that not even black Americans will do.”
However, he refuses to remove from circulation the racist, stereotyping “Sambo stamp” of Memin Pinguin and of course, he refuses to apologize to Mexico’s forgotten Negros.

* plaza
** For a poetic treatment of the tyranny of race in Latin America read the Puerto Rican poem ¿Y tu abuela , donde esta? And your grandmother where is she?

Copyright 05, tomas