A row with the US has highlighted the discrimination faced by black population
Jo Tuckman in Cuajinicuilapa
Wednesday July 6, 2005
The Guardian
Under the punishing rays of summer the shirtless Eladio Garcia throws his fishing nets over a mangrove-ringed lagoon in the isolated Costa Chica region on Mexico's Pacific coast.
Breaking off from his daily ritual, he looks into the distance and recalls the stories his grandparents used to tell him about how his ancestors arrived in the area on a ship that sank off the coast. They did not say where the ship came from, but now the 50-year-old knows, he says, that it was filled with slaves from Africa.
Pointing out the natural beauty around him with understated head gestures, Mr. Garcia pronounces: "I like being black."
But his pride in the colour of his skin soon runs up against a jarring contradiction. He says he is happy that the number of mixed marriages in his community is rising fast. "That's a good thing," the fisherman says, "it improves the race, cleans the blood."
His statement betrays what many see as the limitations on advancement and the realities of life for Mexico's black population. They are few in number and rarely mentioned, but they are always there.
They are there, for example, behind the bizarre international row about racism that is souring relations between Mexico and the US. That row erupted when President Vicente Fox announced in May that Mexican migrants in the US were doing jobs "not even blacks" would do.
There were barbed comments from the White House, outrage among African-American activists and a half-hearted apology from the Mexican government. The tension worsened last week with the issue of a series of stamps honouring a popular 1950s cartoon figure called Memin Pinguin, a little black boy drawn with exaggerated features, thick lips and wide-open eyes.
Vehement complaints from the US that the stamps were racist sparked a nationalistic backlash, with public figures from across the Mexican political spectrum rushing to defend Memin, and the public rushing to buy up the stamps.
Memin is lovable, they insist. They add that it is silly to get upset about a cartoon, and after all Mexicans are not racist because most have mixed European and indigenous ancestry and consider themselves "brown".
But throughout the row there has been barely a reference to the fact that Mexico also has a black population and a black history.
"This is the one community that is not recognised nationally. Indigenous groups are worse off in many ways, but at least they are paid lip service," said Bobby Vaughn, an African-American anthropologist who specialises in the Costa Chica. "Mexicans of African descent have no voice and the government makes no attempt to assess their needs, no effort to even count them."
Colonial records show that around 200,000 slaves were imported into "New Spain" in the 16th and 17th centuries to work in the silver mines, sugar plantations and cattle ranches. For centuries this ensured that there were more black than white people here. The demise of Mexican slavery, just when the trade in other parts of the continent was getting going, helped the descendants of slaves rise to prominence early on, including two of the main leaders of the independence struggle at the beginning of the 19th century.
But independence also put the black population on the road to invisibility with the drive to eliminate ethnic distinctions and build a national identity on the idea of mestizaje, or mixed race.
The African part of Mexico's story was relegated to a few sentences in school books, where it is likely to remain unless the mestizaje concept is to be redefined again. Some observers say Mexico's African past has been buried so deep that even black Mexicans on the Costa Chica are only just beginning to hear about it.
"We don't know what race we are, all we know is that we are black," said Saturnino Castaneda. "Now people talk about us coming from Africa, but I don't know if that is true or just a story."
After five centuries of intermarriage, identifiably black Mexicans are only found in the Costa Chica and in the state of Veracruz, where their persistence is related to proximity to the Caribbean. In the Costa Chica it is due to the region's near-total isolation, as well as feuds between the local indigenous and black populations.
But things began to change with the arrival of a coastal road in the mid-1960s, cutting the journey time to Acapulco, the nearest city, from a week on a donkey to three hours in a bus. Electricity and television soon followed, and today the internet is making inroads. One consequence is a new groundswell of consciousness within the community about their identity as Mexicans of African descent. "When we never left the region we didn't have to explain ourselves to anybody, but when we started to go elsewhere we did," says Eduardo Anorve, a moderate in the movement. He wants the text books rewritten and the constitution reformed to recognise Afro-Mexicanos as a distinct ethnic group.
A more radical group of activists has focused on reaching out to the African diaspora rather than seeking entrance into the Mexican mestizaje family.
"You have to peel away 500 years of history, peel our minds of all the prejudices to see who they really are," says Father Glyn Jommett, a Trinidadian priest who is a key figure in the movement.
Both branches have their work cut out. The moderates can point to some minor advances in education and legal reform but little else. The radicals, meanwhile, are racing against time trying to instill a black identity before the population intermarries itself out of existence.
Meanwhile the vast majority of Mexicans remains loyal to a traditional concept of mestizaje that by definition denies the existence and importance of black people in their country, and has now put them on a crash course with those in their northern neighbour.
Communities Supporting The Promotion Of The Afro Mexican Fed
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