Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality

University of Texas Press
December 2010
183 pages
62 b&w illus, 14 color photos
7 x 10 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-292-72324-5

Anita González, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Theatre Arts
State University of New York, New Paltz

Photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer
Foreword by Ben Vinson III

While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves to be either black or African. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as having a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—of dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal the influence of African people and their cultural productions on Mexican society.

In this work, Anita González articulates African ethnicity and artistry within the broader panorama of Mexican culture by featuring dance events that are performed either by Afro-Mexicans or by other ethnic Mexican groups about Afro-Mexicans. She illustrates how dance reflects upon social histories and relationships and documents how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. Festival dances and, sometimes, professional staged dances point to a continuing negotiation among Native American, Spanish, African, and other ethnic identities within the evolving nation of Mexico. These performances embody the mobile histories of ethnic encounters because each dance includes a spectrum of characters based upon local situations and historical memories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ben Vinson III
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Framing African Performance in Mexico
• Chapter 2: Masked Dances: Devils and Beasts of the Costa Chica
• Chapter 3: Archetypes of Race: Performance Responses to Afro-Mexican Presence
• Chapter 4: Becoming National: Chilena, Artesa, and Jarocho as Folkloric Dances
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality, as the title suggests, is a book about dancing. But more important, it is a book about how dance reflects on social histories and relationships. The photographs and text document how residents of some sectors of Mexico construct their histories through performance. The idea of Afro-Mexico is, in some ways, an enigma. While Africans and their descendants have lived in Mexico for centuries, many Afro-Mexicans do not consider themselves either black or African. Instead, members of this ethnic population blend into the national imagination of Mexico as a mixed-race country. For almost a century, Mexico has promoted an ideal of its citizens as a combination of indigenous and European ancestry. This construct obscures the presence of African, Asian, and other populations that have contributed to the growth of the nation. However, performance studies—dance, music, and theatrical events—reveal that African people and their cultural productions have consistently influenced Mexican society…

…Race in the Americas

The concept of race is continually being redefined. “Race” troubles academic theorists and affects popular social conceptions about origins and nationality. Political events like the rise of Barack Obama challenge existing myths about race and bring to questions the realities of racial mixtures in the Americas. In both local and global communities public understandings about blackness greatly influence who African Diaspora people think they are. Clearly, those who reside in Mexico are Mexican. However, self-perceptions influence both self-esteem and the sense of belonging. Recently, I was traveling by airplane to Costa Chica and picked up a copy of the magazine Intro*, which services the Oaxacan coast. Inside was a story about a surfer named Angel Salinas, an Afro-Mexican from Mancuernas, Pinotepa Nacional. Salinas is a surfing star who has won national and international tournaments. But he wears a wrestler’s mask to cover his face when he appears in public. The article states that the surfer wears the mask as “a result of some advice that his mother gave him when he didn’t appear in magazines because of his dark skin; he decided to do something that would make him different and that would show a Mexican cultural icon. Now he is known as ‘the masked surfer.'” Angel Salinas feels the need to cover his face in order to feel Mexican. Although Mexico is a country where, at first glance, the races have mixed to become a “cosmic race,” there are still urgent social discrepancies that manifest as internalized or blatant racism. This discrepancy between public policy and daily practices influences the kinds of lives that contemporary Afro-Mexicans lead…

4203W-01 – Racial Passing, Masquerade, and Transformation in African American Literature, Law, Film, and Culture

University of Connecticut
Fall 2010

Martha Cutter, Associate Professor of English

What is “race”? What is “whiteness”? What is “blackness”? What does it mean to be “mixed-race” or “multi-racial” in the US? This course will examine what racial passing—people who transform themselves from one race to another—can tell us about the meaning of race itself. Our methodology will be chronological as we test the idea that texts about passing and racial transformation both highlight, but also perhaps undermine, ideas about the meaning of race in a particular cultural and historical moment. Our focus will mainly be on twentieth and twenty-first century manifestations of racial passing and transformation, although we will also look at some earlier texts to get a sense of how ideas of race have changed over time. Our examination will also include scientific and legal texts which help us understand the meaning of blackness, whiteness, and race.

Texts: Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Nella Larsen, Passing; George Schuyler, Black No More; Randall Kennedy, Sellout; Danzy Senna, Life on the Color Line; Spike Lee (Director), Bamboozled; Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America; Barbara Koenig, ed. Revising Race in a Genomic Age (Excerpts); other readings on racial science.

For more information, click here.

English 39695-001 ST: Racial Crossings

Kent State University
2006

Martha Cutter, Associate Professor of English

This course will examine literary and cultural treatments of individuals, authors, and characters who cross from one race to another, and sometimes also from one gender to another. This crossing may be metaphorical—for example, a white writer may attempt to write from the point of view of an African American character or a Native American character may try to “transcend” his or her race through various means. This crossing may also be actual—someone who is white may “pass” for black, or someone who is black may “pass” for white. We will look at novels, short stories, poems and films as cultural texts that depict racial crossing and passing. We will ask what these texts tell us about the way race is constructed and configured in society, culture, history, and the law. We will also attempt to understand how artists both assist and resist social and cultural constructions of the meaning of “race.” Does racial crossing fundamentally undermine or stabilize the meaning of “race”?

For more information, click here.

Media and Performance in Racial Passing: 2007 Heterodox Identities – LCST 2007 A

Eugene Lang College
The New School for Liberal Arts
Spring 2009

Orville Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Racial passing is a ubiquitous and contentious feature of social and cultural life in the United States. Taking “passing” as an object of analysis, this course is organized around the question of whether social identity should be understood as a set of essential characteristics or as a type of “performance.” Readings and discussions center on the conceptualization of race; the dynamics and meaning of racial passing; the movement for the recognition of biracial identities; and the question of racial “authenticity” and the politics of the self. The case of racial passing is also compared to other cases of heterodox identity involving gender, sexuality, and social class.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
2004
248 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 1578066670 (9781578066674)
Paper ISBN: 9781604732481

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

An examination of race and audience in an American innovator’s writings

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt’s novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt’s lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience.

Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience.

Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt’s career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt’s views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt’s unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America’s most significant writers on the subject.