Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita González (review)

Latin American Music Review
Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013
pages 288-291
DOI: 10.1353/lat.2013.0019

Alex E. Chávez, Visiting Assistant Professor
Latin American and Latino Studies Program
University of Illinois, Chicago

Anita González, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality. With photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-0-292-72324-5.

In a mixed-race country like Mexico, being “black” means being part of an ethnic group, but in addition to the unstable inhabitations of racial identities, the richness of expressive culture therein also has much to do with carving out senses of community. With this understanding, González explores the cultural negotiations of Afro-Mexican identity in terpsichorean traditions throughout Mexico—with specific focus on Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. She elaborates on various quotidian dance practices embedded with an African cultural subtext of influence that demonstrates how socially and historically constituted ethno-racial constructions are voiced through performance. Taking cues from methodologies in performance, theater, and dance studies, she homes in on the communicative potential of the gesticulant. Moreover, she incorporates ethnography and relies on photographs to illustrate the dance forms.

Although there is existing scholarship that privileges broader socio-historical questions concerning the African diaspora in Latin America, studies focused on African-derived expressive forms in Mexico are few (Cruz Carretero, Martínez Maranto, and Santiago Silva 1990; McDowell 2000; Pérez Fernández 1990). In her efforts to show how Afro-Mexicans have been instrumental in cultural life in that country, González skillfully attends to the mobile history of ethnic encounter and exchange among Africans, indigenous groups, and the Spanish that has informed the hybridity of expressive forms and subjectivities over time. This approach in some ways gestures toward the types of analyses offered in Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997) and John Chasteen’s National Rhythms, African Roots (2004) in their own interrogations of the complicated nexus of performance, nation, and racial formation in Cuba and South America, respectively.

Mexico’s own fraught ideologies of mestizaje and mexicanidad constitute an officialized discursive field that has promoted a unified national culture by way of de-emphasizing localized and pluri-ethnic productions of subjectivity; and as it pertains to González’s study, this ideological scaffolding has obfuscated—if not entirely excluded—the African component. In this regard, apart from considering phenotype, González suggests that racial identities are also defined by geographic locale to the extent that “most Afro-Mexicans are unaware of the historical circumstances that explain their presence in Mexico,” which places particular importance on the cultural negotiations of social location as such (37).

At the core of Afro-Mexico lies González’s ambition to present a “diversity of perspectives about blackness” (103). She succeeds in this ambition as it relates to the dance forms in question. And by returning to the issues of archetype and stereotype repeatedly, she opens the door for considering the iterative relationship between racialization and performativity. Yet bringing the implicit connections between everyday life and institutionalized racial knowledges to the surface early in the book would have served in demonstrating more clearly how expressive culture fits within the arch of broader racial ideologies with implications for understandings of embodiment, performance, and the viscosity of race.

Nonetheless, the unique contribution of the book emerges from González’s own position of expertise as an artist and dancer so that when she contends that “the bent body posture and looseness of the upper body” in certain forms have aesthetic roots in African dance (66), her own bodily knowledge is involved in making that statement. Dances, she argues, consist of gestures within musical phrases. Possibilities for storytelling exist therein that “express social outlooks” (46). These stories unfold at different levels, from personal to communal, from political to mythical—often simultaneously. Her analysis likewise operates on several levels—form and content of the dance, musicality, historical roots, and ultimately the playing out of contemporary politics, since many of the dances are “theatrical scenarios that include attacks, public whippings, sexual overtones, and other disreputable acts” (40). Still, her descriptions in some ways beg for a more in-depth ethnographic rendering of these expressive flows to illustrate how they communicate beliefs and ideas, the very representations that become myths about blackness over time and how they unfold in relation to larger and contested understandings of nation and racial formation. Afro-Mexico is premised on the contention that in a society where ethno-racial identities are disputed, myths contain within them…

Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance

University Press of America (an Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
February 2004
182 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 7 3/4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7618-2775-7

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

Brown-skinned men and women move across Mexico’s national stages dancing the folkloric jarocho, a symbolic blend of Spanish, Native American, and African cultures. Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity and Afro-Mexican Dance traces the evolution and transformation of an Afro-Mexican dance form into a national cultural icon. It is an ethnographic study that compares and contrasts Mexican performance of national identity with Untied States dance styles. The book uses the image of the jarocho as a window to explore the phenomena of racial/cultural mixing that is endemic to Mexico and increasingly apparent in the politics and aesthetics of United States cultural performances.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 List of Illustrations
• Chapter 2 Preface
• Chapter 3 Acknowledgments
• Chapter 4 Introduction: Crafting Self; Frames of Reference; Locale and Methodology; Chapter Overviews
• Chapter 5 Cultural Mixing and Mexican Performance: Mapping Art: Cultural Contexts; Studies in Revolutionary Nationalism: Manuel Ponce; Amalia Hernandez; Celestino Gorostiza; A Legacy of Performance Strategies; Provincial Identity
• Chapter 6 Roots of Jarocho Dance
• Chapter 7 Jarocho as Folkloric Dance: State Images Ballet Folklórico del la Universidad Veracruzana; Miguel Velez and the Authenticity Mission; Raices del Pueblo (The Peoples’ Roots)
• Chapter 8 Jarocho as Theater: Company History, Veracruz, Veracruz Interprets Jarocho; Actors’ Interpretive (Re)Circulations in Veracruz, Veracruz; Implications and Interpretations
• Chapter 9 Remembering and Transforming the Past: Fiesta de las Cruces; Rewriting Government Agendas
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Chapter 11 Glossary
• Chapter 12 References
• Chapter 13 Index

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…

The African Presence in Mexico

A Symposium Presented by
Callaloo – A Journal of African Diapora Arts and Letters and
The Center for Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University
2008-10-22 through 2008-10-23
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas

Sessions

• The Road to Blackness: A Search for Identity Within the Afro-Mexican Community (audio, photographs)
• Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Mexico (audio, photographs)
• “Where did the Blacks Go?” Post-Slavery Mexico (audio, photographs)
• Contemporary Afro-Mexicans (audio, photographs)
• “Blacks in the State of Veracrus, Mexico” (A Photographic Exhibition by Marcus D. Jones) (photographs)

For more details, click here.