History, Race, and Place in the Making of Black Mexico

FAIN: FB-53194-07

Laura A. Lewis
James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA 22807-0001)

This book project, solicited by Duke University Press, explores variable identities among "black" Mexicans in both Mexico and North Carolina. Utilizing ethnographic techniques, it interrogates the meanings of black-Indianness in San Nicolas Tolentino, a village located in a historically black region of Mexico's southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero. It also looks at shifting identities as San Nicoaldenses migrate to North Carolina, where they undergo what they refer to as a process of "mestizoization" in reference to the Mexican majority "mestizo" (of Indian/Spanish or white mixture). I interpret this shift not as whitening per se but as a denial of the backwardness majority Mexicans ascribe to "Indians" and "blacks."

Associated Products

Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race and Place in the Making of "Black" Mexico (Book)
Title: Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race and Place in the Making of "Black" Mexico
Author: Laura A. Lewis
Abstract: Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicola´s has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journal ists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town’s residents, however, call themselves morenos (black Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicola´s, focusing on the ways that local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph

Indian Allies and White Antagonists: Toward an Alternative Mestizaje on Mexico's Costa Chica (Article)
Title: Indian Allies and White Antagonists: Toward an Alternative Mestizaje on Mexico's Costa Chica
Author: Laura A Lewis
Abstract: San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico, is a ‘mixed’ black-Indian agricultural community on the coastal belt of Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the Costa Chica. This article examines local expressions of race in San Nicolás in relation to Mexico’s national ideology of mestizaje (race mixing), which excludes blackness but is foundational to Mexican racial identities. San Nicolás’s black- Indians are strongly nationalistic while expressing a collective or regional identity different from those of peoples they identify as Indians and as whites. Such collective expression produces an alternative model of mestizaje, here explored through local agrarian history and several village festivals. It is argued that this alternative model favors Indians and distances whites, thereby challenging dominant forms of Mexican mestizaje.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17442222.2015.1094873
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

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