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

FAIN: FT-46623-02

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

No project description available

Associated Products

Home is Where the Heart Is: North Carolina, Afro-Latino Migration, and Houses on Mexico's Costa Chica (Article)
Title: Home is Where the Heart Is: North Carolina, Afro-Latino Migration, and Houses on Mexico's Costa Chica
Author: Laura A. Lewis
Abstract: This article looks at the paradoxical ways in which houses speak to senses of place, history, and notions of community and kin among African descent Mexicans living in the United States. It argues that the building of houses in a Mexican villages through migrant remittances represents an abiding connection to homeplace, the desire for upward mobility, reincorporation into the Mexican nation, and the closeness of family ties.
Year: 2006
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Atlantic Quarterly
Publisher: Duke University Press

Modesty and Modernity: Photography, Race and Representation on Mexico’s Costa Chica (Guerrero) (Article)
Title: Modesty and Modernity: Photography, Race and Representation on Mexico’s Costa Chica (Guerrero)
Author: Laura A. Lewis
Abstract: This article uses ethnographic techniques to examine photographic practices in and around San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, a rural community in a historically black region of Mexico. At its core is a juxtaposed intepretation of a book of photographs entitled Tierra Negra (Black Earth), taken by a Mexican photographer in the early 1990s, and local people’s “home” photos, mostly portraits of family members displayed on the walls of sitting rooms. In 2001, I brought Tierra Negra to San Nicolás in order to elicit local people’s responses to the photographs, which turn out to be mostly of them. Through their comments on these photos, as well as discourses around their home photos, I elaborate on identity issues and local people’s formulations of progress and modernity. I situate my analysis in the historical and anthropological scholarship on race and photographic representation as I draw conclusions about the distinct yet overlapping meanings that “outsiders” and “insiders” give to blackness and the values that such blackness holds as commodity, as historical memory and as one of the roots of Mexican national identity.
Year: 2004
Primary URL: http://http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/1070289x.asp
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

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