Lewis 2000. Blacks

blacks, black Indians, Afromexicans: the
dynamics of race, nation, and identity in a

Mexican moreno community (Guerrero)
LAURA A. LEWIS
James Madison University
In this article, I explore identity formation in Mexico from the perspective of

residents of San Nicolas Tolentino, a village located on the Costa Chica, a his-
torically black region of the southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero. Outsiders
characterize San Nicolas's residents as black, but in Mexico, national ideolo-
gies, anthropologies, and histories have traditionally worked to exclude or ig-
nore blackness. Instead, the Spanish and Indian mestizo has been constituted
as the quintessential Mexican, even as the Mexican past is tied to a romanti-
cized and ideologically powerful Indian foundation. Ethnographic evidence
suggests that San Nicolas's "black" residents in fact see themselves as
morenos, a term that signifies their common descent with Indians, whom they
consider to be central to Mexicanness. As morenos interweave their identi-
ties, experiences, and descent with Indians, they also anchor themselves
through Indians to the nation. These identity issues are complicated by the re-
cent introduction to the coast of Africanness in the context of new national
and scholarly projects reformulating the components of a new Mexican mul-
ticultural identity. In part, local morenos see Africanness as an outside impo-
sition that conflicts with their sense of themselves as Mexican while it rein-
forces their political and economic marginality. [Mexico, Guerrero, blackness,
race, identity, ethnicity, nationalism]
Several years ago, two artifacts encircled with barbed wire sat on a plot of land
some distance from the center of San Nicolas Tolentino, a village located on Mexico's
southern Pacific Coast (the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca) and home to many
people of partial African descent.1 One of these artifacts was a casa redonda, a round
house of wattle and daub with a conical roof, built in the early 1980s during a visit by
two anthropologists. The other, which had been made around the same time, was an
artesa, a trough made of a hollowed-out tree trunk carved in the image of a horse and
turned upside down to be used as a platform for the dances that once accompanied
the regional music known as sones de artesa.
Today, the round house has crumbled following a move to a new location: the
outskirts of the village next to the shuttered casa de cultura (culture house) built by the
government in the 1980s to promote local culture. No one attends to either of these
houses, which are surrounded by overgrown brush. The artesa was recently taken to
Acapulco, where it was left temporarily after a public performance of sones de artesa
by a group of musicians from San Nicolas. One of those musicians, Ernesto, had taken
me to see both artifacts while they were still in the field. As he showed them to me, he
remarked that they constituted "the African center of the village," that he and his people
American Ethnologist 27(4):898-926. Copyright €> 2000, American Anthropological Association.

blacks, black Indians, Afromexicans 899
were "very, very black" (negro) and that "the Mexican" was "an Indian" (indio). More
recently, I have heard other residents of San Nicolas fuse Indians and Mexicans. "The
authentic Mexican is Indian," Margarita told me. "The Indian, well, he's a nopaludo
[nopal eater]," said Manuel. "The flag, the money, an eagle, a nopal.. . if you are In-
dian, well, the flag is yours."
Ernesto referred to his people as negros. Yet in most contexts, San Nicolas's
"blacks" prefer to call themselves morenos. As discussed below, locally this term
means "mixed" black and Indian descent, and it therefore draws Indianness into black
identity formations. In San Nicolas, moreno is also considered more polite than negro
(as Whitten 1986:53 finds in an Ecuadorian context as well) and indicates a preferred
phenotype that includes lighter skin and straighter hair. Negro is nevertheless used
under some circumstances—to refer to ancestors, the classifications of outsiders (such
as those made by scholars and cultural promoters who speak of blacks, Afromexicans,
or Afromestizos), and in situations of joking or insults. It might also be applied to par-
ticularly dark-skinned San Nicoladenses and to people from other villages. Morenos
regularly speak of indigenous peoples as Indians and majority Mexicans (mestizos)
and light-skinned foreigners such as myself as whites (blancos).2 Here I use moreno,
Indian, and white to evoke local perspectives or when I write about local people; I use
the terms black Mexicans, indigenous people, and mestizos for coastal populations.
The latter set of terms is the one scholars generally use, except for black Mexican,
which I prefer to Afromexican, Afromestizo, or black for reasons that shall become
clear. In quoted material, I follow the speaker's usage.
It is clear that in local conversations about identity the terms that circulate on the
coast are deployed in complex ways. They speak to the deep entwinement of black-
ness, Africanness, Indianness, and Mexicanness in morenos' contemporary and past
experiences; they are also embedded in the location, removal, and crumbling of the
round house and the artesa, which have recently become signs of cultural distinctive-
ness. Here I consider how morenos socially invent themselves around these issues as I
address what Peter Wade (1997:109) refers to as flexibilities and continuities in the
way "blackness" has been related to various Latin American nationalisms. I focus on
two processes that might appear contradictory but speak to uncertainties about how
morenos can also be Mexicans. The first centers on local perspectives that merge
moreno identity with Indians, whom morenos consider to be authentic Mexicans and
who in fact have been important icons in Mexican national tradition while blacks and
blackness have not. The sociological and ideological dimensions of the moreno-
Indian relationship have been neglected by scholars of local culture. Yet, even during
my brief first visit to San Nicolas, I was struck by the centrality of Indians to moreno
discourse. I have since become aware of the strategies morenos have developed to
anchor themselves to the nation. These strategies culminate in a paradox that forces
morenos to become "Indians" in order to nationalize themselves. This is illustrated by
Independence Day celebrations in which San Nicolas's morenos dress as Indians and
Spaniards to engage in ritual battle over the flag and its meaning. As "Indians" tri-
umph, the morenos, who identify with them, subvert their own traditional exclusion
from Mexico. Yet the ritual simultaneously maintains the exclusion it subverts be-
cause it too effaces blackness while placing local moreno traditions squarely within
the national ones that tie the Mexican past to an Indian foundation.
The other related aspect of contemporary identity formation considered here
speaks to scholarly and nationalist discourses that have developed around identifying
moreno culture with "African survivals." These discourses promote "Afromexicans"
as Mexico's "Third Root" and celebrate local culture as a valuable contribution to the
900 american ethnologist
national melange. Although the intent of what John McDowell calls "the Africa thesis"
(2000:103) is to give blackness a place on a multicultural national landscape, it has a
distancing effect on morenos as it "ethnicizefs] and highlights] differences" (Jackson
1995:13; Torres and Whitten 1998:24). In so doing, it denies moreno connections to
Indians and therefore conflicts with local conventions morenos have developed for
making themselves Mexican. In the end, then, the Africa thesis also continues a tradi-
tion that has effaced blackness from national society. But unlike morenos' own Indian
strategy, it fails to provide a locally meaningful alternative path to Mexicanness.
In taking a critical perspective on local and national constructions of difference, I
wish to emphasize that "blacks" do not exist in a reified material or biological sense.
Identities emerge from a dynamic that merges social science scholarship, government
interest, and the consciousness and self-definition of individuals with particular un-
derstandings of their own cultural, historical, and political experiences. The ethno-
graphic context for my analysis along these lines comes from fieldwork conducted in
San Nicolas and on the Costa Chica, principally in 1997-99. It also comes from dis-
courses about San Nicolas, which is considered hostile to outsiders but also the seat
of Afromexican culture and one of the last bastions of tradition in a region experienc-
ing increasing capitalist penetration. My fieldwork and outsiders' discourse cannot be
separated. In fact, they come together in revealing ways. During my first brief visit in
1992, the round house and artesa were still on the outskirts of town. Ernesto's conten-
tion at the time—that these two artifacts were the "African center" of the vil-
lage—caught my attention, for this center was quite literally at some remove from the
village's demographic heart. Yet this was the site I was invited to visit because, as I
later came to see, it embodied what local people understand to be the ongoing inter-
ests of anthropologists, politicians, and cultural promoters in recovering (rescatar) the
"lost" traditions represented by the two artifacts. Morenos identify these outsiders col-
lectively as la cultura (literally, "culture").3
My approach to the theoretical issues raised by the ethnography is informed by
recent anthropological concerns with the dialectics of local and nonlocal processes
and with identity and the politics of its construction, especially in Latin America
(Diskin 1991; Friedlander 1975; Hale 1997; Jackson 1991, 1995; Kearney 1995;
PalmiS 1995; Stephen 1996; Urban and Sherzer 1991; Wade 1995, 1997). I situate
my argument ethnographically by focusing on how San Nicolas's morenos under-
stand global and national discourses about blacks and Indians through the particulari-
ties of their everyday experiences. I conclude by suggesting ways of relating the
global, the national, and the local (about which "there is nothing mere" [Appadurai
1996:188]), by connecting morenos' experiences to their production of identities.
Such experiences and identities are informed by "national-popular" paradigms that
have glorified Indianness while relegating blackness to the nation's margins, and by
morenos' own takes on cultural difference and Africanity, which for now they mostly
do not engage because such attributes do not coincide with their self-perceptions or
improve their material conditions.
history, scholarship, and ideology: mestizaje, indigenismo, and blackness

Recent scholarly and government interest in black Mexicans from the Costa Chica
should be situated in ideological renderings of Mexican history and culture. These ide-
ologies first hid blackness and then later rediscovered it. I might begin to examine this
process with attention to colonial Mexico, where involvement in the slave trade gener-
ated a substantial population (both slave and free) of people classified officially and
popularly as black (negro) and mulatto (mulato). The colony's involvement in the slave
trade peaked in the middle of the 17th century, however, and when independence
and emancipation arrived in the early 19th century, few slaves remained (see Aguirre
BeltrSn 1972; Palmer 1976). Indeed, the terms black and mulatto soon disappeared
from the official record altogether (Aguirre BeltrSn 1970:11; Morner 1970:201, 215)
as postindependence legal and administrative codes based on caste largely ceased
identifying people by ancestry.
Beginning in the 1940s, the Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrcin
produced several key studies of Mexico's African-descent population (1972, 1985).
For him, the postindependence national statistics that omitted blacks and mulattoes
reflected a biological disappearance, for they had "blurred into" the process of mesti-
zaje (race-mixing) that came to characterize the new nation (1970:12). He also be-
lieved, however, that Costa Chican blacks (negros) never blended into what he identi-
fied as "the national society that could offer them an identity (as Mexican) and a status
(citizen)" (1970:22, 1985:30). Following six weeks of fieldwork in 1948-49 mostly in
Cuajinicuilapa, which today is a growing black Mexican urban nucleus and the mu-
nicipal seat to which San NicolSs pertains, Aguirre Beltran intermeshed cultural and
biological processes to conclude that while the local population was clearly "mixed,"
the "black factor [was] predominant" (1985:65). In his opinion, "unassimilated" and
"unnationalized" Costa Chican blacks retained a cohesion and group identity that set
them apart from the majority of Mexicans and from certain indigenous groups who
also maintained their distinctiveness (1970:14, 22).
This perspective reifies race by insisting both on the material facts of "mixing"
and that some people did not mix (see also Torres and Whitten 1998:24-25). And as
Aguirre Beltran made Costa Chican blacks objects of study by severing them from the
social (national) body, he generated their cultural-cum-biological difference through
what Torres and Whitten call the "objectification of 'outsidership' " (1998:24). He
concluded that local life displayed a wide assortment of unmistakeably African "cul-
tural elements transmitted by the first blacks to immigrate to Mexico" (Aguirre Beltran
1985:12) and an "ethos" characterized by violence and aggression, which he linked
to a former (and ongoing) cimarron (runaway slave) mentality of resistance to colonial
rule (1985:130,1994:26-27).
Although Aguirre Beltran's work did not immediately generate scholarly interest
in black Mexicans (1972:11), decades later his belief that Costa Chican blacks lived in
ways distinct from other Mexicans became a cornerstone for a Mexican multicultural-
ism that values blackness as difference. In the 1980s, the national Office of Popular
Culture, then headed by the anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, developed a
number of cultural and historical projects under the rubric "Our Third Root" (see
Meza Herrera 1993). Bonfil Batalla was himself concerned with the "non-Western"
orientation of Mexico's "forgotten" peoples (1990) and, with Aguirre Beltr&n's study
as a guide, researchers focused on Costa Chican communities, including San Nicolas.
Here they variously found isolation and violence coupled with distinctive cultural
traits that many considered to be on the verge of extinction (see especially Aparicio
Prudente et al. n.d.; Diaz Perez et al. 1993; Diaz Perez and Catalan 1991; Gutierrez
Avila 1988,1993; Martinez Montiel 1991,1994).4
The goals of the Third Root project have been to recognize the African heritage of
the American peoples (Martinez Montiel 1991) and to give blacks a voice by recover-
ing "traces" of "the African contribution to [Mexican] multiculturalism" (Valencia Va-
lencia 1993:13-14). Scholars linked the project to the then looming Columbian
Quincentenary, and, in a decidely political way, to the history of U. S. blacks' civil
rights struggles (Valencia Valencia 1993:17). The cultural recovery that ensued from
the project thus continued to fashion blackness as difference while developing its
consequent value to the nation.
Historically, nationalist ideologies in Mexico and in other parts of Latin America
have not valued blackness. Rather, Indianness has been the touchstone for important
aspects of national identity. In his examination of Latin American colonial institu-
tional and legal statuses, Peter Wade suggests that these ideologies made blackness
invisible and Indianness visible. Under colonialism, Indians were set apart from white
settlers, who simultaneously hispanicized blacks to facilitate blacks' service to them
(Wade 1997:25-30). Indians were subsequently featured in nationalist ideologies and
scholarly studies that exoticized them while generally disparaging or ignoring blacks
altogether (Wade 1997:35-36).
As is true of other Latin American nationalisms, the Mexican model has largely
emphasized mestizaje, understood as the cultural and biological fusion of Spaniard
and Indian embodied by the mestizo (Knight 1990:84-88; Phelan 1960; Stepan
1991:146-147; Vasconcelos 1925). While mestizaje stresses Indian assimilation to a
Westernized Mexican ideal, at various times it has come into tension with a more ro-
mantic view of the Mexican character as deriving from Indian peoples. Such indi-
genismo became prominent after the Revolution as emerging ideologies and anthro-
pologies developed by elites simultaneously constructed Indianness and determined
its value to a more progressive nation. During this period, efforts were made to estab-
lish academic and government institutions to "study" indigenous issues (Bonfil Bat-
talia 1990:169-173; Dawson 1997; Wade 1997:32); Indian education was pro-
moted; "Indian'' traditions were "woven into a new tapestry of folkloric nationalism"
(Knight 1990:82); and the mestizo "protagonists" of Mexican history came to be tied
more firmly to the "Indian race," the imagined foundation for revolutionary ideals
(Knight 1990:76-77; Lomnitz 1993:277). It is the centrality of Indians in this version
of Mexican national ideology that San Nicol^s's morenos seem to highlight when they
claim that "the flag" belongs to Indians.
Mestizo and indigenist paradigms characterize scholarly as well as national tra-
ditions in Mexico. The older scholarship incorporates mestizos into visions of a Mex-
ico quite literally understood as a nation of "mixed-race" persons sharing both ances-
try and cultural ideas of what it means to be Mexican (e.g., Aguirre Beltran 1970:14;
Phelan 1960:767). Newer scholarship deconstructs national ideologies in Mexico
and elsewhere in Latin America by examining their rhetorics, practices, and symbols
and by addressing the meaning indigenous peoples give to their own positions and
identities as "Indians" in nation-states that are characterized as mestizo and also glo-
rify the Indian "past" (Bonfil Batalla 1990; Dawson 1997; Friedlander 1975; Hill
1991; Knight 1990; LaFaye 1976; Mallon 1992; Muratorio 1993; Royce 1993; Smith
1990; Stutzman 1981; Urban and Sherzer 1991).
Much of this newer scholarship offers valuable insights into the nexus of ethnic-
ity, race, and nation. Yet whether scholars have approached the Mexican mestizaje
and indigenous paradigms in critical or uncritical ways, they have adhered to para-
digms that remain focused on the relationship between Indians and nation-states (as
represented by the mestizo). While scholars have begun to address blackness in the
context of other Latin American nationalisms (Helg 1990; Poole 1997; Skidmore
1974; Stepan 1991; Stutzman 1981; Wade 1993, 1995, 1997; Wright 1990), and to
link it to trends in scholarly writings (Wade 1997), the question of how it has been
shaped in the context of past Mexican nationalisms and its place in contemporary
ideology and scholarship has been overlooked, with few exceptions (notably Stepan
1991:145-153).
The importance of the links Wade establishes between nationalist paradigms and
scholarship becomes apparent in the Mexican case with respect to blackness. Aguirre
Beltrein's work, the recent Third Root Project, and other research on black Mexicans
mark a departure from the customary invisibility of blacks in the scholarship on Mex-
ico.5 This invisibility also characterized Mexican nationalist sentiment, which in fact
actively calculated blacks' disappearance from the nation while centering mestizos
and Indians in it. My sense is that just as San Nicolas's morenos are aware that Indians
are important national icons, they are also aware that blacks are not, even if they do
not articulate their awareness in precisely these terms. They would not have read, of
course, the late-18th century exiled Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero's defense of Indi-
ans from European racism or his rejection of the "vile Black slave and his descendants"
from his image of the Mexican nation (cited in LaFaye 1990:82). Nor would they be
aware that these twin processes later coincided in the writings of revolutionary essayist
Jos£ Vasconcelos, who promoted the "constructive miscegenation" of mestizaje based
on the mixing of whites and Indians while fostering the idea that the "Negro race"
would vanish from the Mexican social body (Stepan 1991:150; Vasconcelos 1925:30).
Some researchers today promote "Afro"mexicans as Mexico's Third Root and fo-
cus their projects on delineating their cultural and historical distinctiveness, but these
scholars have not critically addressed blacks' disappearance from and later reemer-
gence on the national landscape. Such omissions are significant because they draw
further attention to the important parallels between national and scholarly interests,
both of which have hidden blacks and then rediscovered them. Work that remains
blind to these processes cannot critically address blacks as "Afromexicans" or as
"black Indians." Its assumptions go unquestioned, and morenos' experiences of iden-
tity formation remain unexplored.
political and economic contours of the Costa Chica

The Costa Chica region runs southeast from Acapulco down the coast of Oaxaca,
and from the Pacific Coast to the Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range 50 kilometers
to the north. This region was home to a considerable indigenous population at the
time of the conquest, but that population had all but died out or fled by the time (only
shortly after the conquest) that a few Spanish settlers arrived with their slaves and run-
aways began to find havens on the coast. Soon people classified as black and mulatto
came to outnumber all other groups in the region until, by 1791, there were nearly
twenty times as many blacks and mulattoes as Spaniards. Blacks and mulattoes were
concentrated in the fertile coastal regions, with nearby inland areas remaining mostly
Indian (Aguirre Beltran 1985:59-60; Gerhard 1973:148-149,151, 381).
Today the area is generally recognized as including three broadly defined groups
popularly distinguished by race (raza).6 Scholars identify the uppermost socioeco-
nomic stratum with people socially classified as mestizo, the middle one with people
classified as black, and the lowest with people classified as indigenous. These are
mostly Mixtec and Amuzgo speakers, many monolingual (see Cervantes-Delgado
1984; Flanet 1977). Socioeconomic distinctions are mapped geographically. Princi-
pal urban centers are located between the indigenous highlands and the black Mexi-
can coast. These sites of mestizo economic, political, and social power embody "na-
tional [mestizo] culture" (Cervantes-Delgado 1984:40; Flanet 1977:212) and control
commerce and services to indigenous and black Mexican communities (Cervantes-
Delgado 1984:39)7 Throughout the region, mestizos are the principal shopkeepers
and traders, occupying most high-status professional and business-related positions.
Historically, they have had better access to land, capital, and political power than
904 amerlcan ethnologist
indigenous or black Mexicans, and today they are the principal producers of a variety
of products (including cattle, lime oil, and palm oil) destined for regional and national
markets (Cervantes-Delgado 1984:44-45).
Indigenous villages are mostly in the highlands north of the major cities. Some
have rights to productive land, but generally such land lies too far from the communi-
ties to which it belongs. Some land that has also been leased to mestizos or black Mexi-
cans for minimal payments lacks irrigation or has perhaps been illegally usurped
through various forms of deceit. Many indigenous people are thus constrained to rotate
marginally cultivable land frequently as they are displaced further and further from
their villages into the mountains (Cervantes-Delgado 1984:48; Flanet 1977:49-53).
Black Mexican villages are concentrated in the coastal part of the region south of
the major urban centers. Seaside villages depend heavily on fishing; others are agri-
cultural, like San Nicolas, which lies about fifteen kilometers from the ocean and has
a population of around four thousand. Cuajinicuilapa (population 15,000), some
thirty kilometers from San Nicolas, has grown rapidly in past decades and is a devel-
oping commercial center. The two-lane Pacific Federal Highway 200, completed in
the mid-1960s, runs right through it, but San Nicolas still has almost no internal paved
roads, or paved feeder roads. Nevertheless, during the past 15 years it has "opened
up," local morenos say, to the world beyond the coast as scholars and cultural pro-
moters arrive and local residents migrate to national and international destinations.8
The majority of San Nicolas's residents are smallholders,9 producing corn (mafz)
for their own consumption, as well as sesame (ajonjolf) and fruit (mango, papaya, and
watermelon) for markets where globalization processes have caused prices to fall for
many local products. Although by all accounts the land is quite fertile and can produce
three crops a year (with two of those on irrigated holdings), access to resources, includ-
ing irrigation and fertilizer, is uneven. Some members of the community are able to
produce surpluses of marketable goods for both regional and national consumption,
but people often complain that they are at the mercy of agricultural blight, inclement
weather, and the uncertainties of an increasingly privatized and globalized market.
Currently, land is being turned over to fodder production or grazing, since cattle are lu-
crative. Yet cattle prices are out of reach for many and, while cattle have long been a
part of the regional economy, few local people have been able to amass many head.
Although San Nicolas is widely identified as a black or moreno village, and in
some ways the most quintessential and tradition-bound of such, since the mid-1960s
when Highway 200 was completed, it has also been home to a number of people
morenos refer to as Indians (indios), who originally came from the uplands around
Ayutla, Guerrero (a Mixtec region). Apparently, coastal land was plentiful and bounti-
ful at the time of their arrival.10 But today, the Indians, who are relative newcomers,
tend to be poorer than their moreno neighbors since they generally have less acreage
and lack access to irrigated land. Although they are ejidatarios, with legal rights to
land first granted to the community during the 1930s Agrarian Reform, the Indians
sense that morenos question their social rights to residence (see Lewis in press). Some
fear ejection from San Nicolas as population growth coupled with new privatization
initiatives puts pressure on landholders.
Many of these Indians work as temporary unskilled laborers (peones)ior San Ni-
colas's morenos, as do indigenous peoples from outside the village. In addition, while
in regional terms black Mexicans are sandwiched socioeconomically between mesti-
zos and indigenous peoples, status differences are also found within and between
black Mexican villages. Thus, some of San Nicolas's morenos and other black Mexicans
also work as peones in San Nicolas or for the region's mestizo landowners (see Flanet
1977:148).
local perspectives on national belonging I: "people without a country"
Costa Chican racial discourse echoes a national imaginary that pushes blackness
to the margins of the postcolonial landscape while elevating mestizos and indigenous
people to the status of "true" Mexicans. Fragments of this discourse emerge through
the ways some indigenous and mestizo people deride blacks (who are variously
called moreno or negro, but mostly the latter) as "instrinsically violent and impulsive"
(Flanet 1977:134), unable to handle money, and without interest in "bettering" them-
selves. "Blacks are bad people," a Mixtec woman from the environs of Pinotepa Na-
cional told me. Another Mixtec woman from the same region told me that blacks are
"lazy." "The men are jealous," she said. "They are bold, they do not care about edu-
cation, they do not want to work, they like music and eating." She then turned to her
mother to explain that I lived "among the black people [gente negra]." A mestizo
shopkeeper in a Oaxacan black Mexican village used more "polite" nomenclatures to
tell me that morenos "refuse to study or work hard" because "they like to have a good
time." For her, indigenous people were "more obedient and gentle." This mildness in-
vited problems because in her estimation black Mexicans—including women—are
"tougher" than indigenous people.11 "They have different characters/' she explained:
They have children together, but they do not live together. An indigenous woman will
be with a moreno but not the other way around. You will almost never find a moreno
woman in a relationship with an indigenous man. Her character is too strong for his.
At any rate, indigenous people always strive to better themselves but morenos do not
want to. The truth is they are lazier than the indigenous people. Everyone has land, but
the morenos harvest the minimum they need to get by. They don't irrigate their land in
the dry season because it takes more work, and they pay the indigenous people to
work the land for them.
In her view, black Mexicans are disinclined to take advantage of what they have while
indigenous people are hardworking and even upwardly mobile. Similar perspectives
characterized other commentaries I heard. "Blacks don't know what to do with the
money they make/' a mestizo restaurant owner from Pinotepa Nacional told me. "Every-
one has land," he mused, "but blacks don't know what to do with it. Not one owns a
business." Blacks are "lazy," said a young cultural promoter also from Pinotepa, who
went on to contrast them to "hardworking Indians." The ironies are striking, of course,
when one notes the generally higher socioeconomic status of the region's black Mexi-
cans. But these depictions of blacks and Indians parallel nationalist sentiments that
have repudiated blackness while idealizing Indianness. They resonate profoundly in
the comments of the storekeeper's husband, who characterized blacks to me as "peo-
ple in exile" and "people without a country" as he linked "civilization" to the pictur-
esque indigenous and mestizo villages that dot the local landscape.
I address moreno perspectives on Indians below, but they need to be understood
in the context of how blackness is depicted as defying social norms, especially by
whites who have power over morenos that Indians do not have. Such characterizations
are not lost on San NicolSs's morenos, who are compelled to understand the "differ-
ence" imputed to them not as key to their acceptance, as scholars would have it, but
rather as a form of disparagement. Domingo once narrated to me white hostility in a
story that recounted, without reference to time or place, blacks' initial enslavement
and the experiences of a "mulatto" boy with a wounded heart.121 present a truncated
version here:
I have a little story that the children used to tell, how the blacks first came to be slaves.
. . . The blacks . . . went to barter their merchandise . . . but the pirates entered and
came out to rob t h e m . . . . They killed them. Later one pirate said, "We are not going
to waste these people.... Let's grab one and take away his merchandise. Then we'll
threaten to steal the water if they (sic) don't sign on as slaves..." There was a boat and
an old man came with his granddaughter. She wanted to go about with her grandfa-
ther. He told her no because of the dangers . . . [but] she convinced him and the pi-
rates grabbed her.... The old man and the young girl were the first to be enslaved,
and they took them to sell t h e m . . . . A white man fell in love with [the girl], and they
had illicit love and had a son. His parents denied he had had a union with a black girl;
they sent him to "the other side.. .." They took the child and gave him attention and
education, but they never loved him very much as a grandson, and the boy was grow-
ing and he saw how they treated the black slaves. He was born mulatto.... The
grandfather was an old slave.... He told the boy to come and kissed him. His lips be-
came sweet because he was his grandfather, but the boy did not know it. The boy's fa-
ther returned and saw him but could not embrace him because it wasn't permitted. He
told the boy to come to his room. He said, "I want to tell you something." He kissed
him and the flavor came to his lips and his lips were sweet. He wanted to say that he
was his father, but he was never brave enough to do it. The boy's father saw them hit
the blacks, and the white did not have the courage to defend the blacks, but the boy
did, "I have it." The boy went to stay alone. He asked the old slave who his mama and
papa were. The slave said he did not know.
Although much occurs in this story, I will draw attention to how the mulatto son of a
white man and the first black slave woman senses the love of his slave grandfather
through a kiss bestowed by the old man, a kiss that leaves a "sweet" taste on the boy's
lips. The white father also bestows on his mulatto son a "sweet" kiss that suggests an
abiding and loving connection. But in the telling of the story the white father's shame
makes him reluctant to embrace his son and thus his love cannot be fulfilled. Too cow-
ardly to identify himself as the boy's father, the white man cannot come to the aid of
the slaves, who are freed with the mulatto's help in the end.
Austroberta once told me that "whites don't really love blacks at heart." In an en-
tirely separate conversation, Domingo had used almost the same terms: "Blacks be-
lieve that whites do not love them at heart," he said.13 "Our ancestors' hearts were
wounded by whites," he told me on another occasion. "Now there is not much con-
tact between blacks and whites. There is still some hurt."
local perspectives on national belonging II: ambivalent relations between

blacks and Indians
Rodrigo once told me that blacks had to "adopt white traditions in order to
survive," and in ways both obvious and subtle morenos identify with national or
white norms. For instance, they consider themselves to follow such norms in
dress, language, values, and Christian (both Catholic and evangelical) customs.
Telling in this respect is that Patricia frequently makes offhand references to Indians
as gente sin razdn, or people without reason (also Aguirre Beltran 1985:70). This
archaic terminology developed during the colonial period to distinguish Christians
(people of reason) from non-Christians (people without reason), the dominant class
from the subordinated ones, and Spaniards from non-Spaniards (and non-Spanish
speakers). Although during the colonial period classifications of people as black or
mulatto varied with respect to context, degree of hispanization, and genealogy, Patri-
cia is suggesting that morenos and whites are categorically different from Indians.
Yet whites "don't really love blacks" at heart and are constantly reminding
morenos that morenos are not whites. Morenos are thus in something of a liminal po-
sition that I believe in part compels them to acknowledge a common history of exploi-
tation with Indians. This history includes being made different by whites. The multiple
affiliations with Indians that experience and consciousness have engendered for
morenos ultimately link them through Indians to a nation in which whites are deemed
to have a rather ambiguous place.
At first glance, the relationship between morenos and Indians seems to be char-
acterized more by hostility than affiliation. I have already indicated that some
morenos see Indians as lacking "reason." Beto once told me that when blacks first ar-
rived at the coast, at some unspecified time in the past, Indians fled to the mountains
as "blacks and Indians clashed." But Domingo tied this clash to the dynamics of con-
quest. "Blacks were not from here," he pointed out to me. "Indians looked upon them
with hate and not with trust, as did blacks look upon whites, with fear rather than af-
fection." His comments suggest a consciousness of the role played by whites in divid-
ing blacks and Indians. The moreno perspective also accommodates degrees of Indi-
anness, and morenos find themselves drawn to Indians in ways that whites are not.
The most "Indian" Indians would be those morenos call "natives" (indios natu-
rales), who come from the mountains, wear traditional dress, and do not speak Span-
ish as a first language or at all. Morenos often comment on these Indians' mishandling
of Spanish ("you talk like an Indian" is an insult heard in San Nicolas) and scorn their
"odd customs/' which are said to include marrying close relatives or selling their
young daughters to suitors for a pittance. These economically impoverished Indians
live outside of, but often come to work as peones in, San Nicolas, where they stay
temporarily and are paid less than local laborers. Sometimes they become victims of
alcohol-induced racially charged barbs and even physical assaults by local teenagers.
Morenos believe that these really "Indian" Indians control the most potent super-
natural powers. In some ways, morenos therefore follow Latin American colonialist
ideologies and practices, imputing supernaturalism to geographical, cultural, and so-
cioeconomic others (see Derby 1994; Lewis 1996a, 1996b; Silverblatt 1987; Taussig
1987). Yet this distancing is muted by morenos' ready acknowledgment that they are
themselves deeply caught up in Indian supernaturalism. This suggests that Indians
have a force that is "foreign" to non-Indians but also that morenos are somehow like
Indians because they are so affected by this force.
Morenos widely believe themselves to be vulnerable to Indian witchcraft. "Indi-
ans are evil," Petronila once told me. "My cousin," she continued, "he put some In-
dian peones to work and did not want to pay one of them. The same day, he was
killed by lightning. One has to speak nicely to them. My nephew says 'cousin' to the
Indians [to placate them] because they are evil." 14 In one series of events that I wit-
nessed, San Nicolas's young mayor (comisario) fell gravely ill and almost died. Al-
though doctors diagnosed pancreatic failure brought on by alcohol consumption, ru-
mor had it that he had been bewitched after ordering the arrest of Romelio, a slight
Indian from the highlands who wore traditional dress and who had been caught one
night extracting skulls from San Nicolas's graveyard with a long hooked pole. People
said Romelio planned to use the pulverized skulls of moreno men for witchcraft pur-
poses (the skulls chosen were of men killed by bullets—I was told that these men
would have had potent concentrations of coraje [bile, anger] in their heads when they
died). He spent the night in San Nicolas's one-room jail cell and was informally tried
the next evening at a town meeting with the highest and most prompt attendance I
ever witnessed. Mutterings in favor of lynching him or taking him to the bush to be
shot strongly suggested that Romelio was at grave risk. Recognizing this danger, the
mayor who later fell ill, allegedly at Romelio's hand, had called in uniformed police
from Cuajinicuilapa to take Romelio away.15
It surprised me to learn that Romelio was related by marriage to a moreno resi-
dent of San Nicolas and had initially been called in not to perform destructive acts but
rather to heal a case of espanto (literally, "fear").16 From the perspective of morenos I
knew, he embodied the dual sides of Indian power, for morenos not only consider In-
dians to be witches,17 they also assign to Indians skills in love magic and the etiology
of illness. "If someone wants a woman/' Alejandro told me, "he looks for a[n Indian]
witch to give something to attract her." According to Jorge, "If you get frightened, if
someone threatens your life, if you get sick with fevers, if your bones ache, if you
don't want to do anything but sleep," a healer comes to cure you with a "cleansing" or
by pulling out the "bad air." Indians can also determine who is responsible for a par-
ticular bout of ensorcelling and predict the future.
The intertwined processes of Indian witchcraft and healing often converge in the
experiences of morenos. For example, Antonio, a close acquaintance of mine, suf-
fered from a long, undiagnosed, and debilitating illness. After consulting doctors and
pleading the intervention of a saint, neither of which cured him, he came to believe
that he had been bewitched by his Indian lover (with whom his wife later scuffled and
then told me with a slight frown that she was not afraid of the woman, "even though
she's an Indian") or by another Indian woman, the mother of a resident of San Ni-
colas, whom he thought responsible for providing an unknown assailant with the sub-
stances that had harmed him. Antonio then sought the help of an Indian healer from
the hillsides above Pinotepa who did a midnight cleansing (limpia) of Antonio's
house, followed with more local "work" in San Nicolas during the night hours. This
work included trying to save the life of the gravely ill mayor, whose wife insisted that
she did not believe in witchcraft but who nevertheless asked the healer for help in
case the Indian graverobber Romelio had indeed bewitched her husband.
Moreno attitudes toward the two hundred or so Indians who live in San Nicolas
are more measured than their attitudes toward indios naturales. San Nicol&s's Indians
are linguistically and sartorially similar to morenos in that they speak Spanish18 and
do not wear traditional dress. Moreover, their supernatural ism is muted. Although I
have mentioned Antonio's suspicions that his lover or another local Indian had be-
witched him, and his wife's assertion that she was not afraid of the lover, which
clearly suggests a fear that even local Indians might use witchcraft if crossed, Petronila
explicitly excepted San Nicole's Indians from her characterization of Indians as evil.
And even one of my Indian comadres (literally "comother"; a ritual kin relationship)
pointed out to me the virtues of assimilation as she discussed at length the dangers of
witchcraft in her natal region. She felt much safer in San Nicolas, she declared, be-
cause she had less to fear in this respect.
The ambivalent place of Indians in San Nicolas can be identified in other ways.
For instance, most Indians live on the edge of the village in what is called the "Indian
neighborhood"—recently christened "Emiliano Zapata." (They are the "zapatistas,"19
some morenos joke.) This segregation in part results from the Indians' recent arrival
and intragroup kinship ties. It is reinforced, however, by moreno remarks that they
themselves are natives (criollos) while even the second generation of Indians are out-
siders (forasteros).20 Socorro once expressed to me her concern that these outsiders
were taking over the center of the village, a concern that arose from several recent
marriages involving Indian women and moreno men. Since residence patterns are
virilocal, the women moved from the geographical and social margins of San Nicolas
to the center where their husbands' families lived, prompting Socorro's contention
that they were moving into space that was not "theirs."
Although local Indians speak Spanish, their moreno neighbors still tease them for
what they perceive to be Indian mishandling of the language. I have also heard
morenos disparage local Indians for failures of cultural etiquette, especially with re-
spect to major ritual events like weddings and funerals. Although I do not have the
space to address the issue here, local Indians have their own views of morenos, whom
they often disparage and call negros behind their backs (see Lewis in press). Yet, sig-
nificantly, these Indians quite consciously try to "fit in" to village life by performing
rituals "properly." They regularly develop ties of ritual coparenthood with morenos;
they also participate in community events, politics, and church services. For their
part, morenos consistently attend weddings and wakes in the Indian neighborhood,
and they often express their admiration for Indian political unity and cleanliness,
which they contrast to their own "selfishness" and lack of attention to public sanita-
tion. Most telling, perhaps, is that no one seems to be excluded from verbal news and
gossip networks. "People here are like tape recorders," Patricia once commented to
me with a laugh. And I have many times heard the same tale told in the same words
by an Indian at one end of the village as was told to me by a moreno at the other end.
Morenos believe that they have common political and economic experiences
with Indians in general. These are presented in terms of both groups' subordination to
whites. Morenos will point out, for instance, that neither they nor Indians can make a
living through agriculture because white merchants cheat both out of their crops and
their money and are then favored by the government in disputes that arise. The gov-
ernment, in turn, is said to "not want [morenos and Indians] to be educated," as Domingo
once told me, and so fails to provide adequate schools. Morenos not only conflate
whites with "the government" (which might help to explain suspicion of la cultura),
they constitute class categories through racial idioms and refer to whites as "the rich"
(los ricos).
Moreno ambivalence toward Indians is coupled with a consciousness of a com-
parable class position and relationship to "the government" (or whites) in comments
Antonio made to me one afternoon while we were discussing the situation in Chiapas.
The peasant-indigenous movement that began there in 1994 was in ongoing negotia-
tion in 1997-98 and played out locally on television. "We always say 'indios, inditos?
[little Indians]," Antonio remarked to me. "I've seen on television how the Indians
live. Now they've had it. They are resisting, they are fighting back. We all understand
because we too have had it," he declared. "Little Indians," then, are coupled here
with equally disadvantaged (and exasperated) morenos.
The densest locus of convergence between morenos and Indians is probably kin-
ship. This is also one of the ways morenos link themselves to a nation that they see as
belonging to Indians. I should first note that on the coast there are long histories of
marriage between people classified as "black" and those classified as "Indian." 21 As
Socorro's comments about Indians "taking over" the center of the village indicate,
such marriages are increasingly common within San Nicolas itself. I have indicated
that morenos consider black to be an inaccurate, and even an impolite, term when
applied to them, although they do use it in contexts that recall white characterizations
of them and with reference to ancestors, whom they deem to have been much darker
than the present population. When asked what moreno means, morenos respond that
they have "mixed blood" (sangre mezclada) with Indians. Sometimes they even ex-
plicitly distinguish themselves from blacks by referring to themselves as "black Indi-

ans" (indios negros) or "Indian blacks" (negros indios). Mixed descent with Indians
overlaps in moreno discourse with the common historical experiences of blacks and
Indians. In this respect, even Leticia, the wife of the wealthiest moreno in San Nicolas,
could call herself a "black Indian" as she talked to me about the political and eco-
nomic marginal ization of blacks from white society.
Whatever the genealogical facts, claims to common descent with Indians clearly
have cultural and ideological importance. In this respect, moreno claims to being
black Indians lead to kinship discourse replicated on another level in the stories about
San Nicolas, the patron saint of the village, through whom blacks and Indians are also
linked. Morenos in San Nicolas describe the saint as moreno too. They speak of his
birth in the village and subsequent residence in the Indian community of Zitlala in the
Montana (Nahuatl) region of Guerrero, several hundred kilometers to the northwest.
Though I do not have the space here to recount the myriad ways in which the story of
San Nicolas's journey from his natal village to the Indian one links morenos to Indians
(see Lewis in press; also Dehouve 1995; Gutierrez Avila 1987), I will point out that
morenos always stress Indians' adoration for their beloved saint (see Sanchez Andraka
1983:47-48) and tell a story that makes a "Spaniard" responsible for "stealing" him
from the village of San Nicolas in the first place. Additionally, the willful saint, whom
morenos sometimes refer to as "Papa Nico," is said to himself have made the final de-
cision to reside in Indian Zitlala. Since within the framework of the story, Indians rep-
resent Mexico, and whites are traitors, the story of the moreno saint choosing to leave
his "children" to reside in an Indian village resonates with moreno ties to Indians
through common descent and proper claims to national identity and belonging made
through "race" (see also Stutzman 1981:76).
from blackness to Africanness: the ironies of ethnicization
Rather than exploring moreno perspectives on Indianness,22 some of the "change

agents"23 who have visited and written about the Costa Chica region attribute to black
Mexicans differences derived from their Africanness. In both direct and indirect ways,
scholars relate these differences to a past also at times essentialized in "blood" and
rather unproblematically signified through references to Mexico's "African cultures/'
culture of "African origins," "African presence," "African contributions," "African
roots," "African biological and cultural heritage," and "African 'biological remem-
brances' " (see Diaz P6rez 1993, n.d.; Hamilton and Tellez 1992:6; Martinez Montiel
1991,1994; Valencia Valencia 1993).24
The emphasis many outsiders place on Africanness elides moreno claims to Indi-
anness. Moreover, while Africanness is meant to be inclusive, along with the racial-
ized national and local discourses about the aesthetic, cultural, and character defi-
ciences of blacks, scholarly claims about moreno "difference" also contribute to
morenos' perceptions of their marginality (also Torres and Whitten 1998:24-25). It is
telling that local understandings sometimes conflate antiblack racism and the inter-
ests of cultural promoters. In this respect, wariness of whites who pass through the vil-
lage ostensibly to learn about local customs prompted Cecilia to declare to me once
with some bitterness that "whites come to take pictures of us in order to make fun of
us." Because morenos are the objects of both derision and cultural promoti6n, "making
fun" comes to include "making money" because whites often sell the pictures they do
manage to take of morenos. In this respect, the exploitation of blacks by whites has
the unintended effect of making blacks like Indians after all.
Scholarship on Latin American blacks in general tends to equate "their" culture

with African survivals (Wade 1997:77-78). It depicts that culture as isolated and left-
over "bits" (Torres and Whitten 1998:4) understood without reference to a meaning-
ful, contemporary, and dynamic social context. Outsiders' approaches to morenos in
the present case typically emphasize the past, fixity, and their contributions based on
things long vanished from their day-to-day lives. To illustrate, I return to the imagery
of the artesa and the round house in the construction of an ethnocultural space in San
Nicolas, a space Ernesto referred to as "the African center" of the village. The issues I
wish to explore do not center on whether something can be proven to be African or not,
but rather on the ways in which Africanness is rather unproblematically linked to cul-
tural survivals and comes to constitute moreno contributions to national (pluri) culture.
If one were to walk through San Nicolas, one would notice a number of square or
rectangular concrete houses in various stages of construction, a lesser number of red
brick dwellings, still fewer crumbling adobe ones, and a smattering of square mud
brick abodes, some of which have been turned into kitchens as their owners move
into new concrete residences.25 What one would not see, except for the shell next to
the shuttered casa de cultura, would be wattle and daub round houses. These were
still common in the 1940s when Aguirre Beltran conducted his fieldwork in Cuajini-
cuilapa; at the time, some of them still displayed crosses at their apex, as most did be-
fore the Revolution. Aguirre Beltran viewed these houses as "cultural retentions of Af-
rican origin, more specifically, Bantu" (1985:93). Indeed, in his estimation such
houses were "one of the last African cultural traits" retained by Cuajinicuilapa's
blacks (1985:99).
The state of San Nicolas's crumbling replica suggests not so much that its moreno
residents are indifferent to their history as it does that that history needs a context that
is meaningful to them today. The replica was originally commissioned by anthropolo-
gists in the 1980s when the now defunct Center for Popular Culture was founded in
the village for the diffusion of narrative traditions to young people (Gutierrez Avila
1993:18). Although their origins have been questioned,26 round houses are now
prominent emblems for outsiders of a specifically "Afro" Mexican identity located in
the past. They surface principally in contexts controlled by outsiders and linked to
morenos' difference, such as the badges made for participants in the "First Meeting of
Black Communities" held in Ciruelo, Oaxaca in 1997 (see below) and the painted
backdrop created for the "First Traditional Fair" held in San Nicolas in January 1998,
which was organized by cultural promoters and politicians from Cuajinicuilapa.
More recently, the architectural design for a new museum in Cuajincicuilapa, dedi-
cated to the preservation of Afromexican culture, consists in part of concrete replicas
of round houses scattered outside the main building housing the museum.
Perhaps even more than round houses, it is artesa music—which is more port-
able and perhaps culturally denser—that has come to signify morenos' difference
while its close relationship to regional, and even to international traditions, is over-
looked. The music, for which San Nicolas in particular is famed, is performed with a
violin; a low, rectangular drum; and a cylindrical clove-filled instrument called a
guacharasca. It is accompanied by verses in the typical style of Mexican corridos (bal-
lads) as well as the dance music known as chilenas (literally, "Chileans"), the steps of
which are performed on top of the inverted trough. The chilena, identified by Ochoa
Campos as the "most Latin American of Mexican dances" (1987:15), is a courtship
dance found all over Guerrero (Guerrero n.d.; Stanford 1998). Its roots are in 17th-
century Spanish music and in the Chilean cueca (a popular dance), said to have been
brought to Mexico through the port of Acapuico by Chilean sailors in the early 19th
century (Ochoa Campos 1987).27 The use of an inverted trough or canoe as a dancing
platform can be traced to the adoption of the chilena first by coastal fishermen, who
have also traditionally danced barefoot (Ochoa Campos 1987:135). Both the inverted
trough and barefoot dancing are features of sones de artesa as performed by people
from San Nicolas. The dancers' costumes, like those of mestizo and indigenous danc-
ers, include cotton shirts and trousers for men and embroidered or beaded blouses
and full skirts for women. Men and women carry handkerchiefs in their upraised right
hands, as is the widespread tradition.
In the past, artesa music was played for hours at a time mostly at weddings,
which are still affairs lasting several days. Its popularity in San Nicolas seems to have
begun to wane back in the 1940s and 1950s with the advent of orchestra music. To-
day, the widespread Latin American music and dance known as cumbia, along with
electric instruments, and "technopop" imported from North Carolina (where many
San Nicoladenses migrate), have replaced both orchestra and sones de artesa at wed-
dings, where status is signified by outside imports like elaborate wedding cakes and
one or even two bands from Pinotepa or Ometepec.
"They say it is African," one of the musicians remarked of sones de artesa. Al-
though San Nicolas is considered to be the last bastion of the music, it is generally
only played in the village when requested by visitors, for whom it is an emblem of
Afromexican culture in general and the people of San Nicolas in particular. In its pre-
sent form, it was recuperated also at the instigation of anthropologists in the 1980s. It
has given San Nicolas's elderly musicians (some of whom were taught to play the mu-
sic) a role as local intellectuals and opportunities to travel to cultural events some-
times far from the coast. Performances of the music at such events are usually per-
functory, rarely lasting more than two or three minutes. In 1992, the musicians
received state funds funneled through cultural promoters for instruments. More re-
cently, they received funds for costumes. "They wanted us to look good when we
travel to performances," said one member of the group.28 Yet the musicians complain
that those who request them to play never pay them and sometimes expect them to
take care of their own expenses. It also angers them that outsiders demand they organ-
ize themselves "at a moment's notice," as Chico once told me, as if they had nothing
else to do. They often do not appear.
The process by which San Nicolas's past is preserved through the delineation of
certain traditions as emblems of identity is in keeping with what has been termed folk-
lorization with reference to relations between Indians and the state in Latin America
(Urban and Sherzer 1991:10-11). Folklorization transforms traditions through spatial
and temporal decontextualization: the round house and artesa are initially set up in a
field far away from town. Artesa performances are arranged by outsiders and usually
take place outside of San Nicolas. Portable pictures and replicas of round houses re-
place the real thing, and so on. These "traditions" are then promoted as part of Mex-
ico's rich and varied heritage—as part of a "menagerie, one of several semi-inde-
pendent traditions that together make up the whole" (Urban and Scherzer 1991:11;
see also Rowe and Schelling 1991:58-59). They make "Afromexicans" and join them
to the new, multicultural nation, which is "one in its wholeness and diverse in its plu-
rality" (Martinez Montiel 1991:2).
Our Third Root speaks to the interpenetration of blackness and the nation in this
way. Its collective character (the "Our") is situated in a past ("Root") that stretches
deep into Mexican soil and is African ("Third") as opposed to Indian or Spanish. The
project's coordinator has characterized its goals as the acknowledgment that "the
American peoples have an African cultural heritage that is part of national societies
and therefore a part of national identity and culture" (Martinez Montiel 1991:2). This
suggests that rather than fragmenting "the nation" into so many equal interests and
perspectives, Mexican multiculturalism aims to reinforce cultural variety while un-
derscoring national unity. Such unity sometimes has biological overtones, for in-
stance in the introduction to Maya Goded's (1994) collection of Costa Chica photo-
graphs, Tierra Negra (Black Earth), where the commentary states that "black blood
runs in our veins" (Del Val 1994; see also Lewis 2000). That Africa serves as a source
of such unification (especially) for whites was also evident at the First Meeting of
Black Communities in 1997. Organized by several Catholic priests and lay workers,
the meeting brought together academics, campesinos, and schoolchildren, mostly
from the Oaxacan part of the Costa Chica, in a three-day event. Its goals were to share
history and customs, to unite black villages, and to promote the interests of local
blacks. During the meeting, several white participants (an anthropology student and a
history professor) laid claim to black identity by extension. "I'm not properly speaking
black," said one, "but I share this identity." "All Mexicans have black, Indian, and
white roots.. . . It's important to recognize this," said the other.
If, however, common roots once again suggest a common kinship and assumed
social affinity, in embracing blackness whites are nevertheless using it to construct a
national identity that is rooted in a romanticized and primitivized cultural history lo-
cated in a pre-European past of which only showy vestiges remain (Stutzman
1981:64-65; Wade 1997: ch. 3). It thus excludes contemporary morenos much as
contemporary Indians have always been excluded from the nation even as their past
is extolled and preserved for elite consumption. In the end, not only are blacks and In-
dians both exploited, both are folklorized as well. The Africanization of morenos,
then, is a further sign of their Indianization.
Some morenos are aware of this turn of events. I have said that they group them-
selves with Indians in terms of what they regard as their marginality. Domingo groups
blacks with Indians when he expresses his confusion over the folklorization process,
which obfuscates the real needs of contemporary populations. "Whites are really
worried about blacks and Indians losing their customs, but I haven't figured out why,"
he told me. "Why do they spend so much money on this?" He noted that white busi-
ness people who once lived in San Nicolas originally repressed and even outlawed
what they considered to be the boisterous and threatening music and dance of local
people, including the artesa. "The whites saw the customs of the blacks as very bad,
really dumb, crazy, disruptive," he told me. "They were rich," he said, and the "rich
give the commands. They preferred order while we were used to doing it however we
wanted to, as we liked to do it. We had no schedule; they wanted to go to bed. They
stopped the artesa." These comments say as much about class distinctions as they do
about cultural ones.29 The class relationship between blacks and whites has not changed,
only the way that whites control blackness in order to further their own interests.
Africa and America: black Indians revisited

In the opening paragraphs of this article I noted that Ernesto, who is an artesa musi-
cian, identified "the Mexican" to me as "an Indian" even as he showed me the African
center of his Mexican village. That center, he emphasized, was "of the people." Yet
many of "the people" seem indifferent to, or even resentful of, the idea that they have
African roots in part because such an attribution makes morenos distinct from other
Mexicans and in part because it is linked to the presence of cultural promoters. Some
morenos see them as both exploiting local people and favoring the musicians, who
are the only residents of San Nicolas involved in the production of popular culture for
91 4 american ethnologist
outside consumption. While other villages manage to find some financial support for
those who represent them outside of their communities, San Nicolas's residents do
not support their famed musicians financially or in any other way. Indeed, comments
that Socorro made to me suggest that artesa music and the recognition it has engen-
dered evoke feelings of conflict for many residents of San Nicolas. She told me about
a white woman who came in and spent two months filming reenactments of tradi-
tional dances. This woman went around with "only one or two people/' including
one of the musicians. She "taped and taped, but never paid anyone a thing." Socorro
added that she herself does not much like artesa music, and she made a face while
thumping out the rhythm on a nearby chair. She would not have wanted it had she
had a wedding, she insisted,30 even though her beloved grandfather, who died in the
late 1980s, was an artesa musician. He "played and played" for outsiders, she said
with some annoyance but was never paid or "given anything."
In the same conversation, Socorro linked artesa music to Africa. She remarked
that while she has heard it said that "we" are from "Africa or Cuba or something, this
hardly interests the people around here. Anyway," she added emphatically, "we're
Mexicans. We don't want to be from Africa." Domingo had once expressed a similar
sentiment in a less insistent way: "The people here say [they are] Mexicans; outsiders
are the ones that say 'Afromexicans.' Whites don't say that they're 'Spaniards.' They
say they are Mexicans. They say that we are not from here. Well, they are not from
here either." His comment suggests that whites have no more claim to Mexico than
morenos, a complex theme that I now take up.
Africa is elided in everyday conversation and in community-wide rituals. One of
these is particularly noteworthy in part because it is of most interest to local people,
who describe it first when offering visitors a list of local traditions. More pointedly, it
speaks directly to the problem of national identity, morenos' relationship to Indians,
and even to the national claims of whites. The centerpiece of this ritual, which com-
memorates Independence Day in September, is a performance variously called La
America (America) or Los Apaches (the Apaches). During the performance, San Ni-
colas's "black Indian" young people dress up as "America," as "Apaches," and as
"Spaniards" (gachupines). As they Transform themselves into Indian victors, they trace
through dance triumph over whites (Spaniards) and the subsequent birth of Mexico.31
Commemoration begins on the night of September 15 when "La America," a
young woman dressed in the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag and accompa-
nied by several small children playing "little Indians," leads a dancing and whooping
procession of "Apaches" to the commissary. Seated on a red, white, and green plat-
form, La America and her cohorts are then surrounded by Mexican flags both large
and small, while the Spanish queen, the crowned gachupina32 dressed in white and
carrying a scepter, takes a seat at their side. La America waves a large Mexican flag
back and forth while everyone sings the national anthem. She then gives a speech
praising the heroes of Independence and the people of San Nicolas, who are thus in-
trinsically bound together.
The following day La America emerges from her house with a sequined eagle
and serpent (the central emblem of the Mexican flag) prominently displayed on the
front of her red, white, and green outfit. She again accompanies the Apaches, who are
now "civilized" and transformed into Mexicans through the replacement of their
headdress feathers with small Mexican flags. Throughout the day, the Apaches en-
gage in a village-wide mock battle with the gachupines, who toss firecrackers in the
Apaches' direction while the Apaches, accompanied by La America, take shots with
their arrows at the gachupines. Although there are fewer Apaches than gachupines,
the Apaches, who are "wild" and hence fierce and capable fighters, eventually tri-
umph. This ushers in Independence while confirming that Mexico "belongs" to Indi-
ans—or here to morenos dressed up as Indians. La America moves once again to her
seat in the commissary as the Mexican anthem is played, and she again gently waves
a large Mexican flag. This time the ceiling is draped with chains of red, white, and
green crepe paper. The denouement comes when La America takes her bow and pulls
these "chains of slavery" down as the crown is removed from the gachupina queen's
head, and the Apaches break into an exuberant dance.
Through La America, then, San Nicolas's morenos ritually speak to their own
black-Indian identities by appropriating the Indians that Manuel, Margarita, Ernesto,
and others indicate are the "authentic Mexicans." Because they conflate America,
morenos, Indians, and the colors of the Mexican flag, Independence Day celebrations
allow morenos to lay claim to national belonging through Indians who triumph while
figuratively wrapped in what Manuel identified at the opening of this article as "their"
Mexican flag. La America, then, brings to another level moreno claims to Indianness
through kinship and shared economic plight. Here identification with Indians allows
morenos to be Mexican while also excluding whites from the common experiences of
morenos and Indians. When I asked Domingo why Indians played such a prominent
role in the ritual, he patiently explained: "Indians own Mexico. That is why blacks
identify themselves with Indians. Indians were vanquished but they were not en-
slaved. They fought. Blacks did not."33
In this drama, in which whites are defeated, there are no African survivals or
even any blacks. The rebels are not the black slaves emancipated at Independence,
but morenos dressed up as Indians who in turn stand in for morenos' status as Mexi-
cans in a country that, as has been repeatedly pointed out to me, is "free." In this way,
the ritual continues to efface blackness from the nation, an effacement repeated in
coastal discourses centered on blacks' alleged violence and laziness. This discourse is
joined by intellectuals who, in a veiled racial way, also stress blacks' differences from
other Mexicans by emphasizing their Africanness, which they relate directly and indi-
rectly to a heritage essentialized as "blood." It is interesting in this respect that through
a symbolic-cum-biological abridgment with Indians, morenos participate in the same
hegemonic order that differentiates them on the basis of race, attaching themselves
through their Indian "kin" to the nation. This move confirms that these "black Indians''
are more Mexican than anything else.
the politics of Africa

Aguirre Beltr^n identified an "aggressive" coastal ethos that he attributed to a ci-
marr6n (runaway slave) mentality. In a 1995 article, Peter Wade explains that in Co-
lombia the term cimarron has recently become a symbol of resistance to oppression
and a reference to African cultural survivals linked to the isolation of runaway slave
communities from colonial hegemony (Wade 1995:343-344). Wade traces the mobi-
lization of Colombian blacks and the political context of a developing ethnic identity
through the formation of such organizations as Cimarr6n that led to the First Meeting
of Black Communities. A similar trend seems to be developing on the Costa Chica
where a radio station presents a program called "Cimarr6n: The Voice of Afromesti-
zos" and a local cultural organization publishes a newsletter called El Cimarrdn,
which is distributed along the coastal highway. The First Meeting of Black Communi-
ties there has since been followed by a second and a third.34 Prominent at the First
Meeting were discussions of racial stereotypes and Africanisms. Several commenta-
tors understood Africanisms to include everything from dance, to round houses, to
zest for life, while the only African present (a Nigerian philosophy student) addressed
the participants by insisting that blacks were "not Africans; but, rather, black Mexi-
cans." He added, "Only God knows if something is African."
Perhaps the point is not so much whether things are African, however, as it is the
meaning "African things" hold for different groups of people. In fact, some sort of mo-
bilization around a politicized ethnic identity is perhaps beginning to develop out of
Africa on the Costa Chica. Thus the suspected presence at the First Meeting of govern-
ment "spies" who, one conference moderator worried, had infiltrated in an attempt to
gauge the extent of local political organization. Yet it is important to note that the state
has since co-opted the movement: by the Third Meeting (in March 1999) the organiz-
ing committee was registered with the state, which also funded the museum in Cua-
jinicuilapa, recently inaugurated by the outgoing governor in the midst of contested
state elections.35 Additionally, although the meetings were originally envisioned as
events bringing together disparate groups of people from local communities, they
have come to be dominated by Mexican scholars and intellectuals, black Mexicans
from more urban or geographically central communities, and foreigners, including
African (North) Americans.
Wade notes the limited impact that black Colombian ethnic mobilization has
had on isolated, illiterate, and poor rural peoples (1995:343), a situation that seems
strikingly like the one I have described here. In this respect, morenos from San Ni-
colas have a complicated relationship to the new movement in which artesa music
and round houses are such prominent symbols. Since artesa music is mostly identified
with San Nicolas, the site of its recuperation, its musicians have come to represent
"Afro" Mexico to the outside. They have thus been drawn into processes that play on
their differences from other Mexicans and catch them up in distinctive ways in the
new identity paradigms. One of the musicians recently commissioned a brief per-
formance of artesa music at his (adopted Indian) son's wedding in San Nicolas. Dom-
ingo speaks rather eloquently about what "they" say regarding blacks' African roots.
We have seen that Ernesto describes his people as "very, very black" and as "African."
He further expresses his affinity to people he met at a music festival in Cancun by not-
ing that local people, both "black" and "mixed," as he puts it, "feel more like the
blacks of the Caribbean/' whom he assumes are Africans and whom he deems similar
to him because of what he perceives to be their identical skin color. On the walls of
his home hang posters from his travels, posters signed by musicians from Trinidad, Ja-
maica, Belize, Cuba, and other parts of the Americas.
San Nicolas's musicians are rarely rewarded for their performances with more
than travel expenses and a few tortillas. They were invited to the First Meeting of
Black Communities by the priest who organized it and by another priest who tried to
generate local interest in San Nicolas during his twice weekly visits from Cuajinicuilapa.
Yet the musicians had to request funds from the organizers for their own transporta-
tion and grumbled about not having received a timely invitation or sufficient compen-
sation. They were the only San Nicoladenses present at the meeting. The Third Meeting
(1999) took place in Cuajinicuilapa and was therefore closer to San Nicolas than the
First Meeting. It too was notable, however, for the complete absence of people
from San Nicolas, this despite the fact that the organizers had designated the village
the "subheadquarters," as I discuss below. As participants gathered for workshops on
culture, history, and gender issues, photos of local children and at least one painting
of an African woman were for sale in one of the concrete casas redondas outside the
new museum. A fashion show of African clothing, videos narrating black American
history, and other displays were all meant to underscore links between local people
and a diaspora. "What's it all about?" my neighbor Patricia asked me when I returned
home to San Nicolas one evening after a day attending discussions and events, "A
meeting of moreno women?" and she laughed. The passengers I rode with late one af-
ternoon in a taxi heading for San Nicolas also laughed at the title: "The meeting of
blacks [negros]?" they exclaimed, emphasizing the black.
Although San Nicolas is considered to be a cradle of Afromexican culture, it has
a reputation for being uncooperative when it comes to cultural events; promot-
ers—who now include more urban, educated black Mexicans from Cuajinicuilapa, as
well as whites from the state and national capitals—are never quite sure whether per-
formers will appear. Several days before the Third Meeting commenced a few organ-
izers arrived in San Nicolas to ask that the village participate in some significant way
in the event. Although the meeting was broadcast several times over the village's
loudspeaker, only a few schoolteachers, the mayor, a local Indian woman, two
moreno men, and I attended. A black Mexican schoolteacher and cultural promoter
from Cuajinicuilapa began: "The capital of the Afromexican cultural tradition is here.
Saturday afternoon we are going to move the meeting here, because here there are
more traditions." The mayor responded, "Frankly, my people (mi pueblo) do not un-
derstand this thing." And when the organizers left, having exacted a promise that San
Nicolas would put on a "show" (but without having exacted another promise that San
Nicolas would feed the visitors), the mayor laughed that "the culture here is one of
cholos," or gang members who have brought their "tradition" from the United States.
Nevertheless, during the final evening of the Third Meeting several minibuses
loaded with visitors made their way along the bumpy unpaved roads to San Nicolas
where an event featuring bits of artesa music and local dances (including La America)
had been hurriedly organized by the mayor. Up until the last moment, the organizers
were afraid that San Nicolas's dancers and musicians would not be prepared, and the
dancers and musicians worried that the visitors were not coming, that they had read-
ied themselves for nothing. As the visitors climbed out of their minibuses, a funeral
procession for my neighbor's son, whose body had just been returned from North
Carolina, wended its way to the central plaza toward the church, before heading off
to the cemetery that the Indian Romelio had once desecrated with his long hooked
pole. The visitors raised their video and still cameras in unison as they literally fol-
lowed the procession from one side of the plaza to the other.
conclusion
Black Mexicans are clearly not a monolithic group in terms of experience and
identity. While some urban black Mexicans from Cuajinicuilapa and elsewhere have
become involved in cultural promotion, which is one path to upward mobility for
them, the mutual distrust displayed during the Third Meeting, coupled with local peo-
ples' general lack of understanding of its goals and their failure to participate readily,
suggest that residents of San Nicolas, the seat of Afromexican culture, do not yet make
their blackness meaningful in terms of a diasporic consciousness of Africa that links
them to other blacks. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that blackness is not really
useful to them at all because to them being Mexican means being white (and having
material power) or being Indian (and having symbolic power). One cannot therefore
be black and also be Mexican. Since whites reject blackness, alliances with Indians,
achieved through consciousness and understandings of historical experience, remain
the only viable option. And so they are morenos.
Identities informed by Indianness are of course no less constructed or more
authentic and pure (Clifford 1988; Jackson 1995) than those informed by Africanness,
yet Indian identity is more meaningful locally right now since it speaks to moreno ex-
periences and conceptions of history. It may nevertheless be that Africa eventually
does prove to be a useful way for morenos from San Nicolas to locate themselves so-
cially. I have shown that the musicians in particular are generally positive, if some-
what uncertain, about an African heritage as they draw the attention of cultural pro-
moters and anthropologists. Yet their engagement with production for national (and
even international) markets through their music has perhaps given them particular in-
sight into the value of la cultura and their ongoing struggle for recognition. They get
great joy out of playing the music, which some youngsters are learning as well. But
they also gain a particular perspective on class formation through it because it re-
minds them of their marginality: they are not rewarded in appropriate ways nor are
they treated with the respect that they believe they deserve.
Perhaps the definitive irony of all this is that while outsiders tend to locate San
Nicolas's value in an imagined past, San Nicoladenses themselves are much more
concerned about the town's future. When Socorro told me that she and her people
"do not want to be from Africa," she also asked me if there was a lot of work there.
Her concerns underscore the need for San Nicoladenses, like other rural Mexicans, to
cross borders illegally in order to find the income that for them makes a future possi-
ble. Socorro's oldest son and many other San Nicoladenses have found factory jobs in
"Carolina" (North Carolina). Through these jobs they "get ahead" (adelantarse) bit by
bit, contributing to the family income and buying materials to construct houses for
themselves back home. Rodrigo recently told me in an intentional critique of Aguirre
Beltran's ethnography that blacks will one day write their own story. But for now,
Domingo insists, "blacks are still slaves of whites."
notes
Acknowledgments. Versions of this article were presented at the Latin American Studies
Association Meetings in Guadalajara, Mexico (April 1997), at the symposium "African and Afri-
can-American Ethnic Diversity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Making of
Black Identities/' University of Maryland, College Park (April 1998), and at the Centro de Inves-
tigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (CIESAS-Mexico City) (June 1998). I
would like to thank those who attended these presentations for their comments. I would also
like to thank the American Bar Foundation, which supported my initial forays to the Costa Chica
in 1992, and the Research Institute for the Study of Man, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research (Gr. 6073), and James Madison University for support in 1997-99. In
addition, thanks go to Jonathan Amith, Ira Bashkow, John McDowell, and Patricia Spyer for
their extensive comments on recent versions of the article, and special thanks to the anonymous
reviewers for American Ethnologist. I would also like to thank for their general support and
friendship during my research Niklaus Stephan, successive mayors of San Nicolas, the former
municipal president of Cuajinicuilapa, Andres Manzano Anorve, Padre Florencio, Dr. Carlos
Villalobos, and the numerous investigators with whom I have had fruitful conversations (and ar-
guments) over the years, especially Maria Cristina Diaz Pe>ez, Miguel Angel Gutierrez Avila,
and Taurino Hernandez Moreno. My biggest debt by far, however, is to the people of San
Nicolas, who continue to treat me and my family with great warmth and humor. They are iden-
tified with pseudonyms in the text.
1. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in San Nicolas in 1992, and
1997-99, and on the extensive contact I have had with outsiders, including other anthropolo-
gists, cultural promoters, and local politicians.
2. Negro is also used to describe U.S. blacks, who are perceived as blacker (and taller)
than morenos and of course are commonly referred to as "blacks" in the United States. In addi-
tion to the terms discussed above, San NicolaYs morenos employ a wide range of insults that in-
clude moyo for U.S. blacks, macuano for Indians, and gabacho for U.S. whites (although
gabacho is considered less of an insult than the other two terms). The meanings of these terms
are not particularly clear, but it is possible that moyo is derived from the Nahuatl moyote, a kind
of black bug.
3. Arlene Torres and Norman Whitten note that pairing the article la (the) with cultura (cul-
ture) has the effect of elevating culture to a level of "refinement" and "civilization" that contrasts
with "low" culture (1998:4). That local people in San Nicolas collectively refer to cultural pro-
moters with this article perhaps underscores the distance they perceive between themselves
and those who have come to study them. As a non-Mexican, my relationship to la cultura was at
first somewhat uncertain, and I repeatedly had to reiterate that 1 was not with la cultura (and also
that I was not an evangelical Christian, an alelujah, but that's another story). The constant ques-
tions and comments made me quickly realize that many people viewed representatives of na-
tional cultural interests with some hostility, which I discuss below.
4. References to "African culture" in the scholarly literature are discussed below. I do not
have the space to deal adequately with the question of violence here, but the Costa Chica is
consistently depicted as the most dangerous part of a state (Guerrero) that is considered to be
one of Mexico's most dangerous. Within this discourse, blacks are often identified as the most
violent of the region's populations. Violence has been one of the principal topics addressed in
the major published scholarship (i.e., Flanet 1977; Gutierrez Avila 1988, 1997a, and 1997b;
McDowell 2000). The earliest of these works focused on indigenous and mestizo perceptions of
black Mexicans rather than on black Mexicans' perceptions of themselves. It concluded that
violence was not specific to any one group but rather a consequence mostly of land disputes
that are still not entirely resolved (see also Hernandez Moreno 1996; McDowell 2000). Gutier-
rez Avila largely equivocates on the issue of violence. He has pointed out that San Nicolas
and other areas of the Costa Chica with majority "Afromestizo" populations have no higher
rates of violence than Indian regions (1997a:106-107), yet he faults Flanet for not focusing
enough on violence, which he considers a "pillar of group identity" reaffirmed by Afromestizos
themselves (1988:19). In another work, he refers to the "extreme violence" of local Afromestizo
communities (1997a:98), and he follows Aguirre Beltran's lead in attributing the "ethos" of vio-
lence to a cimarron mentality, which "profoundly marked the character of Afromestizo society"
(1988:20). He identifies the practice of rapto (kidnaping) as an example of local violence
(Gutierrez Avila 1997a:101-102;1997b). In the past, this involved the forced abduction of
young women as a prelude to marriage but it rarely occurs today (though consensual "fleeing" is
standard) because of a more active state presence. Aguirre Beltran considered rapto an
"African retention" (Aguirre Beltran 1985:148; see also Gutierrez Avila 1997a:101), which of
course suggests a deep-seated and subtle overlap between the themes of Africanity and vio-
lence themselves. Yet I have heard rapto, and violence in general, characterized as Spanish.
"Violence," a moreno man from San Nicolas told me, "is a Spanish influence. The custom of ab-
duction is Spanish. If the Spaniards liked the Indian and black women, they would grab them.
What could [the women] do?"
5. Not all of this research has been connected to the Third Root Project. Notable are Palmer's
(1976) and Carroll's (1991) historical studies as well as Flanet's (1977) ethnography of Jamil-
tepec, Oaxaca, and McDowell's analysis of local balladry (2000). Aguirre Beltran also publish-
ed an important historical work: before Cuijla, called La poblacion negra de Mexico (1972).
6. Morenos tend to use raza and blood (sangre) interchangeably. Sometimes raza refers to
family or kin, as in mi raza for "my family." Sometimes it encompasses the whole community of
San Nicolas (with the exception of newcomers, who are mostly Indians), and even the whole
coastal region. When people arrive home for holidays, everyone comments, "Here come 'our
people'" (aqui viene la raza).
7. These sites would be Ometepec, Guerrero, about 70 kilometers northwest of San Ni-
colas, and Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca, about 70 kilometers southeast. Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, tra-
ditionally a Mixtec urban center, has now been eclipsed by the much larger Pinotepa Nacional,
which lies to the northwest. Jamiltepec's indigenous Mixtec population has also been displaced
by mestizos (Cervantes-Delgado 1984:40; Flanet 1977).
8. I have been told many times that the majority of people from San Nicolas are in el norte
(the North or the United States). But a recent survey I conducted suggests that the figure is closer
to about one-third of the population. Until recently, San Nicolas's residents, who tend to mi-
grate together, went principally to Santa Ana, California. Currently, Winston-Salem, North
Carolina, where wages are higher and rents are lower than in Santa Ana, is the most popular
destination.
9. San NicolaYs ejido (land given to peasants in usufruct after the revolution) encom-
passes some eight thousand hectares, of which one quarter is under dispute with a neighboring
community. The remaining 6,000 are divided among approximately 800 adults, mostly men.
During the Salinas years, legislation made ejido land the property of individual ejidatarios, as
holders of land parcels within an ejido are known, and liberalized the buying and selling of that
land. Partly as a result, a few people have accumulated upwards of fifty hectares while others
eke out a living with only three or four.
10. I am also told that the Indians were given land as a way of protecting San Nicolas's
ejido from the encroachment of white landholders and neighboring communities (Lewis in press).
11. San Nicoladenses agree that more moreno men marry Indian women than moreno
women marry Indian men. Although I have not systematically attended to the issue, racial dis-
courses are gendered in ways that masculinize blacks while feminizing Indians, as this woman's
comments suggest.
12. Domingo is considered one of the foremost storytellers in San Nicolas. The excerpts
given here are combined from two tellings of the same story. I would like to thank Mary
Farquharson and Eduardo Llerenas for first drawing my attention to it in 1992 and Domingo for
relating it to me once as a cuento (story) and once as historia (history). Since I first heard it, it has
been published in the collection La con jura de los negros (Gutierrez Avila 1993).
13. Although not being a white Mexican has generally been advantageous for me, my
whiteness is still somewhat of an issue for people, especially because whites' alleged dislike of
blacks has become a central feature of moreno understandings of migration issues, in the con-
text of which the traditional tension has translated into a gringo (slang for someone from the
United States) dislike of Mexicans. Hence, a drunken Luisa conflated gringos with whites as she
recounted a border-crossing experience to me: "We love you but you don't love us. We don't
want your help, but we also don't want you to trick [enganar] us."
14. As I discuss below, the kinship idiom is key to understanding moreno identification
with Indians. Petronila's comment that her nephew had to call this Indian "cousin" in order to
placate him suggests that kinship is a means of overcoming hostilities between morenos and In-
dians. Indeed, the term moreno itself, as I discuss, refers to someone of "mixed" black and In-
dian descent.
15. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Romelio, who spoke to me through the
bars of his cell in San Nicolas's one-room jail after the meeting. I later watched the police from
Cuajinicuilapa take him away. Apparently, he did spend a short time in jail in Ometepec.
16. In local parlance, espanto refers to a condition that brings on chills after a person has
been unwittingly exposed to a spirit.
17. Gutierrez Avila refers to the "destructive" side of Indian magic in this region in a dis-
cussion of what he characterizes as "innate" Indian violence (1993:24).
18. Indigenous languages are disparaged by morenos and in the wider society, and it is
still not clear to me if any of the Indians in San Nicolas speak one. They deny any knowledge of
such languages altogether. Sometimes they reluctantly admit that "one or two" people speak
"something," and sometimes they comment that "we do not speak as 'one' speaks" (i.e., as
Spanish-speakers speak). Most often they simply ignore the question or deflect the conversation.
19. The term Zapatistas refers to members of the peasant-indigenous movement in Chia-
pas that broke out in 1994 and is led by the EZLN, the Spanish acronym for the Zapatista Na-
tional Liberation Army named after the revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata.
20. Elsewhere I more fully explore competing indigenous and moreno claims to "native-
ness." I suggest that moreno descriptions of themselves as criollos should be understood with
reference to Indians in general as naturales. Both terms mean "native," yet natural implies a
more "primordial" character than criollo and therefore suggests that even though San Nicolas's
Indians are forasteros (outsiders) with respect to the village, morenos recognize Indians' prior
claims to Mexico itself (Lewis in press).
21. Flanet fails to reconcile her claim of hostility between Indians and blacks with her ob-
servation that "most mestizaje (mixing) appears to be black-indigenous" rather than mestizo-
black (1977:227, note 5).
22. The most in-depth treatment of the relationship between blacks and Indians can be
found in Flanet 1977:37,143-151, but her study takes an indigenous-mestizo perspective. Diaz
Pe>ez (1995:22-23) and Gutierrez Avila (1987; 1988:23-24) acknowledge the issue without
systematically exploring it. I suspect that this relationship has been neglected by some scholars
because it rather complicates the idea of blacks' difference.
23. Jean Jackson uses this term to characterize the missionaries, government personnel,
and whites who have helped bring an ethnic group consciousness to indigenous inhabitants of
the Vaup£s region of southeastern Colombia (1991:133).
24. Such claims typically neglect the complex culture and history of the African continent
and make little attempt to trace practices from Africa to Mexico (with the exception of Githiora
1994). As Wade points out, such exercises are at any rate close to impossible and lend them-
selves to all kinds of conflicting interpretations (1997:77-78). In the present case, linguistic par-
ticularities are said to be "African" but also common to the Costa Chica and to Guerrero in
general (Diaz Pe>ez 1993:24); orality is referred to as African (Gutierrez Avila 1993:24-25);
story themes are characterized variously as popular tradition, popular peasant culture, and Afri-
can (Diaz Pe>ez 1993; Valencia Valencia 1993); the custom of women carrying burdens on
their heads is said to have its origins in Africa (http:/www.mexconnect.com/mex^/feature/eth-
nic/bv/chencha.htm, date of access January 21, 1999); and a study of "African roots" in the
population of the northern state of Tamaulipas traces "independence and an indominable spirit
. . . a taste for vivid colors [and] music and dance" to Africa (Herrera Casasus 1994). As I suggest
in this article, it is not easy to choose appropriate terms for identifying local populations. And as
my bibliography indicates, the terms African, Afromexican, Afromestizo, and black have all
been used, but with little explanation of what they signify either to the scholars using them or to
the local people to whom they are applied.
25. Much of this construction is linked to the money trickling (or, in some cases, pouring)
in from emigrants now in the United States. Concrete houses with a readied but unfinished sec-
ond floor are ubiquitous; many are empty, waiting for their owners to return from lengthy so-
journs overseas.
26. Although Aguirre Beltran partially qualified his contention that round houses were Af-
rican by noting that surrounding Indian groups, even those not in direct contact with coastal
blacks, also traditionally lived in round dwellings, that round houses were known in the preco-
lumbian era, and that many Indian granaries also had a cylindrical form and a conical roof, in
his final judgment, the "architectural patterns" were undeniably "African," and Indian people
had "borrowed" the form from blacks (1985:93). The Mexican anthropologist Gutierre Tibon's
somewhat later visit to the black Mexican Oaxacan village of Collantes prompted him to reflect
on round houses as well. Noting that these were characteristic of the precolumbian Cauca re-
gion of Colombia, as well as of areas of Mexico where blacks never arrived, Tibon questioned
the logic of Aguirre Beltran's argument. "Are [Mixtec round houses] precolumbian?" he asked
somewhat rhetorically, or "a cultural loan from the Africans?" (Tibon 1981:49). "I would have
liked—why not confess it?" Tibon wrote, "to have come across a zombi on the Mixtec Coast.
But if some ancient tradition survives in Collantes it is not African but rather Indoamerican"
(1981:41). "To speak of a Mexican Congo," he concluded, "is a cheap literary device"
(1981:49). Tibon referred to local morenos not as "Afromexicans" but as "Afromixtecos" out of
respect for their "mixed" African and Indian (Mixtec) heritage.
27. The debate over whether this dance form was originally introduced to South America
by African slaves is thoroughly covered in Ochoa Campos 1987.
28. The costumes, picked out by one of the musicians, are traditional outfits from Ver-
acruz though, as Domingo explained, blacks used to wear the same calzones (homemade white
trousers fastened with a tie) as Indians, while substituting store-bought shirts for Indians' hand-
made ones (a substitution that might have indicated blacks' higher socioeconomic status).
29. Some of the people now controlling artesa performances are not whites but rather ur-
ban black Mexicans for whom cultural promotion has also become a path to upward mobility.
30. Socorro was kidnapped and raped by a suitor a little over twenty years ago, when she
was 16. She rejected the boy, whose family had to pay hers a fine, but was never able to marry
because she was no longer a virgin. She has five children with one man, whom she would have
married had his mother approved. Today, forced abductions no longer take place.
31. Plays with indigenous (and sometimes mestizo) protagonists are common all over
Latin America. As Rowe and Schelling point out, they are a "yearly renegotiation of the histori-
cal basis of modern society" and express visions of the fundamental characters of national cul-
tures (1991:56-57). Plays with themes similar to the one I describe, including La America, are
found in other parts of Guerrero as well as in nearby Costa Chican communities. Dressed up as
Indians and Spaniards, black Mexicans from Huehuetan perform La Conquista, or The Con-
qfi/esf (which I saw in 1992).
32. Cachupfn is a term for Spaniardihai has roots in the colonial period.
33. It is worth noting here that, like blacks, nomadic ("wild") Indians such as the northern
Apache were also excluded from what Dawson calls the "Indian as Mexican" construct of the
post-Revolutionary period (1997:20). Because Mexican historical discourse presents these Indi-
ans as fiercer than the sedentary ones of Central Mexico conquered by Spaniards with the help
of black slaves, it is telling that in the ritual the Indians with whom the morenos identify are
"brave" Apaches rather than the sedentary Indians or black slaves subordinated to Spaniards.
Many local people (like many other Mexicans) are unfamiliar with the history of blacks' en-
slavement in Mexico.
34. I was unable to attend the Second Meeting in March 1998. The Third, which I did at-
tend, was in March 1999. At that time, a fourth meeting, to take place some distance from San
Nicolas in Collantes, Oaxaca, was in the planning stages.
35. Wade notes that one way the state tames potentially explosive ethnic movements is to
co-opt them with "official multiculturalism," which also has the effect of strengthening the state
(1997:105-107; also Wade 1995; Williams 1989).
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accepted December 20, 1999

final version submitted March 8,2000
Laura Lewis
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
James Madison University—MSC 7501
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
LEWIS2LA@JMU.EDU

Lewis 2000. Blacks

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blacks, black Indians, Afromexicans: the

dynamics of race, nation, and identity in a

In this article, I explore identity formation in Mexico from the perspective of

American Ethnologist 27(4):898-926. Copyright €> 2000, American Anthropological Association.

history, scholarship, and ideology: mestizaje, indigenismo, and blackness

political and economic contours of the Costa Chica

local perspectives on national belonging I: "people without a country"

local perspectives on national belonging II: ambivalent relations between

plicitly distinguish themselves from blacks by referring to themselves as "black Indi-

from blackness to Africanness: the ironies of ethnicization

Rather than exploring moreno perspectives on Indianness,22 some of the "change

Scholarship on Latin American blacks in general tends to equate "their" culture

Africa and America: black Indians revisited

the politics of Africa

Dawson, Alexander Scott

accepted December 20, 1999

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