The Afro-Mexican Blues

by Odette Cortés

Born and raised in Mexico, I remember that my elementary class was shown the caste system, which was the backbone of New Spain and the foundation shaping our current society: the cosmic race (but that is a different can of worms.) The teacher pointed out each caste and their place in the world—from white to black, and then, mixed race. White and white equaled criollo; white and black: mulatto; mulatto and indigenous: chino; black and black produced a slave. “But it’s okay,” I remember the teacher urgently saying, “...there are no more blacks in Mexico.” At the time, I was too young to understand the implication of such a statement and was mostly confused by the paradox from a practical standpoint. I am white and black; therefore, I am mulatta. The evidence is apparent. I am here; I exist, and yet the voice of authority said I didn’t exist. This was not the last time I’d hear this statement; most of us have been told a version of this tale. After all, our tale is spun from “once upon a time…,” and “in a kingdom far, far away…,” living in a fantasy and never in the present.

This has been the constant struggle of Afro-Mexican people and communities throughout the centuries. As Obsidiana Mwezi well phrases it, the experience of being of African descent in Mexico is like “blooming in the desert.” For many centuries, we have been the dirty little secret of the “traditional” Mexican family. Time and time again, someone reluctantly shares that someone in the family whispered to them, “You must keep this secret, but your father’s father was a black man.” As if that small degree of separation that dismisses any true family relation could possibly hide the African ancestry that marks our bodies in some degree; curly hair, thick lips, dark skin. As soon as the secret is out, many are asked to sweep it back under the rug, “Now you know, but you must forget.”

I don’t paint this picture to be bleak. I promise, good trouble is yet to come. The question is, how can we bloom in such a hostile environment? How could we endure against the erasure of ourselves, our history, and our experiences when the government, the schools, the people and our neighbors insisted that the country was black-free? In 2019, the national census (INEGI) finally asked, “How many Afro-Mexicans are here?” “Over two and a half million,” we answered (and there are probably many more who didn’t even raise their voice). We’ve been here since the first ships arrived, and we never left, nor did we disappear as many history teachers would like us to believe. The only part of the story they got right is that we made our way into the cuisine, the music, the dance, the language, and the earth. Africa submerged and blended itself into the mundane, not to disappear, but to resist. Now, little by little, at a steady beat, Afro-Mexico is coming-to-voice.

Just as we announced that we too “would sit at the table,” the pandemic, like a tidal wave, hit, and it hit Afro-Mexico harder than most. We lost many to poverty, to poor-to-none health insurance, to risky jobs, to evictions, and to homelessness. Since then, the picture seems precarious as the disasters, natural and manmade, stack up. Why, just a few months ago, Hurricane Erick hit “La Costa Chica” of Guerrero, one of our most Afro-Mexican states (named after a low-key, secretly mulatto president). Now, if history has shown us something, it is that we have the ability to endure. We ground our feet into the earth and hold on. Then, we spread roots.

Those roots help us weave community in unexpected places like the weeds that break through the concrete. Tejer and entramar, two words that shape the way we think of community as threads that are woven together by women’s hands. This is important, as the Afro-Mexican movement is constantly being led by women, both in the winter and the spring of their lives—women who have the vision and knowledge to weave in their local communities through action and activism and who have the foresight to spread the threads nationwide. Afrocaracolas and Afromexart are some of the woman-led projects that come to mind. Building community, keeping it safe, sustaining it, and tracing its memory are crucial aspects in the way we weave strong bonds to brave the waves of systemic, political, ecological, technological, epistemological, and gendered racism.

I am amazed by their creative strength as they engage the community through different activities. Some exist to make us aware of our past or encourage us to hold on to the present, and others are meant to ensure that we will continue to exist in years to come. Community, whether local or virtual, is the key to resisting and counteracting an entire system of oppression. Let it be a call-and-response that grows louder as more and more people join the small acts of resistance like weaving and fishing that become the backbone of life. Breaking into spaces that were not made for us, like all the internet, is resistance: becoming visible as many take to public office to gain momentum and bring to light all that was swept aside. Learning to use public funding—playing the arts game, not for personal gain, but for the whole community to weave—has also become an important part for our survival. I don’t think there is one simple and resounding answer to “How do we resist?”, but there are many small answers, pebbles, that can stack up. The process might not be fast, but we are still here. In the future, I hope that no Afro-Mexican child has to hear what I heard, and that their existence is not questioned, but rather celebrated.

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Odette Cortés London is a graduate student in English literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where she also teaches undergraduate courses in poetry and drama. She is pursuing a doctoral certificate in Global South Studies at Tübingen University and serves as the directing poetry editor at Kinsman Quarterly. Her research focuses on anglophone Caribbean literature, with particular attention to diasporic storytelling techniques.