Mexico’s forgotten race

WINDOW ON MEXICO. This is the journal of Julius Ocwinyo, author of Fate of the Banished among other books and an associate editor at Fountain Publishers who is on a writer-in- residence programme in Mexico.

They have been fed two strands of the same tale. The first is that their forebears were shipwrecked on the Pacific coast on their way to slavery elsewhere. The second is that those forebears were brought to Mexico in chains to work as slaves. Both strands, however, have the permanence of mist, for there is no record of them anywhere: not in the written history of Mexico, not in the school books. The decendants of those “castaways” and “slaves” now want firmer contours and permanence to their history; they want to affirm the uniqueness of their identity, the differentness of their ethnicity. And they are becoming more assertive, more restive.

An invisible existance
These are the Afro-Mexicans, whom the official Mexican policy of mestizaje has all but bypassed. The policy asserts that Mexico is essentially a society of mixed-race people – of European and Amerindian descent. And this is reflected in the famous Anthropology Museum, where there is no representation of Mexico’s Blacks. The architects of this policy were the criollos, the historically privileged Spanish elite of Mexican society.

March 26 finds us on our way to the Costa Chica, 500 km away on the South Pacific coast. The Costa Chica straddles two states, Oaxaca and Guerrero, where a substantial proportion of Afro-Mexicans live. Our intention is to do a video documentary on these people, officially estimated at 500,000, a figure they themselves dispute, insisting they are about a million. Upon disembarking from our bus at Pinotepa, the Oaxaca capital, we proceed to the town of José María Morelos, up in the hills. We pass by haciendas of maize, papaya, mango, cassava and coconut. Donkey- and horse-mounted men clop by – and some are quite dark.

Time fades colour not heritage
Our first port of call is Pedro Raymundo Acevedo’s family. It is three generations deep, living in the same locality. There is a noticeable whitening of the skin down the generations, with the youngest member of the family, a little girl called Vero, not looking Black at all. I’m dressed in a cream agbada with elaborate embroidery on the front, part of which represents a grass-thatched hut. “Yes, that’s what we used to have here,” Señora Aquilina Acevedo remarks, running her index finger over the “hut”, ‘about 25 years ago.
We chat with the family for a while and promise to return the next day to do a video recording, including of Señor Acevedo’s sister, Silvina, who lives a few minutes’ walk away.

Next we stop with Israel Reyes Larrea, who runs a small museum dedicated to Black Mexican history and a radio station that revolves around Black activism. His very pretty wife, Angustia, walks in when we are in the middle of a conversation.

Flash backs
The moment she sets eyes on me, she whoops. I’m startled. Then she exclaims, “You look just like my late dad!” She looks more Amerindian than African, and that puzzles me. She seems to read my mind. “My dad was African; black like you, tall like you, spare in build like you.” Her husband nods in agreement. “It’s my mother whom I resemble. She was indigenous (Amerindian).” Now I understand. She is proud of her twin heritage, the African and the Amerindian.

No wonder she’s wearing a huipil. I also realise that one of the large framed photos on the museum wall – all of them black-and-white – is hers. We give them a gift, ebony carvings of a Maasai male and a Maasai female. She places the carvings against my skin and announces: “They are dark just like you.” Señor Larrea himself promises to give us something when we return the next day to do the video shoot.

jocwinyo61@yahoo.co.uk