User:Jlbettis/Afro-Mexicans

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"The creation of a national Mexican identity, especially after the Mexican Revolution, emphasized Mexico's indigenous Amerindians and Spanish European heritage, excluding African history and contributions from Mexico's national consciousness. Although Mexico had a significant number of enslaved Africans during the colonial era, much of the African-descended population became absorbed into surrounding Mestizo (mixed European/Amerindian) Mulatto (mixed European/African) and Indigenous populations through unions among the groups. By the mid twentieth century Mexican scholars were advocating for black visibility. It wasn't until 1992, the Mexican government officially recognized African culture as being one of the three major influences on the culture of Mexico, the others being Spanish and Indigenous."

(right before demography)

Afro-Mexican Visibility in the 20th Century

Many of the prevailing views on Blackness during the early 20th century held that the race would eventually go extinct through voluntary assimilation. This belief held that Afro-descendant peoples, along with the other races, would eventually combine into a “cosmic race.” This cosmic race would have a combination of all the best qualities and would lack the worst qualities of the various races. Due to the stress put on the importance of race mixing and “whitening” oneself, many believed it prudent to simply ignore the Afro-Mexican population and its history as unimportant side notes of their history. Proponents of this theory, like politician José Vasconcelos, would go on to characterize mestizaje, or race mixing, to be between indigenous and white populations; this virtually excluded African descended peoples from the Mexican narrative. Vasconcelos excluded Afro-mexicans from the "cosmic race" and many post-revolutionary politicians sided with his views on race and mestizaje cementing the prevailing post-revolutionary racial ideologies.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico was known to be a safe haven from racial discrimination, especially to Afro-descended citizens of the United States who would seek refuge there. Notably, famous boxer Jack Johnson fled to Mexico in 1919 and claimed it as a safe haven from racial prejudice. Beginning in 1925, the Mexican Ministry of the Interior began limiting immigration. By the 1930s some officials were encouraging immigration only from those they deemed to be of good racial backgrounds. Even travel to Mexico was limited and those applying for tourist visas could be denied access to Mexico based on their race until around 1939. This contradicted the image that Mexico wished to present about their racial equality. After international threats of exposing these practices and ruining the Mexican reputation of racial equality, Mexican immigration policy began to change. In 1939, the NAACP issued an official statement that Mexico was no longer discriminating against African-descended citizens of the United States wishing to travel to the country.

Mexican scholars like anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán or caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias helped begin the process of recognizing Mexico’s African cultural influences as well as making the populations more visible and relevant. Covarrubias would use his artistic skills to highlight Afro-mexican cultures in the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s and to map areas with African cultural influence. He wrote the book, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, condemning policies that would relegate people of color to a kind of second class citizenship and perpetuate fascist ideologies. Covarrubias held that understanding the history of Africanism in Mexico was a key part of understanding Mexico as a whole. After 1945, Aguirre Beltrán became the leading Mexican scholar on Afro-Mexicans. He wrote the book La Población Negra de Mexico, which helped form the foundations for the study of Afro-Mexicans during the colonial period and their post-revolutionary cultural impacts. Aguirre Beltrán would criticize the colonial caste system and its strict racial categorization and instead propose a system of categorization consisting of the three primary categories of Indomestizo (indigenous descent), Euromestizo (European decent), and Afromestizo (African descent). In the 1940s, the Mexican census began to reflect the rejection of strict racial classes in Mexico as it replaced categorization based on biological race with categories pertaining to identification with certain cultural practices like what kinds of shoes one wore or bread one ate. While this was an attempt to diminish racial tensions and categorization, it was condemned by Aguirre Beltrán because it still failed to recognize Afro-Mexicans and encouraged them to declare themselves as either white or indigenous because many had assimilated into these cultural practices. Even while he was promoting Black visibility, Aguirre Beltrán circulated his ideas that there existed no individuals with pure African heritage in Mexico and that Blackness in isolation was violent and aggressive.

During the late 1940s, the question became how to define Afromestizo populations and distinguish them from indigenous communities. Even if one could identify an individual as African-descended by their physical characteristics, they were culturally mixed and could not be easily separated from the larger population by their cultural practices. Black communities in Mexico were being officially recognized by scholars and the existence of Afromestizo populations could no longer be denied. Yet, it was not until 2015 that African descent was added as a census category for official government recognition of Afro-Mexican populations.