Afro-Mexicans in Mexican History and Culture

The nationalistic call to assimilate into La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race) obscures a rich cultural and historical legacy of Afro-Mexicans in a homogenizing quest toward a dominant mestizo culture. The Mexican slave trade reached its peak between 1580 and 1640, when nearly two out of every three African slaves bound for Spanish holdings in the Americas disembarked in Mexico (Gates, Jr., 2011). The scale of the importation of Africans is evident in demographic figures that show Spanish outnumbered by blacks until 1810 (Vaughn, 2001). The experiences of slavery and the rigid caste-system, coupled with a prevalent ideology of whitening among the lower class, have all worked to suppress a significant component of the Mexican people.

Notwithstanding the historical forces against any sense of racial pride, the contributions of Afro-Mexicans have been recently reappraised by scholars, who focus on two regions in Mexico that have significant black populations today, the state of Veracruz on the Gulf coast, and the Costa Chica, an almost 250-mile long region on the Pacific coast in the state of Oaxaca. On the plains of the Costa Chica, livestock provided economic sustenance, and blacks of the colonial period worked principally as ranchers, while in Veracruz, slaves were taken to work in mines, sugarcane fields and wealthy homes. 

African retentions are clearly present in the danza de los diablos, a stomping, syncopated dance performed in the Costa Chica on Todos Santos (All Saints' Day):

By early 17th century, at least 10% of the Africans in New Spain had run away to form palenque (maroon societies).

The most well known of these was founded by Gaspar Yanga, who led a slave rebellion near Veracruz in 1570 and organized a self-sustaining maroon colony that eventually won its freedom to establish what is regarded as the first town founded by free blacks in the Americas. 


The music of Veracruz reveals a strong African influence, especially in the elements of the local fandango celebrations that use the traditional music style of the son jarocho, a harp music that is improvisational, repetitive, and percussive. The son jarocho features a call-and-response song structure and uses a number of instruments, the most African of which is a thumb piano known as the marimbol. The most widely known son jarocho is "La Bamba," although its African roots are not widely recognized.

Bibliography

Gates Jr., H.L., 2011. Black in Latin America, PBS.

Vasconcelos, J., 1997. The Cosmic Race / La raza cosmica, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Vaughn, B., 2001. Mexico in the Context of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Diálogo, 5, p.14-19.

Sugar's Labor Requirements

     The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) positioned Cuba to replace Haiti as the premier sugar producing country in the Western Hemisphere. The immense labor demands of sugar cultivation entrenched slavery and the slave trade in Cuba; consider that within two decades of the Haitian Revolution, slaves constituted 40% of Cuba's population, and, owing to the harsh demands of sugar cultivation, slave deaths outstripped births (Perez, Jr., 2010). The affordability and availability of slaves, together with a complete disregard for their living conditions, made their importation, rather than population gains via natural growth as in the United States, economically favorable. The earlier ban on slave imports in the United Stated in 1808, in addition to the fact that slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886 (the last country in the Caribbean to do so) accounts for the almost two-fold more Africans in Cuba.

Volume and direction of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from all African to all American regions (Eltis, 2010)

     When slave imports to the U.S. were banned in 1808, the black cultures of the United States and Cuba began to chart different courses, especially as more and more Africans arrived in Cuba to address the vast demand for labor.
     Curiously, Afro-Cuban culture was one of the least Islamized of the New World. An interesting dichotomy existed: whereas whites of the United States in this time period came from European countries with virtually no Islamic influence, many of the Africans imported to the U.S. came from Islamized regions of Africa. In Cuba it was just the opposite: its white population had a (somewhat amnesiac) Islamic background, but most the Afro-Cubans hailed from regions of the African continent that had not been Islamized.

     These regional differences were apparent in the musical traditions of Cuba and the United States, as the music and culture of the United States reflected a Sudanic influence. The model for the legions of folk musicians and songsters who created and sustained blues in their infancy may have been the Senegambian gewels (griots), “entertainers who play for dances, do acrobatics, tell stories, pose riddles for members of the audience to solve,” and, like many African-American songsters and instrumentalists, “pride themselves on being able to provide the appropriate music for any situation” (Coolen, p. 9). The griots were skilled musicians and folklorists who served to maintain the history, traditions, and mores of their respective kinship groups through songs and stories. In terms of instrumentation, antecedents of the fiddle and banjo, so ubiquitous in American slave culture, were used widely among Senegambian musicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The African-American songsters who synthesized the blues from preceding forms of black folk music were in line with the griot tradition, preserving the historical and cultural heritage of their people while signaling a desire for social discourse and action. Their songs were the collective representation of the realities of a postbellum generation of African-Americans still reckoning with the legacy of slavery, engaged in a struggle for survival and freedom.

     The music in Cuba, however, reflected altogether different origins, as a rhythmic key, or clave, is a centerpiece of a number of Afro-Cuban musical forms, and Cuban music, for all its delights, does not employ the loping swing rhythms so characteristic of African-American music.

Bibliography

Coolen, M.T.1, 1991. Senegambian Influences on Afro-American Musical Culture. Black Music Research Journal, 11(1), p.1-18.

Eltis, D. & Richardson, D., 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press.

Pérez Jr., L.A., 2010. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution 4th ed., Oxford University Press, USA.

Sublette, N., 2007. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Chicago Review Press.