México Negro Identities across Borders: From Yanga to "Mi negro pasado"

• In Event: U.S. Latino/a Studies and Our Latin American Continent

Abstract

The Afro-history of Mexico, known to have begun with Yanga, a former African slave founder of the first free township of the Americas, San Lorenzo de los Negros (1631) in present-day Veracruz also includes the Mexican borderlands in Coahuila. Both Yanga in the seventeenth century and former U.S. slaves, los mascogos, who migrated to Mexico in the nineteenth century, were seeking freedom. With the objective of bringing to surface the African heritage of Mexicans, writer, intellectual, and politician Laura Esquivel developed Como agua para chocolate (1989) into a saga, adding El diario de Tita (2016) and Mi negro pasado (2017). Aware of the history of Yanga and Mexico’s third root, Esquivel traced another side of Mexican Africanidad in the northern Mexican borderlands. Esquivel uses history and music in Mi negro pasado to portray a distinct side of an African diaspora linking both U.S and Mexico. The sonic elements of her work demonstrate the influence of twentieth-century black vernacular intellectuality. The visualization of an emergent racial consciousness of Afro-Mexicans in Mi negro pasado through U.S. African American music with its genesis in spirituals argues for contemporary ways of addressing the history of slavery, racism, blackness, and white supremacy in Mexico.

Author

• Christian Y Bermúdez Castro