Abstract
As the life of Virgil Richardson poignantly reveals, the story of black Americans in Mexico is one about self-determination, the yearning for humanity and the quest for simple freedoms. But stepping back and looking at the African American legacy from a broader, historical perspective, we also discover that the story is deeply intertwined in international politics, cross-border intrigue, and class struggle. Especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blacks found themselves thrust into the role of cultural mediators, helping to define and articulate the boundaries of the relationship between white North Americans and Mexicans.
There’s an old story about a Revolutionary general who was seated in a famous American-owned restaurant [in Mexico] when a negro was refused service. Drawing his revolver and laying it carefully on the table in front of him, the general said, “The gentleman will be served.”He was.1
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Notes
Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001), 263.
Aguirre Beltrán, La Población Negra; Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44–63;
Colin Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1659 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976);
Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003);
Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York: Random House, 1976).
For one of the best surveys see Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
The life of James Forten is best captured by Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color, The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
For the Santanders and other information on free-colored labor, see Vinson, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 60, and chapter 3.
A leading assessment of the caste system remains Robert Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).
Patrick Carroll has made the important argument that blacks were an important force in bringing together the Spanish and Indian sectors. See Patrick Carroll, “Los Mexicanos Negros: El Mestizaje y los Fundamentos Olvidados de la ‘Raza Cósmica,’ Una Perspectiva Regional,” Historia Mexicana 44, no. 3 (1995), 403–38. An important work on integration is Aguirre Beltrán, “The Integration of the Negro.” However, the arguments about integration have tended to be overblown in Mexican historiography. Still, for comparative purposes, the argument is a useful one.
This subject is treated masterfully in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 211–47.
Quoted in Felipe Tena Ramírez, ed., Leyes Fundamentales de México, 1800–1976 (México, City: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1976), 30; Hidalgo and Rayon’s documents found on pages 21–27.
Buckley, American Patriots, The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2001), 4–5. Note that some historians feel that Buckley’s numbers for blacks serving in the Continental Army are exaggerated.
I do not want to take this argument too far. Very little research has been conducted as to whether aspects of Mexico’s independence struggle had a “black agenda,” or even if this is a fair characterization of the multiclass, multiregional, and multiethnic struggle that took place. We do know that in many instances, regional, familial, and personal agendas directed many lower-class individuals to rebel, perhaps more so than an encompassing racial consciousness. Nevertheless, the question needs to be pursued by more scholarship. One of the best recent treatments examining the discrete goals of the lower social and racial classes is Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion, Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). He refrains from presenting a “race-based” analysis, yet he uncovers many complexities and nuances in the nature of rebellion that will prove foundational for the field for years to come.
Also of importance is Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, Guerrero, 1800–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Alvaro Ochoa Serrano, “Los Africanos en México antes de Aguirre Beltrán (1821–1924),” in Publication of the Afro Latin American Research Association (PALARA) no. 2 (1998), 80.
Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 163.
Brian Hamnett perceived racism to be a major tension in the early national period in terms of politics. See Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency, Mexican Regions 1750–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12–13.
Concrete examples of how Afro-Mexicans ascended to political power in the area of Jalapa can be found in Patrick Caroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 134–41.
Rosalie Schwartz, Across the Rio to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico (El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1974), 10–11.
Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of’Negro History 57, no. 1 (January 1972), 3, 6;
Ruthe Winegarten, Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 30.
Benjamin Lundy, The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy, including his Journeys to Mexico; with a sketch of contemporary events, and a Notice of the Revolution in Haiti (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969).
More details can be found in Kenneth Porter, “The Seminole in Mexico, 1850–1861,” The Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR), 31, no. 1 (February 1952), 1–36.
The years 1880–1884, coinciding with the presidency of General Manuel González, were particularly important for North American immigration to Mexico. Indeed, by 1884, 20,000–100,000 Americans had migrated south of the border. By the middle of the 1890s, there were as many as ten large foreign colonies in Mexico. See Alfred W. Reynolds, “The Alabama Negro Colony in Mexico, 1894–1896,” Alabama Review 5, no. 4, (October 1952), 243.
Moisés González Navarro, Los Extranjeros en Mexico y los Mexicanos en el extranjero, 1821–1970, vol. 2 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1994), 123, 132.
Arnold Shankman, “The Image of Mexico and the Mexican-American in the Black Press, 1890–1930,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 3 (Summer 1975), 43.
The account of the colony comes from the Journal Of Negro History, but a more detailed and careful study of the colony can be found in Reynolds, “The Alabama Negro Colony,” 243–268; and Reynolds, “The Alabama Negro Colony in Mexico, 1894–1896,” Alabama Review 6, no. 1 (January 1953), 31–58. The colony was refounded after the initial colonization attempt failed. By 1907, there were nearly 9,000 inhabitants there, producing cotton valued at 420,000 pesos per year. See: González Navarro, Los Extranjeros, vol. 2, 236.
Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, “The ‘Afro-Mexican’ and the Revolution: Making Afro-Mexicans Invisible Through the Ideology of Mestizaje in La Raza Cósmica,” PALARA, 4 (2000), 73.
Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997);
and Nancy Lays Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
José María Luis Mora, México y Sus Revoluciones (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986).
For some visual images of this see John J. Johnson, Latin America in Caricature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 79.
Benjamin Heber Johnson, “Sedition and Citizenship in South Texas, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2001), 86.
Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75.
See also, James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 153.
Mark Eltis, Race, War and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 6–7.
Eltis, Race, War and Surveillance, 22–23; William G. Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 68.
An excellent examination of the currents of the revolution’s cultural phase is Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). This book questions the boundaries currently imposed by historiography with regard to when cultural elements of the revolution began and ended.
Good treatment of some of these concepts can be found in Alan Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990);
Bobby Vaughn, “Race and Nation: A Study of Blackness in Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2001);
Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1971), and Hernández Cuevas, “The Afro-Mexican and the Revolution,” 59–83.
Guillermo de la Peña, “Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán: Historia y Mestizaje,” in Historiadores de México en el Siglo XX, ed. Enrique Florescano and Ricardo Pérez Montfort (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 192–193.
The creation of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Public Works of Art Project in the 1930s was helpful in giving money to black artists and stressing the importance of producing work for the common man. After 1935, the expansion of the Communist Party’s popular front against fascism brought about a flurry of interest in creating art that exposed the injustices of capitalism. The Chicago Renaissance, a counterpart to the Harlem Renaissance (which emphasized black pride), saw blacks engaging in this message and linking racial injustice with class oppression. For more see Melanie Anne Herzog, An American Artist in Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2000), 27–28.
Less noticed that either Lustrasilk, Angelitos Negros, or Almas Blancas, was the release of a Mexican comic book called Memín Penguín, which boldly depicted blacks in wild caricature and upheld scores of racial stereotypes. Had black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s noticed it, it might have produced more backlash. Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, “Memín Pinguín: Uno de los Cómics Mexicanos Más Populares Como Instrumento para Codificar al Negro,” Afro-Hispanic Review 22, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 52–59. Note that the comic book still circulates today. The story lines are the same as from the original run of the series in the 1940s to 1970s. This is a commentary on how the comic has literally frozen the black image in time for twenty-first century consumption by Mexican (and now the international) audiences. See www.mundovid.com for web-based information.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790–1978 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, 1978), X, 25.
During World War II, the U.S. government entered into an agreement with Mexico that allowed Negro League players to play in Mexico in exchange for Mexican workers who were contracted to assist America in preparing for war. A few of these players stand out in memory. Alfred Pinkston, the six-foot-five, 215-pound slugger, demolished Mexican pitchers in the Mexican League and held the all-time Mexican League record career batting average of .372. Ray Dandrige, one of Mexican baseball’s two greatest shortstops, was an African American who could hit, catch, and throw as well as anyone, and was a genius infielder, able to play any position. James “Cool Papa” Bell (.367) and Willie Wells (.347) were other standouts. Black players continued playing throughout the country after World War II, and continue to do so today. See: William F McNeil, Baseball’s Other All-Stars: The Greatest Players from the Negro Leagues, the Japanese Leagues, the Mexican League, and the Pre-1960 Winter Leagues in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland and Company, 2000), 154–67;
and Phil Dixon and Patrick J. Hannigan, The Negro Baseball Leagues, A Photographic History (Mattituck, New York: Amereon House, 1992).
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© 2004 Ben Vinson III
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Vinson, B. (2004). Epilogue Black American Yankees on Montezuma’s Soil. In: Flight. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981448_14
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