Book Review… When identity and pride are silenced

Feb 12, 2017 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation
Author: Paulette A. Ramsay
Critic: Dr Glenville Ashby
Paulette A. Ramsay delivers a poignantly revealing statement on Mexico’s racial and cultural mosaic. From the annals of literary art and historical archives she unearths the hidden role of blacks in that nation’s past.

Unfortunately the picture she presents is smeared with political elitism, rebellion, racism, and sexism.
While Mexico’s rich past is sealed with the soaring architectural signatures of its indigenous peoples, those days of glory were marked with betrayal and exploitation. Ramsay’s work is replete with enduring lessons far removed from old beliefs carved by Eurocentric teachings.
Ramsay sets the record straight: “…on 21 April 1519, when Hernán Cortés disembarked for the first time in Veracruz, the three hundred Africans who accompanied his team of conquistadores during the first expeditions were the first Africans to land in Mexico.”
She juxtaposes this assertion with the daring thesis of Ivan Van Sertima who argued that Egyptians and Nubians arrived in Mexico as early as the thirteenth century.
Ramsay, though, addresses the pivotal role of Cortés’ blacks in cementing a European presence in Mexico, making particular mention of the conquest of Tenochtitlán for which they were never duly rewarded. While some became personal slaves after fighting major battles, others assumed various positions in the military. This we learn, “served as an incentives to lure blacks to enlist in future expeditions for the pursuit of fame and glory.”
But later, the unbridled enslavement of Africans uprooted from their native land was met with stirring resistance. This gave birth to the Yanga maroons whose circumstances mirrored the events that unfolded in Jamaica centuries later.
Undoubtedly, black existentialism was rooted in resistance to oppression. Their involvement in Mexico’s War of Independence is detailed by Ramsay. “Blacks,” she notes, “readily joined the revolution because they regarded it as way of ending slavery, as well as gaining independence.”
Politically and militarily involved in Mexican life, many blacks rose to influential positions, none more so than Vicente Guerrero who eventually held the highest office of the land, and José María Morelos, a general of note.
As president, Guerrero’s clash with the powerful oligarchy led to his demise, but not before instituting radical social changes. Still, Mexico’s racial infection moved a nation toward a new form of racial branding, a unique racial construct that all but eviscerated black identity.
The promotion of the mestizaje as the face of Mexico saw the marginalization and eventual disappearance of blackness as an inextricable part of the Mexican racial and cultural aesthetic. Ramsay pens, “Visibly black Mexicans were neglected and left in remote areas of the country while popular discourse promulgated the myth that they had eventually become totally diluted and absorbed.”
She adds, “This myth became so dominant and masked Mexico’s heterogeneity to such an extent that even visibly black Mexicans and descendants of indigenous groups accepted the ideology of mestizaje and apparently ended up with no consciousness of race or of themselves as blacks or as indigenous peoples.”
And black culture, where ever it existed in Mexico was brutalized in art and entertainment. The result is the stereotyping of blacks as ignorant, mindless, violent and disloyal. These prejudicial distortions have become part of Mexico’s collective unconscious.
Ramsay uses the widely popular comic book series, Memín Pinguín, to corroborate her argument. Although “a source of great entertainment,” she pens, “it facilitates the excavation of underlying meanings, historical facts, political ideologies, and broader aspects of culture …[that leads] to the conclusion that, whether consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, Memín Pinguín exposes and communicates Mexico’s disregard for racial and ethnic pride and understanding of diversity and difference…”
And black femininity is also pilloried in the portrayal of Memín’s mother who is cold, violent toward her child, classless, corpulent and uneducated.
Art, again – this time in the form of the folktale, Jauniquiyo el oso (Little John the Bear) conjures the unique, tortuous experience of the black female during slavery. A fierce survivalist she employs every wile to protect herself and children from dehumanization. Ramsay is soundly interpretative: “The plight of the black slave woman is poignantly played out in this allegorical tale in which the female is deprived of freedom of choice and of control over her own physical body. Her repeated rape by the bear, the metaphorical representation of the violent dominating male, dualist ally connotes the links between gender and nature/ecology…the repeated sexual assault on her body…produces a child – a hybrid – “half-man, half-bear” like the mulatto offspring, who often was the result of the rape of the black slave women by white owners and overseers.”
Ramsay’s blend of historiography and art depicts a persistent identity crisis in the black Diaspora. It is a problem that transcends the borders of Mexico with far reaching sociological and psychological implications. For sure, the genetic imprints of the plantation system are found in every strata of society, not only in the progeny of the oppressed. And in Mexico this racial virus is spread wittingly or unwittingly through the celebrated medium of art.
Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation by Paulette A. Ramsay © 2016
The University of the West Indies Press, Mona, Jamaica
ISBN: 978-976-640-579-3
Available: UWI Press and Amazon
Rating: Recommended
Feedback: [email protected] or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby

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