The weekly newsletter of the Mexico Solidarity Project

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November 20, 2024 

Afro-Mexicans Find their Voice

Meizhu Lui, for the editorial team

Liberation of Slaves by Simon Bolívar (1783-1830), Fernández L. Cancino: Museo 20 de Julio de 1810, Bogotá, Colombia

The Spanish conquistadors brought the first Africans to New Spain, later to become Mexico, as part of the global slave trade. But the history of Africans in Mexico is very different from the history of Africans and their descendants in the US. In Mexico, they didn’t fully self-identify as a people with a proud history and unique culture of their own until the 1990s. Only in the last 20 years have they crystallized their understanding into specific demands. In today’s interview, Emiko Saldivar helps us understand the delay.

I understand their story myself because the beginnings of the Afro-Mexican movement remind me of my own community, Asian Americans. In the US, the first Asian American activists joined the Black Liberation movement in the 1960s. Black people in Mexico became politically active in the Zapatista uprising, joining the Indigenous people’s struggle for land and self-governance.

In both cases, Afro-Mexicans and Asian Americans hadn’t yet consolidated their own movements for recognition and equality. But they were inspired by other oppressed peoples to claim their identities, take pride in their cultures and make demands for recognition and inclusion.

In the US, interracial marriage was prohibited in many states until 1967. But in Mexico, racial mixing was never the issue, and the national term mestizo literally means a mix. But not every mixture was equally advantageous; the Spanish-Indigenous recipe for belonging left out Africans. Color still marks Africans as “other.”

But today, Afro-Mexicans are set on claiming their rightful place within Mexican society, and they’ve just begun. Thankfully, they have a new government that finally admits out loud that racism exists and that it has no place in a democratic society. Afro-Mexicans — invisible no more!

For a deeper dive into current news and analysis in English, check out our media website. And definitely see the new English podcast ¡Soberanía! (Sovereignty) with José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth.  They entertain, while dismantling the lies and distortions about Mexico fed to us by the mainstream media.

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Afro-Mexicans on the Move

Dr. Emiko Saldivar is a Mexican sociologist, currently a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on race, ethnicity, mestizaje, anti-racism and research activism in Mexico and Latin America. In 2010, she cofounded the Colectivo Para Eliminar el Racismo (COPERA), a Mexican anti-racist collective. 

Like the US, Mexico had a racial project to determine its racial national identity. Where did Africans fit in?

Racial construction in Mexico is very different from the US, where “one drop” of Black blood can identify you as Black. Mexicans historically don’t identify by race. The Spanish invaders mixed freely with the Indigenous people, and both groups supported the 1917 revolution. To unify the population, the new Mexican state embarked on a project of mestizaje, or mixing. If you were Indigenous and married a Spanish person, you became mestizo and therefore a true Mexican. In other words, a person could change their race.

But mestizaje still valued lighter skin color, reflecting deep anti-Black racism — it was a downgrade to marry Black!

What’s the relationship between Black and Indigenous peoples?

The first African arrived with the original conquistador, Hernán Cortés. At that time, slavery wasn’t necessarily linked to a person’s race — it was a social status. You could be white and a slave, but it wasn’t a permanent condition. During the transatlantic slave trade with Africa, whites were separated into indentured servitude and Blacks into enslavement, not only individually but all Blacks and their descendants.

In the 300 years Spain ruled Mexico, 90% of the Indigenous population died, mostly from disease as elsewhere in the Americas. Spain needed Indigenous labor, and to keep them loyal to the crown, it created the República de Indios in the southern region. Here, Indigenous people controlled the land and lived by their own rules; in return, they gave the Spanish a percent of their labor.

In the 1810 revolution against Spanish rule, many Indigenous people fought with the Spanish crown to preserve the autonomy they’d enjoyed in their República. But after independence, they lost their special status and legal protection since everyone was now “equal.” In less than 50 years, they lost 90% of their land — independence didn’t benefit them.

When was the identity of “Afro-Mexican” adopted?

During slavery, the census counted slaves for tax purposes, but when slavery ended, they stopped. The government promoted the idea that “we have no  Blacks here.” Blacks had magically “disappeared!”

Thus, the government could say we have no race problems. Of course, if you don’t exist, you don’t have political influence or get attention paid to your unique issues.

Across Mexico, versions of Blackness emerged in different places — communities of runaways and other isolated communities as well as concentrations in mining centers like Jalisco. No single Black culture developed. Today, while Black individuals live all over Mexico, most Black communities are on the southwest coast.

In 1989, Mexico signed the International Labor Organization's Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169), which declared that everyone has a right to self-ascription and demanded that everyone be counted and included. That didn’t happen.

Indigenous and Black/Indigenous Zapatista activists

Then the 1994 Zapatista uprising triggered a change in how many Black people thought about their identity. A Trinidadian priest, Father Glyn, finally named Blacks as a people and not just a “community;” and helped organize an annual regional meeting for Blacks. Afro-Descendents don’t all have the same skin color, so it was through talking to each other that they realized they shared a unique culture, seeing the roots of their values, their food, dances and so on in African traditions. The Zapatista human rights frame and legal pursuit of those rights became a model for their struggle, and they began meeting on a yearly basis.

In 2000, Afro-Mexicans applied to be included in the census, but the government refused, arguing again that “we are one people,” all mestizos. I participated in the struggle to include  Blacks in the national census; we were accused of introducing racism into Mexico! 

What is their situation today?

Afro-Mexicans suffer from job discrimination, the hypersexualizing of  Black women and racial profiling; they get stopped on buses and are often suspected of being undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Haiti, the two countries Afro-Mexican immigrants are mainly from.

In August 2024, the government passed a constitutional amendment recognizing the rights of Afro-Mexicans and Indigenous communities. Do Afro-Mexicans feel they’ve been heard?

It’s a problem that the two groups are lumped together. Their history and issues are not the same! Indigenous people have a basic claim to their historic lands and for self-governance, although the claim hasn’t been recognized. Afro-Mexicans, without a territorial claim, call for racial justice, reparations and the state’s recognition that they’re here because something very wrong was done to them.

When the government links Afro-Mexicans with the larger, more powerful Indigenous groups, they get the short end of the stick. For example, the Instituto Nacional de Pueblos Indios provides funding for both; so far, the Instituto has allocated very little to Afro-Mexicans.

Many of us questioned AMLO’s policies, and we hope for better with Claudia Sheinbaum. She’s spoken openly of racism and has declared this to be the time of women. Both Indigenous and  Black Mexican leaders have usually been men, but women are stepping forward — speaking up, running for office.

 Many shades of Black, Art by Stephany Torres for Remezcla

In 2015, when we said “Black” we were accused of being racist. Now, racism is recognized as a social issue. Remember, Black people themselves have fully claimed their Black identity only in the last couple of decades. But Afro-Mexicans are on the move now and ready to pursue their rights.

Cast Away Illusions, La Lucha Sigue!

The US electorate has spoken. They’ve declared they want Donald Trump and the MAGA right in charge of our federal government for the coming four years. Trump and the “MAGistas” have run a comprehensive and relentless campaign of openly racist and misogynist messaging since he pranced down his elevator in 2015 to run for US president. A sobering fact: though generals, politicians and broad sectors of US social movements have expressed their fear of fascism coming to power, Trump won decisively anyway.

Trump’s racist campaign focused largely on the estimated 12 to 15 million undocumented immigrants in the US — the great majority from Mexico, but also from Haiti and other nations of the Global South. He blamed this vulnerable population for inflation, for taking jobs from US citizens, for the opioid epidemic and for “poisoning the blood” of US society. A ruling class cabal of 30 billionaires or near-billionaires funded his campaign. Most prominent was Elon Musk, corporate owner of Tesla and the X social media platform, who spouted the most outrageously racist and misogynistic comments.

The Republicans made a concerted outreach to Latino voters, who surprisingly gave Trump a majority of their votes. One prominent media commentator monitoring Spanish-language social media said she heard four or five Republican messages for every one message from Democrats. This continues a longstanding problem; the Democratic Party has long ignored and taken for granted the Latino vote. Well, in this election, the angry chickens have come home to roost.

Trump has said over and over that he will implement his ethnic cleansing campaign on “day one” of his administration. He’s placed open racists such as Stephen Miller in charge of the project, which, in their words, includes massive raids on workplaces and communities and a network of prison camps for warehousing deportees along the US-Mexico border. Also in the crosshairs of the MAGA forces is the US Haitian community. Trump and his racist clique endangered their lives by falsely claiming that they “eat people’s dogs and cats.” A mass roundup of tens of thousands of Haitians who were granted Temporary Protection Status by the Biden administration is now possible. Another target of Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign could well be the fast-growing population of immigrants from China.

The looming question? How will Mexico’s new Sheinbaum government respond to the expected pressure from the Trump administration? Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner and could suffer immensely if Trump applies economic pressure, which could, for instance, include pressuring Mexico to downgrade its growing trade and economic ties with China, currently US “enemy number one.” Some Republican party leaders have even threatened military action.

But Sheinbaum has already assured the Mexican people that she will protect Mexico’s sovereignty in the face of the Yanqui threat. Defending Mexico is also, in effect, defending the Latin American pink tide, which has emerged in Mexico, Brazil and several other Latin American countries and become an arena of resistance to US imperialism.

Now, more than ever, US activists, including in the labor movement, must strive for an inclusive multiracial resistance movement to defend both the undocumented and Mexico’s sovereignty. So gentes, much is at stake in the coming years. But we must never give up hope. If we are united, if we are organized, and if we fight — we win!  Si Se Puede!

Recent news reports and commentaries, from progressive and mainstream media,
on life and struggles on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Compiled by Jay Watts.

Mexico to renew food price control measures Reuters. Inflation has come down sharply since the agreement went into place, according to data from national statistics agency INEGI. In October, the annual inflation rate for food, drinks and tobacco was 3.81%, compared to the 13.95% rate two years earlier.

Étienne von Bertrab, El odio fue siempre de ustedes Pie de Página. La estrategia de siembra de desinformación, ejercida contra AMLO durante todo su sexenio, no logró gran cosa. Pero el odio, constitutivo de una parte del conservadurismo mexicano, se trasladó a la presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum. Para mantener una vida democrática saludable nos toca a todos defender la verdad y cerrar espacios al esparcimiento del odio.

Evrim Ağacı, Canadian Leaders Debate Mexico's Role In Trade Agreement The Pinnacle Gazette. Bizarre and unrealistic proposals from Canadian provincial leaders urging the USA to cut off its largest trading partner Mexico and a new committee established by federal Finance Minister and unapologetic Nazi descendant Chrystia Freeland reveal a desperation on the part of the flailing northern country.

Gerardo Hernández, Reducción de la jornada y plataformas digitales, prioridades laborales para el cierre del 2024 El Economista. Los trabajadores mexicanos trabajan más horas que la mayoría de los demás trabajadores del planeta, y la semana laboral de 40 horas fue una demanda clave de la izquierda dentro y fuera de Morena.

President Sheinbaum: 1% of G20 Arms Spending Should Be Redirected to the Poor and Women Telesur English. “It’s not the market that solves problems. That is what we are going to present to the G20 with great pride,” Sheinbaum said, emphasizing the importance of the state in opening paths for development in Latin America.

Viri Ríos, Cómo el PAN se pudrió El País. Un sui géneris proceso de empadronamiento de la militancia convirtió al PAN en presa de caciques locales.

President Sheinbaum: Mexico does not subordinate itself to the United States Resumen. “With the U.S. government we coordinate, we work together, but there is no subordination. It is a different relationship, of equals, between two independent, sovereign countries,” Claudia Sheinbaum asserted.

México cuestiona declaraciones injerencistas del embajador de EE.UU. Telesur. La Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de México envió una nota diplomática a la embajada de Estados Unidos en respuesta a las declaraciones hechas por el embajador Ken Salazar, el cual criticó la política de seguridad del expresidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Trump’s Tariffs Could Deal a Blow to Mexico’s Car Factories New York Times. The president-elect has said he could impose punitive tariffs on car imports from Mexico, a move that could hurt factories and workers on both sides of the border.

Se celebran 4 años de implementada la Reforma Laboral en México: CFCRL realiza evento en SEGOB El Economista. El Centro, es la única dependencia nacional que se encarga del registro de todos los trámites administrativos relacionados con la vida sindical del país.

The Mexico Solidarity Project brings together activists from various socialist and left organizations and individuals committed to worker and global justice. We see the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of Mexico as a watershed moment. AMLO and his progressive Morena party aim to end generations of corruption, impoverishment, and subservience to US interests. Our Project supports not just Morena, but all Mexicans struggling for basic rights, and opposes US efforts to undermine organizing and Mexico’s national sovereignty.

Editorial committee: Meizhu Lui, Bruce Hobson, Agatha Hinman, Victoria Hamlin, Courtney Childs, Pedro Gellert.  To give feedback or get involved yourself, please email us!

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