Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation

Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation
Author: Paulette Ramsay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9789766405793

Paulette Ramsay's study analyses cultural and literary material produced by Afro-Mexicans on the Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca, Mexico, to undermine and overturn claims of mestizaje or Mexican homogeneity.The interdisciplinary research draws on several theoretical constructs: cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, masculinity studies, gender studies, feminist criticisms, and broad postcolonial and postmodernist theories, especially as they relate to issues of belonging, diaspora, cultural identity, gender, marginalization, subjectivity and nationhood. The author points to the need to bring to an end all attempts at extending the discourse, whether for political or other reasons, that there are no identifiable Afro-descendants in Mexico. The undeniable existence of distinctively black Mexicans and their contributions to Mexican multiculturalism is patently recorded in these pages.The analyses also aid the agenda of locating Afro-Mexican literary and cultural production within a broad Caribbean aesthetics, contributing to the expansion of the Caribbean as a broader cultural and historical space which includes Central and Latin America."This seminal work will provoke much-needed rehistoricization of the national histories relating to Mexico. . . . The varied theoretical paradigms used to frame the critical arguments add to the intellectual richness of the work. . . . This work is a critical and exhaustive study that significantly advances scholarship on Afro-Mexico . . . [and] forges an interdisciplinary conversation on blacks in the region like no other work before it."--Antonio D. Tillis, Professor of Hispanic Studies and Dean, School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, College of Charleston"The text excels in its reading of the popular poetry of Afro-Mexicans of Costa Chica and situates these texts in a clear and coherent way that will be greatly appreciated by students and scholars. The author contextualizes all of the texts (corridos and poetry) with careful analysis and interpretation. . . . This work represents the first comprehensive study of the literary/cultural production of Afro-Mexicans in book-length form."--Dorothy E. Mosby, Professor of Spanish, Latina/o, Latin American Studies, Mount Holyoke College

Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation

Afro-Mexican Constructions of Diaspora, Gender, Identity and Nation
Author: Paulette Ramsay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Arts, Black
ISBN: 9789766405809

"Paulette Ramsay's study analyses cultural and literary material produced by Afro-Mexicans on the Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca, Mexico, to undermine and overturn claims of mestizaje or Mexican homogeneity. The interdisciplinary research draws on several theoretical constructs: cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, masculinity studies, gender studies, feminist criticisms, and broad postcolonial and postmodernist theories, especially as they relate to issues of belonging, diaspora, cultural identity, gender, marginalization, subjectivity and nationhood. The author points to the need to bring to an end all attempts at extending the discourse, whether for political or other reasons, that there are no identifiable Afro-descendants in Mexico. The undeniable existence of distinctively black Mexicans and their contributions to Mexican multiculturalism is patently recorded in these pages. The analyses also aid the agenda of locating Afro-Mexican literary and cultural production within a broad Caribbean aesthetics, contributing to the expansion of the Caribbean as a broader cultural and historical space which includes Central and Latin America"--

Finding Afro-Mexico

Finding Afro-Mexico
Author: Theodore W. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108671179

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

Africans in Colonial Mexico

Africans in Colonial Mexico
Author: Herman L. Bennett
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2005-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 025321775X

From secular and ecclesiastical court records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation by the government and by the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

The Afro-Descendant Woman in Latin American Diasporic Visual Art

The Afro-Descendant Woman in Latin American Diasporic Visual Art
Author: Rosita Scerbo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2024-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1040089526

By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively created by Afro-descendant women. The Black Latin American women featured in the various chapters, spanning multiple artistic mediums and originating from various Latin American and Caribbean nations, including Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Cuba, collectively pursue the central aim of foregrounding the Afro-descendant woman’s experience. Simultaneously, they strive to enhance the visibility and acknowledgment of gendered Afro-diasporic culture within the Latin American context. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, Latin American studies, African diaspora studies, and race and ethnic studies.

Blackness in Mexico

Blackness in Mexico
Author: Anthony Russell Jerry
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813072816

An up-close view of the movement to make “Afro-Mexican” an official cultural category Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black Mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico’s Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry’s study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make “Afro-Mexican” an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the Mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as “other.” Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion. One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project. A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Colonial Blackness

Colonial Blackness
Author: Herman L. Bennett
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2009-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 025300361X

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.

México's Nobodies

México's Nobodies
Author: B. Christine Arce
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2016-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438463596

Honorable Mention, 2018 Elli Kongas-Maranda Professional Award presented by the Women's Studies Section of the American Folklore Society Winner of the 2018 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize presented by the Modern Language Association Winner of the 2016 Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Book Prize presented by the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature and Culture México's Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as "La Adelita" and "La Cucaracha," iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art's crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.

Sovereign Joy

Sovereign Joy
Author: Miguel Valerio
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2022-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316514382

An exploration of how Afro-Mexicans affirmed their culture, subjectivities and colonial condition through festive culture and performance.

Studying Latinx/a/o Students in Higher Education

Studying Latinx/a/o Students in Higher Education
Author: Nichole M. Garcia
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-05-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000381692

This edited volume examines the diverse Latinx/a/o student populations in higher education. Offering innovative approaches to understand the asset-based contributions of Latinx/a/o students and the communities they come from, this book showcases scholars from various disciplines, including, psychology, sociology, higher education, history, gender studies, and beyond. Chapter authors argue that various forms of knowledge and culturally relevant methodologies can help advance and promote the success and navigation of Latinx/a/o students. The contributors of this book challenge the deficit framing often found in higher education, and expand conceptualizations, theories, and methodologies used in the study of Latinx/a/o student populations to incorporate AfroLatinx/a/o perspectives, center Central American students in research, and bring Undocumented Critical Theory into the conversation. This important work provides a guide for higher education and student affairs scholars and practitioners, helping create knowledge to better understand Latinx/a/o student populations in higher education.