Indian allies and white antagonists: toward an alternative mestizaje on Mexico’s Costa Chica |
Indian allies and white antagonists: toward an alternative mestizaje on Mexico’s Costa Chica
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Published online: 2015-10-05
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2015.1094873
Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Latin American Anthropology
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom
San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico, is a ‘mixed’ black-Indian agricultural community on the coastal belt of Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the Costa Chica. This article examines local expressions of race in San Nicolás in relation to Mexico’s national ideology of mestizaje (race mixing), which excludes blackness but is foundational to Mexican racial identities. San Nicolás’s black-Indians are strongly nationalistic while expressing a collective or regional identity different from those of peoples they identify as Indians and as whites. Such collective expression produces an alternative model of mestizaje, here explored through local agrarian history and several village festivals. It is argued that this alternative model favors Indians and distances whites, thereby challenging dominant forms of Mexican mestizaje.
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Tags: Afro-Mexicans, Afromexicans, Costa Chica, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Laura A. Lewis, Laura Lewis