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Karma Frierson Please do not circulate. Draft in progress. From Table Talk to Public Dancing: The Rescate of Blackness It was my first time walking through this callejón, the alleyway into the Plazuela, since I had been back. The signs of the months passed were apparent in the ways only absence makes visible and indecipherable in the ways that seems proprietary to Veracruz. The pedestal of the street lamp in the middle of the walkway was no more broken, though its continued disrepair seemed to mark time anyway. The piece of street art that depicted an old runaway slave newspaper ad was all but gone, just its corner clinging as a reminder to those who had noticed it at all. The Alcoholics Anonymous meeting space had a new—but already peeling—coat of blue paint and a new litter of kittens darted under its doorstep. Logic told me that the cockroaches playing hide and seek along the path had to be new ones, but the sight was familiar all the same. The most startling change was the filaments of roots that hung down low enough to be touched. The tree to which they belonged had long ago taken residence in the abandoned building to the left, but these roots were a new feature in an old space. As I gazed upon them, I wondered if living their growth would have made them less spectacular, more banal. The siren song in the genre of son that came from the Plazuela was, of course, the same. Only those roots, or rather the drama of their presence, truly drove home that I had left at all. In Veracruz, Mexico, many old buildings are let and left to decay through abandonment. Strong trees—old in their own way—grow through long collapsed roofs, through windowless panes, through the very walls of buildings. The life in these buildings are not just the flora that have found root and shelter in these old structures. The structures themselves are comprised of múcara, that is to say the once living coral that was taken from the ocean centuries ago to build the city “made by the sea.” Roots of enterprising trees occupying abandoned buildings paint a worthy portrait of how the port city has “learned the art of growing old” (de Certeau 1984, 91). This art is not always aesthetic, but it is striking. With enough care, the abandoned can be 1 Karma Frierson Please do not circulate. Draft in progress. repurposed, but without proper support, the repurposed, abandoned. This architectural landscape, this spatiotemporal zone is the setting for the narrative to follow: a play in two acts that depicts the drama of investments in blackness large and small. It is a play about purposeful repurposing, the threat of abandonment, and tenacious roots. I open this chapter ostensibly about blackness with the juxtaposition of life and disrepair to bring attention to the ways in which ruin and revitalization keep company in the port city of Veracruz. The words rescate and rescatar ring out across the old city for those who care to listen. And in listening, I heard a variety of connotations behind the word. Sometimes rescate referred to a recovery, other times a revitalization, others still a recuperation. All of these words are shades of a similar phenomenon—a restoration of the past for an intended future. Rescate, then, is the ultimate investment in the sense that it is a devotion of time and effort for an undertaking perceived to be worthwhile. Rescate is the collapsing of the past and the future. Or rather, it is the bridging of the two, for collapse implies the active passivity of the “let to disrepair” seen in the old buildings that set the scene of this play. In the Port it sits uneasily in that place of tension between preservation and restoration, between the impulse to freeze a moment in time as it is and the desire to go back in time to the way things were. Rescate in the port of Veracruz—the oldest European settlement in mainland America—waffles between these motivations as it uses the past as a source of the potential. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ways blackness and local culture have been reunited and restored. To understand lo negro in Veracruz, which I have glossed as blackness, you must focus on jarocho culture and the various investments on different scales, both financial and otherwise, to that identity. In the first act of our play, we will look at the table talk among jarochos to see how the groupness of this ethnoregional term is consolidated and reaffirmed. It is in these smaller moments where it becomes clearer that such talk are performances that define and refine what people mean when they refer to themselves as a jarocho. The term is ubiquitous, both as a noun and an adjective, yet the only true consensus is around what constitutes the regional costume; 2 Karma Frierson Please do not circulate. Draft in progress. when questioned about the specifics of the jarocho, trite sayings and the reliance on stereotyped attitudes like happiness eventually give way to not-so-declarative statements. Everyone is a jarocho, but what a jarocho is requires a lot of maintenance, reiteration, and revitalization. There is a lot of work on the individual, community, and state levels that amount to an investment in being jarocho. Happiness is merely an example of a larger desire to make that which is said to be inherent in jarochos into something that is demonstrable. If chapter one argues how rhetoric has internalized and naturalized a localized understanding of blackness, this chapter explores the work and performance required to maintain it. Because “happiness” has become synonymous with the jarocho, the investment in happiness is a performance of self. This is partly because the port has a reputation that is tied to its popularity as a domestic tourism site. Through tourism we see the investments of the state: top-down financing and a cyclical festival calendar that brings in revenue for the local economy. However, this only tells part of the story. There are also the quieter, everyday investments that sustain the happiness between headline-making events. As in Act I, the second act opens with one of these smaller moments. But instead of using it to pivot into the spectacular, it dwells in the banal. This chapter explores the variety of scales and constituents related to the performance of jarocho and what I term the “rescate of blackness”. Rescate has become the mode of engagement in the port’s cultural scene as various forms of intangible patrimony are treated as if they are dying while simultaneously insisted as being alive. The concerted efforts among various interest groups to revitalize intangible patrimony that is perceived to be dying, looks to both the state and to the community to forestall such an event, proving both the expectation that the state invest in cultural heritage and the sense of shared obligation. The chapter first unpacks Act I’s table talk to highlight what—or who—is in need of saving. From there we explore the festival as a venue of performance and a form of revitalization, in order to explore the two audiences of festivals and events in the port while tracing where the state’s investment ends and the community’s begins. As an intermission or an interlude, we use the nonoccurrence of a popular festival—the International 3 Karma Frierson Please do not circulate. Draft in progress. Afro-Caribbean Festival—to explore a disruption in investment and divest ourselves of a top-down narrative of investments in blackness. Finally, the chapter reintroduces the character Blanca in Act II to look at the banal scale at which the rescate of blackness occurs, one in which the investment is not top-down or cyclical like the festival-as-event, but rather broadly distributed and ever present. Attending to performances, both large and small, organized and spontaneous, outward facing and inwardly motivated, reveals the ways in which blackness is revitalized in the city of Veracruz. By following the same character to explore different avenues of investment, this chapter traces the various modes in which blackness is revitalized and how it functions in the port city. The lack of an enclave of black people in Veracruz helps us to avoid the reification of groups that Rogers Brubaker urges us to go beyond in his essay “Ethnicity without Groups.” Furthermore, it facilitates what he advocates as the shift from groups to groupness, a shift in which the latter is treated as fluid rather than fixed, enabling us “to treat groupness as an event, as something that ‘happens’” (2002, 168). To consider groupness as something which happens is to focus on processes rather than static facts in the world. This perspectival shift toward identification rather than identity lends itself to the metaphor of the rescate and my argument that blackness is performed and reaffirmed in these moments. Such an approach helps clarify that while blackness is a lived experience, it is not necessarily an inhabited one. Cognizant that the word “performance” invites a cynical interpretation that lends itself toward authenticity politics, I use the lens of sincerity which “highlights the ever-fleeting ‘liveness’ of everyday racial performances that cannot be completely captured by authenticating mediations of any kind” (Jackson Jr. 2005, 17). For instance, ethnographer Christian Rinaudo (2010), in line with the “blackness without ethnicity” theory put forth by Livio Sansone (2003), argues that the youth culture in Veracruz has amounted to a desire to “act like black” rather than an identification as black.

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