BLACK MEXICO: NINETEENTH-CENTURY DISCOURSES OF RACE AND NATION BY MARISELA JIMÉNEZ RAMOS A.B. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 1999 M.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2001 M.A. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Marisela Jiménez Ramos iii This dissertation by Marisela Jiménez Ramos is accepted in its present form by the department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date___________________ ____________________________________ Robert Cope, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________________ ____________________________________ Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Reader Date__________________ ____________________________________ Matt Garcia, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________________ ____________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iv CURRICULUM VITAE Marisela Ramos was born in East Los Angeles in 1976. She left home at the age of fifteen when she received a scholarship to attend Northfield Mount Hermon, a New England boarding school in Massachusetts. This was the beginning of her education. As the daughter of immigrant parents, a college degree was never part of a life plan for her, simply wishful thinking. In spite of this, she attended Brown University and received a B.A. degree in Women’s Studies and American Civilization. After Brown, she attended the University of Connecticut where she earned a Master’s degree in History, which was followed by another tour at Brown University where she has earned a Ph.D, also in History. To date, the most revolutionary thing Marisela Ramos has done is get an education. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the many people who supported me through this process. Corrie Martin, whose love helps make this world a beautiful place and whose editing helped make sense of the ideas in my head. Mis padres, Eva y Moisés, y mis hermanos, Ricardo y Sebastián, quienes me han apoyado ciegamente en mi búsqueda hacia el conocimiento. Drs. Robert Cope, Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Matt Garcia, who have guided me through my graduate work with a gentle but firm hand. Kathy Drohan, who has brought stability to my life through her enduring friendship—my connection to the world. Drs. Lydia English and Joyce Foster, and the Mellon Fellows, all of whom have served as mentors and continue to inspire me. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, the Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Middlebury College, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation-Mellon Mays, and all of the programs at Brown University (History, Latin American Studies, the Graduate School), who provided me with much needed financial support. Of course, this work would not be possible without the help of the staff of the many archives I visited: Archivo General de la Nación, Archivo Municipal de Córdoba; Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, John Carter Brown Library, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz, Archivo Municipal de Yanga. It was in my many years in school that I was able to learn about people like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., people who have done extraordinary things. They too, have served as mentors and a source of inspiration. To my nieces Astrid, Alexis, and Analiah, whom I hope, will grow up with the courage and strength to follow their own path. They inspire me to help make this a better world. I have had much help along the way and I will forever be grateful for the wonderful people who came into my life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page…………………………………………………………………………....iii Curriculum Vitae………………………………………………………………………....iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: The Blackness of Slavery: Race in Colonial Mexico, 1519-1821…………..23 Chapter 2: Inventing Mexico: Race and the Discourse of Independence……………….42 Chapter 3: Mexico Mestizo: Nation and the Discourse of Race……………………......77 Chapter 4: Freedom Across the Border: U.S. Fugitive Slave Migration and the Discourse of Mexican Racial Equality, 1821-1866……………………………..113 Chapter 5: The Cultural Meaning of Blackness: The Strange But True Adventures of “La Mulata de Córdoba” and “El Negrito Poeta”……………….....................157 Chapter 6: Yanga: Mexico’s First Revolutionary……………………………………..204 Conclusion: “Where Did The Blacks Go?”……………………………………………258 INTRODUCTION On January 31, 2006, the Associated Press reported that while remodeling the central plaza in Campeche, a Mexican port city on the Yucatan peninsula, construction workers stumbled upon a sixteenth-century cemetery containing what seemed to be the oldest archeological evidence of African slavery in the Americas.1 The cemetery had been in use as early as the mid-sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. That same day, the New York Times published an article about the discovery that focused on the teeth that had been unearthed by archeologists. At least four of the 180 bodies that were recovered showed evidence of having come from West Africa, including the most telling fact that “some of their teeth were filed and chipped to sharp edges in a decorative practice characteristic of Africa.”2 In January of 2006 the evidence of early African slavery in New Spain (now Mexico) was finally making “big news” in the modern world. But, for the historians, archeologists, anthropologists, or cultural investigators who have dug through dusty colonial documents in many of Mexico’s archives or have mined the world histories and local memories of Mexico’s “third root,” the news that there had been Africans in Mexico was hardly news. Scholars have always known that Mexico, along with all of the other Spanish colonies, had a comprehensive fully actualized system of 1 “African slaves were in New World in 1500s Graves found near ruins of a colonial church in Mexico,” in The Associated Press (Jan. 31, 2006), via http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11111366/ (accessed July 31, 2008). 2 Wilford, John Noble. “At Burial Site, Teeth Tell Tale of Slavery” in New York Times: Science Times (January 31, 2006): D1, D4. 2 African slavery. Two days after the initial AP news release, Mexico City’s El Universal and La Reforma carried the story. 3 What these and subsequent news articles reveal is the prevalent and dominant discourse of mestizaje—defined as the mixture of Spanish and Indian elements—and the obscurity of Mexico’s African history. In El Universal, the director of the project, Vera Tiesler from the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, reported that “the most important thing is to create a consciousness that we [Mexicans] not only originate from Indians and Europeans, but that there is also a third root." Tiesler also commented that the discovery was especially important for Blacks in the United States because it provides further evidence of their arrival to the New World. 4 Underlying the language of the “rediscovery” of Mexico’s ancient Black population is the dominant discourse of mestizaje—Mexico’s ideology of racial mixture and national identity. 5 A major feature of this ideology is that “the African, under no circumstance persevered as pure black, either biologically or culturally.”6 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, a mid-twentieth-century pioneer of Black Mexican studies, expressed the common attitude of Mexicans who believed that “the slaves who contributed to Mexico’s genetic make-up became so completely integrated into the process of mestizaje that it is now very difficult for the layman to distinguish the 3 Mexico City’s newspapers reported the news on February 2, 2006, “Hallan primeros restos de esclavos” in La Reforma. 4 Solis, Juan. “Campeche, puerta de entrada de africanos a América” in El Universal (February 2, 2006). 5 Essentially all racial terms pose a problem when dealing with people of African descent in Mexico since there is no one term that adequately encompasses this group, nor is it clear who belongs to this group. For the purposes of this work I will use the term “Black” to refer to people of African descent, and “Blackness” to refer to discourses relating to the latter. For a broader discussion on terminology see Laura A. Lewis. “Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans: The Dynamics of Race, Nation, and Identity in a Mexican Moreno Community (Guerrero)” in American Ethnologist, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2000). 6 Herrera Casasús, Ma. Luisa. Piezas de Indias; la esclavitud negra en México. Mexico: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1991, pp. 28. 3 Negroid features of the present population as a whole.”7 Our current understanding of racial mixture in Mexico does not negate the fact that Blacks were present in that country. If the African presence and influence is not obvious, it is not any less important historically.8 Blacks in Mexico have “disappeared” as a separate racial/ethnic group, to the point that nothing Black or African is considered Mexican. Yet, what is lacking is a clear explanation for the “disappearance” of the contributions that Blacks have made to our current understanding of Mexican identity. The story of those bones in Campeche can be brought to life with a better understanding of the development of Mexican national identity. In this work I focus on nineteenth-century discourses of race and their intersection with nation-building and the exclusion of Blackness from what would eventually be termed, “mestizaje.” Since my purpose is not so much to understand what Mexico’s national identity is (or was), as to understand how and why it came to exclude all things Black and African, I focus my research on the period between Independence in 1821 and the the Porfiriato (1876-1911) when nationalism and national identity became a state-sponsored project. Historians like Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo have claimed that the modern nationalist project in Mexico began with the period of the Porfiriato and culminated with the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917)—an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon.