Synopses & Reviews
Located on Mexico's Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolandaacute;s has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town's residents, however, call themselves
morenos (black Indians). In
Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolandaacute;s, focusing on the ways that local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.
Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolandaacute;s, including community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blacknessandmdash;as a way of identifying themselves and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.
Review
andquot;The kind of great ethnography much needed in research on Latin American blackness: Laura A. Lewis puts a crimp in recent multiculturalist constructions of Afromexican 'blackness'andmdash;but also in Mexican mestizo nationalismandmdash;by revealing local meanings attached to being moreno as a complex historical mixture of blackness and indigenousness.andquot;andmdash;Peter Wade, author of Race and Sex in Latin America
Review
andquot;In the 1940s, when Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrandaacute;n first brought Afromexicans into academic and public discussion, African presence in Mexico had been under erasure for so long that Mexican national identity had elided Africa altogether. Today, Mexicoandrsquo;s 'Third Root' has gained national and international recognition. This process has gone hand in glove with a new politics of identity. Laura A. Lewis's ethnohistorical study of race probes the local politics of autochthony, nationality, and citizenship in the Pacific heartland of Afromexico.andquot;andmdash;Claudio Lomnitz, author of Death and the Idea of Mexico
Review
“Chocolate and Corn Flour is an insightful and remarkable study of color and race, with all its subtleties and implications, by a Professor of Anthropology that has obviously conducted many years of research on the subject. It is a book that I highly recommend.” - Dennis Moore, EurWeb.com
Review
“Geographers will find in this work a good balance between careful case study and broader literatures about race, migration, sexuality, gender relations, globalization, and material consumption that characterize a fascinating group of Mexicans.” - Joseph L. Scarpaci, Journal of Latin American Geography
Review
“Chocolate and Corn Flour should inspire future work on racial identity and inclusion in Mexico and elsewhere and expand the limited knowledge base of ethnological work in the field.” - Nnenna M. Ozobia, Americas Quarterly
Review
andldquo;This delightful book, based on well over a decade of research in Mexico and the United States . . . traces the history and social relations of a self-described moreno community from the colonial period to its contemporary diasporic dispersal to the United States.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;As Lewis takes us, along with the people she has studied, to the edge of the present and before a tentative future, she maintains a narrbative richly textured with research and detail yet poignant and engagingly clear in its composition.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;This ambitious ethnographyandhellip;. presents a very useful history of the Costa Chica region that specialists will relish. and#160;The book also includes a well-researched discussion of the anthropological work of central pioneers in the field of Afro-Mexican studiesandhellip;. Where Lewis most successfully brings to bear her wealth of experience in the region is in her discussions of transmigration and the persistence of family ties despite the economic challenges that often separate families across borders.andrdquo;
Synopsis
Ethnography of the Mexican town of San Nicolas that considers how the residents understand themselves in terms of Africanness and indigeneity.
Synopsis
Chocolate and Corn Flour explores the history and contemporary culture of African descended Mexicans in the agricultural village of San Nicoland#225;s on the southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero (the Costa Chica). This ethnography emphasizes that local history is crucial to understanding identity and explores how racial categories are complicated by globalization and the influence of outsiders.
Synopsis
Anthropologist Laura Lewis explores the lives and self-understanding of Mexicans of African descent living in the agricultural village of San Nicolas on the Pacific coast of Mexico. In recent years, the area has been described by anthropologists, journalists, and activists as the cradle of Afro-Mexican culture, but residents call themselves Moreno or mixed black-Indians, neither denying their blackness nor identifying as Afro-Mexicans. Lewis argues for attending to local forms of race as she describes the conflicts between outsider investments and those of the residents. The last chapter follows some of the residents who have settled around Winston-Salem, but maintain their ties to the village.
About the Author
Laura A. Lewis is Professor of Anthropology at James Madison University and the author of Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico, also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Lay of the Land 15
2. Identity in Discourse: The andquot;Raceandquot; Has Been Lost 55
3. Identity in Performance 85
4. Africa in Mexico: An Intellectual History 119
5. Culture Work: So Much Money 155
6. Being from Here 189
7. A Family Divided? Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces 231
8. Transnationalism, Place, and the Mundane 265
Conclusion. What's in a Name? 305
Notes 323
Bibliography 341
Index 363