Neither Indigenous nor White: Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and the Anthropological Construction of Blackness as Mexican, 1940–58

This paper explores the Inter-American intellectual networks that undergirded the anthropological classification of blackness in Mexico after the Revolution of 1910. It argues that the construction of black culture in post-revolutionary Mexican cannot be divorced from the hemispheric interest to redefine black and indigenous identities. After the Revolution, Mexican anthropologists participated in contentious debates about how to unify the nation. Through state-sponsored ethnographic observation, they sought to integrate rural, indigenous peoples into a democratic post-revolutionary national culture that embraced ethnic and cultural diversity. These anthropologists often participated in Inter-American dialogues that rejected hierarchical classifications of “primitive” indigenous and black communities. In 1942, anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908-1996) travelled to Northwestern University to study with the foremost figure in African and African American anthropology in the Western Hemisphere, Melville Herksovits (1895-1963), in order to further Mexico’s nationalist project. Applying Herskovits’s theory of acculturation and his ethno-historical method, Aguirre Beltrán located blackness first in Mexico’s colonial past and then in its ethnographic present. Through acculturation and ethno-history, he carried post-revolutionary democratic, pluralist ideologies into post-1940 Mexican history, a period that is often described as authoritarian, ethnocentric, and assimilationist. These methods also filtered into Mexico’s Instituto Nacional Indigenista [National Indigenous Institute] and the Inter-American Indigenous Institute, the former which Aguirre Beltrán was sub-director from 1952 to 1956 and the latter which he headed from 1966 to 1970.