From Mexico to the African Diaspora: Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, Katherine Dunham, and the Transnational Construction of Black Music As Mexican, 1926–47

This paper explores the cultural and political contexts in Mexico and in the United States that surrounded Mexican ethnomusicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster’s modernist composition Huapangos. It traces Baqueiro Foster’s position in Mexico’s post-revolutionary musical polemics about indigenous and African vernacular music from the 1920s to the 1940s. “From Mexico to the African Diaspora” explains how African music became an integral part of Mexico’s democratic cultural politics when it was premiered by musical iconoclast, Carlos Chávez during Mexico’s exhibit, Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940. It continues by showing how the ethnographic studies that undergirded Huapangos resonated with African American ethnographer, activist, and dancer Katherine Dunham when she visited Mexico in 1947. This paper concludes by showing how Dunham integrated Mexican music into the cultural politics of the African Diaspora when she performed her ethnographically-inspired dance, Veracruzana, to Baqueiro Foster’s composition. In tracing the political sensibilities behind the composition and performance of Huapangos, “From Mexico to the African Diaspora” argues that the construction of a black diasporic identity in the Americas was in dialogue with Mexico’s democratic reformulation of indigeneity after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In this context, blackness became a constituent element of Mexican national culture and Mexico became part of the cultural politics of the African Diaspora.