Where Is Afro-Mexico? World War II, Ethnography, and the Legacy of Mexico’s African Slave Population

“Where is Afro-Mexico?” examines how two Mexican intellectuals—caricaturist and ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias and anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán—assigned disparate constructions of Africanness to Mexican regions. Since the Revolution of 1910, Mexican state intellectuals have been interested in studying, displaying, and modernizing regional, often indigenous, cultures. Critiquing this project as ethnocentric, literary critics, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists claim that African-descended cultures have been—and continue to be—present but that Mexican intellectuals have erased them in the name of national modernity. This paper, conversely, chronicles how two ethnographers assigned different concepts of African-descended cultures to specific Mexican regions. It argues that World War II-era polemics about migration, democracy, and racial tolerance animated their constructions of Afro-Mexican regional identities. Inter-American conversations at the Mexico City-based International Institute for Afro-American Studies gave them the empirical tools and theoretical apparatuses to study the cultural legacies of Mexico’s African slave population. However, Covarrubias’s and Aguirre Beltrán’s projects drew different conclusions about where to find the most authentic African-descended cultures. Inspired by the vibrant cultural exchanges Covarrubias saw during the New Negro Movement, he drew parallels among the Afro-Diasporic cultures of Harlem, Cuba, and the state of Veracruz. Aguirre Beltrán adopted U.S. anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s steadfast desire to find and study pure African cultural retentions in the state of Guerrero; he claimed diasporic cosmopolitanisms, like those examined by Covarrubias, were stained by European and indigenous cultures. Comparing Covarrubias’s and Aguirre Beltrán’s spatial constructions of African-descended cultural identities shows that Africanness was not erased after the Mexican Revolution. As part of the post-revolutionary ascription of race and culture to regional spaces, Covarrubias’s and Aguirre Beltrán’s constructions of Africanness expanded Mexico’s ethnographic landscape.