ABSTRACT 
 
 
Title of Dissertation: AFRO-MEXICAN FOLKTALES AND 

POETRY IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED 
STATES   

  
 Nancy Berenice Tenorio Carrillo,  

Doctor of Philosophy, 2024 
  
Dissertation directed by: Emeritus Professor, Dr. Merle Collins,  

English Department 
Professor, Dr. Ryan Long,  
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 
 

 
 

The aim of my dissertation is to challenge what I call mestizo normativity. In creating and 

coining the term mestizo normativity, I borrow from Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work 

on queer theory. In their work “Sex in Public” (1998), Warner and Berlant note that 

heterosexuality only appears to be normal because of public structures that regulate the sex 

binary. In their work they note that everything in public life is done with the aim of normalizing 

the male/female binary. This binary affects all aspects of daily life and can be seen, for example, 

in the male/female designations in public bathrooms and male/female categories in sports.  

I use the term mestizo normativity to interrogate how Afro-Mexican works of poetry, folklore, 

ballads, and stories disrupt accepted definitions of Blackness and Latinidad in the Americas. As 

Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note, in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (2010), “we are 

accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually 

exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@.” In essence, those who do not fall neatly along the 

Black/Latino binary are asked to choose between their identities. They can be either Latino or 

Black but not both. In a similar fashion, queers and bisexuals are made to choose between the 



  

heterosexual/homosexual binary; they can be heterosexuals or homosexuals but not both. With 

these definitions in mind, I read Afro-Mexican literature as queer literature. Afro-Mexicans do 

not fit neatly along the Afro/Latino binary; they are both, and in that two-ness lies their 

queerness.  

My dissertation adds to the field of Afro-Mexican studies by positing that Afro-Mexican 

literature shares similarities with African traditions, history, and culture. As Nicole von 

Germeten has pointed out in her work “Juan Roque’s Donation” in Afro-Latino Voices (2009), 

the African diaspora in Mexico is as much a part of Mexican history as Spanish history. 

Throughout the colonial period, Spaniards always constituted a small minority in New Spain and 

were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Africans throughout the colonial period. African culture, 

like Spanish culture, is also part of Mexico.  

In order to prove my thesis of mestizo normativity, I have organized my dissertation into 

four chapters. In chapter one I argue that Afro-Mexican folktales share similarities with West 

and Central African storytelling practices. In my analysis, I note that Afro-Mexican tales share 

similarities with trickster rabbit tales from the Bantu people in Central Africa and Hausa people 

in West Africa. And moreover, I note that these tales fall into the tatsuniya genre of storytelling 

found among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa. This genre of tales is known as a 

subversive category of tales, for it includes tales of small animals taking down larger animals. I 

argue that these tales are how Afro-Mexicans remember their African heritage. As is discussed in 

my first chapter, the first scholars to analyze Afro-Mexican folktales moved away from 

comparing them to West and Central African folklore because they understood all Mexican 

literature to stem from Mexico’s Amerindian and Spanish roots. That is, their readings upheld 

mestizo normativity.  



  

In my second chapter, I argue that the ballad tradition in the Costa Chica shares 

similarities with West African storytelling traditions. Moreover, I argue that through ballads, 

versos, and maroon poetry, Afro-Mexicans disrupt the notion of a mestizo Mexico. That is, they 

question the single story that has been told about Mexico and create a multifaceted and culturally 

complex site that they recognize as home. To drive this point home, I compare Afro-Mexican 

corridos to calypsos and argue for readings that include Afrodiasporic strategies of resistance 

when dealing with Afrodesendant peoples.  

In chapter three, I read Afro-Mexican works written by writers in the U.S. diaspora. I 

examine how these writers’ perceptions of race are formed in the U.S.  

Lastly, I examine how contemporary writers such as Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, 

Abel Emigdio Baños Delgado, and Filemón Silva Sandoval use social media to promote their 

written works and challenge readings that depict Mexico as a Black free space.



  

 

 
 
 

AFRO-MEXICAN FOLKTALES AND POETRY  
IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES   

 
 

by 

 
 
 
 

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the  
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 

of the requirements for the degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy  

2024 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  Advisory Committee: 
Professors Merle Collins and Ryan Long, Co-Chairs 
Dr. Ralph Bauer 
Dr. Nancy Mirabal 
Dr. José Navarro 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Nancy Berenice Tenorio Carrillo 
 



  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

© Copyright by 
Nancy Berenice Tenorio Carrillo 

2024 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

 

ii 
 

Acknowledgements 

This dissertation would not have been possible without the unwavering support of my co-

advisors Dr. Merle Collins and Dr. Ryan Long and my mentors Dr. José Navarro and Dr. Dustin 

Stegner at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and of course, Dr. Ralph Bauer and Dr. Nancy Mirabal at 

the University of Maryland, College Park. The journey has been long but worthwhile. Thank you 

for sticking by my side. You have all set the bar so high. I can only hope to be half the educators 

you all are.   

Moreover I would like to thank my wonderful friends Dominique Young and Fatima 

Taha. I have learned so much from you both and you have made my graduate education such a 

wonderful experience.  

I would also like to thank Dr. Will Mosley and Dr. Neel Ahuja at the Harriet Tubman 

Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I have learned so much as your teaching 

assistant, and my theory of mestizo normativity would not have been possible without the 

intersectional readings that you both bring to the classroom.  

Last but not least, I want to extend a big thank you to my wonderful husband Stefan Felix 

Spack. Thank you for being so encouraging and for traveling with me to Mexico and reminding 

me to have fun during my dissertation journey.  

Speaking of fun, thank you Dr. Isabella Alcañiz and Eric Tomalá, at the Latin American 

and Caribbean Studies Center. Your POP-UP research grants went a long way in Mexico and 

made my research and travels possible.  

Moreover, I could not properly close this chapter without thanking the wonderful 

librarians, who drive the heart of academic research. Dr. Linda Macri, the director of the 



 

 

iii 
 

Graduate School Writing Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, has been an 

invaluable source of support, guidance, and wisdom during my dissertation journey. And the 

staff at the university libraries of Bern, Basel, and Zurich, Switzerland have continuously 

welcomed me with open arms and gone above and beyond to find the texts I have needed for my 

research while living abroad.  

 



 

 

iv 
 

Table of Contents 
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii 
Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv 

Table of Figures .............................................................................................................................. v 
Introduction: Afro-Mexican Folktales and Poetry in Mexico and the United States ..................... 1 

Chapter One: West & Central Africa Remembered in Costa Chica Folklore .............................. 15 
Chapter Two: Connecting Afro-Mexican Poetry, Ballads & Versos from the Costa Chica to the 
African Diaspora in the Americas ................................................................................................. 72 
Chapter Three: Looking Forward & Back: Afro-Mexican Literature from the U.S. Southwest 108 

Chapter Four: Afro-Mexican Activism and Scholarship Through the Lens of Three 
Contemporary Afro-Mexican Writers ......................................................................................... 138 

Conclusion: There Can Be No Balance of Stories Without Balance of Power .......................... 158 
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 165 
 
 



 

 

v 
 

Table of Figures 

Figure 1: Left to right: Brisa’s stepfather, wearing a cream white button-down dress shirt, Brisa’s 
maternal grandmother, wearing a blue dress, Brisa, the bride, Brisa’s mother, wearing a gold 
dress, and Brisa’s stepbrother, wearing a white suit. .................................................................... 24 
Figure 2:Picture taken from the Gobierno de México webpage titled “La Danza de los Diablos”
....................................................................................................................................................... 25 
Figure 3: Neighborhood children in Corralero, Oaxaca, Mexico dancing while Calé plays his 
drum and sings in the background ................................................................................................ 48 
Figure 4: A picture from Hector Moreno’s Facebook page, where he shares this dance with his 
followers. .................................................................................................................................... 102 
Figure 5: Poem by Pelaez Lopez ................................................................................................ 122 
Figure 6: Pictorial representation of Sankofa ............................................................................. 125 
Figure 7: From left to right: Brisa Valdez Prudente, wearing a pink jumper, Candelaria Donají 
Méndez Tello, wearing a green shirt, me, wearing a spotted blue and white shirt, Méndez Tello’s 
daughter, throwing up a peace sign and wearing white shorts, and André Lo Sánchez, wearing a 
pink T-shirt and reading glasses. ................................................................................................ 164 
 



 

 

1 
 

Introduction: Afro-Mexican Folktales and Poetry in Mexico and the 

United States 

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to 

work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling 

slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so 

immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my 

mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could 

not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a 

people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. 

—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from “The Danger of a Single Story” 

 

In “The Danger of a Single Story” presented at TED Global in July 2009, Chimamanda 

Ngozi Adichie traces her journey as a young writer in Lagos, Nigeria and the United States. In 

her talk, she narrates how she viewed rural villages in Nigeria, where the help was usually from, 

as unable to “actually make something” (3:31). As she noted, she had a single story about her 

family’s house boy Fide. As she states, “all [she] had heard about them was how poor they were, 

so that it had become impossible for [her] to see them as anything else but poor” (3:31). Later, in 

her talk, she notes how she fell victim to the trope of a single story again. When she visited 

Guadalajara, Mexico, she was shocked to see that Mexicans had complex, rich, and fulfilling 

lives that did not revolve around the U.S./Mexican border. As she notes, she “bought into a 

single story of Mexicans” (8:42).  



 

 

2 
 

I begin with Adichie’s story to illustrate the power of stories. As Adichie notes, before 

she even traveled to Mexico, she already had a story about Mexicans and expected them to live a 

certain way and act a certain way. That is she had internalized the news reports coming out of the 

U.S. and “endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, 

sneaking across the border, [and] being arrested at the border” (8:09). In this dissertation, I am 

chiefly interested in the stories that Mexicans create about themselves and the Afro-Mexicans 

who are often left out of these stories.    

As a young Afro-Mexican American scholar, growing up in the United States and 

traveling to Guerrero, Mexico during the summer to visit my maternal grandmother, I noted early 

on that Afro-Mexicans were not included in the stories that Mexicans created about themselves. I 

noticed this at first in the telenovelas that were aired such as Rebelde (2004), Rubí (2004), and 

La fea más bella (2006), which were among some of my favorite soap operas growing up. I 

noted that the actors and actresses in these Mexican soap operas were very white and even those 

actors who were supposedly ugly like in La fea más bella were also white. Yearning to see 

myself reflected, I would have even been content with an ugly brown beauty on the screen. I 

thought to myself, “Damn. They won’t even cast us brown folk as the ugly characters. It’s all 

white.” Early on, it seemed to me like there were two Mexicos. There was the white Mexico that 

Mexico aspired to be on TV and the real Mexico, which consisted of Mexicans of varying skin 

shades and hair textures.  

But even when I started taking Mexican history courses, in the United States, I noted that 

Afro-Mexicans were missing from the story of Mexico. In my courses, I was told again and 

again that Mexico was a mestizo country of Spanish European and Native American descent. In 

her landmark work Borderlands/ La Frontera (1987), the first work I ever read about Mexican 



 

 

3 
 

Americans in the U.S. Southwest, Gloria Anzaldúa defined the mestizo as the violent product of 

Spanish European and Amerindian contact and sexual reproduction:  

At the beginning of the 16th century, the Spaniards and Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico 

 and, with the help of tribes that the Aztecs had subjugated, conquered it. Before the 

 Conquest, there were twenty-five million Indian people in Mexico and the Yucatán. 

 Immediately after the Conquest, the Indian population had been reduced to under seven 

 million. By 1650, only one-and-a-half-million pure-blooded Indians remained. The 

 mestizos who were genetically equipped to survive smallpox, measles, and typhus (Old 

 World diseases to which the natives had no immunity), founded a new hybrid race and 

 inherited Central and South America. En 1521 nació una nueva raza, el mestizo, el 

 mexicano (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), 1 a race that had never existed 

 before. Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, are the offspring of those first matings. 

 (Borderlands 16) 

In essence, Gloria Anzaldúa defined most Mexicans and all Chicanos and Mexican Americans as 

mestizos: the offspring of Spanish European colonists and Native Americans. Although I was and 

still am refreshed by Anzaldúa’s matter-of-fact style of writing, I was always puzzled at her 

definition of Mexicans and Mexican Americans because it did not include the Afro-Mexicans I 

knew existed.   

Although mestizaje proved to be a useful discourse for some, as seen by Anzaldúa’s 

writing above, it is a discourse that assumes that only one kind of mixture took place in colonial 

Mexico; in other words, it assumes that the only mixture occurring was the one between 

 
1 In the preface to her work, Anzaldúa asks readers to meet her halfway and respect the Chicano Spanish of the 
borderlands. Due to this request, I will not be translating this work in particular in this dissertation. 



 

 

4 
 

Spaniards and Amerindians. As Joshua Lund writes in his work The Mestizo State (2012), the 

mestizo became exalted by the new Mexican republic as the true Mexican, who had defeated 

centuries of Spanish colonial rule:  

As New Spain became Mexico and the country slowly emerged from the detritus of 

centuries—long colonial rule, intellectuals, statesmen, and poets rallied around the figure 

of the mestizo—understood as an individual of mixed-race heritage, usually assumed to 

be of European and indigenous American ancestry—as the symbolic protagonist of a new 

project of state formation. (ix) 

In essence, the mestizo/a was already a state backed figure that the new post-colonial elite 

wanted the people to identify with. Chicanos like Anzaldúa and Oscar Acosta, a self-described 

Chicano lawyer, took the symbol of the mestizo to define themselves in the U.S. Southwest. 

Through the figure of the mestizo they could lay claim to the U.S. Southwest and defend 

themselves against Anglo racism. Mestizos were not an immigrant group that arrived to the U.S. 

Southwest yesterday but a group with ties to the U.S. Southwest that preceded Anglos’ arrival. 

Through the figure of the mestizo, Chicanos became native to the U.S. Southwest and not mere 

foreigners encroaching into Anglo spaces.  

 But who is left out of this definition? Afro-Mexicans, of course. As Taunya Lovell Banks 

argues in her article “Mestizaje and the Mexican Mestizo Self” (2006),  the uncritical celebration 

of the mestizo/a hides the fact that the mestizo/a was a privileged category even in the colonial 

period because it was a racial category that was removed from Blackness; indeed, the caste 

system set up by the Spanish colonial elite reinforced the idea that those who had no African 

ancestry such as mestizos and castizos were better off and had a chance at eventually becoming 

españoles and supposedly bettering the race and their social as well as economic standing (204).  



 

 

5 
 

 The point that I am trying to make here is that mestizo/a is not an inclusive category, and 

it was never meant to encompass all Mexicans in Mexico or Mexican Americans/ Chicanos in 

the U.S. Southwest. Mestizaje has been used as a type of one size fits all category that is 

especially not useful for Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica. The aim of this dissertation is to 

challenge what I call mestizo normativity. Mestizo normativity is the assumption that Mexicans 

and Mexicans Americans have only two roots: the Spanish European and Amerindian. Chicanos, 

Mexicans, Mexicans Americans are so much more than hybrids of Spanish and Amerindian 

culture.  

I came up with the term mestizo normativity while serving as a teaching assistant at The 

Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of 

Maryland. After reading Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant’s work on queer theory and 

heteronormativity, it occurred to me that Afro-Mexican literature was being mestizo-ized. 

Meaning that it was being forcibly read through a mestizo lens. In their work “Sex in Public” 

(1998), Warner and Berlant note that heterosexuality only appears to be normal because of 

public structures that regulate the sex binary: 

This sense of rightness—embedded in things and not just sex—is what we call 

heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia 

against gays and lesbians; it is produced in almost every aspect of the forms and 

arrangements of social life: nationality, the state, and the law; commerce, medicine; and 

education. (554) 

In their work they note that everything in public life is done with the aim of filtering people 

through a male/female binary. This binary affects all aspects of daily life and can be seen in the 

male/female designations in public bathrooms and male/female categories in sports. In a similar 



 

 

6 
 

manner, as my dissertation will show, Afro-Mexican literary productions are assumed to be 

hybrids of Native American and Spanish European literary traditions.  

 To my knowledge, there is one other scholar who uses the term mestizo normativity. 

David Dalton’s use of the term mestizo normativity influenced my work when I came across it 

after coming to the term on my own. In his work Mestizo Modernity (2018), Dalton uses the term 

mestizo normativity to refer to the exalting of the mixed-race subject—Native American and 

Spanish European—in Mexico’s 20th century politics:  

By the twentieth century, Mexico’s colonial experience had produced a Hegelian 

master/slave relationship where the country’s means of self-representation was patterned 

after those of its imperial oppressor(s), a fact that was particularly visible with regard to 

how it engaged both Spain and the United States. As Mexican elites followed this 

imperial model, they necessarily established internal empires that mirrored those of their 

own historical colonizers […]. Mestizo normativity found itself at an awkward juncture; 

while hegemonic in its own national space, global powers treated mestizo identity as a 

distant “echo” of European whiteness. As mixed-race peoples attempted to validate 

themselves within these Eurocentric constructs of power, they devalued the indigenous 

components of their racial and cultural heritage. Statist articulations of postrevolutionary 

mestizo modernity were highly alienating because they revolved around a desire to 

emulate a historical conqueror who still refused to recognize the worth of mixed-race 

subjectivities. As postrevolutionary actors sponsored official articulations of mestizaje, 

they further validated and institutionalized the racial and gender divisions that had existed 

since the earliest days of the Conquest. (8) 



 

 

7 
 

As Dalton notes, mestizaje further internalized imperial models in Mexico that had already been 

set in motion during the earliest days of colonization. The ideal Mexican citizen was one that had 

moved away from indigeneity and embraced modernity, progress, and western European 

whiteness. Moreover, mestizaje favored the male over the female. That is to say, mestizaje also 

abided by a gender binary that was transplanted from Europe into Mesoamerica. Dalton uses the 

term mestizo normativity to critique modernity and critics of modernity like Néstor García 

Canclini (5).  

In particular, Dalton criticizes García Canclini for claiming to be moving away from 

mestizaje—from colonial understandings of race—while simultaneously making use of elitist 

discourses tied to mestizaje to propose his new theory of hybridity:  

García Canclini defines modernization as a largely socioeconomic ideal that entails both 

industrialization and the education of the population at large so that it can participate in 

modern society. While the critic emphasizes modernism’s many failures in bringing 

about modernization, we should note that proponents of official mestizaje employed 

elitist discourses and projects in an attempt to modernize “primitive” indigenes through 

various forms of hybridity. State actors employed at least three different “hybridities” in 

their quest to transform indigenous people into “modern” mestizos: technological, racial, 

and cultural. Upon undergoing any of these forms of hybridization, indigenous people 

could become coded as racially hybrid and mestizo in a cultural, economic, and even 

genetic sense. Rather than bring about García Canclini’s famous notion of “modernism 

without modernization” then, postrevolutionary thinkers strove to bring about 

modernization through modernism. (6) 



 

 

8 
 

In essence, García Canclini uses hybridity not to refer to sexual mixing and “bettering of the 

race,” as José Vasconcelos did in his work La raza cósmica (1925), but technological mixing. 

Still, Dalton argues that this supposed technological uplift already borrows from the realm of 

mestizaje because mestizaje defined itself as complete when it had undergone either a racial, 

cultural, or technological transformation.  

 As Nestor García Canclini himself writes, hybridity does not come about through the 

sexual mixing of different races but through the mixing of different technologies, and the 

mixture of these technologies has been made possible because the world is becoming 

increasingly globalized:  

there are millions of indigenous people mestizoized with white colonizers, but some have 

been “chicano-ized” by traveling to the United States; others reshape their habits in 

relation to the offerings of the mass media; others have acquired a high level of education 

and enriched their traditional patrimony with aesthetic resources and knowledge from 

various countries; others incorporate themselves into Korean and Japanese enterprises 

and fuse their ethnic capital with the disciplines and knowledge of those productive 

systems. Studying cultural processes, therefore, rather than leading us to affirm self-

sufficient identities, is useful for recognizing forms of positioning oneself in the midst of 

heterogeneity and for understanding how hybridizations are produced. (García Canclini 

“Introduction”) 

The access to technology, education, and travel has made Mexico into a hybridized space, but 

what does this say of race? How is the Mexican defined? How is the Mexican American defined? 

As García Canclini himself notes, one can become Chicano-ized by traveling to the U.S. 

Southwest. But how do Chicanos define themselves racially? Who is left out of that definition? 



 

 

9 
 

How do Mexicans, depending on what region they inhabit, define themselves racially? Race is 

the main topic of this dissertation.  

I use the term mestizo normativity to interrogate how Afro-Mexican works of poetry, 

folklore, ballads, and stories disrupt mestizaje. When referring to mestizaje, I use the colonial and 

present definition that define mestizas/os as people of assumed Spanish and Amerindian 

ancestry. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores note in The Afro-Latin@ Reader (2010), 

“we are accustomed to thinking of “Afro” and “Latin@” as distinct from each other and mutually 

exclusive: one is either Black or Latin@” (1). In essence, those who do not fall neatly along the 

Black/Latino binary are asked to choose between their identities. They can be either Latino or 

Black but not both. In a similar fashion, queers and bisexuals are made to choose between the 

heterosexual/homosexual binary, they can be heterosexuals or homosexuals but not both. As 

Siobhan Somerville notes in her essay “Queer,” “to queer [is] is to denaturalize categories such 

as “lesbian” and “gay” (not to mention “straight” and “heterosexual”), revealing them as socially 

and historically constructed identities that have worked to establish and police the line between 

the “normal” and “abnormal” (198). In essence, to queer means to question the line between 

“normal” and “abnormal.” With these definitions in mind, I read Afro-Mexican literature as 

queer literature. Afro-Mexicans do not fit neatly along the Afro/Latino binary. Their very 

existence in a supposedly Black free country brings into question accepted definitions of 

Mexicans and Mexican Americans.   

My dissertation adds to the field of Afro-Mexican Studies. So far, to my knowledge, 

there is only one writer—Paulette Ramsay—who focuses on the literary production of the Costa 

Chica. In terms of literary analysis, the field of Afro-Mexican studies is threadbare in Mexico’s 

Costa Chica region. While Ramsay reads Afro-Mexican folklore as part of the greater Caribbean, 



 

 

10 
 

I am interested in how Mexican scholars have read Afro-Mexican folklore as mestizo folklore. I 

argue that Afro-Mexican literary productions—ballads, folklore, poetry, and versos—are not a 

mere blend of Spanish and Native American storytelling but share similarities with literary 

productions in the greater African Diaspora in the Americas, including the Caribbean, and with 

West and Central African storytelling traditions.  

As Nicole von Germeten has pointed out, the African diaspora in Mexico is as much a 

part of Mexican history as Spanish history. Throughout the colonial period, Spaniards always 

constituted a small minority in New Spain and were outnumbered by Africans throughout the 

colonial period:  

From the time of military the conquest of Tenochtitlan, men and women of African 

descent inhabited the viceroyalty of New Spain. Some of these individuals were 

descended from Africans living in Spain for generations, but the majority, at least one 

hundred thousand Africans, arrived in New Spain on board Portuguese slave ships before 

1640. Although the descendants of indigenous peoples dominated population numbers 

 for the entire colonial period, before 1640 more Africans than Spaniards came to New  

 Spain. In urban areas, especially the viceregal capital of Mexico City, Africans and their  

 descendants were a significant percentage of the population. (83) 

African cultures like European cultures have also influenced mexicanidad and are also part of the 

Mexican and Mexican American family. Given this history, contemporary readings of Mexican 

works need to consider that Africans also arrived to what was then called New Spain and left 

their imprint in society just as much as Spanish Europeans did. The non-existence of Afro-

Mexicans in the Mexican imagination seems to suggest that Africans were the servants so their 



 

 

11 
 

culture didn’t matter. By reclaiming and tracing the story of Afro-Mexican literature, my 

dissertation seeks to change that perception.  

I have organized this dissertation into four chapters. In chapter one, “West & Central 

Africa Remembered in Costa Chica Folklore,” I argue that Afro-Mexican folktales share 

similarities with West and Central African storytelling practices. In my analysis, I note that Afro-

Mexican tales have similarities to trickster rabbit tales from the Bantu people in Central Africa 

and Hausa people in West Africa. And moreover, I note that these tales fall into the tatsuniya 

genre of storytelling found among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa. This genre of 

tales is known as a subversive category of tales for they include tales of small animals taking 

down larger animals. I argue that these tales are how Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica 

remember their African heritage and build community. As will be seen in my first chapter, the 

first scholars to analyze Afro-Mexican folktales moved away from comparing them to West and 

Central African folklore because they understood all Mexican literature to stem from colonial 

Mexico’s Amerindian and Spanish roots. That is, their readings conformed to mestizo 

normativity. When these Afro-Mexican folktales resisted assimilation, scholars claimed that 

Afro-Mexican tales were obviously hybrids of Spanish and Native American folklore.  

In the second chapter “Connecting Afro-Mexican Poetry, Ballads & Versos from the 

Costa Chica to the African Diaspora in the Americas,” I argue that the ballad tradition in the 

Costa Chica is influenced by West African storytelling traditions. Moreover, I argue that through 

ballads, versos, and maroon poetry, costeños disrupt the notion of a mestizo Mexico. That is, they 

question the single story that has been told about Mexico and create a multifaceted and culturally 

complex site that they recognize as home. To drive this point home, I compare costeño corridos 



 

 

12 
 

to calypsos and argue for readings that include Afrodiasporic strategies of resistance when 

dealing with Afrodesendant peoples in the Costa Chica.  

In chapter three “Looking Forward & Back: Afro-Mexican Literature from the U.S. 

Southwest,” I read Afro-Mexican works written by writers in the U.S. diaspora. I am focusing on 

what they add to the field of Mexican American studies. In essence, I examine how these writers’ 

perceptions of race are formed in the U.S. and I examine how and why these writers look to 

Mexico to make sense of their shared Black and Mexican ancestry. Moreover, I am interested in 

how these writers disrupt notions of assumed mestizo normativity through their writings.  

Lastly, in chapter four, “Afro-Mexican Activism and Scholarship Through the Lens of 

Three Contemporary Afro-Mexican Writers,” I examine how contemporary writers such as 

Aleida Violeta Vázquez Cisneros, Abel Emigdio Baños Delgado, and Filemón Silva Sandoval 

use social media to promote their written works and challenge readings that depict Mexico as a 

Black-free space.  

 

Methodology  

 For this study, I am using qualitative methods—interviews, textual analysis, and field 

research—and I am drawing from the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, queer studies, 

African studies, and Mexican and Mexican American studies. In chapter one, I use the folklore 

collection Jamás fandango al cielo (1993), which was published by the Dirección General de 

Culturas Populares in Mexico City.  

In chapter two, I analyze corridos from the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca as well 

as poetry and versos from Alma Cimarrona: versos costeños y poesía regional (1999). Alma 

Cimarrona is a compilation of versos and poetry collected by Angustia Torres Díaz and Israel 



 

 

13 
 

Reyes Larrea from the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. In addition to corridos, versos, and 

poetry, I rely on my own firsthand experience and field notes from my research trips in the Costa 

Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca in 2022 and 2023, and Oaxaca City, Oaxaca and Cuernavaca, 

Morelos in 2022.  

In chapter three, I analyze María Rosario Jackson’s autobiography in The Afro-Latin@ 

Reader (2010), Ariana Brown’s collections of poetry Sana Sana (2020) and We are Owed 

(2021), and Alán Pelaez Lopez’s poetry collection Intergalactic Travels (2020).  

In chapter four, I rely on my field notes and interviews from Mexico City, Cuernavaca, 

Oaxaca, and video interviews, which I conducted with writers, filmmakers, and artists from April 

to December 2022.  

I work with these primary sources because they constitute works where Afro-Mexicans 

speak and write for themselves and are not imagined or recreated by the mestizo imagination. 

There are plenty of Mexican American works that portray Afro-Mexican characters such as 

George Washington Gómez (1990) by Américo Paredes and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra 

Cisneros, but, in my estimation, these works imagine and fictionalize the lives of Afro-Mexican 

people rather than give them space to tell their own stories.  

My dissertation concludes that Mexican and Mexican American studies have been 

hindered by mestizo normativity from achieving their full potential. As will be shown in this 

dissertation, whatever cultural productions emerge out of the Costa Chica are automatically 

recycled into the world of mestizaje. If a storyteller in the Costa Chica comes up with a tale 

about a rabbit, that rabbit will be analyzed for its similarities to Native American or European 

folklore rather than the African roots from which the living and breathing Afro-Mexican came. 

The resounding justification for these analyses and conclusions are that Afro-Mexicans do not 



 

 

14 
 

have a culture or that they do not remember their culture. But Afro-Mexicans do have a culture 

and they remember it. It just might be easier to believe that they do not have one or have 

forgotten it. It may be easier to believe in mestizo exceptionalism, homogeneity rather than 

diversity.  

 Mestizo normativity arose to make the world safer and more bearable for the colonist. As 

Antonio Cornejo Polar has noted, “mestizaje […] offers a harmonious image of what is 

obviously disjointed and confrontational, proposing representations that deep down are only 

relevant to those from whom it is convenient to imagine our societies as smooth and non-

conflictive spaces of coexistence” (760). It is only by refusing to believe in the myth of 

harmonious coexistence that Afro-Mexican works can begin to be read and appreciated for the 

fantastic stories that they are. Mexico is composed of a diasporic group of people. It would be a 

shame to read everything through a compulsory mestizo lens.  

 

Some Limitations of My Dissertation 

One of the major limits of my dissertation is my lack of inclusion of indigenous folktales 

from the Mixtec, Amuzgo, or Zapotec people, who have historically had and have a high degree 

of social contact with Afro-Mexicans. For they, the indigenous Mixtec, Zapotec, and Amuzgo, 

have historically lived alongside Afro-Mexicans, or better yet, Afro-Mexicans have historically 

lived alongside them. Future studies will include comparative readings of indigenous and Afro-

Mexican folktales as well as field interviews with indigenous storytellers. In the future, I hope to 

show exactly how Afro-Mexican folktales have been influenced by Amerindian storytelling 

traditions. As my dissertation will show, there is only an assumption that Afro-Mexican folktales 

are influences, but the how and to what extent have yet to be examined.  



 

 

15 
 

Chapter One: West & Central Africa Remembered in Costa Chica 

Folklore 

 

Los afromexicanos, somos los más olvidados de todos los pueblos de México. Debemos 

revisar nuestra historia para reafirmar nuestra identidad. 

—Encuentro de Pueblos Negros, 2001 

 

We Afro-Mexicans are the most forgotten of all of the Mexican peoples. We must review 

our history in order to reassert our identity.2 

—Meeting of Black Communities, 20013 

 

 I begin this chapter with an objective formulated by the participants at the 5th Meeting of 

Black Communities4 which took place from the 22nd to the 25th of March 2001 in Santiago 

Tapextla, Oaxaca. The Meeting of Black Communities is a community-led organization which 

began in 1997. The First Meeting of Black Communities took place in El Ciruelo, Pinotepa 

Nacional, Oaxaca in 1997, and was led by Father Glyn Jemmott Nelson, a Trinidadian priest who 

voluntarily relocated to Oaxaca, Mexico to work exclusively with Afro-Mexican communities. 

In her work Afro-Mexican Construction of Diaspora (2016), Paulette Ramsay details her travel 

to Oaxaca, Mexico in the summer of 2013 and shares her interview with Father Glyn. As Father 

 
2 Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.  
3 In order to assert the importance of the reclaiming and of the term as a signifier of a trans-national ethnicity, I will 
follow the example of many other scholars and capitalize the word “Black” when referring to Afro diasporic 
peoples.  
4 The region of Luanda, Angola that is covered in this chapter is referred to as being part of Central or Southern 
Africa by scholars. As an Afro-Mexican scholar, I refer to Angola as being part of Central Africa to keep 
consistency with other Afro-Mexican scholars such as Colin Palmer and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. 



 

 

16 
 

Glyn states, in his own words, when he arrived to El Ciruelo, Oaxaca around 1983, he was met 

with hostility from Afro-Mexicans who told him “un negro no puede ser sacerdote, somos gente 

corriente, somos para el machetero,” which roughly translates to, “a Black man cannot be a 

priest. We are a simple people; we are for machete work” (Afro-Mexican Constructions 

“Conclusion”). In other words, Father Glyn disrupted what Afro-Mexicans in El Ciruelo, 

Oaxaca, in the 80s, thought was acceptable work for a Black man.  

Ramsay’s interviews with Father Glyn demonstrate how vital it was for Afro-Mexicans to 

see a Black man in a position of authority and to see themselves as more than an abandoned 

group of people who were only good for hard labor. The Meeting of Black Communities was 

started to form a sense of community and for Afro-Mexicans to collectively push for their rights. 

As the participants at the 5th Meeting of Black Communities noted, Afro-Mexicans need to be 

aware of their own history so that they could be agents of their own future (Weltman-Cisneros 

and Méndez Tello 153).  

I start off my first chapter with this powerful collective objective because it has become 

commonplace today to dismiss the idea that Mexico has an African heritage and history. Since 

popular narrative suggests that there is nothing African about Mexico, the contributions of Afro-

Mexican people are dismissed, ignored, or attributed to belonging to Mexico’s Spanish and/or 

Native American traditions by the general populace.  

In this chapter, I challenge the popular notion that Mexico has no African history or 

heritage. I compare Afro-Mexican trickster rabbit tales to trickster stories found throughout West 

and Central African folklore. I argue that Afro-Mexican folklore is not just a blend of Spanish 

and Native American folklore but that Afro-Mexican folktales also share similarities with pre-



 

 

17 
 

colonial West and Central African storytelling practices popular in other parts of the Americas, 

including anglophone and francophone regions.   

To date, the best-known scholar to contest that Afro-Mexican folklore is not a hybrid of 

only Spanish and Amerindian folklore is Paulette Ramsay, a Jamaican academic, who studies 

race relations in the Caribbean and Mexico. Besides Ramsay, there are no scholars to my 

knowledge who try to understand Afro-Mexican folklore as part of the cultural output of the 

African diaspora in the Americas.  

In her works, Ramsay has argued that the trickster Afro-Mexican rabbit El Tío Conejo 

resembles the spider trickster Anancy from Ghana, who subverts dominant power structures and 

brings down animals who are much larger and more powerful than him by using his wit 

(“Establishing an Independent Identity” 9). According to Ramsay, Afro-Mexicans use trickster 

rabbit tales to pass on strategies of resistance from generation to generation (“Establishing an 

Independent Identity” 10). In essence, these tales remind the colonized that they need not be 

powerful or hold all the power to overthrow their oppressors. Ramsay reads Afro-Mexican rabbit 

trickster tales for their subversive qualities.  

Although the comparative analyses that Ramsay has drawn between Anancy and El Tío 

Conejo are powerful in themselves, like all good research, her research pushes scholars to ask 

even more questions. In this chapter, I investigate the origins of El Tío Conejo and the origins of 

the Afro-Mexican people of the Costa Chica to understand how a folk tale figure like Anancy—

from Ghana—shares similarities with another trickster figure called El Tío Conejo, a continent 

away. In this chapter, I argue that El Tío Conejo comes from a specific African storytelling 

tradition of resistance classified as tatsuniya tales, which are native to West and Central Africa. 



 

 

18 
 

Scholars may have overlooked El Tío Conejo’s African origins to keep in line with the 

idea of a mestizo (Spanish and Amerindian) Mexico that rose to prominence in the 20th 

century. As Pedro Palou has noted, the Mexican Revolution gave birth to mexicanidad or 

mestizaje. Mestizaje is a means by which the indigenous person was incorporated into the 

capitalist system. Through mestizaje—the myth of racial unity and culture—the social order of 

one single language and nationalism is legitimized (Palou 15). In other words, talks of racial 

progress were really fronts for convincing Mexico’s Native American peoples to let go of their 

indigenous ways and their lands in the process.  

In order to prove my argument, I have broken up this chapter into four sections. In the 

first section, I examine the origins of Mexico’s Afro-Mexican people. In my second section, I 

trace the journey of the trickster rabbit from Central and Western Africa to the U.S. South and 

Mexico. I argue that the trickster rabbit has been transforming and taking on different animal 

shapes depending on where his tales are being told. Moreover, I argue that El Tío Conejo, who is 

present in the Costa Chica, is a blend of West and Central African folklore and that the unique 

characteristics that El Tío Conejo has in Mexico are due in part to the blending of West and 

Central African cultures that took place in the Costa Chica of Mexico. In my third section, I 

argue that Afro-Mexican folklore has been analyzed as a blend of indigenous and Spanish 

European folklore because Black identity in Mexico has been undervalued and subsumed into 

other cultures since the colonial period in Mexico. In this section, I demonstrate how the national 

ideology of mestizaje affected how scholars analyzed and understood Afro-Mexican tales. By 

analyzing the prefaces in Jamás fandango al cielo (1993), I show how nationalist projects for a 

mestizo Mexico—a nation supposedly devoid of present-day African culture—affected even 

scholars who were trying to bring Afro-Mexican folklore to light. Finally, in the fourth section, I 



 

 

19 
 

examine three trickster rabbit stories from the Costa Chica and compare them to similar stories 

that can be found throughout West & Central Africa. By making this comparison, I show that 

Afro-Mexican folklore is in dialogue with West and Central African storytelling traditions. In 

other words, West and Central African storytelling practices are remembered in the Costa Chica.  

 For my methodology, I selected trickster rabbit tales in the folklore collection Jamás 

fandango al Cielo (1993). I chose this collection because it is one of the first attempts by 

researchers in Mexico to transcribe and collect Costa Chica folklore. Moreover, the prefaces in 

the collection demonstrate how the anthropologists and linguists assigned to this project 

struggled to analyze Afro-Mexican folklore in a country where African traditions supposedly do 

not exist.    

Jamás fandango al cielo consists of Afro-Mexican tales from the Mexican state of 

Guerrero, which is one of the two states, the state of Oaxaca being the other, that make up the 

heart of Black Mexico, colloquially known as the Costa Chica. The oral stories in Jamás 

fandango al cielo were recorded and transcribed by Mexican anthropologists working with 

“endangered languages” and Afro-Mexican traditions in Guerrero, Mexico. As will be seen in 

this chapter, Afro-Mexican dialects and traditions are not endangered but rather form part of an 

Afro-Mexican’s upbringing. Additionally, I rely on my field notes from a trip to Mexico in April 

2022 to make sense of how Afro-Mexicans view themselves and the works that they produce. In 

other words, I am interested in not only what scholars have to say about these folktales but how 

Afro-Mexican people use these folktales. I am interested in the social function of folklore in the 

Costa Chica.  

 

 



 

 

20 
 

Section One: The Origins of Afro-Mexicans  

 

As for the origins of Mexico’s Afro-Mexican peoples, historians have noted that Afro-

Mexicans living in present-day Mexico are of West and Central African descent. Colin Palmer 

notes that during the 16th and 17th centuries, enslaved Africans bound for New Spain were 

primarily taken from West and Central Africa. Since the beginning of Spanish colonization in 

Mexico, West Africans were forcibly brought to not only the Caribbean but also mainland North, 

Meso- and South American countries. About 80% of African-born Afro-Mexicans between 1545 

and 1556 came from the present-day West African countries of Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and 

12% came from other parts of West Africa such as Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and São Tomé 

and Príncipe (Palmer 20). After the 16th century, enslaved Africans were no longer taken from 

West Africa but instead Central Africa. In the 17th century, 75% of the enslaved Africans 

forcibly taken to New Spain consisted primarily of Luandans from Angola (Palmer 22). What 

this means is that New Spain participated in the transatlantic slave trade and thus has an 

Afrodiasporic history and people. The resemblance of Afro-Mexican tales to their West and 

Central African counterparts is a part of Afro-Mexicans’ Afro-diasporic heritage.  

As Herman L. Bennett notes, enslaved Africans entering New Spain generally 

experienced one of two fates. Those who were sent to work against their will in areas with a low 

number of enslaved Africans eventually lost their identity and their descendants began to identify 

as mestizos (racially mixed persons of Spanish and Native American descent); on the other hand, 

enslaved Africans sent to work in large slaveholding estates with significant African populations 

retained their identity, culture, and idiosyncrasies for a longer period of time:  



 

 

21 
 

Local slaveholding patterns and indigenous communities shaped the idiosyncratic nature 

of the transformation process in fundamental ways. In those areas with a small African 

population liberally dispersed, the descendants of Africans tended to blend physically and 

culturally, eventually acquiring identities as Indians or Spaniards but most likely as 

mestizos, the offspring of Spaniards and Indians. Manifest throughout New Spain, this 

pattern of absorption or “disappearance” occurred in both urban and rural areas. In 

contrast, in those areas with a significant enslaved population congregated on large 

estates–Veracruz, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Morelos, Michoacan–the African 

population retained its distinctive physical presence for a longer period. (Bennett 27)  

The states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, which are the focus of this dissertation, fall under the list of 

Mexican states that brought in enslaved Africans to work on large plantations. The Afro-

Mexicans assigned to work in the Costa Chica were most likely able to keep a sense of their 

culture and stories because they were bound together and isolated from the rest of Mexican 

society for a longer period of time.  

As journalist Randal C. Archibold notes, in his article in the New York Times “Negro? 

Prieto? Moreno?” (2014), during his travels to José María Morelos, Oaxaca in 2014, Afro-

Mexicans have historically kept to themselves and continue to keep to themselves for survival:  

While traveling outside of their communities, black Mexicans say they are stopped 

routinely by the police and accused of being illegal immigrants from Cuba or Central 

America. They often endure long stares and even touching of their hair by curious fellow 

Mexicans. That unfamiliarity comes in part because Mexico’s black populations, often to 

escape persecution and discrimination, historically never moved in large numbers to big 



 

 

22 
 

cities and have kept largely to themselves in scattered communities in three southern 

states: Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz.  

As Archibald notes, Afro-Mexicans who were sent to work on plantations retained their West 

and Central African characteristics such as curly hair and dark skin. Through no fault of their 

own, Afro-Mexicans are commonly viewed as foreigners when traveling outside of their Afro-

Mexican communities.  

By contrast, Afro-Mexicans sent to work in the interior of Mexico experienced interracial 

mixing to a greater extent. As Patricia Seed notes, the inhabitants of Mexico City experienced 

racial mixing to a greater degree than any other town or city in New Spain:  

The capital city provided the opportunity for far greater contact between individuals of 

different races than did the rural regions or smaller towns of New Spain. Mexico City 

was thus an area in which racial mingling took place on a large scale and the assortment 

of displaced rural groups and ethnic mixtures was among the greatest in the empire […]. 

Over the three centuries of the colonial era, there emerged in Mexico an intermediate 

group of people of mixed racial origin. The mixed-bloods were known collectively as 

castas, but a variety of distinct names [were] applied to each of the individual mixed 

combinations. (572) 

To this day, many Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica of Oaxaca and Guerrero know about the 

nation’s history of enslavement, which they preserve through oral tales. Afro-Mexicans sent to 

work in Mexico City began to lose their sense of a Black identity as they also lost connection 

with others sharing their culture. As Patricia Seed notes, by 1811, census takers in Mexico City 

no longer asked inhabitants if they were Black (577). 



 

 

23 
 

In contrast to Mexico City and other parts of Mexico, race developed differently in the 

Costa Chica. Blacks in the Costa Chica have tended to marry one another and thus strengthened 

and reinforced their Black identity in the colonial and post-colonial period. Ben Vinson’s 

historical research on marriage in the Costa Chica in the late eighteenth century shows that free 

Afro-Mexicans were more likely to intermarry within their own group than to marry indigenous 

or white people. As Vinson states, “no free-colored man took a white bride, or even a fair 

skinned castiza […] Free-coloreds tended to intermarry more frequently with Indians, [but] 

Indian [Native American] intermarriage rates were probably lowered by the physical distance 

which separated them” 5 (280). Vinson’s research is even further supported by ethnographic 

research carried out by Bobby Vaughn in 1997. In his work on the Costa Chica, Vaughn notes 

that Afro-Mexicans on the Costa Chica tended to marry one another and most of their family 

trees can be traced back to common Afro-Mexican surnames  (“Afro-Mexico” 124).  

During my research stays in the Costa Chica between April 2022 and January 2022, I 

have noted that most Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica tend to marry one another simply 

because they are in close proximity to one another more than anyone else. Costa Chica towns up 

and down the Pacific Coast of Guerrero and Oaxaca tend to be isolated and lack public 

transportation or even paved roads for residents to navigate in and out of their hometowns safely. 

At an Afro-Mexican wedding that I had the honor to attend on December 27, 2022, in 

Santiago Llano Grande, Oaxaca, I noted that there was a lack of sanitation services such as trash 

disposal or even running water. Residents have to pile up their trash and burn it and bury the 

ashes. And if they need water, they need to buy it from a water vendor who fills up his truck with 

water and then comes and fills up the family’s water tank which is called a pila. I say all of this 

 
5 Castizas and castizos are those who are three quarters Spanish and one quarter Amerindian. 



 

 

24 
 

to illustrate that there simply are not many opportunities for Afro-Mexicans to marry anyone else 

because Afro-Mexican towns are so remote.  

At the wedding of Brisa Valdez Prudente, a respondent who became a friend, all the 

couples consisted of Native Americans or Afro-Mexicans. And Brisa was marrying a fellow 

Afro-Mexican from Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero, whom she met through mutual friends. I enclose a 

photo of Brisa on her wedding day below. The photo was taken on December 22, 2022, in 

Santiago Llano Grande, Oaxaca: 

     

Figure 1: Left to right: Brisa’s stepfather, wearing a cream white button-down dress shirt, Brisa’s maternal grandmother, 
wearing a blue dress, Brisa, the bride, Brisa’s mother, wearing a gold dress, and Brisa’s stepbrother, wearing a white suit. 

 



 

 

25 
 

In remote areas like Santiago Llano Grande, where Brisa and her family are from, it is not 

uncommon, as occurs in many other places, for people to marry and form bonds with those who 

they are in close proximity with.  

Given this data, it is possible that enslaved Afro-Mexicans who once labored along the 

Pacific Coast of Guerrero were sufficient in number to form their own sense of identity and 

culture. In fact, Afro-Mexicans from the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca are sufficient in number 

to this day to hold onto their unique traditions, foregrounding, for example, the Dance of the 

Devils, which honors the African god Ruja, whom they danced to during colonial times to 

petition for their liberation (“La Danza de Los Diablos”). Below I enclose a picture taken from 

the Gobierno de México webpage titled “La Danza de los Diablos” so that readers can get a 

sense of the elaborate costumes and artistry that this dance requires:  

 

Figure 2:Picture taken from the Gobierno de México webpage titled “La Danza de los Diablos” 



 

 

26 
 

As may be seen from the picture above, the dance is usually performed by men and the masks 

that are supposed to represent the devils consist of horsehair, goat horns, and leather. Hugo 

Arrellanes Antonio, an Afro-Mexican photographer, shared with me that these masks take weeks 

to make. If the mask is made of leather, as most are, the leather needs to be cured and everything 

is put together and stitched by hand.   

The first time I saw the Dance of the Devils was at the I Foro de Jovenes Afro-

Mexicanos: Historia, identidad, pertenencia y orgullo afromexicano held in Huatulco, Oaxaca 

by the Asociación de Mujeres de las Costa de Oaxaca (AMCO) from April 8th to the 10th, 2022. 

During this three-day conference aimed at young Afro-Mexican filmmakers and multimedia 

artists from around the world, the young participants demanded a recess to stretch their bodies 

after sitting and listening to presentations nearly all day. One of the Afro-Mexican participants 

started playing his tiny drum and the rest of the young participants caught on to the beat and 

started dancing the Devil Dance. It was amazing to see how in sync they danced despite being 

from different parts of the Costa Chica. Once the dance ended, they collectively shouted out, 

“Ruja!” 

As David Montaño, a professional Devil Dance mask maker and musician from 

Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero notes, “the Dance of the Devils comes from Africa, and it is a dance 

that has been passed down from generation to generation. It is in our blood. As soon as the beat 

drops, children start dancing and people get goosebumps and get the urge to join in and start 

dancing as well” (La danza de los Diablos Negros 3:38). In the Costa Chica, unlike in other parts 

of Mexico, West and Central African traditions are remembered in song and storytelling. One 

hero of folktales who is most prominent in the Costa Chica is El Tío Conejo. In the next section, 

I examine the origins of El Tío Conejo.  



 

 

27 
 

Section II: The Origins of El Tío Conejo from the Costa Chica 

 

 When I first read the Afro-Mexican folk story collection Jamás fandango al cielo (1993), 

I was intrigued and frustrated by a recurrent figure named El Conejo or El Tío Conejo, who had 

almost a whole section of a four-part collection dedicated just to him and his escapades. Who 

could this figure be? And why was he so important that he appeared more than any other 

character in the collection? When I shared my frustration with my colleague Dominique Young 

over a plate of pupusas, she exclaimed, “El Tio Conejo sounds like Brother Rabbit.” After 

hearing this, I did all the research I could on Brother Rabbit from the U.S. South and I kept 

following this trickster rabbit all the way back to West and Central Africa and learned about his 

origins and his journeys to the U.S. South and the Costa Chica.  

 As for Brother Rabbit, here is what folklorists have to say. Alice Werner notes that the 

trickster rabbit that is known throughout the United States because of Joel Chandler Harris’s 

work Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings (1880), a collection of African American oral tales 

from the Turnwold Plantation in Eatonton, Georgia, has roots in Central African storytelling 

traditions. As Werner notes, the oral stories that Harris recorded were brought from Africa and 

did not spontaneously emerge in the United States but rather had longstanding roots in Central 

African storytelling traditions:  

 The Uncle Remus stories, which suddenly became so popular about fifty years ago, not  

 only delighted both young and old, but attracted the serious attention of folklore students. 

 It is now generally recognized-though the point was hotly debated at first-that they  

 originally came from Africa, brought by the Negro slaves, who, in the southern states,  

 seem mostly to have belonged to Bantu-speaking tribes. (Werner “Brer Rabbit in Africa”) 



 

 

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It is now accepted as a matter of course that oral stories in the U.S. South come from an African 

storytelling tradition but this was not always the case. As Emily Zobel Marshall notes, at the time 

that Harris was collecting stories between 1870 and 1906, it was presumed that the stories 

formerly enslaved Africans were recounting were of Native American and/or European origin 

(Marshall 33). 

As the journey of the trickster rabbit is analyzed, it is important to remember that when 

Brother Rabbit tales were being collected by white American academics such as Joel Chandler 

Harris, the nation was steeped in notions of white supremacy. As Marshall notes, Brother Rabbit 

was denied his African heritage precisely because folklore scholarship in the 19th century was 

committed to downplaying Black culture so that segregation seemed reasonable and justified 

post-slavery, which legally ended with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865:    

The impact of a longer period of plantation slavery combined with these factors, and 

continued segregation under Jim Crow [...] affected the interpretation of the Brer Rabbit 

tales in America and resulted in the desire, amongst some members of the scholarly 

community in particular, to deny the African origins of the tales and manipulate the 

narratives to support damaging black stereotypes and Jim Crow laws. The need to 

legitimize segregation in the South in the twentieth century partly hinged on devaluing 

and ridiculing black culture, and the great origins debate reflects the complex and often 

contradictory attitudes white Americans had towards African American folklore during 

this period. (24) 

In other words, it was easier for most white Americans to believe and support segregation if they 

could be convinced that Black Americans had no culture and were supposedly subhuman in 

comparison to whites. The colonization of African Americans in the United States hinged on 



 

 

29 
 

dehumanizing not only African Americans’ bodies but also on stomping out any art or culture 

they produced. The paradox that Brother Rabbit tales presented in the 19th century is that they 

proved that Blacks in the U.S. South possessed a collective culture and consciousness at a time 

when Blacks supposedly had no culture. 

But the question remains: if Brother Rabbit was born in Central Africa among the Bantu 

people, how did he wind up in West African folklore? And most importantly, how did he end up 

in Mexico’s Southern Pacific Coast? As Kimberly A. Christen has noted, the trickster hare is not 

unique to Central Africa but can also be found among the West African Hausa people (245). The 

Hausa are a native ethnic group in West and Central Africa and reside in Nigeria, Niger, Benin, 

Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, 

Togo, Gabon, Gambia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, and the Republic of the Congo (“Hausa”). As 

Alice Werner has speculated, trickster hares became trickster rabbits in the so-called New World 

because there were no hares in the U.S. South:  

 Uncle Remus, knowing more about rabbits than hares, has turned him into Brer Rabbit,  

 just as the hyena (who cheats and ill-treats the hare, and is finally 'bested' by him) has  

 become Brer Wolf or Brer Fox. If Uncle Remus nearly always gives animals a title-'Brer  

 Rabbit,' 'Mis' Cow,' and so on-this must be because his African forefathers did the same;  

 we generally find them distinguished in some way when figuring in tales; sometimes,  

 indeed, they are called by quite a different name. (Werner “Introductory”) 

In the same fashion that African Americans in the U.S. South transformed the trickster hare into 

Brother Rabbit, Afro-Mexicans may have very well transformed Zomo the hare into Uncle 

Rabbit because there are no hares in the Costa Chica, which is a tropical region unsuitable for 

hares to live in. Moreover, instead of calling Zomo “brother” as African Americans in the U.S. 



 

 

30 
 

South do, Afro-Mexicans call Zomo “uncle” because it is a sign of respect. For example, when 

my mother’s close friends visit our home, I do not call them by their first names but call them tía 

or tío as a sign of respect and inclusion. The naming of this trickster hare as “uncle” in Afro-

Mexican folklore also points to the high ranking that he has among Afro-Mexicans in the Costa 

Chica. He is a folk character to be treated with respect and honor.  

  The oral tales of Zomo the clever hare fall under the Hausa’s tatsuniya genre of oral 

narrative (Christen 59). The tatsuniya storytellers are generally women, who use these tales to 

teach their children how to behave properly (Christen 59). As Christen notes, the tatsuniya is a 

feminine form of folklore that differs from other Hausa genres due to the human role that 

animals play in the tales:   

The tatsuniya genre is typified by its use of animals in human roles; that is, animals are 

given human characteristics. The stories are generally entertaining and educational; they 

contain morals and demonstrate socially acceptable ways of behaving in Hausa society.  

In addition, the Hausa have several other categories of oral narrative and prose: kirari, the 

praise-epitaph; yabo, the praise-song; labari, history and biography; and waka, poetry. 

Each of these genres was established prior to outside contact. (42) 

What this means is that the instruction of children and their rearing into proper citizens falls on 

the shoulders of women. Women it seems are responsible for keeping children entertained and 

teaching them about the values of the society that they are born into.  

What is also interesting about the tatsuniya genre is that it is not only used in the 

instruction of children but also as a form of back talk to oppressive regimes and systems. As 

Christen further notes, there are three main characters that make up the tatsuniya genre: Zomo, 

the trickster hare, Dila, the trickster jackal, and Gizo, the trickster spider (245). The Gizo is used 



 

 

31 
 

to point out the “economical, political, and social challenges [...] faced by the Hausa people. 

Because of the stratification of Hausa society, rural people are constantly under the control of the 

elite rulers. The stories of Gizo demonstrate the frustrations of the rural Hausa people with the 

imbalance of power in their society” (59). In other words, the Gizo becomes a way for the rural 

Hausa people to envision revenge on their unjust rules. Moreover, due to his small size, the Gizo 

demonstrates that one does not need to be stronger than one’s opponent to beat him, only 

brighter and more patient. 

 In one famous Gizo story, transcribed by Christen in Clowns and Tricksters: An 

Encyclopedia of Tradition and Culture (1998), Gizo takes revenge on a lion who has taken 

advantage of his generosity (59). One day Gizo was cooking fish and a lion came up to him and 

asked him for a fish. The lion kept on asking for more and more fish until Gizo had none left for 

himself or his family. Afterwards, Gizo came up with a plan to exact revenge on the lion. Once 

the lion was done eating, Gizo saw a bush owl and told the lion that he had made the bush owl’s 

beautiful spotted plumage and that now the bush owl was too conceited to even say hello to 

others. Upon seeing the beautiful spotted feathers on the owl, the lion begged Gizo to make him 

the same beautiful feathers. After much persuasion, Gizo agreed to make the lion feathers like 

the bush owl but Gizo told the lion that he would need to find a strong kazaura tree that would 

not snap once he was hung from it and a big bush cow for the process. Once the lion found a 

strong kazaura tree to be hung from and a big bush cow, the lion stretched himself out and 

allowed Gizo to bind him tightly and hang him from the tree. Once the lion was tightly bound to 

the kazaura tree, Gizo poked the lion with a hot skewer until he was covered in spots and left 

with the meat from the big bush cow. The gist of the Gizo tales is that even the smallest animals 

can fight back and bring down large and powerful animals if they are clever and bide their time. 



 

 

32 
 

These tales are told to boost morale and to encourage the Hausa to stand up for themselves in the 

face of injustice and powers that may seem greater than them.  

Afro-Mexicans’ unique sense of identity and culture is evident in their folklore. In the 

two trickster rabbit tales I examine from Jamás fandango al cielo, it is evident that folklore in the 

Costa Chica of Guerrero is influenced by West and Central African storytelling traditions. 

Instead of saying that the folklore in the Costa Chica strictly comes from West Africa or Central 

African storytelling traditions, I contend that it comes from both because Costa Chica folklore 

does not follow a strict West African or Central African pattern of storytelling. Moreover, it is 

also influenced by European and Native American traditions. After all, the tales are written in 

Spanish, but the Native American and European influences of Afro-Mexican oral tales are 

beyond the scope of this dissertation and its purpose, which is to highlight Mexico’s African 

heritage.  

Uncle Rabbit seems to embody both the spirit of Zomo, a trickster hare found in West and 

Central African Hausa folklore, and Wakalulu, a Central African trickster hare found among the 

Lamba people of Central Africa, Zimbabwe, and the Congo. At times, the Costa Chica Uncle 

Rabbit behaves like Zomo and hurts others simply for his own gain. As Christen notes, Zomo 

“uses his wisdom to get what he wants, in any way possible and without regard for other 

people’s wellbeing” (245). One example of Uncle Rabbit acting like Zomo can be seen in the 

folktale “El Tío Conejo.” In this tale, Uncle Rabbit thinks of a way to pay off his debts without 

having to pay anyone back. Uncle Rabbit claims to have corn for sale and he goes around town 

selling corn. Aunt Cockroach, Aunt Hen, the fox, the dog, the tiger, and the hunter all purchase 

corn from Uncle Rabbit. Uncle Rabbit gives them each a different time to stop by and pick up 

the corn. When Aunt Cockroach arrives, Uncle Rabbit pretends to be making atole, a hot corn 



 

 

33 
 

beverage. But, in reality, he is boiling a rock in a pot of water. When Uncle Rabbit sees Aunt 

Hen coming down the road, he feigns concern for Aunt Cockroach’s safety and orders her to 

hide in the corn husks. When Aunt Hen arrives to collect her corn, Uncle Rabbit keeps her 

entertained by telling her that a treat is waiting for her in the cornhusks. Aunt Hen spots Aunt 

Cockroach in the corn husks and eats her. Uncle Rabbit repeats this pattern of deceit until all of 

his clients are dead (38). In this tale, the trickster rabbit only thinks about himself and his own 

survival rather than anyone else’s.  

But at times, Uncle Rabbit also takes on the characteristics of Wakalulu. According to 

Christen, Wakalulu, a cunning Central African hare, represents “a character who proves that 

power does not belong only to the strong and that actions may have more than one outcome” 

(Christen 223). In the Costa Chica folktale “El Conejo, El Leon y El Grillo” (The Rabbit, the 

Lion, and the Cricket), Uncle Rabbit puts an end to the lion’s boasting by pitting him against 

King Cricket, the king of all the insects (57). In this tale, Uncle Rabbit resembles Wakalulu and 

brings down the lion a notch not out of sheer joy but to remind the lion that as much as he may 

boast and brag about being the strongest and fiercest, a pack of unified, small insects can still 

bring him down. Thus, Uncle Rabbit acts the way he does to keep the lion’s hubris in check and 

to remind everyone else that when they work together, they are not powerless against the lion. 

The lion is of course a metaphor for oppressive regimes and institutions that abuse their power. 

Trickster tales seem to be used to boost morale and remind people who believe that they are 

powerless that they are not powerless when they work collectively towards a common goal.  

Given the colonial history of Africans in Mexico, it is understandable that some scholars 

would avoid focusing on Africa. Mexico’s African history as a whole is undervalued and 

underestimated. For as much as Mexican scholars have repeatedly claimed that there is no color 



 

 

34 
 

line in Mexico, there clearly is one and there are heritages and histories in Mexico that are more 

valued and celebrated than others. The undervaluing and underestimating of Mexico’s African 

culture can be seen clearly in the prefaces in Jamás fandango al cielo, which will be analyzed in 

the next section.  

 

Section III: A Brief History of Race in Latin America & the Prefaces in Jamás fandango al cielo 

 

 In this section, I present a brief history of race in Latin America before analyzing the 

prefaces to Jamás fandango al cielo. It is only by understanding the way that race has developed 

in Mexico and much of Latin America that the prefaces to Jamás can make sense and can be 

understood as the attempt of scholars to fit Afro-Mexican folklore into popular understandings of 

race at the time.  

The Regional Units of Popular Cultures, based in Mexico, compiled the oral tales in 

Jamás fandango al cielo as part of their larger Afro-Mexican awareness project called Our Third 

Root: Presence of African Cultures in Mexico in 1989. The aim of the project was to shed light 

on Mexico’s African history and its Afro-Mexican population. The goal of Our Third Root 

involved challenging assumptions about Mexican identity that had been cemented in perceptions 

of Mexico’s past.  

In these prefaces, the researchers who were appointed to highlight Mexico’s Afro-

Mexican folklore did so in a way that left readers questioning whether Afro-Mexican culture 

even existed in the Costa Chica. As will be seen, in the prefaces, Mexico’s Afro-Mexican people 

are sometimes presented as not being African at all but rather Black Spaniards. The point here is 



 

 

35 
 

that the researchers at times seem to want to reinforce a politics of mestizo Mexico instead of 

questioning the validity of a notion of mestizo Mexico altogether.  

As David Dalton notes, talks of unifying the Mexican nation under the banner of 

mestizaje predate the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and actually came about during the 

Porfiriato (1876-1911):  

Mestizaje (both cultural and genetic) represented a means through which Amerindians 

could assimilate to the state, but it also became a tool for erasing indigenous societies. 

The key functional role of racial hybridity became especially clear in Mexico by the late 

nineteenth century, when the científicos—a group of positivist bureaucrats in the 

Porfirian administration—began to invoke paradigms of eugenics. Because most people 

in the country (including elites) were mestizos to some degree, Mexican eugenics 

rejected the northern European belief that racial miscegenation was necessarily 

dysgenic […] the very existence of these debates shows that discourses of race, science, 

and the body were already mutually constructing each other in an attempt to define the 

Mexican nation long before the Revolution. (4) 

In essence, Mexico’s elites walked a tightrope. They wanted to move the Mexican nation 

towards “progress” and “modernity” but they had to find a way to explain and exalt their own 

Native American ancestry, which at the time was believed to be naturally inferior to and the 

opposite of western European and American modernity.   

 

 

 

 



 

 

36 
 

A Brief History of Race Relations in Latin America 

 

One of the Mexican scholars who popularized mestizaje in Mexico was José 

Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos’ work La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (The 

Cosmic Race: Mission of the Ibero-American Race) (1925) is arguably the most cited and most 

controversial work when it comes to race relations in post-Revolutionary Mexico. His work 

detailed the ideal way in which the Mexican race or what he referred to as such ought to progress 

and mix or not mix with other races. In his work he declared that the Mexican people were a 

Europeanized people, who possessed Spanish blood, and that Mexico’s Native Americans had no 

other door to the future but one that had been paved by European civilization (Vasconcelos 16). 

In Vasconcelos’s racial plans for the Mexican nation, the Native American and Black races cease 

to exist and give way to the mestizo race, which supposedly makes up contemporary Mexican 

society: 

The lower types of the species will be absorbed by the superior type. In this manner, for 

example, the Black could be redeemed, and step-by-step, by voluntary extinction, the 

uglier stocks will give way to the more handsome. […] The Indian  [Native American], 

by grafting onto the related race, would take the jump of millions of years that separate 

Atlantis from our times, and in a few decades of aesthetic eugenics, the Black may 

disappear, together with the types that a free instinct of  beauty may go on signaling as 

fundamentally recessive and undeserving. (32) 

When read in the context of Mexico’s colonial period, Vasconcelos could be seen as carrying out 

what Spanish census takers initially planned for New Spain’s population: a disappearance of 

Blacks and Native Americans altogether. As Patricia Seed notes, the most detailed census taken 



 

 

37 
 

in 1811 in Mexico City did not distinguish between castizos, mestizos, mulattos, or racially 

mixed persons but referred to them all as castas instead (577). In a similar manner, Vasconcelos 

championed a future for Mexico where race did not exist.   

Other notable scholars such as Fernando Ortiz and Néstor García Canclini can be seen as 

creating theories related to Vasconcelos’s theory of mestizaje. These two theories promote false 

homogeneity. In his work Cuban Counterpoints: Tobacco and Sugar (1940), Fernando Ortiz 

coined the term “transculturation” and argued that Cubans were a neo cultural people making up 

the sum of peoples from all corners of the world:  

The Negroes brought with their bodies their souls, but not their institutions nor their 

implements. They were of different regions, races, languages, cultures, classes, ages, 

sexes, thrown promiscuously into the slave ships, and socially equalized by the same 

system of slavery […]. After the Negroes began the influx of Jews, French, Anglo-

Saxons, Chinese and peoples from the four quarters of the globe. They were all coming to 

a new world, all on the way to a more or less rapid process of transculturation. I am of the 

opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process 

of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring 

another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the 

process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could 

be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of 

a new cultural phenomenon, which could be called neoculturation. (Ortiz 102)  

Ortiz’s genealogical walk through the waves of people who have voluntarily or involuntarily 

arrived in Cuba is similar to Vasconcelos’s theory of mestizaje in that out of many people a 

supposed homogenous neo cultural people will emerge. As one reads Ortiz’s work, it is 



 

 

38 
 

important to note the historical context in which his theory emerged. As Robert Whitney notes, 

“in the 1930’s the “Cubanness”—or lack thereof—of the island’s population was of great 

concern to state leaders” (297). Cuba needed immigrants and they especially wanted Spanish 

immigrants to make their home in Cuba; but they also needed Haitians and West Indian workers 

to fill up eastern Cuba and tend to the sugar harvest (Whitney 297). How can a cohesive nation 

emerge out of supposedly opposite peoples? Ortiz’s response is that Cubans were a neo cultural 

people with a new distinct Cuban culture.    

In a similar manner, in Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity 

(1995), Néstor García Canclini argues that Latin American theories concerning race in the 

Americas such as mestizaje, syncretism and creolization can be thought of as the forerunners of 

his proposed theory of hybridity. He defines hybridity not as the mixing of races per se but the 

mixing of technologies:  

These terms—mestizaje, syncretism, creolization—continue to be used in a good part of 

the anthropological and ethnohistorical literature to specify particular, more or less 

classic, forms of hybridization. But how does one designate fusions between mass media 

and urban working-class cultures, between the consumer styles of different generations, 

between local and transnational musics, that take place on the borders and in large cities 

(but not only there)? The word hybridization seems more ductile for the purpose of 

naming not only the mixing of ethnic or religious elements but the products of advanced 

technologies and modern or postmodern social processes. (García Canclini 

“Introduction”) 

In essence, García Canclini moves beyond the nation and notes the hybridization that is already 

occurring at a global scale. As he notes, technology allows for a hybridization that transcends 



 

 

39 
 

international borders, age groups, urban and rural residents, and white- and blue-collar workers. 

Although García Canclini’s theory may appear to be inclusive, it is important to keep in mind 

that his theory of hybridity still borrows from Lamarckism, a branch in the field of eugenics that 

stresses nurture over nature, and also it does not consider the voluntary/involuntary relationship 

that transnational communities across various socioeconomic sectors are having with technology.  

As García Canclini himself notes, he borrows from Brian Stross’s theory of “cycles of 

hybridization” to describe how societies move from “the discrete to the hybrid, and to new 

discrete forms” again and again (“Introduction”). García Canclini’s arguments is that there is no 

such thing as cultural purity and that that which appears to be pure is actually a hybrid 

(“Introduction”). Brian Stross, whom García Canclini borrows from, is himself a champion of 

Lamarkian eugenics. As Stross states, it is better to focus on hybridizing people culturally rather 

than genetically because a person’s genetic makeup cannot be changed whereas lifestyles can be 

changed. In essence, Stross stresses that a person’s environment (nurture) can shape individuals:   

Cultural hybrids are created through such processes as diffusion (or borrowing), 

invention, learning, cultural assimilation, and construction, among others. Human 

institutions or activities that deliver these processes include trade (commerce), warfare 

(conquest), travel (tourism), education (school), marriage, friendship, ethnography, and 

other forms of social interaction. All of these promote heterogeneity, thus contributing to 

the production of hybrids and through them hybridity. (264) 

Stross argues that sexual mixing between the races is not the only way to create a hybrid people. 

Hybrid people are also created through diverse inputs such as school, travel, and commerce. 

Having access to different viewpoints and being able to travel to other countries and trade with 



 

 

40 
 

others also creates hybrids, according to Stross. Similarly to the científicos of yore, Stross argues 

that hybrids can be created through technology.  

  These critics have of course not gone unchecked by others in academia. As Pedro Palou 

notes, José Vasconcelos’ grand ideas about incorporating the aboriginal Mexican peoples had 

more to do with making them productive and getting a profit out of them than really creating a 

unified Mexican family or a sense of mexicanidad:  

Vasconcelos en La raza cósmica, publicada en 1925, consideraba el mestizaje como 

salvación, la mezcla pacífica de las razas en una nueva, biológica y culturalmente más 

fuerte. Si bien esa utopía autoritaria devino discurso y política pública, el origen mismo 

de la idea de mestizaje representaba una aporía insoluble: incorporar al indígena a la 

nueva realidad productiva; convertirlo en ciudadano implicaba modernizarlo, hacerlo 

partícipe del único modo de producción posible para ese liberalismo, el capitalismo 

industrial. (15) 

Vasconcelos in The Cosmic Race, published in 1925, considered mestizaje as salvation, 

the peaceful mixture of races into a new, biologically, and culturally stronger one. 

Although this authoritarian utopia became discourse and public policy, the very origin of 

the idea of mestizaje represented a difficult roadblock: to incorporate the indigenous into 

the new productive reality; to convert them into citizens implied modernizing them, 

making them participants in the only mode of production possible for this liberalism, 

industrial capitalism.  

Talks of mestizaje then were aimed at romanticizing the forced mixture of the races. Mexico’s 

aboriginal peoples could only hope to enter modernity by becoming less indigenous and 

shedding their “backward” ways so that they could enter into the capitalist mainstream and 



 

 

41 
 

supposedly better their race and the nation. Mestizaje also serves as a gaslighting rhetoric in that 

it negates racial difference while calling for the “bettering of the race” in the same breath. In this 

new envisioned nation, all the races are mixed, therefore race supposedly does not exist. 

Moreover, it is a way to reward those indigenous peoples who move away from their roots. The 

more they move away from their roots the more “modern” they supposedly become.  

 Antonio Cornejo Polar also critiques Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation, 

describing it as, “the most sophisticated disguise of the category of mestizaje” (761). As for 

Cornejo Polar’s thoughts on mestizaje, he argues that mestizaje tries to create a false sense of 

unity:  

 What mestizaje does is to offer a harmonious image of what is obviously disjointed and 

 confrontational, proposing representations that deep down are only relevant to those for  

 whom it is convenient to imagine our societies as smooth and non-conflictive spaces of 

 coexistence. (761) 

In essence, mestizaje does not really serve the needs of those it claims to represent but is instead 

an ideology that soothes those who imagine there is harmony where there is none. One popular 

adage in Mexico City sums up Mexico’s failure to unify the nation, which is “juntos pero no 

revueltos,” which literally translates to “together but not mixed.”   

 As Alberto Moreiras notes in his work The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), García 

Canclini’s theory of “hybridity” incorporated many of the theories that came before it. As 

Moreiras argues, “hybridity might in the present come close to becoming, on its performative 

side, a sort of ideological cover for capitalist reterritorialization—and even a key conceptual 

instrument for the very process of naturalization of subaltern exclusion” (267). Moreiras’s point 

is that “hybridity,” like mestizaje, pushes modernity through technology.  



 

 

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These “cycles of hybridity” or mestizaje are exactly what Ileana Rodríguez regards as the 

death blow to Latin American studies in her essay “Postmodern Theory and Cultural Criticism” 

(2022). As Rodríguez notes, “Latin America suffers from a terminal condition that consists in 

never reaching up to the “real” modern and is therefore always being defined at best by its 

mixtures. This is the effect of its colonial and postcolonial condition.” (616). In making this 

comment, Rodríguez is urging her readers to consider that much of postmodern discussion in 

Latin America is still focused on hybridity. As I have shown in this section, concepts such as 

mestizaje, transculturation, and hybridity all share a common denominator of being defined by 

their mixture.  

But after all, what does this have to do with the prefaces to Jamás fandango al cielo? I 

bring up a brief history of race relations in Latin America precisely because it frames how 

scholars interpreted the oral, Afro-Mexican folktales they were encountering in the Costa Chica. 

The prefaces to Jamás fandango al cielo reveal how scholars struggled to reconcile Mexico’s 

needs for modernity and the actual existence of a thriving Afro-diasporic culture and people in 

Mexico.  

For this reason, the reader will see that Afro-Mexicans are rhetorically transformed into 

Black Spaniards and moved away from their African heritage in order to fit into a Eurocentric 

model of Mexican modernity. For Mexico to successfully move into modernity, the dominant 

story goes, indigenous subjects must willingly give up claim to their ancestral lands and the 

African must be erased or whitened.  

Mexico’s colonial project and goals for reaching modernity have consisted of 

downplaying their African heritage; and even when African heritage is acknowledged, Afro-

Mexican scholarship is defined by its connections to Spain and Europe rather than Africa. These 



 

 

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Eurocentric claims of course rest on the belief that Spain itself has not been influenced by its 

North African neighbors. 

 

The scholarly white-washing of Mexico’s Afro-Mexicans and Jamás fandango al cielo  

 

The idea of a Mexico that is devoid of Blackness is so profound and cemented into the 

nation that it has even affected how Mexican anthropologists depict the Afro-Mexican subject. 

The first anthropological work ever conducted on Afro-Mexicans was carried out by Mexican 

anthropologist, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. In 1946, he completed the first monograph on Afro 

descendants in Mexico while he was a doctoral student in African Anthropology at Northwestern 

University. His work La población negra de México: Estudio etnohistórico (The Black 

Population of Mexico: Ethnographic Study) (1946) proved that New Spain participated in the 

Atlantic slave trade and that Africans had influenced the customs and practices of indigenous 

people and Mexican life. Aguirre Beltrán’s work came at a time when most Mexicans denied that 

Africans existed in Mexico and that slavery was once practiced in the country (Green 658). And 

moreover, it came at a time when influential scholars such as Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas 

began to examine the cultural production of Blacks in other parts of the African Diaspora.  

Unfortunately, just as the world was turning to the study of Afro-Mexicans, Aguirre 

Beltrán tried to close the doors on Afro-Mexican studies with his work Cuijla, esbozo 

etnográfico de un pueblo negro (Cuijla, Ethnographic Sketch of a Black Village) (1958). In this 

work, he claimed that Blacks had only left behind their history but that they themselves did not 

exist like Blacks existed in other Latin American countries:  



 

 

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En aquellos países donde el negro es un fenómeno de viva actualidad, el afro-

americanista, al realizar sus investigaciones, puede conformarse con los instrumentos 

comunes que le ofrece el método y las técnicas antropológicas, sin buscar mayor 

profundidad que la que suministra la información de las gentes que tiene bajo su directa 

observación; más en esos países, como México, donde no existe ya el negro como grupo 

diferenciado, sólo la perspectiva histórica es capaz de proporcionar el panorama exacto e 

integral […]. Negros hubo en México desde el momento de la Conquista; su número 

creció cuando el imperialismo español estructuró la explotación de la colonia a base de 

una sociedad dividida en castas; decreció al advenimiento del híbrido libre que hizo 

incosteable la mano de obra esclavista y desapareció, por mestizaje, en el correr de la 

etapa Independiente. (7)  

 In those countries where the Black is a living phenomenon, the African-Americanist,  

 when carrying out his investigations, can be satisfied with the common instruments that  

 the anthropological method and techniques offer him, without looking for greater depth  

 than that provided by the information of the people he has under his direct observation;  

 but in those countries, such as Mexico, where Blacks no longer exist as a differentiated  

 group, only the historical perspective is capable of providing an exact and integral  

 panorama [...]. There were Blacks in Mexico from the moment of the Conquest; their  

 number increased when Spanish imperialism structured the exploitation of the colony on  

 the basis of a society divided into castes; it decreased with the advent of the free hybrid  

 that made slave labor unaffordable and disappeared, due to crossbreeding, during the  

 Independent stage. 



 

 

45 
 

In essence, Aguirre Beltrán argues that Blacks no longer exist in Mexico because they are 

racially mixed and not truly Black like the Blacks in the United States or in other parts of the 

Americas. Aguirre Beltrán’s negation of Blackness is in some ways similar to Vasconcelos’. 

Like Vasconcelos, Aguirre Beltrán uses the argument of purity to negate Blackness. There are 

supposedly no Blacks in Mexico because there are no pure Blacks. Despite Aguirre Beltrán’s 

claim that Afro-Mexicans are not truly Black, his work detailed the most intimate parts of Afro-

Mexican life such as marriage, death, and courtship practices as well as the roles that men, 

women, and children played in Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero. Ironically, saying that Blacks did not 

exist in Mexico seemed to have pushed some researchers to seek out Blacks in Mexico.  

For example, in 1989, the same year that Cuijla was published, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla 

launched Our Third Root, a project which sought to challenge mestizo Mexico. He denounced 

Mexican discourses that attempted to construct a homogenous popular culture in Mexico. And he 

asserted that national homogeneity came at the detriment of indigenous and racial minorities 

whose languages and way of life were constantly under attack by the nation’s imposed concept 

of a homogenous mestizo Mexico (Bonfil Batalla XVII). He saw Mexico as being made up of an 

“imaginary Mexico,” which consisted of the dominant mestizo elite, and a México profundo (true 

Mexico), which reflected the real Mexican society and its general population:   

 The recent history of Mexico, that of the last five hundred years, is the story of permanent 

 confrontation between those attempting to direct the country toward the path of Western  

 civilization and those […] who resist. The first plan arrived with the European invaders  

 but was not abandoned with independence. The new groups in power, first the creoles  

 and later the mestizos, never renounced the westernization plan […]. Thus, the diverse  

 national visions used to organize Mexican society during different periods since   



 

 

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 independence have all been created within a Western framework. In none of them has the 

 reality of the México profundo had a  place. Instead, it has been viewed only as a symbol  

 of backwardness and an obstacle to be overcome. (Bonfil Batalla XV)  

In his writing, Bonfil Batalla pointed out that Mexico, although independent, still held onto 

notions of European superiority, which first Spanish colonizers left behind and then the creoles, 

the children or grandchildren of the Spaniards sent by the King of Spain to rule Mexico, and then 

the mestizos, the combination of Spanish, Black, Indian, or any other ethnicity in Mexico, 

continued to rule Mexico with notions of European superiority. Those who rose to power 

consistently visualized for Mexico a racial future like that espoused by European colonizers who 

had come from Spain.  

 In line with Bonfil Batalla’s philosophy of promoting the true Mexico and highlighting 

the many vibrant cultures and peoples that made up Mexican society, a team of anthropologists 

set out to the Costa Chica of Guerrero and compiled a collection of folktales under the title 

Jamás fandango al cielo. In the preface of the collection, Malinali Meza Herrera praises Bonfil 

Batalla and his commitment to unearthing the real Mexico before detailing the research and 

methods used to compile Jamás fandango al cielo (9).  

The goal of Jamás fandango al cielo was to move away from the idea of a homogenous, 

mestizo Mexico, but throughout the preface, prologue, and introduction, written by each 

anthropologist of the project, the notion of a homogenous and Europeanized mestizo culture is 

reinforced rather than contested.  

In the preface to the collection, historian and ethnologist, Malinali Meza Herrera asserts 

that the Afro-Mexican culture is in danger of extinction and that very few Afro-Mexicans can 

recall any folk stories of the past:  



 

 

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 Al recrear el cuento, el narrador nos lleva a escenas anteriores, cuando la televisión no  

 había hecho su aparición y era común en la Costa, que los pequeños se sentaran   

 acuclillados alrededor de los viejos para escuchar sus historias; las chancas, los   

 duendes, pescados de muchos colores, el Tío Conejo que se burla de todos […]. Hoy, eso  

 ha quedado atrás, muy pocos se acuerdan de los cuentos […] algunos viejos, jóvenes y  

 niños, se acuerdan aun lo que les han contado. (10) 

 In recreating the story, the narrator takes us back to a previous time, when televisions had 

 not yet appeared and it was common on the Costa Chica, for the little ones to sit squatting 

 around the old people to listen to their stories; the pigeons, the elves, the colorful fish,  

 Uncle Rabbit making fun of everyone [...]. Today, that is behind us, and very few   

 remember the stories [...] some old people, young people and children, still remember  

 what they have been told.           

Meza’s statement about oral tales being in danger of extinction is contradicted by the fact that 

several young people and children in the Costa Chica towns of San Nicolás Tolentino, 

Maldonado, and Huehuetan could recall oral folktales as late as the 1990s (Díaz Pérez 22). 

Moreover, the people in these towns could recall oral stories of the past despite technological 

advances such as television sets and radios in their homes (Díaz