Images from an Afro-Mexican History of the Imagination

By Itza Amanda Varela Huerta

On a bus ride from Puerto Escondido to Cuajinicuilapa, I’m thinking about blackness, African heritage, and Afro-Mexicanness: what are the possibilities of finding a space to imagine what they are, how they’re composed? What is its materiality? What opportunities are there for the mark of raciality to operate so far from the centers of power? Above all, I’m wondering how to imagine, conceive, and enact the history of the Afro-Mexican community, the pages of which continue to be written outside of the halls of academia. At any rate, I’m interested in thinking on the same wavelength as the other forms of filling Afro-Mexican blackness with meaning.

Who can explain Afro-Mexican blackness outside the purview of the written word—and how? As I see it, the three sections of this exhibition seek not to answer the question of what Afro-Mexican blackness is, but rather to nourish the different representational forms of this group of differentiated political identities.

The Dance of the Devils can be read, interpreted, and mobilized from different points of view: as a folkloric dance, a form of community play, a political strategy, or an essentialized tradition of the traces of Africanness, among many others. None of these is right or wrong; I am more interested in thinking about the ways in which that dance is chain of signs whose links constitute one of the many notions of Afro-Mexican blackness today. I’m referring specifically to the masks used as the finishing touch in the attire of this dance, which Afro-Mexican Black people claim as truly and uniquely their own.

David Montaño Roque presents unity in diversity—that is, the aesthetic mark proper to Afro-Mexican blackness—by crafting the different countenances of the devil masks. Each community, each individual participant in the Dance of the Devils imprints their mask with the elements that make it possible to convey a feeling—fear, joy, fantasy, laughter, suspense—but the masks in this exhibition always refer unquestionably back to Afro-Mexican blackness on the Costa Chica of Guerrero, Mexico.

Through the lens of Allan Fis we encounter another way of trying to capture—in the strict academic sense of the word capture—Afro-Mexican blackness: what do an outsider’s eyes see? By outsider, I mean someone whose way of seeing has not been shaped by the constitution of the Mexican racial, political, and cultural order; someone whose eyes are not those of Black, Afro-Mexican identity, outside the everyday life, and who appreciates, as I do, the beauty that inheres in the devil masks, and the importance of putting the lives and dignity of people from the Costa Chica at the forefront of photographic discourse.

A woman who challenged their history: Aydeé Rodríguez, painter

It’s a Friday night during a cool spring in Mexico City. I grab my phone, sit down in my study, turn on my computer, and wait for the Afro-Mexican painter Aydeé Rodríguez (Comaltepec, Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero, 1954) to pick up my call. Cuaji is her base of operations. I hear a sweet voice on the other line. I’ve seen her paintings thanks to the staff at Proyectos Monclova, who sent me some images of them. Our conversation begins with a few questions about Aydeé’s health; she tells me that it’s still fragile, that her diabetes limits the time she’s able to concentrate. Her head is bursting with images of the coastal communities she has come to know, but at the same time her physical pain butts in like it’s keeping time.

Every time I speak with a Black Afro-Mexican artist, the Centro Cultural El Cimarrón organized by Father Glynn Jemmot on the Costa Chica, comes up, and this conversation is no different. Aydeé tells me how she met Jemmot at his old restaurant in Cuaji, accompanied by Sergio Peñaloza. Jemmot and Peñaloza are two activists who led the debates in the Costa Chica community about Black identity and Black difference in the late 1990s. Although they hold different points of view, stemming from Peñaloza’s experience growing up in Cuaji versus Jemmot’s in the Caribbean, both of them contributed to the development of a meaningful black Afro-Mexican discourse.

Who fills a historical narrative with images? It is important that artists like Aydeé have space to undertake the central operation of history from two standpoints that are regarded as legitimate on the streets, but questioned by the academy. The first of these is the power of the imagination with respect to the public history of blackness, or the place of the visual arts—in other words, a standpoint that prioritizes imagination over the written word.

I’m taken aback when Aydeé tells me what happened when she met “the black leaders on the Costa Chica:” they made fun of the paintings she had on display in her restaurant, and they asked her who had made those images of Black people on the coast. Aydeé told them that it was a woman who went around selling her art in exchange for food. She denied being the artist because, in her experience with the other gatekeepers of local culture, people had commented about her “silly habit of painting nothing but ugly, big-lipped, bow-legged Black people.”

Then came the time in Mexico when Afro-Mexican blackness was recognized as an important political identity—so important that in 2019 these people, towns, and communities were finally incorporated into the Constitution of Mexico as part of the multi-cultural nation. What could be done to ensure that this recognition would also encompass Aydeé’s work and the community’s own ways of seeing and debating Afro-Mexican blackness?

It is vitally important for these other histories of Afro-Mexican blackness that spaces like Proyectos Monclova—with their connections to contemporary art and to sectors that are not strictly academic, political, nor part of civil society but rather part of the international art world—be able to show that the diversity of images, aesthetic diversity, and therefore, our notions of beauty have also been shaped by the pattern of coloniality that has been described in the social-anthropological work of Aníbal Quijano.

Aydeé mixes local elements, like redondos, thatched-roof houses that have all but disappeared, and which the anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán identifies as a point of connection between Africa and parts of Guerrero and Oaxaca in his canonical text Cuijla, esbozo etnográfico de un pueblo negro [Cuijla: An Ethnographic Sketch of a Black Community]. To continue along the path of the imagination: for Aydeé, anthropological knowledge about the redondo gives a direction to the public history of blackness in Mexico; at the same time—as she indicated to me during our phone call—it is a childhood memory of her own, of her home, of the feelings that associate us with what is familiar, what is known.

The painter puts three Black women at the center of some of her other pieces, two of whom look directly at us, their hands laden with local products; I imagine that one of their baskets might contain turtle eggs. The woman whose back is turned to us reveals her black, curly hair and curvaceous silhouette: Black, Afro-Mexican women from the coast, in the foreground, on land; in the sea, also in the foreground, there are small boats with men fishing from them. Life on the coast, Black life on the Costa Chica as Aydeé describes it to me, responds to the images that come up in everyday life.

Aydeé’s journey has not been easy. Like many women from the coastal area, she moved to Mexico City, where she lived for twelve years before returning to Cuaji. There, in her place in the world, her new life showed up all at once: painting, the art she inherited from the women in her family, imposed itself on her hands, on her mind. She started researching and painting the Black people, towns, and communities from which she originates. Thus, with endless patience—a gendered patience, I would say—the artist defended her art. Hardly understood at first, it is the same art that has brought us together in this text, in this exhibition space.

Our perceptions of Afro-Mexican blackness are closely tied to colonial imaginaries. We usually think in terms of representations that come from the global North when we consider questions about race or about what the discipline of anthropology has called ethnic identities. It is important to affirm Aydeé’s story in order to see the ways in which social inequalities prevent women like her from developing their talents without having to bear the burden of structural racism, which crushes the dreams of children and women—cis and trans alike—in the Mexican geographies of terror.

At the same time, it is also important to tell the stories of people like Aydeé. It is important to hear about the forms of resistance she has encountered, but also the circumstances under which she has built the wings of her imagination. She started painting at the age of 38 because of a promise she had made to her grandmother, because of the importance that the women in her family had as community artists.

Aydeé tells me something that will inspire this document: she makes “history from voices.” She goes to different towns that are recognized as Black and Afro-Mexican, and invites the people there to tell her about how they imagine blackness: the past, present, and future then find themselves on canvases that the artist activates as the visual history of their voices. By the same stroke with which she constructs and imagines these towns’ memories, she cracks open mestizo discourses about the origins of the grand fantasy of Mexicanness as a homogeneous entity.

Afro-Mexican blackness: From the margin the multi-cultural center

“Back then, nobody would tell you about that history. We grew up without realizing who we were, because that’s how our parents were.”

Aydeé Rodríguez

If Afro-Mexican blackness as a political identity is under construction, destabilizing the categories of race, ethnicity, identity, and racialization as fixed political-academic units, one hopes that the visual art of Black people, towns, and communities will destabilize the Eurocentric gaze that has shaped what we understand as beautiful, as canonical, as contemporary art. It is only with Black Afro-Mexican artists that our representations will cease to fuel fantasies about difference as a commodity and we will be able to conceive plurality as that which sustains and reproduces human and non-human life.

The works in this exhibition are an invitation to see from certain perspectives, and (un)learn others, what we recognize as beautiful and canonical—and not just in the artistic realm. That is what makes this show important: the beauty reflected by Allan’s camera in relation to the bodily markings of coastal life; the beauty of the horsehair used as the beard of the main devil in David’s masks, and the importance of seeing the beautiful in the everyday, in the imagination, and in the struggle for history in Aydeé’s paintings.

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