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Marco Polo Hernández Cueva. The Afro-Mexican Ancestors and the Nation They Constructed. Edwin Mellen Press, 2015, 160 pp.
The title itself responds with no ambiguities whatsoever to the basic question addressed in the book: who constructed what we conceive as the Mexican nation in modern times? If contemporary historiography denies that the Spaniards discovered America and it is still difficult to deconstruct the concept of Madre Patria-or Motherland-to refer to Spain, it is perhaps more difficult to refine the convenient concept of mestizaje, that is, racial hybridization, mixture of different ethnic groups, fusion of different cultures, simple combination of human beings of dissimilar physical characteristics through copulation. The concept is used not only in Mexico but all throughout Latin America to exclude the enslaved Africans and prioritize, somehow, the Native Americans-or First Nations, as Dr. Hernández Cuevas suggests they should be called. A social construct, effectively, the word mestizo seems to attenuate blackness, African ancestry, and carefully evades the reality that, after all, there is one race-that happens to have originated in Africa. Dark skin seems to be an issue with the imperial powers that cannot conceive of the other as equal and even dare to portray their Christ as a white, blond man with blue eyes-a most unlikely depiction of the King of Jews.
The Afro-Mexican Ancestors and the Nation They Constructed is a collection of essays-two of them previously published in specialized journals-that come together admirably to assert that, when it comes to evaluate the essential contribution of Africans and Afrodescendants in contemporary Mexico, there has been a systematic erasure of their deeds and a carefully planned postponement of their recognition. As a result of such absurd whitening of historical evidence, Mexican nationals have been lead to a veritable denial of their origins and those few who embrace their black ancestry tend to be marginalized, condemned to economic displacement, subject to social discrimination and treated as second-rate citizens, ironically, by their own brothers.
Perhaps the most attractive feature of Dr. Hernández Cuevas' text is that very dissimilar chapters-there is a common thread in two of them-somehow come together to prove the carefully planned and perhaps masterfully executed exclusion of a numerous group that has contributed much and gathered precious little, if anything, in...