Chocolate and corn flour : history, race, and place in the making of "Black" Mexico / Laura A. Lewis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lewis, Laura A., 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black people--Mexico.

Black people.

Black people--Race identity--Mexico.

Race relations.

Black people--Race identity.

Mexico--Race relations.

Mexico.

Physical Description:

xv, 370 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2012.

Summary:

Located on Mexico's Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolás has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town's residents, however, call themselves morenos (black Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolás, focusing on the ways that local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, including community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness-as a way of identifying themselves and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community. Book jacket.

Contents:

The lay of the land

Identity in discourse : the "race" has been lost

Identity in performance

Africa in Mexico, an intellectual history

Culture work : so much money

Being from here

A family divided? : centripetal and centrifugal forces

Transnationalism, place and the mundane.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822351214

0822351218

9780822351320

0822351323

OCLC:

748287037