When Hugo Arellanes Antonio moved from his rural hometown of San Juan Bautista Lo de Soto to his nation’s capital, Mexico City, in 2014, he hadn’t planned on staying in Mexico City.
Scheduled for only a few days of vacation, Arellanes found he liked the city, and after being offered work as a wedding photographer, he decided to stay.
The Mexican capital was different from his southwestern hometown. Arellanes said he hadn’t always been able to get work as a photographer back in San Juan Bautista Lo de Soto because photography was often not valued as real work. “It’s like it’s not considered a job: It’s like a hobby,” Arellanes explained. “For the people in my community, working means that you’re going to sweat, that your hands are going to hurt, that you’re going to suffer.”
Tourists often visited his hometown, but few contributed to the local economy. Most purchased their tourist trinkets in the region’s larger cities — places like Oaxaca, Acapulco, and Puerto Escondido. Tourists only come to smaller locales along the state of Oaxaca’s Pacific coast to take their own, stylized picturesque photos.
Arellanes said that in San Juan Bautista Lo de Soto, most people would photograph houses that might be in disrepair or a young child whose clothes looked a little shabby. In his predominantly Afro Mexican and Indigenous town, the people were being characterized by photos that portrayed them as poor and illiterate. Given a camera by his parents, Arellanes had begun taking his own photographs to show his community in a new light. When he brought his love of photography to Mexico City, he also brought his desire to widen knowledge about the nation’s Afro Mexican communities.
Hugo Arellanes Antonio photos
Arellanes has some of his documentary and conceptual photographs on view through December 2, 2024, as part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s “Visibility & Resistance: New Acquisitions, Contemporary Afro-Mexican Photography” exhibit. He leads Huella Negra (Black Footprint), an organization that pushes for the recognition and civil rights of Afro Mexicans —– particularly those living in Mexico City. “I had already started Huella Negra on the coast,” he said. “What we wanted to do was to make it clear that Afrodescendants exist in Mexico because very little is known about our history –– our history has been made invisible, or never been told. And for us, it was important to start telling it.”
Enslaved West Africans came to Mexico via landing sites in the ports of Veracruz, Campeche, and Acapulco. From there, they were dispersed throughout the country. By the mid-17th century, Mexico’s African population was larger than its enslaving European population; according to anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, it had increased from 0.6% to 2%, while Europeans barely amounted to 0.8%.
The African influence took sway over Mexican food, dance, and culture, but acknowledgment and appreciation of the African presence in Mexico were not widely promoted. Mexico’s Black heritage was not chronicled in the nation’s history books. Even in Black communities, activities like African drumming were banned by entities like the Catholic Church.
That strong cultural tradition had to be transformed into zapateado: foot-tapping, a form of tap dancing or making drum sounds, but with the feet. Black Mexican communities have used the zapateado to perform African-based musical traditions called sones, which, according to oral traditions, were dances used to celebrate freedom from enslavement and the symbolic trampling of Spanish oppressors.
In the Costa Chica region, Arellanes said, people dance the Son de Artesa; in Veracruz there is the Son Jarocho; and in various other regions, there are the Son Calentano and Son Tixleco — sones created in the Tierra Caliente zone.
Other than these types of zapateados, most Afro Mexicans had little understanding of their African heritage. One person who has had a tremendous influence in helping people learn about their heritage is Father Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest originally from Trinidad and Tobago who was assigned to minister to a parish of a dozen Costa Chican villages in 1984 and couldn’t fathom why the community was so out of touch with their heritage.
Alongside his Catholic ministry, Jemmott began conducting workshops with community members, particularly local children. “… for us, it was a way to begin to say that we were Afrodescendants. We could begin to say, for example, when we would use a color to paint ourselves, we would use a color that is our skin color. We no longer chose pink; we chose brown, or black, a softer color,” said Arellanes.
“That was a way for us to discover that we were not the same [ethnicity] as other parts of Mexico. It also gave us a sense of pride — we no longer felt ashamed, because my parents, my grandparents, obviously knew in some part that they were Afrodescendant people, but they didn’t want to talk about it, because they felt –– they were made to feel –– ashamed for being Black, because Black people have always been discriminated against.”
Mistreated, underemployed, living in poorer communities: Afro Mexicans felt the brunt of the nation’s racism but would not acknowledge it, so they had no way to confront it. Mexico had promoted itself as a mixed/mestizo “cosmic race,” a place where European, Indigenous, and African races had joined as one. “Here they started to talk about the so-called bronze race, which were the Mexicans, and everyone thought we were mestizos, but the truth is that we are not,” Arellanes said.
“There are many populations where there are still many Black communities, but they do not want to talk about it, because it is still difficult for them. Now, with all of the activism we have done to sensitize people to our existence, people are now saying, ‘Ah, I am also Afro.’ But before, they did not talk about it; the less they talked about it, the better it was for them.
“The problem is that these issues have only been discussed within the activist world or within the world of academics. Very little of this information has been brought to the people, so in that sense, people still need to understand that being Afrodescendant is not bad. Blackness has always been associated with bad in Mexico. What we are doing now is to raise awareness and to say, ‘Afro is not bad, Afro is good, too.’ What I do with my photos is to photograph positive references and print those images, so that the children, the young people who see them, say, ‘Ah, I want to be like him or her.’”
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Publish date : 2024-09-25 17:00:00
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