Mexican Culture Essay

However, a consensus has yet to be reached on how black communities in Mexico prefer to identify.Several terms used by locals and activists reference racial origins, such as Afro-Mexicano, Afro-Mestizo, or Afrodescendiente, while others directly reference phenotype and skin color, such as .

However, a consensus has yet to be reached on how black communities in Mexico prefer to identify.Several terms used by locals and activists reference racial origins, such as Afro-Mexicano, Afro-Mestizo, or Afrodescendiente, while others directly reference phenotype and skin color, such as .The general culture of Mexican families has a strong foundation in unity.

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It is the many colonial binaries that continue to operate in the present, black/white, local/foreign/diaspora, which frame the ways in which we can go about interpreting the many images of blackness that continue to circulate as part of the process of meaning making that surrounds the politics of difference around race in Latin America, and the Americas more broadly, and creates a larger “spectacle of difference” as discussed by Stuart Hall (1997).

These binaries continue to frame the subject and create lenses through which to read the black body as it is presented through images.

In this way the black body can be fetishized (Mercer 1994, Hall 1997), as it is perceived to exist outside of the contexts in which it was produced.

This is to say that there may be a conflict between the perception and ways in which we have theorized blackness and the everyday lived experience by which the blackness continues to be produced throughout the diaspora.

Examples can also be taken from the many independence movements that swept through Latin America in the 19 century, where locally born European descendants were able to politically resist diasporic understandings through the political construction of the Mestizo as a proxy for whiteness.

This mostly rhetorical move solidified the perception of the native peoples of the Americas as foundational elements to the newly conceived nations, while simultaneously allowing locally born whites to use the history of the “civilizing” project in the Americas to tap into a legitimate sense of belonging within the newly formed American nation states.

While this has been attempted for African descendants in Latin America, the issue of a racial logic used to define African descendants continues to complicate the strategies of recognition of these groups as “authentic” cultural groups.

[3] Kobena Mercer has discussed this process in terms of fetishization of the black body by which the black male body is produced and interpreted as a sexual object to be consumed by whiteness.

I am in partial agreement with Vaughn, and feel that this situating of the black experience at either pole is unproductive.

However, the situating of the black experience somewhere in the middle of these poles still does little to help us explode the false dichotomy, which the acceptance of these poles helps to create in the first place.