FOR LOVE OF MEXICO:
VICENTE GUERRERO AND HIS BLACK INDIAN FAMILY

African impact upon Mexico dates to over three millenniums ago, and the visits of ancient Egyptians to the Olmec civilization in Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmecs, however, are not the focus of this web page, which is reserved for African impact upon Mexico in the post-Columbus period.

The story of the past five hundred years involves the saga of the Afro-Mexico of the villages and small towns where over generations efforts have continued to maintain an African cultural and social tradition. And the story also involves the efforts of a far larger group of Afro-Mexicans who have lived in the regions that had the Afro-centric villages, but who recognized that the vast nation of Mexico was at root Indigenous, and that Indigenous and Black unity was needed to effectively fight the oppression of the Europeans and Europe worshipping Mexican elite. From this sector of Afro-Mexicans has come most of the best known leaders of the politically progressive mainstream of the nation.

Vicente Guerrero exemplifies the progressive tradition and how it has been carried forward from fathers to sons and daughters and grandchildren.

The mule driver Vicente Guerrero rose to become Commander-in-Chief of the Mexican army during the last years of the 1810-1821 independence war with Spain. Eight years after independence he was president and he issued his nation's slavery abolition decree. Guerrero was a descendant of African slaves brought to colonial Mexico. He also had Indigenous and Spanish roots, and his multi-cultural experience was enriched by contact among the many in his region who were descendants of the estimated 100,000 Asians brought to Mexico in slavery on the Manila to Acapulco galleons. The Asians were labeled "African" because the Spanish wanted more slaves, and by law only Africans could be slaves. Most of the Asians did come from places where people were dark, such as Malaysia, and the southern Filipine Islands, including the island of Negros, so named because the Negritos lived there.

The Black Indian Family on the Museum Wall

Guerrero has a state in his name, only one of four heroes of the nation to be so honored. On a wall in the National Museum of History in Mexico City is a display of the family tree that stems from President Guerrero. He and his wife Guadelupe Hernandez de Guerrero had one surviving child, Dolores. She married Mariano Riva Palacio, who was head of the city council in Mexico City during Guerrero's presidency. Mariano was later the mayor of the capital city, a state governor, a prominent promoter of public education, and a general in the army during the mid-century war of the Reform. In 1831 Vicente Guerrero was assassinated, and in the years that followed Mariano and Dolores made their home a gathering place for followers of the fallen leader. In this environment the children of Mariano and Dolores were politicized. Their sons Vicente (named after grandfather) and Carlos became state governors and army generals. Vicente is best known as a literary light, and for being the most read historian in Mexico. The tall and thick multi-volume compendium, MEXICO A TRAVES DE LOS SIGLOS, that he directed to publication in the 1880s continues to go through reprintings today. Also much republished is Riva Palacio's account of the African slave Gaspar Yanga, who led a revolt in the sugar plantations of Veracruz in 1570.

Additional Guerrero/Riva Palacio generations produced more state govenors, including a second Carlos Riva Palacio. During the latter stages of the 1910 social revolution, Carlos #2 supported President Calles, a loudly nationalistic leftist who drew threats of intervention from the U.S. in 1927. In 1934 Carlos was first president a new ruling political party, which is said to have been originally progressive, and now, under its new name, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, is said to stand for "technocrats" beholden to a wealthy clique. Emerging in the late 1980s to fight the corrupted PRI from a left wing perspective was Raymundo Riva Palacio. A crusading journalist, Raymundo was instrumental in making two Mexico City dailies, EL FINANCIERO and LA REFORMA, into popular anti-establishment papers. The physical appearance of Raymundo does not suggest that he is a descendant of the first "Black President" of Mexico. But he is none the less following the family business, opposition to the elite.

Mother was Indian

The African experience in modern Mexico is basically interracial. The boat loads of African captives that the Spaniards brought to Mexico were from 2 to 1 to 3 to 1 male to female, and this situation resulted in slaves creating families with Indigenous women. While the law said black must live with black, African male slaves had a powerful incentive to seek Indian women. The children they made together were born free. By law, all children of Indian women were free, even if the father was a slave - this legal clause was part of the prohibition upon enslavement of Indians. Mixing of the Black with Indian also occurred when slave runaways sought refuge in Indian villages. Spaniards who had children with black women furthered what is called "el mestizaje." In a census taken in 1810, near the end of Spanish rule, Afro-Mexicans were 98% mixed race, and were 10.2% of the population. Toward the end of Spanish rule only 1 in 35 Afro-Mexicans were slaves, thanks to intermarriage with Indians, and to revolts and flight which encouraged the masters to grant manumission in order to maintain a work force.

Afro-Mexican as "Model Minority"

While colonial Mexico had many Afro-Mexican field hands and pick ax laborers in the mines, a great many others attained positions in respected and highly skilled labor. Africans became substitute skilled laborers during the century of conquest, when war and sickness reduced the Indian population from an estimated 9 million to 1 1/2 million. The Spanish introduced cattle and the use of iron tools into Mexico. For obtaining jobs with cows, horses and iron work many Africans arrived with a prior knowledge that amounted to an "educational advantage" over the Indigenous. By Guerrero's time the Black Indian skilled laborers included the vast majority in his profession of mule driving. They also included perhaps a majority of the cattle herding vaqueros, and included blacksmiths, shoemakers and other independent trades people. This Afro-Mexican (Black Indian) sector was significantly above most pure-Indians in class position. But Afro-Mexico was restricted by caste law discriminations. The institution of slavery was in decline, but painful memories remained. The Guerrero family was but two generations removed from slavey, and the young Guerrero was familiar with the institution because Vicente's mule driver father Pedro had run supplies to one of the few remaining big slave plantations in the colony.

Inventing Progressive Mexico: Indian and Black Unity

Vicente Guerrero was part of the independence era transformation that the scholar of Afro-Mexico, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, has called the nation's shift "from caste to class." It was a transformation that made possible a "black president." But the transformation was incomplete. Guerrero was baited throughout his election campaign for being "a black." Guerrero's response to the racist attacks was not to form a "black agenda" or a specific Afro-Mexican interest group, but rather to organize a broad multi-racial coalition of "mulattos," "mestizos" and Indigenous. His coalition was predicated on one person one vote democracy. The coalition vision was that of "nationalist" unity against the generally European looking Mexican elite that supported foreign economic and cultural dominance of Mexico. "Citizen Guerrero," as the president signed his correspondence, sought national political power, and that task required that race be played down in the interest of gathering into his coalition all dark skinned ethnic factions which the Spanish had kept divided during colonial times. His story is that of an alleged "black militant" who wanted to transcend race, not in order to "pass" into a secure but subservient place in a white run society, but rather, to build a multi-racial run nation of Mexico.

An Indian and Black Nation in the Middle

Early in colonial times Spain designed a caste system which legally separated to one side the resident Spaniards and White Mexicans, and to the other side the Indigenous that lived in rural villages (along with the few all-African villages). But for the mixed races, Africans and Asians the system had loop holes in its occupational, residential and other discriminations. Over the many decades there emerged a world that lived between the white nation on the one hand, and on the other the nation of isolated villages of the Huastecans, Zapotecans, Mayans, and pure Africans. By 1810 the majority of the people lived in the Third Nation in the middle. It had two main components, Afro-Mexicans (Black Indians) and Indians who had learned Spanish and worked in haciendas or the mines. There were also some offspring of whites and Indians, and a few whites. This nation in the middle created its own styles in clothing, music, dance, and way of talking. From it comes those qualities which are popularly identified today as "Mexican," and those qualities which are considered Indian, African, Asian, or Spanish but are modified to fit the multi-racial "Mexican" context. Recent research has found an African imprint upon "Mexican" music, dance, painting, sculpture, language, poetry, cuisine, religion, marital customs, magic rites, and medical practices.

Genetic vs. Socially Defined Afro-Mexico

Cultural contributions from Africa to Mexico need to be distinguished from the genetic contributions. One the one hand, popular Mexican songs (such as "La Bamba" - misnamed from the Angolan city of MBamba), along with types of religious observances and other cultural behaviors evolved in certain areas of sizable Afro-Mexican population and were then spread nationwide to help create the distinctiveness that is Mexican. On the other hand, geographic mobility during the 19th and 20th century has spread African genes with little cultural consequence. The degree of genetic spread is seen, for example, in the surprising blood sample findings of a 1990s international cancer research group. Samples were taken in two Mexican cities on the U.S. border, and over two thirds of those sampled had at least some African genes. Details of these controversial findings are being withheld pending follow up sampling.

Politically relevant Afro-Mexico, in contrast to genetic Afro-Mexico, is composed of those whose ancestors in colonial times were declared "African" by the Spanish bureaucrats. Many were more Indian than African but were African enough in the oppressor's view to be forced to live with the legal and other disadvantages of an African label. The dark skinned Asians were usually labeled African. The lieutenant of Guerrero during the independence war, General Isidoro Montesdeoca was basically Filiipino in origin, but he declared "I am African" in a speech to his troops in which Montesdeoca denounced the discriminations he suffered.

Black Indian Militancy Centered in Certain Regions

"Africans" who had the emotional strength to do something about their oppression tended live where the new multi-racial "Mexican" culture thrived and provided something to fight for. Guerrero and Montesdeoca lived in such a region. The national culture, upon investigation, was strong in areas that had a higher than normal Afro-Mexican population and a minimal Spanish presence - mostly areas that the European considered too unpleasant to live in. These areas have been both the centers of Mexican cultural development and the strongholds of the political revolutions which rocked Mexico during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A concentration of energy in specific regions is understandable. Dyanmism in most modern nations originates in and continues to come from the same areas or towns. Boston has been politically and culturally vibrant as long as Charleston, South Carolina has been aristocratic and conservative; Amsterdam has always been the art center that Rotterdam has not been; and Leon and Granada, Nicaragua, were such political opposites that eventually the two cities agreed to create the city of Managua midway between them in order to have national peace.

It is common to modern nations of this hemisphere that a family once baptized into a political cause will tend to follow that overall perspective for generations. For his black nationalism, the Jamaican national hero Marcus Garvey was spied upon by U.S. government agents during the 1920s, and for his black nationalism Garvey's son Marcus Jr. was said to have been spied upon by CIA agents during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The U.S. anti-Vietnam war activist William Sloan Coffin was a descendant of anti-slavery abolitionists in Ohio. President Clinton's aid Harold Ickes Jr. was said to be the conscience of the cabinet, and Harold Sr. had a similar role in the cabinet of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Vicente Guerrero came from the center of Mexico's culturally vibrant region of "the South," and he helped mold the Third Nation (Mexico) politically. He did not define it, however. His life was one of urgent immediate issues, ending Spanish rule, and abolishing racial caste and slavery. He was interested in creating a democracy, but racial equality under the law was primary for Guerrero, if for no other reason than that his followers needed it. During the independence war the majority of his soldiers and officers were people labeled "pardo" (African) in the Spaniard's census of the colony. The equality issue surfaced during the peace process near the war's end. Guerrero was sent a draft proposal for a government of an independent nation. It granted political rights and legal equality to whites and to Indians, and to those two races' mestizo combinations, but the proposal excluded from rights anyone with African heritage. An angry Guerrero demanded "all" Mexicans be granted their rights, or his side would not agree to the plan. Consequently, the plan included Clause #12, "All inhabitants of New Spain, without distinction of their European, African or Indian origins are citizens... with full freedoms to pursue their livelihoods according to their merits and virtues."

The Scholar/Activist Grandson

Guerrero fought to solve political problems, and his literary grandson Vicente Riva Palacio sought to explain who and what was "Mexican." To grandson, the elite that looked European and that wanted to bring Europe to Mexico was not genuinely Mexican. The Mexicans were the people who wore serapes, sandals, and big sombreros. The Mexicans were women walking with baskets on their heads. Mexicans were people who drank tequila rather than Spanish wine; who who eat tortillas rather than white rolls; who were uninterested in Mozart but who enjoyed "La Bamba" and other lively folk dances. And Mexicans were people who sang songs about cowboys who wore silver studded Mariachi pants, outfits first popularized in one of those zones where in the old census Afro-Mexicans were overrepresented and Spaniards were few.

Vicente Riva Palacio was politically linked to his grandfather, even though grandfather was assassinated a year before he was born. Grandson was raised in a house where the old Guerreroistas congregted, including "Uncle Juan" would become the second Mexican president of African heritage in 1855. Vicente explained his politicized upbringing in 1871 at the nation's fiftieth anniversary of independence. Vicente had the honor at this celebration of delivering an address given from the balcony of the national palace to an enormous crowd gathered below in the Zocolo square. During his oration, he asked his listeners

Who among us, we who form this present generation, have not heard in our first years of life, in that formative age, the traditions and legends that stick in our minds like a stick of dynamite; who has not heard in those tranquil nights in the sweet security of our parents' home, as we recline in the soft lap of our loving mother, those references to old friends of the family. It is a story always repeated and always new in our now well formed hearts, the story of the independence of our nation.

Who among us in the passage of our life, in the bustle of existence in this society, have not encountered someone from among the ancient veterans, covered with medals on their old uniform,... who look upon us with profound intensity and recreate in a voice trembling with emotion, and eyes darting from side to side, some luminous page from the history of our heroes, their names pronounced as if they are family members and with a veneration according, of Hidalgo, Morelos, Matamoros, Guerrero, Mina, Bravo and Galeana.

The politics of the Guerreros and Riva Palacios were not, of course, accepted by all dark hued Mexicans. Nor was Guerrero and his family consistently in the revolutionary camp. Guerrero could take the role of an accommodator who tried to steer between his camp of radicals and that of the conservatives. The next two generations of Riva Palacios were often but moderates among the radicals of their day. What the Guerreros and the Riva Palacios have had in abundance is an almost romantic nationalism.

Riva Palacio was one beneficiary of a history publishing boom in Mexico that started in the 1980s and was strong until the 1995 "economic crisis" which hit hard at the academic world during the last years of the decade. Among the reprints were many of his short stories with socio-cultural themes. They made a pleasant addition to the substantial amount of new work produced in anthropology and social history, including a great many small works and a few large ones specific to Afro-Mexico.

From Afro-Mexican to Mexican

The abolition of the caste system at independence was accompanied by a feeling that to use racial labels was to continue to the psychological tyranny of the Spaniards. The feeling reached ridiculous extremes when in 1824 a suggestion was made in the congress of Mexico that in the name of "progress" no congress member should ever again utter the word "Indian."14 The politically conservative faction that was especially enamored of the aracial policy was, none the less, willing to openly try to intimidate voters away from Guerrero in the 1828 presidential election on the grounds that he was "a black." Hypocrisy and confusion on race mark modern Mexican history. The Spanish certainly gave Mexicans across the political spectrum reason to loath racial identification. Creating discord and division between Mexico's many racial groups was a part of Spanish Crown strategy for control. A sizable government bureaucracy engaged in compulsive racial categorizing in the census, and in military and tax records. One race would pay at one tax rate and another race at a different rate, etc. Babies were baptized with esoteric racial designations such as "lobo," "castizo," "morisco," and "coyote." Spanish racial categorizing extended into the art world in the "caste paintings." These oils from the late colonial period were sold to Spaniards to take home after their tour of duty, to be put on the wall to display the quaint "breeds" in Mexico. Each caste painting typically contained inside it 12 to 16 depictions of a mother, father and child, each depiction showing different racial combinations, such as a black father, Indian mother, and their "zambo" child; or a zambo and a mulata produces a "calpamulo," etc. African roots were typically in about half the painting's depictions. Caste paintings are among the few pictures showing ordinary daily line in the colony, as in the painting of a hard working Afro-Mexican cobbler. But insult and ridicule are common, as in the painting of a mother cleaning the mess off of her baby's bottom, and the paintings of families that had a black and a white parent. In most of these the parents are shown having a fist fight, and their child is crying.

The "caste paintings" are despised for their stereotyping. A caption to a caste painting that hangs in the Independence war Museum of Morelos in the city of Cuautla attributes a desire to end such painting as one reason for the determined fighters in that war with Spain. On the other hand, the caste paintings are accepted for showing the mix that creates modern Mexico. While browsing at the National Museum of History in Mexico City this writer overheard a father explaining the national identity to his seven or eight year old. The two were walking past a caste painting that was displayed not far from the wall with the Guerrero/Riva Palacio family tree. The father called his son to the painting, pointed and said, "See these people. Look closely, son. This is what we are, Mexicans."

Mexico Does Culture Rather than Fireworks at Millennium

Vicente Guerrero wanted his nation to have this acceptance. He defined the nation in terms too broad, "the citizens" and "the people." His grandson illustrated and gave dignity to the many parts, and in the process Vicente Riva Palacio had a major role in creating among "the people" a fierce pride in being Mexican. Today, Mexico is obsessed with "national culture." The millennium celebration in Mexico's Zocalo square, for instance, was distinctively cultural. Whereas fireworks, jumping up and down and crazed shouts were the modis operandi in most other big cities of the world, in Mexico City, the magic moment arrived, church bells tolled, and the estimated 300,000 people in the square launched into a folk song sing-a-long to a band of 200 Mariachis playing "Las Golondrinas" and "Las Maņanitas."

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