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Festival in Yanga
The city of Yanga's annual August "Carnival en Negritude" was inagurated in 1986. It was to honor the town founder, the African slave Gaspar Yanga, who led a slave revolt in the area in 1570 and in 1609 negotiated a treaty for he and his ex-slaves for land and freedom from the Spaniards. For the next two hundred years the Spaniards tried repeatedly to abrogate the treaty and close down the enclave of Yanga. But the town remained "free" on condition that its citizens come to the aid of Spain in case of foreign attack upon Mexico, and that the Yangans return any slaves who ran away to the enclave to their masters. Consequently, Yanga, Mexico, stands as one of, if not the only, colony of runaway African slaves in the Americas that negotiated a treaty with the oppressors and had that treaty honored until national independence. Banners at the Yanga festival declare "The First Free Town in the Americas."
The above montage is from the 1998 festival. The man at the top with the raised sword and the broken chain around his neck was depicting Yanga. When his truck passed the reviewing stand, the master of ceremonies could not help but comment over the mike, "It appears our founder has put on weight over the years."
During the 1990s the festival expanded to include floats and dancing units from nearby towns and villages. But the aire of militant black pride wained during the decade. Embassadors from African nations to Mexico who had attended in the festival's first years ceased to come, mostly because the Third World economic crisis had eliminated most African diplomatic posts in Mexico City. Political violence in Yanga dampened enthusiasm, especially after a shootout during the festival between rival factions of the ruling PRI political party. Then, within weeks of the January 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexican Federal Police descended upon Yanga and arrested a half dozen people who were subsequently kept in solitary confinement in jail for nearly two years on charges of having stored weapons for an uprising of Yangans who planed to join with the Chaipans. Those arrested had family roots to Chaipas.
An independent spirit continues on in quiet in Yanga, according to the journalist and novelist, Guillermo Sanchez de Anda, in his 1998 book YANGA: UN GUERRERO NEGRO. He notes that Yanga represents a region of Veracruz sugar plantations were rebellions by African slaves who worked the fields were frequent during colonial years, and that fifty miles to the south of Yanga was "the Republic of Amapa" a now nearly deserted village but once thriving black and Indian enclave that also achieved a treaty from the Spaniards that was honored up to Mexican independence. Sanchez de Anda equates Gaspar Yanga with Emiliano Zapata and Comander Marcos in Chiapas, the three being leaders who "fought for the dignity of oppressed Mexicans." Sanchez de Anda writes in his book's conclusion, that "you who read the story of Yanga, you will be effective fighters" in the trying times of the turn of the century. Because "you realize today there are thousands, millions of Mexicans who long for justice (and)...today you are Yanga, and those who read the story can be Yanga, every body ought to be Yanga."