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Martin Luther King School
The spirit of African consciousness on the Pacific "Costa Chica" is reflected in the name of the junior high school in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Martin Luther King school. Jamiltepec is located in the coastal area that since 1996 has held an annual festival called "Meeting of the Afro-Mexican Villages" of coastal Oaxaca and Guerrero. The photo in this gallery of the dancers on the artesa is from the 1997 festival.
The area includes the town of Cuajinicuilapa, located just across the state border in Guerrero. Since 1990 the people of Cuajinicuilapa have held an annual "Dance of the Devils" festival, in which dance troups from villages in the region compete to win the prize for best performance in the Devil Dance that depicts the colonial enslavement of Africans on this coast.
Cuajinicuilapa and Jamiltepec have been strongholds of the left-opposition PRD, Revolutionary Democratic Party. A federal congressman was elected from Cuajinicuilapa on the PRD ticket in 1997. The tie to the opposition in Jamiltepec led to government harrassment of the "Meeting of the Afro-Mexican Villages" in 1997. At one point, the government turned out the lights on an evening event of the festival.
Political radicalism on the "Costa Chica" dates back to the independence war. Early in 1811 the Spaniards constripted some two hundred farmers and laborers of Jamiltepec into the Spanish army. A prohibition at that time on Indians being in the Spanish army meant that the conscripts had to be almost all Afro-Mexicans, the only other sizable ethnic group on the coast. Captured in their first battle by the Mexican army of Father Morelos, they were sat down and lectured to by their captor. Morelos used a slave master's branding iron as a visual aide while he explained his cause and his goal of eliminating caste and servitude. In conclusion he told the Jamiltepecanos they could choose to either join his army, or return home. They reportedly joined up in mass.
The 1994 Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas ilicited a response from the "Costa Chica." A Cuijinicuilapa leader in the circles of cultural organizers and PRD politics issued a press release in which she declared that if the Indigenous in Chiapas were getting organized, it was time that the blacks of the "Costa Chica" did likewise. The release was published widely, and made the San Francisco CHRONICLE newspaper, among others.