Chocolate and Corn Flour

History, Race, and Place in the Making of "Black" Mexico

Laura A. Lewis

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780822351320, 9780822351214
• eBook ISBN: 9780822394778
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: Social Sciences

Located on Mexico's Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolás has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town's residents, however, call themselves morenos (black Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolás, focusing on the ways that local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, including community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness—as a way of identifying themselves and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Lay of the Land
• Chapter Two: Identity in Discourse: The “Race” Has Been Lost
• Chapter Three: Identity in Performance
• Chapter Four: Africa in Mexico: An Intellectual History
• Chapter Five: Culture Work: So Much Money
• Chapter Six: Being from Here
• Chapter Seven: A Family Divided? : Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces
• Chapter Eight: Transnationalism, Place, and the Mundane
• Conclusion: What’s in a Name?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index