Professor of Afro-Mexican Studies Is Revising History

Published in Newswise:

NCCU Associate Professor of Spanish, Dr. Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas has written an essay entitled “Modern National Discourse and La muerte de Artemio Cruz: The Illusory “Death” of African Mexican Lineage” that has been included in a new volume of literary criticism edited by Harold Bloom entitled Carlos Fuentes’ The death of Artemio Cruz.

The essay presents part of Hernández Cuevas’ research countering the prevailing tendency in Mexico to deny the existence and influence of African slaves and their descendents on Mexican culture.

Dr. Bobby Vaughn of Notre Dame de Namur University writes that at the height of the importation of West Africans by the Spanish crown in the 1590s, slaves were used in the mines of Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Mexico City as well as on the cattle ranches and sugar plantations of the Gulf and Pacific coasts of Mexico. According to Hernández Cuevas, the official history of Mexico is that post emancipation, the Africans inter-married with the native and European populations and disappeared creating a “racial paradise.”

The work of Hernández Cuevas and others reveals that this is not so. Cuevas has documented a thriving African cultural legacy in the food, music, language, and festivals of Mexico today. According to Cuevas, being black is more than a question of genetics but “a way of looking at the world” and there are very many black people in Mexico.

Afro-Mexicans do not always welcome Hernández Cuevas’ insights, however. Having internalized the racism of the dominant culture, they would rather deny than embrace their heritage. According to Hernández Cuevas, this fact confounds efforts to redress continuing issues of injustice and inequality.

“Being black was stigmatized throughout the colonial period in what was a caste society stratified according to variation in color, hair texture, and facial features with the Africans on the bottom level,” said Hernández Cuevas.

According to Hernández Cuevas, those attitudes persist to the present time as evidenced by the publication of a popular comic book called Memín Pinguín (“Little Devil”) in which a visibly black African child and his mother are portrayed as witless buffoons bouncing from one mishap to another. Such a publication would be decried as hate-literature here in the United States but in Mexico, such blatantly racist propaganda is “not part of the debate,” said Hernández Cuevas.

Hernández Cuevas is working hard to force acknowledgement of the problem of racism in Mexico. Part of his work on the myth of miscegenation was used to inform the ongoing exhibition at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago called “The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present,” on display from February 11, 2006, to September 3, 2006. He has written three books on the subject (one in English and two in Spanish) and has begun work on a fourth introducing the language of Carnival as a befitting lens for the critical analysis of African American cultural texts.

Hernández Cuevas launched the Mexican Institute of Africana Studies in 2005 in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico. In the future, he plans to develop a Center for Afro-Hispanic Studies at NCCU that would bring together scholars from a number of disciplines such as language, linguistics, history, music, the arts, and law, in order to enunciate the Afro-Hispanic experience. According to Hernández Cuevas, one outcome of this work on common roots may be the improved integration and reconciliation of African American and [Afro] Hispanic cultures in the US and other countries.


(Hernández Cuevas received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Spanish language and literature from Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. He earned his Ph.D. in Spanish language, literature, and Hispanic studies from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He may be reached for comment at mcuevas@nccu.edu.)