Home is where the heart is: Afro-Latino migration and cinder-block homes on Mexico's Costa Chica

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 801-829

  Lewis, Laura A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950634853     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2006-002     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. The original Spanish is colloquial: "Mi madre me lo decia que a San Nicolás no fuera; a San Nicolás me voy a unque mañano me muera."
2. Steven Vertovec makes a distinction between personal or individual remittances sent to families, and collective ones sent to communities by migrant organizations, particularly Hometown Associations; see his "Migrant Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation," International Migration Review 38.3 (Fall 2004): 970-1001, esp. 986-87.
3. Unlike many other Mexican overseas communities, San Nicoladenses do not have a Hometown Association. As almost all remittances are personal, they go to personal family needs, including houses. The result is what has been called " 'private affluence and public squalor,' or new homes reachable only over dirt roads" (ibid., 986).
4. Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society," International Migration Review 3 (Fall 2004): 1003.
5. Competition has increased as more and more Latinos move to the U.S. South, which has become a geographical magnet for Latinos; see Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill, eds., Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001). North Carolina's Latino population quadrupled between 1990 and 2004 (http://census.osbm.state. nc.us/lookup/, accessed December 14, 2005);
6. Laura A. Lewis, "Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans: The Dynamics of Race, Nation, and Identity in a Mexican Moreno Community," American Ethnologist 27.4 (2000): 919, n. 4.
7. For examples, see Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, Cuijla: Esbozo etnogríafico de un pueblo negro (1958; reprint, Mexico City: Secretaria de Educación Pública, 1985);
8. Miguel Gutiérrez Avila, Derecho consuetudinario y derecho positivo entre los mixtecos, amuzgos y afromestizos de la Costa Chica de Guerrero (Mexico: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, 1997);
9. María Los Angeles Manzano A., Cuajinicuilapa Guerrero: Historia Oral (1900-1940) (Mexico City: Ediciones Artesa, 1991), 37, lower caption.
10. See, e.g., Leo Chavez, Shadowed Lives (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
11. See also the discussion in Levitt and Glick Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity," 1002, 1005.
12. "Simultaneously in two countries": Nina Glick Schiller and Eugene Fouron, Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 3.
13. "Transnational migrant circuits": Roger Rouse
14. "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Transnationalism," Diaspora 1.1 (1991). "Social fields": Levitt and Glick Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity," 1008-9.
15. Of the vast numbers of studies of Mexican transnationalism, here are but a few that consciously link the different locales Mexicans inhabit: Kimberley Grimes, Crossing Borders: Changing Social Identities in Southern Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998);
16. Peri L. Fletcher, La casa de mis sueños: Dreams of Home in a Mexican Migrant Community (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999);
17. and Jeffrey H. Cohen, "Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development and the Household," American Anthropologist 103.4 (2001): 954-67.
18. The term "cultural bifocals" is from Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, "Introduction: A World in Motion," in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, ed. Inda and Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 20.
19. This essay generally fails to distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants, instead assuming that the position of not fully belonging to any one place that transmigrants find themselves in is due entirely to the state of living in two places at once. As I suggest here, immigrants' legal statuses must be taken into account in any discussion of transnationalism because such statuses affect people's sense of, and ability to, belong. Hilary Cunningham makes similar points when she argues that anthropologists need to "stay attuned to ... issues of exclusion, access, and stratification in a context of global interconnections," in "Nations Rebound? Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11 (2004): 332.
20. Inda and Rosaldo, "Introduction," 11.
21. Although she does not make this explicit, Karen McCarthy Brown does the same in her wonderful ethnography of Haitian vodoun, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
22. E.g., Jane Perlez, "Where Pagodas Draw Tourists, Concrete Is Unwelcome," New York Times, July 8, 2004.
23. For an early history of the region see Rolf Widmer, Conquista y despertar de las castas de la Mar del Sur (1521-1684) (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Culturay las Artes, 1990).
24. For a later history of the region see Maria de los Angeles Manzano Añorve, Cuajinicuilapa, Guerrero: Historia Oral (1900-1940) (Mexico City: Ediciones Artesa, 1991).
25. Laura A. Lewis, "Of Ships and Saints: History, Memory and Place in the Making of Moreno Mexican Identity," Cultural Anthropology 16.1 (February 2001): 62-82.
26. Lewis, "Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans," 898-926.
27. James Clifford, "Diasporas," Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302-38.
28. Gutierre Tibón, Pinotepa Nacional: Mixtecos, negros y triques, 2d ed. (1961; reprint, Mexico City: Editorial Posada, 1981), 49, 41.
29. "To speak of a Mexican Congo," Tibón concluded, "is a cheap literary device" (ibid., 49).
30. The anthropologist Frederick Starr's account of his late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century travels in the Mixteca Alta region of southera Mexico includes photographs of redondos that look strikingly like the ones that prevailed on the coast; see Starr, In Indian Mexico (Chicago: Forbes and Company, 1908), 135, 139.
31. Archival evidence, including a late-sixteenth-century map depicting round dwellings with crosses at their apexes, suggests the same, for the dispute the map was meant to help resolve involves Indian homes and land (Archivo General de la Nación, Rarno Tierras, vol. 48, exp. 6, f 162, 1583). Local people also associate redondos with Indians, for the form can still be found in upland Indian communities.
32. The American historian Richard Thompson even devoted a chapter of a book to Mande-influenced architecture in the Americas, arguing on the basis of comparison, and despite significant differences, for cultural ties between Mexican redondos and western Africa; see Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1984), 195-206.
33. Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 77-78;
34. Jean Rahier, introduction to Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, ed. Rahier (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999), xv-xxi.
35. On the concept and intent of folklorization in general see Greg Urban and Joel Scherzer, introduction to Nation-States and Indians in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 11;
36. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (New York: Verso, 1991), 58-59.
37. Miguel Gutiérrez Avila, La conjura de los negros (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1993), 18.
38. As a non-Mexican my relationship to la cultura was at first somewhat uncertain, and I repeatedly had to reiterate that I was not with la cultura (and also that I was not an evangelical Christian, or an alelujah, as other whites in the village tend to be). The constant questions and comments made me quickly realize that many people viewed representatives of national cultural interests with some hostility (Lewis, "Blacks, Black Indians, Afromexicans").
39. Arlene Torres and Norman E. Whitten Jr., "General Introduction: To Forge the Future in the Fires of the Past: An Interpretive Essay on Racism, Domination, Resistance and Liberation," in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Torres and Whitten, 2 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 4.
40. John McDowell, Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico's Costa Chica (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
41. Torres and Whitten, "General Introduction."
42. Although both are made of dirt mixed with plant materials, the building processes are different. Adobe bricks are a mud and straw mixture; wattle and daub consists of interlaced posts covered with mud.
43. Manzano A., Cuajinicuilapa Guerrero, 30.
44. Grimes, Crossing Borders, 66.
45. "Ways of being" and "ways of belonging": Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller, "Conceptualizing Simultaneity," 1010. On food and self-identification in the wider context of consumption see Jonathan Friedman, "Globalization and Localization," in Inda and Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization, 233-36.
46. Juan Sánchez Andraka ¡Hablemos Claro! ¿Que occurió en Guerrero durante el gobierno de Alejandro Cervantes Delgado? Testimonios (Mexico City: Costa-Amic, 1987), 26.
47. Rouse, "Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Transnationalism," 252.
48. Vertovec, "Migrant Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation," 976.
49. Cited in Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 204.