Chocolate and Corn Flour

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

By: Laura A. Lewis

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Hardcover | 14 May 2012

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Located on Mexico's Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolas 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 Nicolas, 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 Nicolas, 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.

Industry Reviews

"The kind of great ethnography much needed in research on Latin American blackness: Laura A. Lewis puts a crimp in recent multiculturalist constructions of Afro-Mexican 'blackness' - but also in Mexican mestizo nationalism - by revealing local meanings attached to being 'moreno' as a complex historical mixture of blackness and indigenousness." Peter Wade, author of Race and Sex in Latin America "In the 1940s, when Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran first brought Afro-Mexicans into academic and public discussion, African presence in Mexico had been under erasure for so long, that Mexican national identity had elided Africa altogether. Today, Mexico's 'Third Root' has gained national and international recognition. This process has gone hand in glove with a new politics of identity. Laura A. Lewis's ethno-historical study of race probes the local politics of autochtony, nationality and citizenship in the Pacific heartland of Afro-Mexico." Claudio Lomnitz, author of Death and the Idea of Mexico

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