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[color="Sienna"]Where Did Mexico's Blacks Go?
By Steve Sailer
May 9, 2002
Where did Mexico's blacks go?
The nearly complete absorption of Mexico's identifiably African people offers an intriguing contrast to the persistence of a rather distinct black race in the United States.
Most Americans, and even many Mexicans, don't realize that a significant fraction of the Mexican population once looked markedly African. At least 200,000 black slaves were imported into Mexico from Africa. By 1810, Mexicans who were considered at least part-African numbered around a half million, or more than 10 percent of the population.
Mexican music, for example, has deep roots in West Africa. "La Bamba," the famous Mexican folk song that was given a rock beat by Ritchie Valens and a classic interpretation by Los Lobos, has been traced back to the Bamba district of Angola.
What's especially ironic about Mexico's "racial amnesia" -- a term coined by African-American historian Ted Vincent -- is that during Mexico's first century of independence, more than a few of its most famous leaders were visibly part black.
Emiliano Zapata was perhaps the noblest figure in 20th century Mexican politics, a peasant revolutionary still beloved as a martyred man of the people. Although Marlon Brando played him in the 1952 movie "Viva Zapata!" the best-known photograph of the illiterate idealist shows him with clearly part-African hair. His village had long been home to many descendents of freed slaves.
Similarly, Vicente Guerrero, a leading general in the Mexican War of Independence and the new nation's second president, appears from his portraits and his nickname to have been part black.
Perhaps African-Mexicans were so often leading the revolutionary vanguard because they were even more oppressed by law than Mexico's Indians. Back in the 16th century, the great Spanish Bishop Bartolome de las Casas, the first modern human rights activist, in the sense of battling for justice for another race, persuaded the King of Spain to ban the enslavement of Indians, at least nominally. Yet, bondage for Africans remained legal until "El Negro Guerrero" officially abolished it in 1829. It had largely withered out before then, however.
The apparent assimilation of Mexico's ex-slaves into the overall gene pool is in marked contrast to America's experience, where the black race has remained relatively distinct. In the average self-declared white American's family tree, there is only the equivalent of one black out of every 128 ancestors, according to the ongoing research of molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver of Penn State University and his colleagues.
In fact, Mexico even differs from the rest of Latin America, where distinct black populations remain genetically unassimilated. "Mexico is unique in this regard," commented population geneticist Ricardo M. Cerda-Flores of the Mexico's Autonomous University in Nuevo Leon.
Cerda-Flores' team found that a sample of Mexicans living around Monterrey in Northeast Mexico averaged around 5 percent African by ancestry, according to its genetic markers. In other words, if you could accurately trace the typical family tree back until before the first Spaniards and their African slaves arrived in Mexico in 1519, you would find that about one out of twenty of the subjects' forebears were Africans.
Cerda-Flores and his colleagues also examined the DNA of Mexican-Americans in Texas, who came out as about 6 percent black. Other studies of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans by molecular anthropologists have come up with black admixture rates ranging from 3 percent to 8 percent.
By way of contrast, this appears to be, very roughly, something like half of the black ancestry level of the overall American population, as implied by Shriver's studies. Of course, most of the African ancestors of Americans are visibly concentrated among African-Americans, who average 82 percent to 83 percent black, according to Shriver. Among Mexicans, however, African genes appeared to be spread more broadly and evenly.
Nevertheless, the official ideology of Mexico has been that the Mexicans are simply a "mestizo" people -- a mixture of Spaniards and Indians -- officially referred to as "La Raza" or "The Race." Since 1928, Mexico has celebrated Oct. 12 as "The Day of The Race." On Oct. 12, 1946, Mexican politician José Vasconcelos famously declared mestizos to be "the cosmic race."
African-American anthropologist Bobby Vaughn wrote, "Issues of race have been so colored by Mexico's preoccupation with 'the Indian question' that the Afro-Mexican experience tends to blend almost invisibly into the background, even to Afro-Mexicans themselves. Mexico's official narratives ... leave Afro-Mexicans outside of the national consciousness."
That's because Mexico's national ideology centers on "the belief that contemporary Mexico is a kind of 'perfect blend' of both Spanish and Indian heritages, and that this synthesis is at the heart of what it means to be Mexican."
Socially, Mexico does not have any kind of "color line," in contrast to the United States, where "one drop of African blood" frequently categorizes a person as "black." For example, Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry's white mother raised Halle to think of herself as black, even though her African-American father abandoned the family when she was quite young. Those kind of sharp-edged racial categories seldom exist in Latin American countries.
In reality, Mexico's white-Indian racial blending is far less complete than Mexico's political orthodoxy would make it appear. What Mexico does have instead of a color line is a "color continuum." There are no sharp racial divides, yet the rule for social prestige remains "the whiter the better." For example, the stars of Mexican television are almost completely European. In fact, the actresses on Mexican "telenovelas" tend to be blonder than the ones on American soap operas.
Mexico's elites are much whiter looking than its working class. At 6'5" tall, President Vicente Fox stands roughly a head taller than the average Mexican man. Fox's paternal grandfather was an Irish-American born in Cincinnati.
There remain in dire poverty millions of virtually pureblooded Indian peasants, who speak the same Indian languages as their ancestors did before 1492.
This ideological assumption that all Mexicans are mestizo can lead to some amusing conundrums. For example, Luis Echeverria, president from 1970-1976, saw himself as the natural leader of the nonwhite Third World. The problem was that he, like most Mexican presidents, appeared to be pure white. So, he spent many hours under sun lamps, trying to tan himself into the Third World.
While it's easy to scoff at this "mestizo myth" as propaganda put out by the mostly white ruling class to keep the brown lower classes from noticing Mexico's racial hierarchy, its usefulness at maintaining the peace should not be despised. In recent decades, Mexico has suffered much less from racial violence than nearby Guatemala or more distant Peru. During the '80s in both of those countries, where attitudes of white superiority are more blatant than in Mexico, oppressed Indians joined Marxist intellectuals in guerilla wars against the white ruling class.
The Mexican populace's African "third root" is occasionally honored, but Mexican officials have generally ignored it. University of Minnesota demographer Robert McCaa wrote, "Afro-Mexicans, who numbered one-half million in 1810, more or less vanished, thoroughly intermingled and unidentifiable by 1895 if the official discourse is accepted at face value."
That discourse should be viewed skeptically. It's unlikely that African racial characteristics had become so blended in by 1895 that they had actually vanished. Yet, since then, black genes appear to have been so broadly distributed around the population that few Mexican individuals stand out today as notably black.
In fact, the black contribution to Mexico's "cosmic race" has been so forgotten that in last November's race for governor of the state of Michoacán, Alfredo Anaya of the former ruling party PRI hammered away at his opponent Lázaro Cárdenas, the scion of Mexico's most famous leftist dynasty, for having a part-black Cuban wife and son.
Anaya argued, "There is a great feeling that we want to be governed by our own race, by our own people."
One of his supporters said, "It's one thing to be brown. The black race is something different."
Ultimately, this strategy failed, as Anaya lost. Still, he came within five percentage points of beating the son of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the man who is widely believed to have been cheated out of Mexico's presidency in 1988 by massive PRI vote fraud. Further, this Lázaro Cárdenas is the grandson of the Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico's most popular president, who is still adored for triumphing over the United States by nationalizing American-owned oil companies in 1938. So, considering the vast name recognition enjoyed by Cardenas, Anaya's pro-mestizo and anti-black ploy cannot be dismissed as wholly ineffectual.
By 2001, after generations of intermarriage, no more than 1 percent of the Mexican population is said to be identifiably African. Most of the remaining Afro-Mexicans are concentrated in the humid coastal regions, rather than the cooler highlands or dry northern desert.
There are self-consciously Afro-Mexican communities on the Gulf of Mexico near Vera Cruz, where the slave ships docked. There are heavily black villages on the Costa Chica on the Pacific, although the residents tend to see themselves as simply Mexicans with dark skins. One confusing factor is that Mexico also imported slaves from across the Pacific, including some African-looking New Guineans and also Negritos from the Philippines.
Life can be difficult for black Mexicans, because they are often assumed to be illegal immigrants from elsewhere in Latin America, such as Panama. The Mexican police often treat illegal aliens harshly.
Mexico's obliviousness to its black roots is slowly changing. An Afro-Mexican Museum recently opened south of Acapulco in Cuajinicuilapa in the state of Guerrero, which is named after the Afro-Mestizo second president.
So, what happened to the Afro-Mexicans who made up one tenth of the population in 1810?
The massive importation of East African slaves into the Middle East has not left much of a visible trace there either, although Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to America, is clearly part black. Historian Bernard Lewis attributes this lack of blacks to the tendency in the Islamic world to castrate male slaves and work both sexes to death.
In contrast, the Mexican experience appears to have been much more benign. According to Cerda-Flores, intermarriage continued steadily until African genes had widely diffused into the population.
It's often argued these days that race is purely a "social construct." This view often puzzles geneticists, such as the forensic anthropologists who are employed by the police to examine hairs left at crime scenes and determine the race of suspects from their DNA.
Yet, there is a definite sense in which societies construct their own genetic makeups. America's color line and "one drop" rule have kept the genes of black Africans relatively isolated. In contrast, Mexico's color continuum and openness to interracial marriage have spread them so widely that there are few conspicuously black Mexicans left.
http://www.isteve.com/2002_Where_Did_Mexicos_Blacks_Go.htm
Posted : 09/04/2006 1:49 pm
Topic starter
Thought I'd post that in order to promote a little truth in advertising.
Below are some words to contemplate from Pio Pico, the last governor of Mexican California. Records indicate that Pio Pico was of African, Indian and Spanish ancestry:
"What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?"
-- Spoken by Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California (1801-1894), he was of mixed African/Indian/European heritage.
"He never learned English and signed deeds thinking they were mortgages. When he was past eighty years of age, he borrowed $62,000 from one BERNARD COHN, signing a deed that he thought was a mortgage. Therefore, he lost Rancho Paso de Bartola and died penniless in 1894".
http://www.sfvhs.com/piopico.htm
http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi05s.htm
Some factoids on Mexico that I ran across while researching this topic:
...At the same time that Mexico’s colonial economy grew, its native population shrank. When Hernando Cortés landed near Veracruz, perhaps as many as twenty-five million natives lived in Mexico; by 1610 their numbers had dwindled to less than a million. Spaniards, remembering the depopulation of the Caribbean islands a half-century earlier, feared the same occurrence in Mexico. Old World diseases caused most of the deaths, but whites attributed the decline to overwork and mistreatment of the Indians. As a result, Spaniards introduced African slavery into the area to relieve apparent labor stress on native Mexicans...
http://www.humanities-interactive.org/newworld/africa/blacks_in_mexico.htm
...The historical record, of course, tells another story. In the sixteenth century, New Spain--as Mexico was then called--probably had more enslaved Africans than any other colony in the Western Hemisphere. Blacks were present as slaves of the Spaniards as early as the 1520s. Over the approximately three hundred years it lasted, the slave trade brought about 200,000 Africans to the colony. Many blacks were born in Mexico and followed their parents into slavery. Not until 1829 was the institution abolished by the leaders of the newly independent nation...
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/legacy/almleg.html
...In the early colonial period, European immigration was extremely small--and for good reason. There were great risks and many uncertainties in the New World, and few families were willing to immigrate until some assurance of stability was demonstrated. Because of this hesitance, very few European women immigrated, thus preventing the natural growth of the Spanish population.
The point that must be made here is the fact that the black population in the early colony was by far larger than that of the Spanish. In 1570 we see that the black population is about 3 times that of the Spanish. In 1646, it is about 2.5 times as large, and in 1742, blacks still outnumber the Spanish. It is not until 1810 that Spaniards are more numerous...
http://www.afromexico.com/brief.htm
Today Mexico's population is 9 percent White, 30 percent Indian and 60 percent Mestizo (mixed Indian, White and Negroid).
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mx.html
Posted : 09/04/2006 1:51 pm
When stories don't make sense, be suspicious of the explanation. When two people who both have white blood and black blood produce a child, that child has a good chance of being blacker than either parent. Therefore, you have to believe that in Mexico it worked differently, and Asiatic/Indian type features stamped out all trace of black features, which is not the way it works in human genetics.
Arabs killed any mixed black babies at birth -so I read - maybe the Mexicans did, too. That photo of the man with "black hair" does not look he has afro hair to me. Anyway, many Jews and Italians have kinky hair, yet they are not known for having a large black slave population that was absorbed.
As the jews like to say, they came over with Columbus, and when Mexico was taking out the Catholic church and trying to go commie, don't you think it was the Jews at work? I do. Any article about mexican races that completely ignores the jews is suspicious, like articles about the middle east conflict that don't mention Israel.
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
Posted : 09/04/2006 3:26 pm
So according to jew Sailer Mexies have the same percentage of negro as his tribe does. Wilmot Robertson, in THE DISPOSSESSED MAJORITY, wrote that Arthur Ernest Mourant of Oxford, expert on Human Blood Groups, found that jews had 5% negro blood. So let's send mexies back to mexico and jews to Israel where they can get down with jazz and bamba.
Posted : 09/04/2006 4:23 pm
Topic starter
When stories don't make sense, be suspicious of the explanation. When two people who both have white blood and black blood produce a child, that child has a good chance of being blacker than either parent. Therefore, you have to believe that in Mexico it worked differently, and Asiatic/Indian type features stamped out all trace of black features, which is not the way it works in human genetics.
Arabs killed any mixed black babies at birth -so I read - maybe the Mexicans did, too. That photo of the man with "black hair" does not look he has afro hair to me. Anyway, many Jews and Italians have kinky hair, yet they are not known for having a large black slave population that was absorbed.
As the jews like to say, they came over with Columbus, and when Mexico was taking out the Catholic church and trying to go commie, don't you think it was the Jews at work? I do. Any article about mexican races that completely ignores the jews is suspicious, like articles about the middle east conflict that don't mention Israel.
Not sure what you are trying to say Abzug, there is no way that the Mexican's invading my neighborhood meet the traditional definition of mestizo as being half White and half Indian, hell I wish they were half White. What we got is the Mexican lower classes, mostly Cholos and Indians who are hopping the fence. Judging from the looks of the ones around here they are lucky to be one third White (a small fraction are White) and very definitely there is some Black addmixture. Take a look at the California census of 1790 it's loaded with mulattos who somehow have "disappeared". However I agree with your last paragraph, Sailor forgot to include Jews into the Mestizo mix, alot of the converso jews wound up in Mexico where they were farther out of reach from the inquisitors and no doubt contributed their demon seed.
¿Emiliano Zapata es mestizo y Zambo?
Posted : 09/04/2006 5:18 pm
Topic starter
So according to jew Sailer Mexies have the same percentage of negro as his tribe does. Wilmot Robertson, in THE DISPOSSESSED MAJORITY, wrote that Arthur Ernest Mourant of Oxford, expert on Human Blood Groups, found that jews had 5% negro blood. So let's send mexies back to mexico and jews to Israel where they can get down with jazz and bamba.
Steve Sailor is a Jew? Steve Sailor doesn't give my Jewdar much of a bounce, can you corroborate that, I like to keep track of those demons. And I agree on the last count!
Posted : 09/04/2006 5:21 pm
Here's a summary of admixture studies in Mexico. There is clearly a black genetic imprint but I doubt that it's as high as 10%. Mexicans with visible black ancestry are pretty rare.
Posted : 09/04/2006 6:04 pm
Juanita Gonzalez & Pedro “Caca” Gomez , Tijuana Mexico, circa 1900
The ink of the learned is as precious as the blood of the martyr. For one drop of ink may make millions think.
Posted : 09/04/2006 6:08 pm
Steve Sailor is a Jew? Steve Sailor doesn't give my Jewdar much of a bounce, can you corroborate that, I like to keep track of those demons. And I agree on the last count!
Sailer is like the jew Cardinal of France, Lustinger, a jew adopted and raised by a Catholic family. What Stevie does to the goyim is what MacDonald has pointed out: divert attention away from the root cause, the jew, onto symptoms. He provides cover for his tribal members, all the while gentiles think,"Why he's one of us", no, he ISN"T one of us, he is a jew.
Posted : 09/04/2006 7:05 pm
Here's a summary of admixture studies in Mexico. There is clearly a black genetic imprint but I doubt that it's as high as 10%. Mexicans with visible black ancestry are pretty rare.
I note from the chart that there is a majority "European" population demographic in and around Monterey, Mexico. Check the article below for the truth about the ruling elite of Monterey.
TEXAS MEXICAN SECRET SPANISH JEWS TODAY
by Anne deSola Cardoza
from Halapid Summer, 1995
Jewish food, oral traditions, culture, and secret religious customs are showing up today in the folklore, habits and practices of the descendants of early settlers in southern Texas and the surrounding areas of Mexico. In northern Mexico and what today is Texas, the Jews of Nuevo Leon and its capital, Monterrey, Mexico, lived without fear of harassment from the Holy Office of the 1640's and beyond. Many of the leading non-Jewish families today of that area are descended from secret Jewish ancestors, according to scholar, Richard G. Santos.
Santos states there are hundreds, if not thousands of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews living today in San Antonio and throughout South Texas. Not all are aware of their Jewish heritage. Santos is a renowned scholar in ethnic studies of South Texas secret Spanish Jewry. He presented a paper to the Interfaith Institute at the Chapman Graduate Center of Trinity University on secret Sephardic Jewish customs in today's Texas and nearby Mexican areas.
Here’s how we know that many Tex-Mex Hispanics today are of Jewish ancestry. It's a well accepted fact that the founding families of Monterrey and the nearby Mexican border area, "Nuevo Reyno de Leon" are of Sephardic Jewish origin. If we go back to the Diccionario Porrua de Historia Geografia y Biografia, it states that Luis de Carvajal y de a Cucva brought a shipload of Jews to settle his Mexican colony - with some Jews being converts to Catholicism from Judaism and others "openly addicted to their (Jewish) doctrine".
Seymour Liebman, a scholar on Mexican colonial secret Jews, in his book "Jews in New Spain", explained why Jews settled in areas far away from Mexico City in order to escape the long arm of the Inquisition in the sixteenth century.
There's an old, universally known anti-Semitic Mexican joke, a one-liner that says, "la gente de Monterrey son muy judios ... son muy codo". In English it translates, "The people of Monterrey are very Jewish ... very tightwad".
Secret Jews colonized the states of Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Tamualipas and good old Texas, USA in the 1640's-1680s and thereafter. The majority of Texas's Spanish-speaking immigrants came from Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila (the old Neuvo Reyno de Leon) beginning in the 1680s.
Posted : 09/04/2006 7:19 pm
I bet the author added the tightwad part in to explain the joke. Usually, when people say "jewish" everyone knows it means tightwad and nobody would have to explain it. Or they would just say "Monterey!" and everyone would nod their heads and know it means-"tightwad jew bastard."
"Go, Nazis, Go!"
Posted : 09/04/2006 8:00 pm
What Stevie does to the goyim is what MacDonald has pointed out: divert attention away from the root cause, the jew, onto symptoms. He provides cover for his tribal members, all the while gentiles think,"Why he's one of us", no, he ISN"T one of us, he is a jew.
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly Steve's raison d'être. Thanks, Mister MacDonald.
Posted : 09/04/2006 8:04 pm
Topic starter
Holy Shit! Coyote or professional mexcrement smuggler, was already an occupation way back in 1790! I did not know that.
I wondered about that, seems at one time the Spanish had 64 different racial caste classifications for their subjects living in the colonies including "coyote" which stood for a 3/4 breed indian. Of course things got a little complicated with the pecking orders the way they were handling things down there, so out of political correctness they recently narrowed it down to just three classifications]Mestizo[/url] which has been substituted to mean mixed race. I would have prefered to have kept the original classifications, here are some of them:
Spanish/Criollo
A Criollo was a Spaniard born in the colonies
Two "white" Spanish Parents* or one Spanish parent and one Castizo parent
Castizo
From the word "casta" or caste
Offspring of one Spanish parent and one Mestizo parent
Mestizo
Literally, a person of "mixed" ethnic heritage
Offspring of one (white) Spanish parent and one Indian parent
Mulatto
From "mule": a reference to the interbreeding of horses and donkeys. At one time, people believed Mulattos (like the animal with which they were compared) would be sterile.
Offspring of one Spanish parent and one African/Black parent
Morisco
From Spanish moro, "Moor"
Offspring of one Mulatto parent and one Spanish parent
Ahi te estas
Mexican localism: "stay where you are"
Offspring of one Mulatto parent and one Coyote parent
Coyote / Cholo
From Nahuatl: coyotl, "coyote"
Offspring of either one Mestizo parent and one Indian parent*
Lobo
From Latin lupus, "wolf"
Offspring of:
Black/African and Indian
Mulatto and Indian
Torna-atras and Mulatto
or several others
Zambo
Offspring of one Black or Mulatto parent and one Indian parent
Posted : 15/06/2006 3:08 pm
My personal experience is on the Gulf Coast side around Veracruz (11 on the map,) a lot of Mexicans look a little African. In Guadalajara (3 on the map,) the Mexicans look either mixed European/Indio or Indio (some look very European). I've been to lots of places in Mexico and the only place that the Mexicans look somewhat African is the state and city of Veracruz.
Just my observations.
Enkidu
Hunter S. Thompson, "Big dark, coming soon"
Posted : 15/06/2006 3:20 pm
Sailer is like the jew Cardinal of France, Lustinger, a jew adopted and raised by a Catholic family. What Stevie does to the goyim is what MacDonald has pointed out: divert attention away from the root cause, the jew, onto symptoms. He provides cover for his tribal members, all the while gentiles think,"Why he's one of us", no, he ISN"T one of us, he is a jew.
Could you show a biography or something that says he is a Jew?
I don't know about covering for Jews. Maybe he just thinks like many others, that it's best to stay away from that topic.
Here is Steve Sailer about an exchange he had with The Times' former executive editor, Frankel, where he questions why there's so much handwringing about how they never wrote about the Holocaust (tm) during WWII]Let's be frank: history is not written by the victors. The truth about who writes history isn't well understood, even though it's tautological:
History is written by the writers of history.
What that means, in practical terms, is that if the Ukrainians want their Holocaust to stop being ignored, well, they'll just have to become executive editors and professors of journalism and columnists and historians and movie producers and documentarians and all the rest. The Ukrainians will have to do it themselves. People care about avenging their relatives' victimizations a lot more than they care about fair historical balance.
Posted : 15/06/2006 3:27 pm