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Paulette Ramsay, senior lecturer in Afro-Hispanic literature and culture at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, presents in this book an original and well-researched thematic analysis of the oral literature and poetry of Afro-Mexican communities from the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, in the south of the country. This allows her to analyze—through the lens of contemporary theories of genre, identity, and postcolonialism—the emergence of an Afro-descendant and Caribbean consciousness among Mexican blacks, in a clear break with the nationalist ideology of mestizaje and racial homogeneity that had kept them largely invisible.Ramsay did fieldwork in Oaxaca and Guerrero and analyzed several compilations of oral literature by Mexican anthropologists. She also acknowledges an intense collaboration with Father Glyn Jemmott Nelson, who wrote the foreword, a Trinidadian Catholic priest active in the region studied by Ramsay for several decades. This book can be read as part of a process of increasing collaboration between Afro-descendant peoples from Mexico and from other countries of the Americas. Academics, activists, and cultural workers from the latter are increasingly involved in research as well as political and social initiatives with the former. Such collaboration constitutes a very interesting example of how the political concerns, research agendas, and identity politics of other communities of African origin can enrich our understanding of Afro-Mexican communities.In the introduction, Ramsay presents a general panorama of the region under study and a thorough historical introduction about the life of Afro-Mexicans since colonial times, based on her fieldwork and bibliographical research. The first chapter analyzes the popular black comic book character Memín Pinguín as an example of the distorted views and negative stereotypes that Mexican mainstream culture holds about Afro-Mexicans, utilizing postcolonial deconstruction and visual rhetoric analysis. Ramsay persuasively debunks the argument that this racist depiction is merely harmless humor, advanced by several Mexican intellectuals to defend the series against criticisms coming from the United States.The rest of the book deals with Afro-Mexican literary productions. Chapters 2 and 3 analyze oral narratives and corridos, songs with a strong narrative component, to examine the construction of gender roles within the patriarchal context of Mexican and Afro-Mexican societies. The author strives to show how marginalized female black voices find a way to present a positive view of their racial and gender identity. She also proposes that black masculinity is constructed in resistance to dominant mestizo conceptions of male power. Chapters 4 and 5 use literary and cultural studies methodologies to analyze the oral and lyric poetry produced in the region. Ramsay argues that these verses reveal a higher level of racial consciousness than is usually attributed to Afro-Mexicans. In the latter chapter, she presents a bold proposal to include in the Caribbean cultural world Afro-Mexican and Mexican culture in order to fully acknowledge their diasporic and multicultural realities, thus dismantling the myths of national unity and cultural homogeneity that have prevented a fuller recognition of Afro-Mexican culture and identity.As a whole, this book presents a coherent, thoughtful interpretation of the literary manifestations of the Afro-Mexican communities in southern Mexico. Ramsay's perspective is all the more interesting because it remains explicitly and deliberately foreign to traditional Mexican narratives about this reality, though Ramsay acknowledges the contributions of recent Mexican scholars to her analyses. However, at times the author offers an overly simplistic juxtaposition between Afro-Mexicans and a Mexican culture that appears too homogeneous. She repeats the definitions of mestizo identity produced in the early and mid-twentieth century, not taking into account how they were criticized from many quarters of Mexican society in the recent past. She also appears to undervalue the cultural commonalities between Afro-Mexican cultures and those of their indigenous and mestizo neighbors, the result of centuries of close contact and continuous exchanges. For instance, some of the tropes in the narratives and oral poems that she analyzes as idiosyncratic manifestations of Afro-Mexican consciousness are also present in other ethnic communities, where they may be vehicles for different meanings. Acknowledging the deep entanglement of Afro-Mexican cultures and their neighboring cultures, without falling into the homogenizing narratives of mestizaje, would only enrich Ramsay's compelling analyses.
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