Miembros Newsletter: February 2022

Honoring and Reaffirming the Afro-Latinx Artists, History and Culture

In honor of Black History Month, we highlight the Afro-Latinx culture, presence, and impact of African people in the Americas. We share the artworks included in MX21 Resistance, Reaffirmation and Resilience. 

Artworks in the MX21 Reaffirmation section speak to affirming the unique history and cultural diversity of our shared heritage, complex identity, and vitality shaped by experiences in the Americas. First People and their descendants throughout the Americas have struggled to affirm a place and identity. Affirmation of one’s culture is to strive for political change. Artists work to affirm, self-determine, and resist racial stereotypes. Our plurality represents First People, the African, the Mexicano, Mexican Americans, and other Latinx peoples. Our struggles to achieve liberty and social justice are one. We affirm our similarities and embrace our differences. Artists respond and create to contribute to understanding these complexities in the pursuit of social justice today. In MX21, we reflect on history and current reality here in the U.S., reclaiming and reaffirming shared history and experiences. Africans torn from their homeland brought to work the land; women forced through rape to produce a new generation of workers to fuel the colonial economy. African people in Latin America are decentered and blurred from history.  

Artists have recovered, rewrote, and reconstructed history. Reclamation of indigenous roots has become a symbol of belonging. It is essential that we acknowledge the physical, economic, and psychological trauma that colonialism has inflicted on so many communities throughout the Americas. It is also essential to acknowledge historic and momentous moments of resistance and human rights movements continue today. In the following works, artists preserve connections to heritage by incorporating ancestral imagery into their art as a way for historical and cultural affirmation.  

Thousands of Africans were brought to America as slaves. They came to join the ranks with the Indigenous people, the great mass of the oppressed and exploited. Sometimes they rebelled against their situation and their tormentors. Yanga, a courageous African man, led one such rebellion in Veracruz, which was crushed with bloody violence. Africans brought involuntarily are a part of Mexico’s history. Yanga or Nyanga (May 14, 1545) was an African who led a community of enslaved people in the highlands near Veracruz, Mexico during the early period of Spanish colonial rule. He successfully resisted a Spanish attack in 1609.  In 1618, Yanga achieved an agreement with the colonial government for self-rule of the settlement. It was later called San Lorenzo and also San Lorenzo de Cerralvo. In the late 19th century, Yanga was named as a “national hero of Mexico” and “El Primer Libertador de las Americas”.  In 1932 the settlement he formed, located in today’s state of Veracruz, was renamed as Yanga in his honor.

Hidalgo and his lieutenant Allende were executed by firing squad, at the end of a brief period of formidable struggles in which the popular forces, poorly organized, were beaten by a disciplined royalist army. Hidalgo was succeeded in the leadership of the Revolution of Independence by another distinguished clergyman, with enormous military capacity and a profound sense of the social transformations that were already imperative at that time. This was José María Morelos y Pavón. José María Morelos y Pavón, statesman and Roman Catholic priest, was one of the greatest insurgent military commanders during the Mexican War of Independence.  Morelos was born into a Afro-Mexican) family in Valladolid, Mexico on September 30, 1765.

Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña – (1782 –1831) was one of the revolutionary leaders of the Mexican War of Independence. As a son of the fabled tierra caliente, the hot region of the south between the Río Balsas and the Pacific coast, he was descended from the enslaved Africans of colonial Mexico, and from the indigenous people. Guerrero was of humble origins; in his youth he worked as a mule driver on his father’s mule run. His travels took him to different parts of Mexico where he heard of the ideas of independence. Through one of these trips he met rebel General José María Morelos y Pavon. In November 1810, Guerrero decided to join Morelos.

Upon the assassination of Morelos by the Spaniards, Guerrero became Commander in Chief. After Independence, Guerrero was elected the second president of Mexico in 1829. As president, Guerrero went on to champion the cause of not only the racially oppressed, but also the economically oppressed. Guerrero formally abolished slavery on September 16, 1829. 

Yelaine Rodriguez, Ezili Dantor, Freedom & The African Diaspora, (Detail), 2021, Photographic Tapestry, Cotton, Vintage French Metallic Lace, Mexican Milagros, 30″ x 36″ Courtesy of the artist.

Ezili Dantor, Freedom & The African Diaspora is a multi-layered project of the artist interpretation of the Bois Caiman Ceremony of August 1791. It is part of Rodriguez’s series: We Are Here Because You Were There, inspired by cultural theorist Stuart Hall. In this secret ceremony, the enslaved Africans gathered and organized the first significant slave insurrection of the Haitian Revolution against the French colonizers of Saint-Domingue. It served as a religious ritual and tactical congregation, where the Afro-syncretic religion of Voodoo played an instrumental role in which some people believe formed a more homogeneous Black culture in Haiti. It is also the birth site of the mother of Haiti, Haitian loa (Gods/Spirits) Ezili Dantor, syncretized with The Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

Five hundred years ago the wind changed everything. The fire of ambition devoured Quetzalcoatl and his children mercilessly. The cold metal blinded the innocent blood. Taking lives in exchange for gold was the only feasible plan. But they discovered that Quetzals do not live in cages and cannot die because they are dreams that fly. Now our history lives in the color of our skin, the shape of our bodies, our language. Our culture resists time. Our culture is the resistance of eurocentric values. 

“My mural is a historical portrait. The satirical style in my work reinforces the theatrics of life and how the most valuable things are relative- like the lives exchanged for gold 500 years ago.”

We thank Jesus Becerra for Preserving Traditions in Austin!

This month marks the thirty-third year of the opening of La Mexicana Bakery in Austin, Texas in 1989. It also is the last month that it will prepare and serve the delicious pan dulce and Mexican dishes to the community. I have had the honor of knowing and working with Señor Jesus, Rosie and La Mexicana for all these many years.  

The culinary and pastry arts are in fact that – arts that we acknowledge and recognize. We would say that we all appreciate these even more than all the other arts. In addition to seeing the beautiful forms of the pan dulce, we all can taste and eat them, and we receive nutrition.

Jesus Becerra and La Mexicana have been an important part of the Museum’s programs like Dia de los Muertos since he opened in 1989.

Throughout October, Señor Jesus would arrive very early in the morning to bake the hundreds of pan de muerto in various creative forms and colors for the Museum, schools, and organizations so that we could place the pan on the ofrendas for our loved ones. La Mexicana has also contributed to maintaining traditions and festive days like the Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, Dia de los Reyes with the Rosca de Reyes for all the families.  

Señor Becerra has also been very generous and has donated delicious bread for events like the Taste of Mexico and to schools and non-profit organizations. He is an outstanding member of our community.  

On Feb.16th the City of Austin and the Consulate General of Mexico recognized and thanked Señor Jesus Becerra, Rosie Becerra and the La Mexicana staff and family for their contributions and service to the community.  It is through the hard work of individuals like Señor Jesus that we are keeping our beautiful traditions alive. We wish Jesus and Rosie the best and sincerely we thank you!