NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

Dear readers:

The nation is currently celebrating Black History Month, and to join such honoring of the people of African descend, El Reportero has the honor to bring to you the following article, written and researched by Alvaro Amador Muwhich highlights the contribution of those invisible communities of African descent – beyond the US border: the afromexicanos.

2015 census revealed nearly 1.4 million Mexicans of African descend

by Alvaro Amador Muniz

Until a few years ago, most Mexicans had no real idea about how many Afro-descendants existed, where they live or how they live.

Afro-descendants are part of who we are as a country, part of our history, our culture and ethnic background but most Mexicans do not know much about them. We do not know about our third root.

In 2015, for the first time in Mexican history, the Institute of Geography and Statistics (Inegi) included in the national census a question asking respondents whether they consider themselves to be afromexicano.

The results surprised many. NGOs and academics realized they had seriously underestimated their pre-census population estimates.

There are almost 1.4 million Mexicans who consider themselves to be afromexicanos. The majority of them live in the coastal areas of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Guerrero, but Mexico City and Baja California Sur also have important afromexicano settlements.

In 2015, the afromexicanos won an important victory: they went from an invisible and almost mythological status to a recognized ethnic group in Mexico.

But the importance of the afromexicano community in Mexico goes beyond numbers. What the census results don’t tell us is that without the cultural and historical contributions of the afromexicanos, Mexico would not be where it is today. So to celebrate Black History Month and as a humble attempt to keep alive this vital part of Mexican history, let’s do a quick dive into the untold history of the afromexicanos:

During the colonization

The first African slaves were brought to Mexico in 1519 by Hernán Cortés and some were granted their freedom and rewarded with land because of their loyalty and bravery during the colonization battles.

One of the most renowned cases was that of Juan Garrido, who was very close to Cortés and was compensated with the prestigious job of guardian of the aqueduct of Mexico City in Chapultepec.

The first slavery-free community of the new world

In 1570, before the first slaves were brought to the United States, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave from Gabon, rebelled against his Spanish master and escaped to the mountains of the state of Veracruz. There, he and a group of escaped slaves established, with the recognition of the Spanish crown, the first slavery-free town of the new world.

There is no exact number of the African and African descendant populations during the first years of the Spanish colony, but some historians believe that the number of Africans living in Mexico superseded that of the Europeans.

War of Independence

During the Mexican War of Independence in 1810 the leader of the independence movement, Miguel Hidalgo, released a decree that abolished any kind of slavery. This action was aimed at weakening the economic and political power of the Spanish slave owners that opposed Mexican independence and to add the freed slaves to the troops fighting for independence.

In 1813, after the death of Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos took over the leadership of the independence movement and again declared illegal all forms of slavery.
Independent Mexico and the first Afro-descendant president in North America

In 1821 Mexico declared its independence from Spain and the anti-slavery spirit of the draftsmen of independence made its way into the first Mexican constitution in 1824. The abolitionist laws were, unfortunately, a dead letter during the first years of independent Mexico.

The economy of the northern states, especially Texas, depended heavily on slave labor and those states refused to follow the abolitionist laws.

In 1829 President Vicente Guerrero, an Afromexicano himself, vigorously enforced anti-slavery laws.  Guerrero, in a conciliatory spirit, offered to pay the slave owners for the freedom of their slaves.

Black Seminoles or Mascogos in Coahuila

Not all the afromexicanos came to Mexico during colonial times. During the Seminole Wars in the United States some of the freed slaves settled with the Seminoles in what was then slavery-free Florida and fought against Andrew Jackson’s encroaching troops as he moved in to take the newly-purchased Florida back to a slavery state.

They fought for their freedom alongside the Seminole tribe in Florida but were eventually forced to abandon their land and relocate to Arkansas and Oklahoma. Some slaves took a small detour from the march to the west and escaped to northern Mexico where they had heard slavery was illegal.

In 1867, President Benito Juárez granted those refugees Mexican nationality and gave them the land that many still occupy in Múzquiz, Coahuila.

Maximiliano and the last attempt to reestablish slavery in Mexico

This might disappoint those of you who think Maximilian I was a kind-hearted “emperor” but it needs to be told. In 1865, in a desperate attempt to add allies to his fading cause, Maximilian attempted to reestablish slavery.

This was aimed at attracting the recently-defeated American confederates to northern Mexico as settlers in order to keep his “empire” afloat. Maximiliano met his end with Juárez’s firing squad, and the laws he signed never took effect.
Today
Some important victories have been won recently in favor of the afro-descendants in Mexico. The results of the census have triggered public awareness campaigns like #SoyAfro by the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (Conapred) and NGOs.

Also, places like Veracruz, Guerrero and Mexico City have included the afromexicanos as an ethic group in their local constitutions. But there is still a long road ahead. It is important that we learn, share and divulge this part of history so we can keep the ball of equality rolling forward.

“It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.”  —United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Alvaro Amador Muniz hails from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, is an honorary Tennessean and an avid basketball player currently living in Mexico City. He can be contacted at alvaroamadormu@gmail.com.

CORRECTION: The original version of this pieces stated that Hernán Cortés was around in 1919, a mistake of four centuries in magnitude.

They built a digital city in Guadalajara and an industry was born

by Raoul Lowery Contreras

Babies born today will be 32 years old in 2050 when the United States will not be the No. 1 economy in the world (it will be No. 3) and next-door Mexico will be right behind the U.S. in economic size (No. 5 or No. 7, depending on the study).

That is projected by experts. But what of today?

From Business Insider: “Mexico is the 11th-largest economy in the world with free access to the largest economy in the world . . . not to mention vast amounts of American investment pouring in . . . Mexico is seen as a land of drug dealers. But this perception is like viewing the United States as if it were Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s and the typical American as Al Capone.”

While most Americans think of Mexico as a third-world country, those who live on the border, those who see Mexicans every day, those who do business in Mexico, know that it is not.

Guadalajara is the high-tech capital of Mexico. It is a higher-education center with quality public and private universities producing thousands of science technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates annually.

The Mexican state of Jalisco (Guadalajara is its capital) has 12 universities, including the prestigious Tecnológico de Monterrey, creating 85,000 graduates in IT a year. In the past four years an estimated US $120 million has been invested in more than 300 high-tech start-ups.

Mexico, surprisingly, ranks well in the world with engineering graduates — about half the number of U.S. engineering graduates with only one-third the population.

Guadalajara has a security-tight high-tech complex, Guadalajara Creative Digital City, headquartered in a former shopping mall. It was founded by a public/private partnership led by the Jalisco state government. The state leased more than 100,000 square feet and built it up into individually wired turnkey work spaces and charged high-tech start-ups minimal rent.

In they came, one and two-person operations, small cohorts of educated men and women, young and old, who knew what ones and zeroes do when properly put together. An industry was born.

That effort continues. However, the days of one and two-person firms has passed, replaced by firms with dozens and even hundreds of people churning out more than $21 billion worth of tech products that are exported all over the world — in particular, to the United States.

“Itexico” is one of those start-ups that is maturing in Guadalajara with offices in Austin, Chicago and Mountain Valley, Calif. It was founded by Guillermo Ortega, a Mexican engineer, and Anurag Kumar, also an engineer and an Indian immigrant to America. Kumar is the CEO of the company. It has grown from a staff of a half-dozen to 170.

Need a mobile app, original software, software maintenance? Need geographic or time-zone convenience, or fluent English-speaking contractors? Ortega and Kumar explained to this writer (in better English than I speak) why their American/Mexican facilities are better to deal with than firms in Europe or Asia.

Convenience is the key word, and language is next, with time-zone relativity closing the deal. Well-educated people working with ones and zeros from top universities, including MIT and California State University, who speak the same language make working with Guadalajara totally more desirable than working with Singapore, Hong Kong or Moscow.

The beginning: Mexican manufacturing grew exponentially when giant American manufacturers flooded into Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s to take advantage of wages, the peso, geography and transportation to the world’s largest market, the U.S. Then, China entered the global industrial scene and, in 2001, Mexico found itself with empty manufacturing facilities left behind when plants moved to China for lower wages. The nascent Mexican auto industry took up some of the unemployed but other efforts were needed.

The brightest Mexican minds gathered and commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and consulting firm Accenture to conduct a study of how to fill the employment gap left behind by Chinese-bound companies.

The public/private partnership to help high-tech start-ups was suggested; it was organized. The 14-year-long leader is retired Hewlett-Packard executive and engineer Julio Acevedo García, who revels in the non-paid job. He works at it unpaid full time.

Itexico founders and partners Ortega and Kumar told us about their first days in business and how they grew and continue to grow. Their pitch made sense to customers, and referrals provide 70% of their business. Today, Itexico has 170 employees; in five years, it projects 1,000. Today, Mexico’s high-tech industry accounts for $21 billion in exports; in five years, maybe $100 billion?

Mexico could be the fifth largest economy in the world in 2050. Will it be led by high-tech in Guadalajara? Maybe.

Raoul Lowery Contreras is the author of “The Armenian Lobby & American Foreign Policy” and “The Mexican Border: Immigration, War and a Trillion Dollars in Trade.” His work has appeared in the New American News Service of the New York Times Syndicate.