Blackness Is Everything Side I
cardboard,paper, glass, plastic
8.5 x 11
Blackness Is Everything Side II
cardboard, paper, pyrography, ink, acrylic
8.5 x 11
Seeing the movie Black Orpheus when I was 10 exposed me to the interconnectedness of Africans in the diaspora. I saw myself in the Black faces of the characters on the screen. Blackness became expansive and not limited to the Black American. The movie moved me as a Black child in a way that changed my life forever. It ignited in me a longing to connect with my “distant cousins” to understand their experience so I could understand mine.
Attending an artist residency in Mexico in 2022 helped me realize the childhood desire to connect with my “distant cousins.” Over a six-week period I immersed myself in academic and experiential research on Black Mexicans. I found many similarities to the Black American experience: marginalization, cultural appropriation, and the active use of negative images to degrade and dehumanize a people.
My great-great-grandfather, who escaped slavery in the US, was born in 1833. In 1837 slavery was abolished in Mexico. Thirty-two years later, slavery would “officially” end in the United States – although it actually did not end in 1865 for everyone in bondage.
Even though Black Mexicans and Black Americans are essentially free, they remain in a kind of bondage because of anti-blackness within both societies.
The Spanish desired to Hispanicize enslaved Africans to temper resentment and stave off uprisings. The British preferred to create an environment of abject misery to remove the restless want for freedom. Assimilation in Spanish culture activated an invisibility for the Afro Mexican and disallowed the kind of Civil Rights and Black Power movements that happened in the US.
Their desire to connect with their African roots, to be seen, understood, and acknowledged as both African and Mexican is emerging now with force. This says to me that belonging and cultural pride are invaluable to the human experience and can’t be made invisible. For Black people in the diaspora, having a positive relationship to our Blackness is paramount to our well-being.
Blackness is everything and nothing at the same time. It is the culmination of all colors yet absence of color. Black people are indigenous and also foreign. Our culture is the epitome of cool, yet the majority culture denigrates much of it. Experiencing my Blackness in the US and from observing Afro Mexicans, I understand being Black for us in White societies is constant, but being understood is not.