By Pancho McFarland
Immigrants and Urban Eaters
Chicago, IL. In spite of 500 years of Black-Mexican interaction, the existence of African Mexicans, and the Mexican-Black co-creation of and participation in much popular culture, Mexican and Black relations in Chicago are far from ideal. Heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and virulent anti-Black racism have often caused misunderstanding, suspicion and dislike for one another. We hope that a better understanding of both the machinations of capitalism that use race and racism to divide and conquer and the long history of Mexican-Black cooperation will improve relations between the groups and help us build a more just future. The teaching and implementation of food justice theory and practice can assist in this effort.
Mexican-Black Relations: A History of Cooperation and (Some) Conflict
African and Mexican/indigenous relationships begin in the early 16th century (some argue first contact between these peoples is ancient pointing to the famous Olmec heads as evidence of Africans in the Americas prior to the Spanish invasion) when Spanish colonialists brought hundreds of thousands of Africans to Mexico. Indigenous, and later Mestizo, Mexicans and Africans encountered each other and were the co-creators of Mexican society. Significantly, they and their racially-mixed offspring resisted their exploitation at the hands of the conquistadores and hacendados. Yanga led a slave revolt that created the first free African town in the Americas in 1609 later named in his honor. Dozens of similar towns would eventually be created in Mexico’s Veracruz and Costa Chica regions. Eventually, indigenous, African and mestizo/mulatto resistance ended Spanish rule in Mexico. Men like Guerrero were, in part, descendants of African slaves. In the spirit of Yanga they fought for self-determination.
During the Spanish colonial years, African and indigenous cultures mixed and mingled to create what we now know as Mexican culture. While we are aware of Spain’s contribution to Mexican culture in the form of the Spanish language, Catholicism and architecture, many are unaware that the bulk of Mexican culture is indigenous and African. Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas in African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation focuses our attention on the African contributions to Mexican cuisine, language, music and dance among other important aspects of our culture. Traditions such as mariachi, fandango, the consumption of barbacoa and tripa, and the central place of the verb "chingar" in Mexican language-use result from Africans and their interaction with indigenous/mestizos.
In spite of the divide and conquer strategies of Spanish, and later Mexican, elites that led to both anti-Black racism and anti-indigenous racism and the exalting of "Hispanidad" in Mexico, the history of cooperation between the Africans and the indigenous continued in the 19th and 20th centuries. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 (nearly 40 years before the United States did so). Additionally, escaped slaves from the U.S. South often chose to go south to Mexico instead of North. Black slaves from the U.S. were often assisted and encouraged to settle in Mexico. Gerald Horne in Black and Brown shows further how Black people received a positive reception in Mexico leading people like Jack Johnson to encourage Black settlement there. Further, Mexico provided opportunities for Black baseball players and artists that were absent in the U.S. At the same time, Blacks and Mexicans in the U.S. encountered one another on the West Coast. Here they co-created zoot-suiting, lowriding, street style, the U.S. third world resistance movement, and West Coast rap/hip hop and breakdancing.
While the evidence for positive relations is immense, structural factors including capitalism and racism imposed strife and tension between the two communities. This begins early in the colonial period when elites chose to enslave Africans and not the indigenous after it was determined that the indigenous did, indeed, have souls (see the entry on "Scientific Racism" in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States). Africans, it was determined, were soul less. A racial hierarchy was established that placed Africans below the indigenous and mestizos. Later, the African presence and contributions to Mexico and its culture were rendered invisible. In addition, Blacks were depicted negatively in Mexican popular culture of the 20th century. The U.S. racial hierarchy, xenophobia and popular culture representations contributed to Mexican-Black conflict. Today, economic downturns have created tensions between the two groups as the worsening economy causes both to suffer and the media portrays Blacks as lazy and criminal and Mexicans as foreign and usurpers of Black jobs.
Food: The Invisible Link
Capitalism fetishizes the products that workers make. As a product is turned into a commodity to be sold to an unknowing consumer, the relations of the commodity’s production are hidden. The consumer sees the commodity sitting on a shelf disconnected from anything but price. Nowhere is there evidence of anything or anyone involved in its production. The workers who make the product and create its value through the labor they put into it are made invisible. The industrial process that is almost always toxic, the shipment of commodities from the point of production to the point of distribution which uses polluting petroleum products, and the encasing of commodities in plastic are hidden as consumers’ concerns revolve around getting the “best” product for their buck. We, U.S. citizens and denizens, learn early the lessons that the bourgeoisie teaches regarding consumption. The first and most important of these is don’t ask questions.
When some of us ask questions about the relations of production, we find that the fetishization of products is seen in its most stark form in food. From what part of the cow does a fajita come? How do the beautiful strawberries in their plastic boxes grow? How are they planted and harvested? What does it take to get them from where they are grown to my supermarket? Under what conditions do the workers in the fields live? Who are they? How much do they get paid? You won’t find any evidence at the supermarket to help you investigate these questions. Instead you get pretty packaging. The relations of production that exploit workers and the land and that bring pesticide- and hormone-packed food to our tables while enriching a small number of agribusiness owners hide behind advertising and packaging.
The efforts of many in the food justice movement unveil the mysteries of capitalist food production. The relations of production that distance consumers from the producers are revealed. Exploring questions about food production, distribution and consumption provides a window into the understanding that we are all connected through the human need for food. Simply asking students to trace back the food that they eat on a given day to its origins begins to demonstrate the invisible link between urban eaters and immigrant producers. This simple exercise that people of all ages can engage in shatters the façade of the capitalist food system. Instead of food miraculously appearing on a table disembodied from its origins in nature and the literal bodies of the superexploited farmworkers, this thought exercise demonstrates the centrality of immigrant workers to “our daily bread.”
Many Black students who I teach in Chicago quickly come to the profound realization that farmworkers, many of who are undocumented immigrants, are not criminal, job-snatching pariahs but people who make their lives easier through subsidizing food costs with blood, sweat and tears. As the various layers of the commodity fetish surrounding food are peeled away, students begin to make the connections between urban problems, especially health and race relations, and rural problems. They see how the racial system that for so long has denied Black people dignity and access to the resources necessary for a good life is the same system that poisons farmworkers in the fields and labels immigrants a menace. They see that the same relations of food production, distribution and consumption that cause high levels of obesity-related diseases and other illnesses in their communities are the same as those that cause cancer clusters in farmworker communities. They see that while their communities suffer from high prices and poor quality food and farmworkers suffer from low wages and dangerous working conditions, owners of agribusiness companies are rich and powerful with an important and influential lobby in Washington, D.C.
Students inevitably ask: What can we do about this?
Local Food and Black-Brown Coalitions
Those of us engaged in developing local food systems in urban areas such as Chicago can build Latina/o-Black coalitions to struggle against the destructive capitalist food system and for a just and better future. A key component of local food systems, and perhaps, its most important, is the education in food production that results from community members working together to feed themselves. In the gardens urban consumers become producers who gain firsthand knowledge of food production from seed to table. Conversations and formal and informal classes on organic, sustainable and culturally-relevant food production teaches members of the local/community food system not only about organic horticultural practices but also about how agribusiness does its business. Discussions about the importance of diversity in a garden plot and polycultural techniques such as intercropping and companion planting translate easily into acknowledgement of diversity and polyculturality in our human communities. The lessons of ubuntu (I am because you are), in lak ech (you are my other me), and mitakuye oyasin (all my relations) are easily integrated into a plan for a successful community garden and food system. These lessons come alive as the gardens grow and food is harvested and shared.
The growing of las tres madres (corn, beans and squash) only feet away from collard greens and okra becomes a living metaphor for the possibility of relations between Black and Mexican/Latina/o people. When recipes are shared a new conviviality develops that would be impossible under a capitalist food regime. As Estevan Arellano explains in his March 26, 2010 op-ed piece (“Convide,” http://ejfood.blogspot.com/2010/03/guest-blog-estevan-arrellano.html), convide (the sharing of food among neighbors) reinforces a sense of community and mutual aid that is part of nuevomexicano culture and the cultures of many African, Mexican and indigenous Diasporas. He explains that convide “is an idea that has allowed our communities to survive and thrive when it comes to eating healthy food.” He writes further that in his part of Northern New Mexico such practices made it so that no one went hungry for centuries. Convide and similar concepts and practices of African-origin peoples are essential in the struggle against the racist capitalist system that separates Blacks and Mexicans and that threatens our communities with poor quality food. Through convide, ubuntu, in lak ech, and mitakuye oyasin, we hope to create local food systems that bridge the gaps between different racial/ethnic groups and producers and consumers of food.
However, such practices require vigilance to be successful. We must be aware that societal pressures continually threaten the development of Latina/o-Black and consumer-producer relations. Misreadings and selective readings of history, real present-day competition, a media that fans the flames of fear and anxiety of others, urban and rural social problems,and an economy that not only denies people of color access to important resources but also does untold psychological and spiritual damage to them, creates a situation in which the lessons of conviviality taught through the mutual production of healthy and culturally-relevant foodstuffs can be overlooked. The lessons of one community garden in Chicago in which Black and Mexican American community members worked serves as a warning about how the ambitions of Black-Brown coalitions can be easily undermined. In a Southside neighborhood that had been predominantly Mexican and Mexican American since the 1920s but had begun to transition to a predominantly Black neighborhood in the late 1980s-early 1990s, the tensions around race and class led to a palpable animosity between the two groups by the early 2000s. A community garden in a Mexican American part of the neighborhood drew both Blacks and Mexican Americans. While the excitement of building a beautiful award-winning garden eased tensions in the beginning, soon pride, fear and racism caused animosity. Fights over space, grant money and which vegetables to be grown led to the garden being overtaken by the Mexican American members who felt a certain entitlement related to their sense that the garden was located in their neighborhood and that the newer Black residents were interlopers.
Thus we should be aware of the barriers to conviviality that result from a capitalist culture that teaches fear of other and radical individuality. The problems that erupted in the aforementioned garden required attention and education. Members needed to remind each other of the convivial belief systems of our ancestors. This situation required more than learning organic, sustainable horticultural practices. It required a critical analysis of our society from a social ecology perspective that connects the problems of food production and environmental destruction to that of human to human relations. This example proves that a beautiful community garden can be achieved while practices of conviviality are undermined.
On the other hand, practices of community gardening and the development of local food systems combined with lessons in conviviality and respect for all our relations can produce an equitable social system. Overcoming a capitalist ethos that hides social relations of food production and offers ahistorical understandings of difference and otherness, requires not only a knowledge of sustainable, organic horticultural practices but a knowledge of our mutual interdependence and the true history of our relations to one another. This knowledge is essential if we are to escape from the capitalist-imposed food deserts and inequalities and work towards food and social justice.
NOTE: The “Food Justice in the City” series is written by Pancho McFarland, Assistant Professor, Chicago State University.
