Abstract

Through photographs, interviews, life stories and a dialogic methodology based on horizontality, this visual ethnography reconstructs diverse forms of identification and self-representation that refer, in different ways, to Afro-descendence and its supposed somatic marks. All of this is situated in a regional, urban and contemporary context, historically associated with the Mayan as a dominant alterity and as a foundational component of local identity. The objective is to understand, from the experiences and perspectives of a Yucatecan woman, how the marks of belonging and identity operate in relation to social hierarchies and self-representation, as well as the processes involved in the appropriation or rejection of the categories associated with these marks.1

Keywords: afrodescendencia, self-representation, photo-bid, identity, Yucatan

curating the self: representing african ancestry

This visual ethnography reconstructs various forms of identification and self-representation that evoke African ancestry and its supposed somatic markers in diverse ways through photographs, interviews, life stories, and a dialogical analysis based on horizontal relations. In the regional, urban, and contemporary context of this ethnographic study, the Mayan has historically served as the predominant "other" and a foundational component of local identity. Drawing on the experiences and perspectives of a Yucatecan woman, the article explores how markers of belonging and identity operate within social hierarchies and self-representation, as well as the processes involved in appropriating or rejecting categories associated with those markers.2

Keywords: self-representation, identity, African ancestry, Yucatán, photo-elicitation.

Starting points3

Rosma Garduza was born 46 years ago in Valladolid, Yucatán, a city now recognized by the federal government as a magical town. From the age of nine she grew up in Mérida, the state capital, with her mother and younger brother. He currently lives with his two sons and the father of his second son in a rented house one street away from the gastronomic corridor of Mérida, part of the renovation project of the historic center aimed at promoting tourism and the local economy. This location is strategic for the exhibition and sale of her jewelry, which is the main source of income for her family. Rosma studied Anthropology with a major in Literature and Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (wow),4 and has been recognized in the Mexican design world for her artistic talent.

I met Rosma 14 years ago, in Mérida, during an art exhibition. Since then, we have shared a relationship based on open and frank dialogue. Throughout our shared conversations and reflections, Rosma has related to me various experiences in which her presence recurrently provokes comments that racialize and exoticize her, alluding to her somatic marks. Such comments often evidence a dissonance between the perception that others have of her and the social representations of Mexicanness, Yucatecanness and otherness.

Since her childhood, her nicknames were marked by her skin color: "Negra", "Sorulla",5 "Memín Pinguín",6 "Somali," appellations that he experienced as denigrating. Later, in his interaction with foreigners in Mérida, he was the object of fascination for his supposed "Mayan profile".7 On one occasion, a Haitian stopped her on the street intrigued by her appearance and said "You are not very Mexican".8 At a meeting she attended without knowing the other guests, one of them asked her to serve her coffee, mistakenly assuming she was a domestic worker. In another situation, during a counseling session with her elderly teacher, the entertainers at the restaurant where they were eating made "joking" comments insinuating that Rosma was a Cuban prostitute "fixing" her immigration status. A couple of years ago, a photograph of her face was included in an exhibit on Afro-descendants in Yucatan, even though she did not, until the time of the interview, identify herself as such (image 19).

What factors come into play for Rosma not to be recognized-in Caballero's terms (2019: xx)-as a typical "regional" subject? How does this perception affect her self-representation and identity? How does Rosma's self-representation present itself as a counterpoint to the dominant narratives of local identity and the ideals of beauty it embodies?

"The what?"

This visual ethnography, together with the curatorship that results from it (see the 21 images that appear in the PowerPoint), seeks to reflect -from the intimate dimension of the subject- on the forms of identification and self-representation that refer, in different ways, to Afro-descent.9 and its supposed somatic marks. This reflection is situated in a regional, urban and contemporary context, historically associated with the Maya as a dominant alterity and as a foundational component of local identity in Yucatan.10

From the photographs, as well as from the experiences and reflections shared with Rosma, the objective of this text is to understand how the marks of belonging and identity operate in relation to social hierarchies and self-representation, as well as the processes involved in the appropriation or rejection of the categories associated with these marks.

"The how"

Rosma was not born into a community or family that claimed to be black or Afro-Mexican. It was during her adolescence when she began to question her phenotype and its representation, linked to somatic traits commonly associated with black or "Afro" populations. These concerns emerged in the light of external views and her own experiences, profoundly influencing her self-representation and identity, the latter understood in the terms proposed by Stuart Hall:

It is worth saying that, directly contrary to what seems to be its pre-established semantic career, this concept of identity does not point to that stable core of the self [emphasis added] that, from beginning to end, unfolds unchanged through all the vicissitudes of history; the fragment of the self that is already and remains always "the same," identical to itself throughout time. Nor is it - if we transfer this essentializing conception to the scenario of cultural identity - that "collective or true self that is hidden within the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves' that a people with a shared history and ancestry have in common" [Hall, 1990], and that can stabilize, fix or guarantee an unchanging "uniqueness" or cultural belonging, underlying all other superficial differences. The concept accepts that identities are never unified and, in late modern times, are increasingly fragmented and fractured; they are never singular, but constructed in multiple ways through different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions (Hall, 2003: 17).

The notion of self-representation that guides this work is also close to the proposal of José Mela, who links identity to a "self-representational practice" based on the capacity for agency and the elaboration of self-images. These, he argues, can function as a device to deploy other readings of racialized and subordinated otherness, "more distant from the legitimacy of institutionalized discourses, and much closer to the point of view of those who live the identity experience and observe themselves" (Mela, 2021: 65).

To reconstruct the narrative of the "roots and routes" of Rosma's identity process, I start from her experiences, her gaze and her experiences. For this purpose, I have chosen photo-elicitation as a fertile methodological tool for its capacity to activate subjectivity and dialogue, thus allowing to reconstruct moments, situations and events, but also intimate experiences of my interviewee. This methodological approach allows to deploy a sensory dimension that enriches the narrative and enhances the reflective exchange (Collier and Collier, 1986).11 It is, therefore, a dynamic and, in many ways, experimental ethnographic exercise, since the photographs "do not have a previously assigned narrative" (Londoño, 2013: 55). The memories they evoke are multiple and never definitive. The time elapsed between the taking of an image and the moment of its interpretation, crossed by the personal perspective and its specific temporality, organizes the experience and the memory in a dynamic and non-linear way. As Gemma Orobitg reminds us, the use of photographs as part of interviews can become "means of data production through negotiation and reflexivity" (2004: 34).

Photography, in this sense, is not only a methodological tool, but also a source: a vehicle that allows materializing time, constructing and reconstructing memory, identity and the representation of reality. Thus, it becomes what Agustina Triquell (2015: 122) calls "an epistemological starting point" and a consubstantial part of ethnographic work.

I asked Rosma to choose some significant photographs from which we could identify key moments in her life related, in some way, to that "Afro root": sometimes suspended, sometimes diluted, sometimes embodied and almost never assumed. Some of these images come from the family album that her mother kept and kindly agreed to share one afternoon with us. Others were taken by photographers known to Rosma, and the rest correspond to her own selfies. The selfi is understood here, in terms of Gutiérrez Miranda (2023), as a "performative device of identity construction":

The individual "self-constructs" himself through it, or he can reflect an image equal to or completely different from the one captured, a public image, or reveal a more personal or private sphere. It can, then, show -as the traditional self-portrait originally did- a performative image of his "self" accompanied by elements or symbols that allow it to be revealed or complemented (Guitérrez Miranda, 2023: 120-121).

As our conversations progressed, the photographic selection evolved. We started with five images, but as the dialogue deepened, the selection grew. To the photos initially chosen by Rosma, we added some suggested by me, as they added nuances and contextualized her life story. In total there are 21 images. It was thus a collaborative curatorship that functioned as an interface to her multiple "selves", her person and the reflexivity of her self-representation.12

It is worth asking, as Duván Londoño does: "How can photography be approached overcoming the most evident content it contains, and with this a more ethnographic content can emerge" (Londoño, 2013: 55). My methodological bet started from the principle of horizontality as the central axis of the research process, seeking to displace the logic that divides the subjects who "know" from those who "do not know". Instead, I opted, in terms of Mailsa Pinto and Rita Ribes, for the negotiation of knowledge and the "tangle of ideas and possibilities" (2012) through a dialogicity with my interviewee, which "does not occur only in the relationship that is established in a given order of questions and answers, but in the moment in which the subjects meet to narrate their practices and stories [...]" (2012: 168-171).

The meetings and interviews with Rosma took place in different spaces: in her mother's house -where I had access to the family album-, in her creative workshop, in different coffee shops and in public recreational spaces. This collaboration was enhanced by a friendship of more than ten years, woven from trust and complicity, which significantly nurtured the dialogic approach of this ethnography and visual curatorship. Therefore, I opted for a horizontal methodology that fostered, in Sarah Corona's terms, "the autonomy of one's own gaze", understood as "the dialogic fact that occurs between the researcher and the researched, in which the listener and the speaker take turns and translate their own and the other's to build their own knowledge and that of the other" (2012: 92). In short, the aim was not only to know how Rosma names herself, but also to understand how she represents herself and how she wants to be represented.

Inheritances, traces and searches

It is through the paternal line that Rosma identifies the texture and shape of her hair, as well as the color of her skin. This somatic feature has had considerable weight both in the way others name her and in her own self-representation (see images 1 to 11 in the visual curation). During our visit to her mother's house to review the photographs in the family album, Rosma had several revelations. Of one image in particular - a group photograph taken in the Mexico City basilica - she took a snapshot with her cell phone. It gave her zoom to the face of his paternal grandmother, a woman who lived in Veracruz and with whom he had little contact, but whose figure left a strong imprint in his memory and in the construction of his own identity.

It is the only photo I have of my paternal grandmother. That's where I got the hair and the brown hair. I don't remember her much either... I do remember things... I saw her until I was seven, eight years old. I have a couple of memories of her. My mom has helped me shape my grandmother's personality, because she was a strong, strong woman... My mom says that I would grab her cigars and her beer, she was always drinking and smoking, and she would say, "I'm going to smoke like my grandmother." And my mom hated it! [laughs]. My mom never smoked. I remember her, she always, always smoked. I remember she was a strong woman, a woman who decided, a woman who... well she was already old, although she was never old with gray hair, because look at her hair there... In that photo I'm in it, but I wanted to see her face [...] It's a full body photo, and there's my mom, me, my aunt and her. I just gave her zoom to his face because I wanted to know what his face looked like [...].

This grandmother's father was originally from Loma Bonita, Oaxaca. His family migrated to Veracruz when he was a child. He became a fisherman and, after being widowed, married a Juchiteca woman who raised his daughter. Rosma finds in this heritage an explanation for the strong and determined character of her grandmother, with whom she fully identifies and in whom she recognizes essential traits of her personality and elements that have marked her life story: "Remembering certain chapters or stages of my life, all those people who impacted me, they are very strong women... those women who spoke with a loud and firm voice, and also with rude words, I loved it! [laughs]".

Juchitecan women,13 Marinella Miano explains, are recognized in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec for their strength, presence and autonomy, and have been described as "opulent women, with proud bearing, heads held high, haughty gaze [...]" (Miano, 1994: 72). Thus, Rosma's cutting out and approaching of her grandmother's face (see image 1 in the visual curation) is part of an introspective process of search, of reconstruction of her own person and of the symbolic inscription to an origin.

The beauty

The chromatic contrast of the photograph referred to in image 12 also represents a contrast of temporalities. It allows visualizing some of the different representations and self-representations that configure Rosma's social, cultural and identity self. The photographs of her childhood contrast with the full-length silhouette that appears in another image corresponding to her adolescence. In this image a different aesthetic is outlined, a figure that perhaps refers, unconsciously, to a "wanting to be". It is a photograph of a famous model, which projects beauty, elegance and a certain dreamy air. This image was not part of the original album, but was stuck on the wall of her bedroom, and she decided to keep it because of the beauty that, according to her, this model evokes in her. This prototype of beauty does not dialogue with the dominant standards in Mexico, where historically an aesthetic based on whitening has prevailed. In this context, blackness has been left out of the national narrative.14 as regional and of the ideal of beauty. For Rosma, the recognition of her beauty - and of a possible previously unimagined root - emerged as part of a dialogic and interactive process that allowed her to appropriate unconventional parameters of beauty and to value them in the light of her own identity and self-representation (see images 12 to 15 and 17).

"You say you are Dominican": memories, beauty and racialization.

Well... I'm trying to remember when I started observing black women, because I did feel closer to them. Obviously, because I am brown... and because I saw them as beautiful. There was also no representation of indigenous or Mexican women with this brown beauty. I remember a model named Paloma, when I was about 16 years old... she was beautiful, Mexican, not Yucatecan. At some point she was on television. I was fascinated by that woman, because she was very beautiful, very brunette, but with very straight hair....
I met Damián Alcázar... beauty of a man! Another one who fascinated me since I was a child was Roberto Sosa. So, I always loved dark-haired men, didn't I? I was never attracted to "the other", that which they impose on you... the white, the blond, the stylized.

Rosma's story highlights how the identification with certain non-normative references of beauty occurred in tension with the hegemonic models that privilege whiteness and mestizaje, of course, as the dominant aesthetic ideals. The admiration for brown and black figures -both feminine and masculine- appears here not only as a personal taste, but also as a way of questioning the whitened canon that prevails in the national and regional imaginary.

When I was about 14 years old I had a friend, her name was Lupita... she used to say to me: "Look! You're beautiful! She used to fix my hair in a way that I didn't do... she used to press my hair with mousseI have some pictures where I look super curly because she used to put things on me.
He would tell me: "No, no, no... you say you are Dominican. Don't say you are Yucatecan. I'm going to tell everyone that you are Dominican [laughs].
For her, it was very cool that I was a brunette. She did see that Afro-descendant trait in me that I didn't see at that time, didn't she? I would ask her: "Why Dominican? And she would say, "Because you look like a black woman". And I, with a face like... is it good or bad? He would say, "You look like a black woman, but better from the Dominican Republic. Belize, no... Dominican Republic".
In fact, about two years ago someone said to me, "You're not from the Dominican Republic? And I answered: "No, I am Yucatecan".
And he: "I don't know why I always thought you were Dominican".
And I thought: "I do know why... I'm sure it was this bitch [laughter]".

Identity, pride and visibility: the process of coming into one's own

For Rosma, her family history, her Anthropology degree and the experiences derived from her interaction with the wealthy sectors of Mérida -particularly through her work as a jewelry designer- have been fundamental aspects in the construction of her identity. These elements led her to assume and recognize herself with pride as a brown, Valladolid woman.15 and from the popular sphere:

I recognize that, when my identity has to come out, I proudly say that I am from Valladolid. For a long time I never said it. I do not know why. In fact, when I was a student in the Faculty of Anthropology, many things changed about myself, about what I was proud of, about my history [...] because how society pressures me to feel ashamed!

Another decisive moment in her identity process occurred in a commercial space of high purchasing power, located in the northern part of Mérida, where her jewelry is sold. Rosma's story reveals how class relations and racialization intersect in the way she is perceived and how she responds to those views:

In that store, the owner and an employee told me that when people asked about my jewelry, they would say: "Ah, this designer is from Yucatan", and then people would ask: "What family is she from? Then I felt something like: "Oh, well, no... no family!". I'm sure they thought: "Poor and brown", as the "fresa people" usually express themselves.16 But, well, I think I have shaped that identity by highlighting these features that are noticeable. Yes, I am brown; yes, I am from the popular sphere; yes, I am from Valladolid. It has become a banner of strength rather than shame. However, it was part of my history to feel, first, the need to hide the undeniable.

This testimony shows that identities are always an ongoing process, and that "[...] they are more a product of the marking of difference and exclusion than a sign of an identical and naturally constructed unity [...]" (Hall, 2003: 18).

Afros"/"blacks" in the sister republic?

In contrast to other contexts such as the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca17 -probably the most researched in terms of Afro-descendant populations in Mexico, studies on this topic in Yucatán remain limited, especially from an anthropological perspective, which has been less developed compared to the historiographical one.

Historical studies have documented the presence of the black population in the Yucatán peninsula since colonial and slave times (Victoria and Canto, 2006; Gutiérrez, 2021). Historian Matthew Restall, for example, refers to this presence as a constituent part of the social diversity of the region, coining the term "Afro-Yucatecans" and describing the colonial city as "Afro-Mérida" (Restall, 2020). For his part, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1989: 222) points out that, in the xviiiThe "Afromestizos" constituted the second most important group in demographic terms within the peninsula.

With the process of independence and the construction of a common citizenship, the colonial categories used to name this population - such as blacks, pardos and mulatos - were officially abolished. However, the socio-racial prejudices that underpinned these distinctions persisted, giving rise to a differentiated and unequal political citizenship for the Afro-descendant population (Campos, 2005; Can, 2021).

Towards the end of the xix and in the first half of the xxthe daily presence of Afro-descendants contradicted the dominant narrative about mestizaje and Yucatecan identity, which made this otherness invisible or assimilated it, denying it a relevant social place (Cunin, 2009; García Yeladaqui, 2019;18 Campos, 2005; Victoria Ojeda, 2024). This narrative has emphasized a binary mestizaje, the result of the encounter between Maya and Spanish,19 framed in a strong regionalism that exalts the state's separatist past and its cultural uniqueness. In this context, the black "appears and disappears" in historical research, visual sources, cultural and artistic manifestations; but its presence is neither perceived as familiar nor legitimized as an inherent part of the region. It is often represented as something alien or foreign, displaced from the regional identity narrative (Cunin and Juárez-Huet, 2011).

This scenario explains the sense of strangeness with which people like Rosma are perceived: through exoticization, suspicion or denial of belonging, since, in Yucatan, Afro-descendence continues to be a hierarchical otherness historically configured from a subordinate position.

Pathways for further discussion

Visually approaching and reconstructing a life story that includes experiences of racialization, exoticization or the family wounds left by the absence of a father is not an easy task. This story is also marked by somatic marks that, in a broader social context, refer to stereotypes and denigrating representations, often expressed through "jokes", sayings and insults, as illustrated by the testimony of my interviewee at the beginning of this text. The use of photography, as a memory device, becomes a key tool to enhance the life story, allowing to apprehend sensitivities and experiences found in it.

The construction of the visual curatorship of which this text is a part was possible thanks to a close collaboration and a horizontal methodology that allowed me to delve into the process of how an identity is embodied or not, and how the subject intersects with the social structure (Mallimaci and Giménez, 2006: 190). The suggestion to Rosma to choose the photos that are significant for her, with the focus on her Afro-descendant -fluctuating- roots, sought to start from her point of view and what is relevant for her in her life journey, as well as how she is and wishes to be represented. This approach enhanced the horizontality and reflexivity of her self-representation.

Studies and analysis of Afro-descendants in Mexico are not a minor issue. One of the transversal experiences of these peoples has been the daily experience of discrimination, inequality, exoticization and racism. From the photo-elicitation, the intimate scale of the subject offers nuances that enrich the situated interpretation of these experiences. It is important to point out that ethnic and/or identity categories are contextual, not fixed, and vary regionally. Afro-Mexican is, in reality, an encompassing category of a diversity of identity references anchored in local contexts (Juárez Huet and Rinaudo, 2017). People who are identified by their somatic features as "black/black" or with an "Afro-descendant/Afromexican identity" are not always recognized as such, finally who decides what one is, who is [Afro] Mexican and who is not?-. This phenomenon highlights the social imaginaries at play, the need not to reduce identity to a skin color and the indispensable exercise of knowing one's own reading of who is living a certain identity experience. This must take into account its multidimensionality and the meaning that subjects assign to it, despite the inertias of racializations that are deeply imbricated in historical dynamics of inclusion/exclusion within the narratives of national/regional identity in our country. Such dynamics have generated a historical inequality that naturalizes the subordination of an "other", in this case, "black/afro-descendant".

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Nahayeilli B. Juarez Huet is a research professor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas), Peninsular headquarters, and member of the snii. Her research focuses on three main areas: religious diversity in Mexico, Afro-descendants and the different manifestations of racism. She was academic co-responsible of the Cátedra unesco/inah/ciesas"Afrodescendants in Mexico and Central America: recognition, expressions and cultural diversity" (2017-2021); since 2016 she has served as academic co-coordinator of workshops on the use of visual tools for social research in. ciesas, Peninsular, from where he promotes collaborative work and methodological experimentation in visual anthropology. He is a member of the Network of Researchers on the Religious Phenomenon in Mexico (rifrem) and the Audiovisual Anthropology Research Network, Audiovisual Laboratory (riav) of the ciesas.