In this issue of Encartes we present a selection of the most recent contributions of the Audiovisual Research Network (Red de Investigaciones Audiovisuales (riav) of the ciesasThe work of the Foundation has also been contributed by researchers who have been linked to it through various collaboration programs and projects, and from different latitudes and fields of action. Some of these contributions are the result of years of research, while others are part of projects currently under development.

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.

The present article shows the way in which the aesthetics of Afro-American religions, in particular the dance and music of Afro-Cuban Santeria, are inserted as part of a “black” gestural, musical and corporal repertoire that is constructed in transatlantic interconnections from at least the 19th century. I argue that in this sway, the scenarios of the representations of said repertoire become a platform that takes on a “refractive” character (Grau, 2005), that is, they decompose an idea of the “black” into multiple symbolic and interpretive references that they can even be opposite.