En este número de Encartes presentamos una selección de las contribuciones más recientes de la Red de Investigaciones Audiovisuales (riav) of the ciesas, así como de investigadoras e investigadores que se han vinculado a ella a través de diversos programas y proyectos de colaboración y desde diversas latitudes y campos de acción. Algunas de estas aportaciones son fruto de años de investigación, mientras que otras forman parte de proyectos actualmente en desarrollo.

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.