Mestizaje and African heritage in Afro-Caribbean music, Veracruz, Mexico

Christian Rinaudo (1)

1 URMIS - Unite de recherche migrations et sociétés

Based on a fieldwork carried out in the town of Veracruz (Mexico), this article explores the ethnic and racial identifications, which come under the African roots of the mestizaje. In absence of afro militant mobilization in the area, it’s mostly in the field of popular music, that one attends the highlighting of the black or African cultural dimension. The concept of symbolic boundaries is used to examine mestizaje and African heritage in music and dance. As such, symbolic boundaries are tools with which individuals and groups carve out definitions of reality. They are the outcome of the representation of a social world that music and dance enable us to document. At first, it was mainly at the level of cultural policies described in terms of “third root” that the issue of the African presence was debated and specific positions were asserted by the various local actors. Hence, after going over the main elements that contributed to the implementation of a cultural policy embracing the Afro-Caribbean dimension, the autor will look at the narratives of Veracruz’s musicians before carrying out the ethnographic description of a cultural program. This is to try to understand how the African dimension of mestizaje is expressed.

Mots clés: Popular music; ethnicity; African heritage; Mestizaje; urban ethnography; Veracruz; Symbolic boundaries

Domaines: Sociologie; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Christian Rinaudo. Mestizaje and African heritage in Afro-Caribbean music, Veracruz, Mexico. Ethnomusicology Review, 2015, 20. ⟨halshs-01241880⟩