3 - Making Blackness Transnational

Summary

Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.