A project commissioned by Africamericanos
Coyolillo is an Afro-mestizo community in southern Mexico that has an inspiring history of freedom. Its first settlers were enslaved Africans who disembarked in the municipality of Actopan, Veracruz, where they started working on sugarcane plantations in the region.
The stories told include one about the boss of the San Miguel de Almolonga hacienda, who gave the enslaved workers only one day off every year, which they turned into a grand celebration. The main characters of this fiesta today are known as disfrazados (disguised ones) or negros (blacks), who cavort in the streets or engage in pranks. Behind their wood-carved masks, representing bull’s heads, we find an Afro-Mexican identity that has remained hidden for centuries, preserved by the people of this town located in the Valle de Mozambique in Veracruz.
Koral Carballo’s work spreads out from the fields of journalism, the visual arts, and documentary photography to explore visual narratives connected with identity, violence, and territory. She was awarded a Moving Walls Fellowship by the Open Society Foundation in 2018, fellowships from the Adelante program of the International Women’s Media Foundation on two occasions (2017 and 2018), and a grant from the loan program of Leica Fotografie International in 2017. She was nominated for the Berlin Talent Award in 2019 and the 2018 Joop Swart Masterclass of World Press Photo. Her journalistic work has been published in Le Monde, El País, The Washington Post, and El Universal. She is a founder of MIRAR DISTINTO, a documentary photography and photojournalism festival created in 2014 in Veracruz. She is a member of the collective Trasluz and of the Women Photograph initiative.
A project commissioned by Africamericanos
Unlike the Afrodescendants of Guerrero and Veracruz, who were brought to Mexico as slave labor by Spanish colonists, the Mascogos arrived in Coahuila after escaping from slavery in the United States.
Also known as black Seminoles and led by John Horse, the Mascogos came to Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, displaced by land seizures and fleeing slavery and racial discrimination. The government welcomed them, on the condition that they form patrols to defend the northern border from incursions by nomadic groups. In exchange, they received land, cattle, and Mexican citizenship. In late 1851, they settled at El Nacimiento de los Negros, adjacent to ancestral Kickapoo territory, in the municipality of Múzquiz, Coahuila, in northern Mexico.
Today about seventy families live in this community, running farms where they grow beans, corn, and wheat and raise cows and goats. In spite of mestizaje, some Mascogos still have the physical features of their ancestors. They are known for being excellent horsemen, and it is customary for them to learn to ride at a very young age, though they never give their horses names.
Each year the Mascogos celebrate Juneteenth (a contraction of the words ‘June’ and ‘nineteenth’) to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the state of Texas. On this day, everyone in the community wears traditional clothing to celebrate his or her roots, dancing and eating ancestral dishes.
Luján Agusti
―Portraits taken during the celebration of Juneteenth in El Nacimiento de los Negros, Coahuila, 2018.
In her work, Luján Agusti explores issues surrounding the construction of identity in relation to the territories and places we inhabit. She uses photography as her principal language, while also employing other disciplines to analyze her environment. In 2017 she received a fellowship from the International Women's Media Foundation and an Emerging Artist Scholarship from the Lucie Foundation. Her work has been published in National Geographic, The Washington Post, Lens (blog), and The British Journal of Photography. In 2018 she was selected for the 6x6 Global Talent Program of World Press Photo. She is the author of Un montón de ropa (A Bunch of Clothes), a privately published photobook that appeared in 2016. She belongs to the Agencia ZUR in Argentina and is a member of the collective Prime, a global initiative made up of documentary photographers, filmmakers, and visual artists.
