{"id":34,"date":"2019-08-15T12:49:15","date_gmt":"2019-08-15T10:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2019-08-21T23:06:50","modified_gmt":"2019-08-21T21:06:50","slug":"black-americas","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/black-americas\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Americas: Crisscrossing Visions of Mexico and Colombia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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BLACK AMERICAS: CRISSCROSSING VISIONS OF MEXICO AND COLOMBIA<\/div>\n
Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez De La Parra, Mexico<\/div>\n

Odile Hoffmann & Adriana Naveda<\/i><\/p>\n

To conceive a book of photographs about black communities in Latin America is not merely an experiment of an aesthetic or academic nature. It means taking a specific stance towards and in collaboration with the individuals photographed, clarifying with them the aims, conditions, and purposes of the photographs.<\/p>\n

In this book, the images of Mexico are the result of Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s visits to Coyolillo, a town in the state of Veracruz. The photographer traveled there often and spent a lot of time there, gradually building relationships with the townsfolk based on trust and respect. The local residents are descendants of two groups of black settlers: some came from Florida in the eighteenth century (1), while others were enslaved Africans who arrived over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to work on the sugarcane plantations belonging to the town of Xalapa: mainly at the sugar mills of Nuestra Se\u00f1ora del Rosario in Almolonga. In the settlements, marriages and friendships between indigenous people, blacks, and Caucasians led to the formation of what we now call Afro-mestizo communities.<\/p>\n

The work that Gonz\u00e1lez did in Colombia followed a different process. His pictures were taken in a vast region of rivers and plains in the country\u2019s southwest, after he had come to formal accords \u2015or more spontaneous agreements\u2015 with black organizations that are attempting to reclaim control over cultural and scientific enterprises taking place in their territory. Subsequently, as Gonz\u00e1lez traveled by boat or bus through the rural Colombian landscape, meeting fishermen and smallholder farmers, it is once again the fundamental relationship between the photographer and the person being photographed that comes to the fore, reflecting the moment when these two figures establish (or fail to establish) a personal rapport.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez de la Parra, Luces de ra\u00edz negra<\/i> (Universidad Veracruzana, 2004).<\/p>\n

MANUEL GONZ\u00c1LEZ DE LA PARRA<\/div>\n
(Cotija de la Paz [Michoac\u00e1n], Mexico, 1954 \u2013 Xalapa [Veracruz], Mexico, 2012)<\/div>\n

Manuel Gonz\u00e1lez de la Parra devoted a large part of his career to documenting the Afrodescendant communities in the Mexican state of Veracruz and along the coasts of Colombia. His first photo essay, produced in collaboration with the geographer Odile Hoffman, was published as Xico<\/i>, una sierra y su gente<\/i> (IVEC, 1982). In 1989 Gonz\u00e1lez de la Parra undertook a long-term project entitled Coyolillo, un pueblo afromestizo<\/i> (Coyolillo: An Afro-mestizo Village). As a result of this project, as well as other work done in Tumaco, Colombia, he published Luces de ra\u00edz negra<\/i> in 2001, a portrait of the African legacy in these two regions. He has also worked as a still photographer for motion pictures such as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba<\/i> (1999) and Otila Rauda<\/i> (2001). He was the director of the Instituto de Artes Pl\u00e1sticas of the Universidad Veracruzana from 2006 until his death.<\/p>\n

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1. It is known that the Afrodescendant people who arrived in Mexico from Florida settled mainly in the norther state of Coahuila.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-proyecto-en.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":614,"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions\/614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africamericanos.vistprojects.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}