Blinded By Indignation, Mexicans Ignore Black Opinion At Home

MEXICO CITY — In 2001, I traveled with a group of Atlanta-area college students to a remote part of Mexico's southern Pacific Coast.

Pigs roamed dirt streets, and people in ragged clothes cooked tortillas over simple outdoor fires.

We were a world away from the students' affluent urban milieu. Yet the Americans and Mexican villagers felt instant kinship when they saw one another: they were all of African descent.

"To be a black Mexican seems almost impossible. But they're here," said Kieran Pearson, one of the students from Morehouse and Spelman colleges, Atlanta's traditionally black colleges.

Mexico has a tiny minority — maybe 100,000 people — whose heritage is distinctly African. The descendents of slaves, they are concentrated in isolated villages, and only within the last decade has a black-pride movement emerged.

But it appears the Mexican media and public are still not listening. That's too bad — because it might have done some good for Mexicans to defer to black opinion here during a racially charged flap that erupted this month.

The dispute, which degenerated into a U.S.-Mexico duel, started in late June when Mexico's postal service issued a series of stamps honoring a 1940's-era Mexican comic-book character called Memin Pinguin, a poor little black boy.

Mexican defenders of Memin argue that the comic is a "tradition" that millions grew up with and still enjoy. Memin, they say, is an innocent boy with a heart of gold, whose struggle for acceptance teaches tolerance.

But Memin and his chubby single mother are drawn in a manner that is sub-human compared with the comic's other more realistic-looking white or mestizo, mixed-blood, characters. Memin's eyes and lips are of exaggerated size, and his arms hang down almost like a monkey's. It's a physical depiction that instantly inspires discomfort among all the Americans I know here.

When news about the stamp hit the United States, the reaction from Bush spokesman Scott McClellan to Jesse Jackson was unanimous: the images on the stamps were out-dated and offensive.

Memin Pinguin might not have made headlines in the United States but for an unfortunate comment last May by President Vicente Fox, who said that Mexican immigrants take jobs "not even blacks want to do."

Fox said he was misunderstood, and that's pretty much what he said in defense of Memin Pinguin.

Once McClellan and Jackson spoke, the Mexican media defended the cartoon as if national honor were at stake. A host of columnists and people quoted in the streets demanded to know how Americans, creators of Speedy Gonzalez, the Ku Klux Klan and border vigilantes, dared to call anything Mexican racist.

Prominent Mexican historian Enrique Krauze fired off a challenging July 3 Reforma newspaper column, later published in part by the Washington Post.

"When an American tosses charges of racism toward a Mexican," Krauze huffed, "the retort should be one question: Have you, in your 229 years of independent history, had a 'Native American' or 'Afro American' president? Of course not."

Arguing that Mexico by nature is "inclusive," Krauze pointed out that Mexico has had many presidents of mixed Mexican Indian and European blood, as well as a president of some African blood and a full-blooded Indian leader.

That kind of logic "is absurd," countered El Financiero columnist Oscar Enrique Ornelas, one of the few editorial voices here to urge Mexico to look inward, rather than succumb to blind rage at U.S. opinion.

Mexico, Ornelas said, still has a problem with brown, much less black.

The vast majority of Mexicans are brown-skinned, yet Mexican TV and print media habitually feature only white Mexicans as stars in shows and ads. Mexican Indians are at the bottom on the economic and social ladder, and one can often still hear — in private conversation — the word "Indian" equated with foolish.

Mexico's media made only a cursory attempt to see what blacks here might think about Memin Pinguin.

On July 4, Reforma published a short story about a protest letter to Fox from a group called Black Mexico. The organization is active in the same area that I visited with the students from Atlanta.

Memin, the group argued, was born in a time when stereotypes of blacks and Indians were common and accepted. In the 21st century, it's time to stop defending those images.

"Memin Pinguin," the letter said, "celebrates, typifies and makes official an image of black people in general that is distorted, mocking and stereotypical."

Those are Mexicans talking, not Americans.

Susan Ferriss covers Mexico and Latin America for Cox Newspapers.