Ron Wilkins documents black villagers in Mexico

PHOTO by RON WILKINS

Some of Ron Wilkins’ photographs in “Journey to Black Mexico” are untitled, and the names of others—Grandma and Me; Village Elder—only hint at their story.

This is an odd problem, particularly if you’re seeing the show as I did, when it first went up and everything was blank and untitled. If ever a show needed backstory, it’s this one; without details, Wilkins’ subjects are just intriguing-looking folks. So he explains:

“They’re poor, everybody’s poor,” says Wilkins, a Cal State Dominguez Hills professor who has spent much of his life photographing black people living outside the U.S. or African nations. The people in this exhibit are villagers in the Mexican neighboring states of Guerrero and Oaxaca—on the country’s southern coastline, nearly 2,000 miles south of Mexico City.

Some—an old man—stare down the camera as if they’ve seen it all. Others clearly haven’t, as in the case of a young shirtless boy, grinning with all his baby teeth showing, emptying a red plastic tub of water over himself. Clues are few, but their meager existence is all but apparent.

“Some of them work with cattle. Some do fishing because they’re near waterways,” Wilkins says. “And some grow subsistence crops. The houses are usually dirt floors, thatched roofs, mud and straw for walls—to help them stay cool—but they don’t hold up well. They sell pigs and chickens.”

And they’re Mexican—a fact lost, the professor says, on so many African Americans.

“As you know in [Mexico] and parts of the United States, there’s increasing friction between these two groups, blacks and Latinos,” says Wilkins, whose show is on view during Black History Month. “I try to help black people in Mexico become more visible, and help people in the United States and elsewhere realize that this is part of the global Latin family.”

JOURNEY TO BLACK MEXICO 2ND CITY COUNCIL GALLERY | 435 ALAMITOS AVE LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.901.0997 | 2NDCITYCOUNCIL.ORG | WED-SUN 12-5PM | THROUGH FEB 28 | FREE

Tags: 2nd city council gallery, diaspora, Long Beach, Mexico, Photos