A long, intertwined history

Soledad Camero grew up in the Mexican state of Guerrero, one of the areas featured in “The Forgotten Roots” and “African Blood,” two documentaries screening today at the Pan African Film Festival at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.

“I grew up in a little town, Cajinicuilapa. There, we are mixed, white and black,” Camero said recently by telephone from her home in Concord, N.C.

“Where I’m from in Guerrero, there are many towns where there are a lot of black people.”

How did that happen?

“People from Spain, they get the African people to work,” she says, referring to slavery during Mexico’s colonial period.

Her family tells another story.

“My father told me, and his great-grandfather told him, the Englishmen would get Africans for slaves. Once, they were traveling on a ship. The ship sank. The Africans, who survived, who could swim, went to Guerrero,” she explains. “They escaped from the English. They started to mix with the white people and the Indians.”

The slaves brought their habits and traditions, and some have endured, as both films show. In Guerrero, women carry items on their heads without using their hands, Camero says.

“They carry buckets and pots on their heads when they go to sell stuff,” she says of her mother and other women. “They go to the river to wash clothes, and they take them on their head in a bucket.”

On All Saints’ Day, they do the Dance of the Devil, which looks similar to dances performed in West Africa.

“They’ll put the mask on,” Camero says. “They’ll put out offerings for the dead people: candles, flowers, food. We cook something special for them, like tamales, or the favorites of the dead person because supposedly they’ll come eat it.”

Dark skin color is no big deal in Guerrero, because there are a lot of black people, Camero says. That’s not the case in the cities or other states, where she says some families talk proudly about their Spanish blood, and marrying someone lighter-skinned than oneself is sometimes referred to as mejorando la raza -- literally, “bettering the race.”

Camero met her first African American 20 years ago, when former fashion photographer Tony Gleaton heard about black enclaves in Mexico and traveled to Guerrero. He spent years photographing people in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America who looked black.

His extensive portfolio, “Tengo Casi 500 Anos (I Have Almost 500 Years): Africa’s Legacy in Mexico,” has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally.

As the photographs traveled, Camero kept hearing from friends.

“A lot of people from my town live in Chicago and Los Angeles,” she says. “They told me they saw my picture.”

She wasn’t sure which photo.

“I was a little girl,” she says of when Gleaton took his first picture of her.

Today, she is 31, married with a daughter and son, and has lived in the United States for 13 years.

Seeking the pictures of herself, she tracked down Gleaton this month at Texas Tech in Lubbock, where he is the artist in residence at the university’s special collections library. He gives frequent lectures in his series at universities, either in their Latin American or African American studies departments. And he remains interested in Africa’s worldwide legacy.

“The issue is not the people who look black,” Gleaton says. “The issue is all the people who have a genetic link to Africa and don’t know it.”

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-- Gayle Pollard-Terry