Executive summary

The French Academy of Sciences recommends that the procedures followed to allow dissemination of scientific publications be reorganized along two complementary axes, on one hand, via open archives, and Institutional Open Access on the other, financed by national agreements between the State authorities and the publishers, ensuring throughout that academic standards for scientific quality are preserved.

Open archives

Open archives are to be seen as complementary to publications in journals with referee committees and should be developed to enable constant conservation of our scientific knowledge bases. It is, however, a model that has not, as yet, permeated all specialty-intensive cultures and, if it were to be generalized, there is a need for incentive measures. These archives could, moreover, serve as a base to establish so-called "epijournals", the underlying principle of which is to add expertise to existing archived articles. Notwithstanding, application of this solution would prove limited and complex and would generate infrastructure costs calling for analysis and perspective before decisions are taken.

Institutional Open Access

The "pay-as-you-read" model has demonstrably reached its limits: the excessive costs enforced by certain publishers and lack of accessibility to most articlesrunning contrary to the principle of free access to the results of publish research activities. Reorganizing on the basis of embargos could only be justified in as a transitional mode, limited in time.

Condemning the traditional method, however, must be tempered on two points:

-Hybrid formulae, that for example enable the authors to allow free access to their articles with the proviso of payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC) may be deemed acceptable, provided the process does not lead to a double payment, i.e., using a sliding, wedge system whereby the APCs for a given year serve as the base reference for the subscription rate for the following year; -Certain reviewsin a very restricted numbersimply will not be able to switch over to a free access system, given that such a change would be totally incompatible with their current economic business model.

Gold Open Access, in its current distributed format, carries the inconveniency of not allowing proper cost validation, inasmuch as the APCs are set unilaterally by the publishers, with whom isolated research scientists find themselves in a weak position to defend their desiderata.

Constant budget negotiation, based on global values for current subscription costs, is absolutely necessary between State authorities and the publishers, to extend the logic of a national license so as to include the Open Access option, and allowing the situation to evolve to a flat, centralized subscription rate (viz., Institutional Open Access (IOA)): a single, pluralannual contract should be agreed between State authorities and each publisher, organizing free access to all articles for which one of the authors belongs to the establishment who sign the agreement, immediately the said articles go on-line at the publisher's site. A coefficient of reassessment would serve as a guarantor for stable revenues for the publisher. The articles in question would be stored in open archives, identical to their edited format.

Negotiation of the terms of each flat agreement should be entrusted to the Couperin Consortium and efforts should be deployed to enlarge the framework of this approach to at least the European level.

The IOA model is compatible with the Gold Open access model for any article not covered by the scope of the license and for publishers who have not signed this national agreement. However, what remains to be answered is the question of journals that operate fully in Gold Open Access, such as the PLOS journals. It is difficult to imagine how the Consortium could come to agreements with such journals. On the other hand, we could envisage an institutional aid to partly or fully subsidize the APCs where the scientific quality of the articles has been attested on a national scale.

Preservation of scientific quality

The need for peer-reviews by academic research scientists of the articles received by journals must be reaffirmed and referee participation in the final decision to publish or reject should be encouraged.

Reference and use of the impact factor of an article, deemed inappropriate to the assessment of research scientist careers, must once again be denounced.

The Academy of sciences is aware that its findings and recommendations apply to those sciences and specialties that come under the Academy's remit, but may prove more difficult to apply in the fields of social sciences and humanitieswhich have their own sets of criteria.

Summary

The development of Internet has changed the scene of scientific publishing, leading to a co-existence of several models for access of research scientists to the publications' contents. Clarification is necessary now, to favour free access to the information, for a regular or even decreasing budget outlay, whilst adhering to the fundamental principle of critical assessment of articles through peer-review and the existence of journals to which the research scientists are attached. To attain this objective, solutions are forthcoming and are examined here in a critical and realistic manner.

1 -The current system, based on the reader-payer model is becoming increasingly unacceptable, not only because of the excessive fees enforced by the editors but also through lack of accessibility to most of the articles 2 -The "green system" (via subscriptions with free access after an embargo period) can be justified on an interim basis but calls for regulation with a view to reducing embargo time and ensuring cost control. 3 -An "Open Archives Access" approach offers an attractive solution, but it has not as yet permeated all the cultures, field by field. They are complementary to peer-reviewed publications, but cannot replace them because of the embargo rules and because they do not lend themselves to studies involving commonly used search engines. To do this, we would probably have to establish general incentive procedures. Moreover, they can serve as bases to create "epijournals", the principle of which is to add expertise to existing, published articles. This as yet experimental, application is a limited solution and leads to infrastructure overheads that we must analyse carefully and place in prospective. As a general ruling, it would be appropriate to provide content certification tools to the archives. 4 -The so-called Gold Open Access, with free access for all immediately following publication -the cost being borne by the authors in the form of an "article processing charge" (APC)is in line with the objective of providing universal access to the results of public research. In its current "distributed" format, there is a setback inasmuch as it is not easy to control the veracity of costing since the APCs are established unilaterally by the publishers. Through lack of accompanying measures, the system cannot provide a guarantee against practice of excessive pricing. 5 -The hybrid formulawhich in subscription-based reviews enables authors to grant free access to an article, provided an APC is paid -is a sort of 'intermediate gold' access which is only acceptable in a transition framework, given that a double payment is involved: the subscription fees are not diminished and the amount due for the APC (often quite 'steep') are difficult to negotiate inasmuch as the authors are isolated in the process. However, it could have a fully justifiable position if it is organised with a smooth wedging of funding, viz., with the APCs of a given year offsetting the drop in subscriptions of the following year. 6 -It transpires that none of today's prospective systems can be neglected and support should be forthcoming for all forms of public initiative that aim at producing balanced combinatory formulae, that respect the needs off the various communities involved. The French Academy of Sciences, however, has a marked preference for an Open Access model with a centralized negotiation mechanism, which still remains to be developed. 7 -A complete transformation of public research subscription budgets into aids for publications in certified reviews is necessary, as is a round of negotiation between the State authorities and the publishers to generalize single, national licenses that would be transposed to the new system.

At the same time, the logic underpinning the national license, for a regular budget, must be extended to incorporate then concept of free access, introducing an evolution of the principle of Open Access integrating a centralized flat fee subscription: a single multiannual subscription contract should be negotiated between the public authorities and each publisher, specifying which titles are eligible, organizing free and immediate access via the publisher's site to all the articles of those reviews where one of the authors is employed by the institution that negotiated the subscription, consequently with payment of the flat fee plus a coefficient of revaluation designed to assure stable revenues for the publisher. Articles published in this system could also be archived as open access documents in the published format.

In contradistinction, certain additional services proposed (based on the nature of the data contents) would be excluded from the general contract agreement and commercialised separately by the publishers in the form of a "premium offer", designed to compensate for a shortfall of subscribers from both industrial and service sectors, due to the changeover to an open access policy and provided the central payment system becomes an accepted worldwide practice.

Negotiation of the basic features for each flat fee agreement should be entrusted to the Couperin consortium.

The model could be called the Institutional Open Access (IOA) and would be compatible with the "gold" Open Access model (APC) for those articles not covered by the scope of the license.

Centralized fee rate negotiations leave room for the publishers and establishments who have not signed the national agreement: under this hypothesis, diversity offered by the other systems could continue to apply.

However, in reference to the gold access with an APC for each article, those research scientists invited to pay an APC should be supported in this process by their institution. The order of magnitude for aid here could amount to 1 000€/article, distributed between annual standing credit allocations, project based allocations and independently from specific aids provided by intuitions for publications by their employees.

8 -Reviews will be certifiedwhether they are part of the national agreement or notaccording to publishers' editorial "good practice" and this decision must be motivated in priority by the intrinsic quality of the articles and the dissemination of knowledge, as is generally assured by those reviews directed by learned societies. The scientists" freedom of choice must be preserved, including the option to publish their articles in non-certified reviews but thereby accepting the extra costs incurred.

-

The prime need for peer-review by other academic research scientists before publication must be reaffirmed. In a more general framework, participation of academics in the final approval decisions, as is the case for journals edited by learned societies and academies.

10 -Reference to the impact factor of reviews is not appropriate for statutory career assessment of the research scientists and should be quashed.

11 -The issues addressed here cannot be solved only on a national scale and it is therefore important and indeed urgent that effort be undertaken to see the agreements extended at least to European level.

Short report

The advent of Internet has led to a very positive evolution of scientific publications but has accelerated, at the same time, the current crisis in the publishing world, questioning as it does the very model on which the international system of scientific and technological information (STI) base was established. The crisis is mainly due to the unbeatable increase in subscription fees, forced on all the universities and institutions by a small number of publishers, thus preventing free circulation and dissemination of the articles. Another issue is the difficulty to pin down relevant information because of rapid progression and sheer numbers of articles in an increasing number of reviews, often of mediocre quality. Lastly, the inappropriate referral to the impact factor of the journals used to assess the research authors themselves had led to an exaggerated form of elitism that, in fact, only benefits a few of these reviews.

The French Academy of Science has decided to address all three aspects, prioritizing the question of the how scientific publications should be financed. The two other aspects are independent but will be dealt with in the framework of the new model that needs to be created.

Reframing the economic model to accommodate a general Open Access protocol

The aim that should be soughtfor both practical and ethical reasonsis immediate, free and universal access to the results of scientific research, already shared by the scientific communities and today by public authorities round the world.

The traditional reader-payer system is condemned either to disappear completely or a least to cease being the dominant model.

Moreover, the excessive fee charges by some publishers, forcing the scientific institutions to subscribing at very high cost to bundled review offers, many of which are of little use to themis a situation that is all the more shocking that the contents of the articles and their level of expertise is assured by the scientists for freethis fact alone being conducive a to an amplification of the rejection of the model in question.

Various technical barriers that hampered the universal dissemination of knowledge and know-how have mostly fallen and progress here continues to improve and perfect the tools available. But the Internet can also be illusory, viz., that everything is easy and free. No-one should contest the fact that scientific editing and publishing is a profession where improvisation has no part to play; on the contrary, it calls for special professional skills and implements technical processes that incur specific costs. Seen in this light, it is a sector that merits having a balanced economy based on a fair remuneration for the services offered and deployed. We must therefore seek such a balance in which each actor has a justified place and where the guiding principle will be freedom of access to information.

The models

Green Open Access

This approach would entail a part rearrangement of the current situation, in which, we recall, a majority of articles remain inaccessible, as indeed are the earlier documents. The rearrangement would be via subscriber access in the reader-payer mode but with free, generalized access after a 6 to 18 month embargo. This model would not provide immediate access and does not solve the problem of the excessive costs incurred by the subscription rates. It does not offer long term stability inasmuch as it induces universities with low research activity levels to cancel their subscriptions, and consequently encourages the publishers to impose higher subscription fees. The model should not be encouraged although it can meet specific needs expressed at given times and if this is the case, the model should be improved (e.g., by reducing the embargo delays).

Open Archives

An "Open Archives" procedure would not constitute a valid form of publication -given that there would be no critical review by a reading committee and associate experts of the subject matterbut rather a prepublication process and/or providing accessibility to versions published after the embargo period. Nor do they lend themselves to investigation with commonly used research engines. It is a modern, generous, model, and should be defended as being complementary to the other viable solutions, thus ensuring perennial access to the archival information, independently of the publishers. The degree of acceptability of the model is as yet low in certain specialty fields. Open Archives can also serve the purpose of "epijournals", the principle of which is to add a layer of expertise on articles already registered. This is an experimental application limited to certain areas (mathematics, computer sciences, probably because of cultures that are specific to these fields), but it leads to infrastructure overheads costs that we must analyse carefully and place in prospective. As a general ruling, it would be appropriate, if we wish open archives to be considered as a novel form of publication, to provide content certification tools to the archives and analyse accurately the extra costs incurred. We can note that Open Archives are a necessary component for the IOA model, to which we shall return later.

Gold Open Access

The author (or the employer-institution) pays for the preparation of the article, via the Article Processing Charges (APC). Access to "gold" articles is free, immediately afterwards for the entire scientific community and even beyond, in particular for developing countries, where financial support is difficult, even if there can be part solutions through grants and aids.

For an existing review, the changeover from a traditional access to a Gold Open Access raise transition problems, which are inexistent if we refer to reviews created ex nihilo under this scheme.

But above all other considerationsand for the system to be viablewe must ensure that the underlying organization makes provisions whereby the research scientists can avail of the means to pay the APCs without significantly cutting back on their personal operations budget allocation. There is a setback to the present distributed system, inasmuch as it is not easy to control the veracity of costing since the APCs are established unilaterally by the publishers. Through lack of accompanying measures, the system cannot provide a guarantee against practice of excessive fee pricing.

The hybrid formulawhich in subscription-based reviews enables authors to provide free access to an article provided an APC is paid -is a sort of "intermediate gold" access which is only acceptable in a transition framework, given that a double payment is involved: the subscription rate is not diminished and the amount due for the APC is difficult to negotiate inasmuch as the authors are isolated in the process. This point should be included in concerted European level negotiations.

With the prospect of reducing embargos and controlling costs, it is necessary to work on regulation of the systems as a whole, seen as a series of alternatives to the "traditional" model of subscription and to and support should be forthcoming for all forms of public initiative that aim at producing balanced combinatory formulae, that respect the needs off the various communities involved. The French Academy of Sciences, however, has a marked preference for an Open Access model with a centralized negotiation mechanism, calling for development.

Incentives for a transition to Institutional Open Access

The central issue is how costs are to be transferred from the readers to the authors and the capacity of the latter to cope, following a balanced negotiation with the private publishing sectors or with the learned societies.

To proceed, it is primordial to know, on one hand, the total budgetary allotments for the current scientific information and the amounts that could be re-allotted to a regular budget used to pay all APCs and, on the other, the real publishing costs involved.

On this last point, it would appear that a cost of 1000 € for an APC, compliant with necessary editorial services, could prove to be a sensible basis for negotiation. It can be noted that this figure (1000 €) corresponds roughly to the amount of today's subscription revenues in France, viz., 105 M€ divided by the number of articles published annually, approximately 100000.

However, when we consider the high degree of complexity involved in distributing the amounts need to subscribe to the reviews, in the form of credits allotted to the laboratories to pay the APCs, and the inconvenience generated should the fee negotiations be individualized leaving the authors alone faced with the reviews' subscription departments, it would appear highly preferable to centralize the negotiation phases and to agree to contracts based on Open Access at a national level.

It is necessary to see the subscription budget allocations of public [French] research transformed fully into budgets for aids to publication in certified reviews. Negotiation between the State authorities and the publishers is of prime importance to generalize single national licenses that can be transposed into the new system.

At the same time, the logic underpinning the national license, for a regular budget outlay, must be extended to incorporate free access, introducing an evolution of the principle of Open Access integrating a centralized flat subscription: a single multiannual subscription contract should be negotiated between the public authorities and each publisher, specifying which titles are covered, organizing free and immediate access via the publisher's site to all the articles of those reviews where one of the authors is employed by the institution that negotiated the subscription, consequently with payment of the flat rate plus a coefficient of revaluation designed to assure stable revenues for the publisher. Articles published in this system could also be archived as open access documents in the published format.

In contradistinction, certain additional, so-called "added value", services proposed (based on the nature of the data contents and cross referencing with other articles) would be excluded from the general contract agreement and marketed separately by the publishers in the form of a "premium offer", such as to compensate for a shortfall of subscribers from both industrial and service sectors, due to the changeover to an open access policy and provided the central payment system becomes an accepted worldwide practice.

Negotiation of the base agreement for each flat rate should be entrusted to the Couperin consortium.

The model could be called the Institutional Open Access (IOA) and would be compatible with the "gold" Open Access model (APC) for those articles not covered by the scope of the license.

Centralized fee negotiations leave room for the publishers and establishments who have not signed the national agreement.

Generally speaking, the diversity offered by the other systems could continue to apply. However, in reference to the gold access with an APC for each article, those research scientists invited to pay an APC should be supported in this process by their institution. The order of magnitude for aid here could amount to 1 000 €/article, distributed between annual standing credit allocations, project based allocations and independently from specific aids provided by intuitions for publications by their employees.

A hybrid model could prove useful if seen as a transition, i.e., if it includes a smooth wedging arrangement for funding with the APCs for a given year fixing the shortfall of subscription in the following year: after negotiation with the publisher about cost rates for APCs, subscribers who submit accepted articles with carrying an APC tab for Open Access would incur a subscription amount for year N decreased by the amount of APCs paid for year N-1. In this hybrid model, and for a fixed subscription cost, the number of articles published would be limited by the total amount of APCs and the cost of the subscriptions.

The scientists" freedom of choice must be preserved in a large panel of certified reviews known for the quality of their editorial practice. An important pointfailing which the models would not be readily accepted by the scientific communities, is that the laboratories would not have to pay for APCs i.e., they should not impact negatively on the already tight laboratory budgets, except in exceptional cases. If authors who are not party to the national agreement choose to publish their articles in non-certified reviews with high APCs or that propose extra services, at a cost, but which the authors wish to acquire, they could pay the difference out of their own research contracts or operational budget. Indeed, this proposal not only calls to question reviews that have come to rely independently on the Gold Open Access mode and who have, moreover, secured an undisputed position in the publishing world.

An Institutional Open Access (IOA) model could also co-exist with Open Access (APC) for certain rare individual cases: the reviews involved would carry free access articles, either IOA or OA for those individual cased cited above and limited access articles.

Reader access

Author access Non-subscribers OA and IOA articles Free or with an APC for OA Subscribers not party to the single licence agreement OA and IOA articles, limited access Free or with an APC for OA Subscribers party to the single licence agreement OA and IOA articles, limited access Free for IOA

Too many articles in too many reviews

World production of scientific articles has doubled over the past 15 years. Excellent articles are "drowned" in a mass of less interesting articles in far too many reviews with complicated access procedures and often at high cost. Moreover, many mediocre quality reviews are created in just a few days, by "rogue publishers" who take advantage of the Gold Open Access protocol to promote commercial patchwork packages for the sole benefit of their cash register, without any real expertise nor guarantee as to correct referencing and attributions.

One of the attractive features of a Gold Open Access organized by State authorities would lie in making the research scientists responsible in terms of the costs of publications and this would tend to regulate the quality of article and the reviews themselves, thereby enhancing article quality. The rogue publishers would naturally be excluded from the global licenses, and only certified reviews would be involved.

Devious use and reference to review impact factors

Inappropriate reference made to the impact factor of reviews when used to assess research scientist's individual career merits leads to a hyped value being assigned to fashionable research topics appearing in a very limited number of reviews in which, moreover, the criteria for expert critical analysis are not exactly satisfactory.

The prime need for peer-review by other academic research scientists before publication must be reaffirmed. The editorial functions of learned societies must be reactivated.

Free access and better visibility of articles could encourage research scientists and their assessors to move away from the abusive reference to review impact factors and even citation ranking of articles, which could be conducive to the assessor reading the contest of the articles in question The Academy's Recommendations (summarized) 1 -The French Academy of Sciences is supportive of all efforts deployed for the purpose of reducing the cost of subscriptions, in particular of the project for a single national license, currently being implemented, whereby the State authorities signing a single contract with each publisher for the benefit of all national institutions. The Academy is desirous to see this procedure extended to the centralized Open Access model at a national level.

2 -The French Academy of Sciences would welcome a national analytical accounting system -, audited by the Cour des Comptes [France's National Comptroller's Office]that integrates costs currently incurred by the scientific information sector and also to see this overall budget, in constant euros, be assigned to a gradual transition to Open Access policy and procedures. Moreover, the Academy expresses the wish that scientists (or via their learned societies) regain control of costs for activities that relate to dissemination of scientific information. 3 -The Academy has observed the variety of models that co-exist today. The Academy recommends a more professional approach, to ensure better control of public expenditure here.

Notwithstanding, the Academy considers that among the possible solutions, the Institutional Open Access (IOA) is the model to be favoured, inasmuch as it corresponds to the objective of providing universal access to research results and enables costs to be limited, via centralized negotiation. Payment of APCs should not impact negatively on the already tight laboratory budgets 4 -The Academy therefore recommends that Institutional Open Access be organized not only to ensure freedom to read and publish, but also to help improve assessment procedures for research workers and to continuously control the global budget allotments to the IOA system, for the purpose of avoiding excess fees that have degraded the readerpayer system. 5 -The Couperin Consortium (or another, similar, specific body) should be entrusted with the overall negotiation and, for those reviews as yet non-integrated to the system, management of the APCs, thanks to existing regulatory skills and large visibility vis-à-vis subscription costs and policies.

6 -Local and national archiving, with its high merits in those fields where the practice is accepted, must be improved and extended to all fields, so as to preserve the information and the articles and their visibility-accessibility via search engines. 7 -The prime need for peer-reviewing of articles before publication by academic research scientists must be reaffirmed. In a more general framework, participation of academics in the final approval decisions, as is the case for journals edited by learned societies and academies. 8 -Reference to the impact factor of reviews should be quashed. 9 -The issues addressed here cannot be solved only on a national scale and it is therefore important and indeed urgent that efforts be undertaken to see the agreements extended at least to European level.


Costa Chica

LACES Odile Hoffmann

Christian Rinaudo

The issue of Blackness and Mestizaje in two distinct Mexican contexts

Keywords: racialization, ethnicization, indian identity, black identities, afro-latinos, hybridity, creolity

The construction of new nations in Latin America has triggered debate on the definition of national identity with a view to reconciling the reality of mestizaje with the attribution, inherited from Colonial times, of specific "characteristics" to groups and individuals ("Spanish", "Indian", "Black", "mulatto", etc). It was also confronted with racist connotations which, in the early 19th century, included the ideas of progress and modernity, hence the difficulty in legitimizing its own "brand of mestizaje." We will address these issues through empirical examination of two contexts in Mexico: the State and City of Veracruz, and Costa Chica on the Pacific coast of the States of Oaxaca and Guerrero. What these two case studies share is the issue of mestizaje, so strongly associated with that of Mexican national identity, from the standpoint of the African presence which, though considerable from the start of colonization, was not included in "classic" views of national mestizaje. This analysis helps reveal various ways in which populations of African origin were incorporated into the Nation. Thus, we can see how the local configuration articulates with the overall discourse to privilege one facet or dimension of (cultural, or social, or political) Afro identification over another.

Odile Hoffmann is Geographer at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD-France), at the URMIS Laboratory. Her research deals with social construction of ethnic and racial categories in the case of afrodescendant population in Colombia, Mexico and Belize.

Christian Rinaudo is Sociologist at the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Unité de recherche migrations et sociétés, URMIS. His research deals with ethnic and racial studies in France, Colombia and Mexico.

The explicit racialization of colonial societies appeared in the 18th century and developed especially in the 19th century, as shown by Alan Knight for Latin America [START_REF] Knight | Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940[END_REF]) and well developed by more recent authors for Mexico. 1 Before then and with Atlantic modernization in the 16th century, differences in colour, status, prestige and social position intermingled in multiple combinations within which the "racial configuration" existed without eliminating the others [START_REF] Velázquez | Racismo, mestizaje y población de origen africano en México: una perspectiva histórica[END_REF].

It was finally in the course of the 19th century that the idea of race was refined and reinforced.

In Mexico, political figures from different parties and intellectuals, including "scientists" (a group inspired by positivist theories), built a young nation, assumed to be Mestiza, 2 in search of its unity (after achieving independence in 1821) and identity after a century of civil strife. Combining opposites and seeking a new path, they then shaped such notions as "Mestizo race", "Bronze race" and "New race", all expressing the will to recognize the specificity of a very mixed population while fitting it into the universalizing scientism that prevailed at the time. With the Mexican Revolution (1910)(1911)(1912)(1913)(1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918)(1919)(1920), which further reinforced the need for cohesion, José Vasconcelos developed the concept of "Cosmic race" [START_REF] Vasconcelos | La Raza Cósmica[END_REF], echoing Manuel Gamio"s Indigenismo (Gamio 1992(Gamio [1916]]) to lay the groundwork for "integrationist" cultural nationalism. Thus, even when glorifying Mestizaje and mixing, "race" continued to guide the vocabulary, reasoning and discourse and, with "race", the political and social rationales of hierarchical organization.

Instituted at the end of the 19th century, such paradigms waned a century later, giving way to other political concepts and a new societal model. The period of [1980][1981][1982][1983][1984][1985][1986][1987][1988][1989][1990] was marked by the success of multiculturalism, the politics of recognition [START_REF] Taylor | Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition[END_REF]) and political handling of differences [START_REF] Kymlicka | Ciudadanía multicultural. Una teoría liberal de los derechos de las minorías[END_REF]. These models were viewed as new options for fighting the marginalization and discrimination historically suffered by "ethnic", "racial", "cultural" and "national" minorities. From then on, several Latin American countries like Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Perú, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela launched a process of politico-institutional recognition of the claims of populations asserting their indigenous and African origins explicitly inspired by multiculturalism, and modified their constitutions and legislations accordingly [START_REF] Gros | Políticas de la etnicidad: identidad, estado y modernidad[END_REF][START_REF] Wade | Gente negra, nación mestiza. Dinámicas de las identidades raciales en Colombia[END_REF][START_REF] Wade | Race and Ethnicity in Latin America[END_REF]. In Mexico, the Indigenista discourse around integration changed during this period evoking issues and action programmes defined in terms of respect for cultural diversity. Nonetheless, the constitutional change of 1992 recognizing the nation"s "multicultural composition" did not give rise to legislative reforms on this theme. This political context largely contributed to "ways of seeing" and understanding the issue of mestizaje as it arose in Mexico. Here as in many other Latin America countries, this question was discussed mainly "from the Indian standpoint", starting from a process of "dis-Indianization" (or assimilation in the 19th century and early 20th century), then (very) relative "re-Indianization" conducted on the basis of indigenous recognition accompanied by rejection of the ideology of mestizaje which prevailed throughout the 20th century. At the end of the 20th century, some observers and political players began interpreting this as what impelled the forced cultural homogenization central to the process of forging an official national chronicle which ignored the importance of other demographic phenomena [START_REF] Viqueira | Reflexiones contra la noción histórica de mestizaje[END_REF]. In particular, populations of African origin were largely ignored until the end of the 20th century, when the Dirección General de Culturas Populares launched a national programme, "Our Third Root" (Nuestra Tercera Raíz), and various scientific initiatives began revealing the importance and diversity of "contributions" by people of African origin [START_REF] Hoffmann | Renaissance des études afromexicaines et production de nouvelles identités ethniques[END_REF]Martínez Montiel 1994;Velázquez & Correa 2005). The invisibility of such populations can be explained in part by structural demographic processes: in Mexico, the largest number of slaves from Africa were brought in during the first part of the Colonial period, between 1580 and 1640 (Aguirre Beltrán 1972), unlike the Spanish Caribbean islands where the slave trade lasted much longer, into the 19th century (Benítez Rojo 1983). Consequently, there was no renewal of "Black" populations and, in Mexico today, few individuals correspond to the generally recognized "Black" stereotype associated with other identifications: "African", Cuban "Black", North American "Black." This low visibility of "Black populations" on a national level also corresponds to the fact that few individuals identify with a category that has officially disappeared (from census data, official texts, public policy) since Independence (1821). Today in Mexico, only a tiny minority people define themselves collectively as "Black". Were we to try and count the number of individuals in this category, the figures might easily range from a few thousand to several million according to the selected criteria (phenotypic traits and skin colour, self-definition, genealogical descent, cultural practices, etc).

In this context, the matter of seeing how the link between the history of slavery and populations "of African origin" is activated or not, proclaimed or not, used for political purposes or not helps revitalize research on the "Black diaspora" or "Black Atlantic." Taking into account how the issue of mestizaje is called into question or not, redefined or diversely interpreted, sometimes given a political bent, leads to examining the conditions in which boundaries based on presumably differentiated genealogies may produce "groupness", meaning the crystallization of collective awareness of belonging to the same "group." In Brubaker"s terms, the notion of "groupness" -unlike "groupism", which is a tendency to consider ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entitiesrefers to an event, something which may or not occur in the social world, which may or not succeed in crystallizing despite players" efforts to impose its existence [START_REF] Brubaker | Ethnicity without Groups[END_REF].

To address these issues, we chose an empirical method enabling us to sidestep discursive approaches or ideologized debates. This entails describing two local contexts in Mexico which both share an approach to the issue of mestizaje based onor includingan African presence: the coastal region and City of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico and Costa Chica on the Pacific coast between the States of Oaxaca and Guerrero. In both cases, we sought to understand how local configurations articulate with broader rationales to reveal or alter representations of mestizaje or, conversely, ignore them in favour of other models or representations.3

Veracruz, ethnic 'whitening' and folk culture

In the State of Veracruz, the absence so far of political organizations connected to transnational networks defending the rights of "Black people" or "Afro-descendants" produced a regional configuration in which contemporary political interests bear less on recognizing, labelling and counting social groups established on an ethnic basis than on accounting, or not, for cultural traits assumed to be of African origin (music, dance, festivities, diet) fitting in with those assumed to hark back to Spanish and indigenous origins as part of a regional culture recognized as linked to "Jarocho identity"4 and perceived as Mestizo [START_REF] Sue | Race and national ideology in Mexico: an ethnographic study of racism, color, mestizaje and blackness in Veracruz, Ph D of Sociology[END_REF]. In these conditions, it is mainly on the level of cultural policy formulated in terms of the "Third Root" and its contributions to the regional heritage that the issue of an "African presence" has been the subject of debate and specific positions taken by different local players.

In Veracruz, and throughout Mexico, the relatively early slowdown in the slave trade and the return to demographic growth of the indigenous population after a sharp fall resulted in rapid inclusion of populations of African origin into a largely rural "folk civilization" Antonio Garcia de León called the Afro-Andalusian Caribbean. 5 The development of such cultural expressions as Fandango and Son Jarocho in this "Afro-Andalusian" or "(Indo-)Afro-Andalusian" Caribbean (Pérez Montfort 2007, p. 183) organized around livestock and herding was not cut off from the city, however. Quite the contrary, they reinforced each other through continuous exchanges between ports and hinterland. From the start of the Colonial period, the city of Veracruz was home to a large number of people of African origin, slave and free, who enjoyed a rather broad margin of tolerance compared to other regions of Mexico, because of the presence of few Spaniards and their descendants who fled the city during the long hot season and outside periods when boats arrived to find refuge in the cities of the Altiplano (Alcántara [START_REF] López | Negros y afromestizos del Puerto de Veracruz. Impresiones de lo popular durante los siglos XVII y XVIII[END_REF].

Starting in the 19th century with struggles for independence throughout the region, new migratory waves from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, Santo Domingo, Colombia and Venezuela, unrelated to the Mexican system of slavery, as well as new forms of circulation and cultural exchange transited through the port of Veracruz (Ávila et al. 2011), contributing to complexifying the issue of the presence of populations of African origin in the city and nurturing what would be described in contemporary local historiography as an "urban folk culture" largely characterized by the inclusion of Cuban (Danzón, Son Montuno or Cubano, Bolero...) and more broadly "Afro-Caribbean" music.

Examining these elements helps identify two distinct processes in the transformation of representations of the local population, both linked to political interests in the issue of mestizajefirst, "whitening" of the Jarocho stereotype in Mexico; then, development of cultural policy centred around the "Third Root" of mestizajeand their implementation in the State and City of Veracruz.

"Whitening" Jarochos Throughout the 19th century, Veracruz was not spared the social phenomenon of the passage of travellers and chroniclers visiting Latin America from abroad; it was one of the main ports where they reached the continent or left for other destinations. There are many written descriptions of the region and its inhabitants, the most important of which are published in an anthology titled Cien viajeros in Veracruz, Crónicas y relatos (Poblett Miranda 1992). These travel accounts helped shaped an image of Veracruz which was viewed at the time above all as a dangerous inhospitable unhealthy city, a gloomy place that was hard to reach, where the local population was often depicted as idle, "sleeping all day under the rays of a scorching sun" (García Díaz 2002, pp. 215-238) or "belonging to all American races with complexions ranging from ochre to ebony" (De Valois 1861, p. 40).

In this context, Jarochos were most often shown to be the result of "crossbreeding" with a strong African mark, as seen for example in this excerpt from Ernest Vigneaux, a young Frenchman with liberal republican ideas, who set out for the Americas in 1848 to describe backward, exotic regions where Modernist ideas should apply: "The Jarocho is the peasant of the province of Veracruz; most often a product of the three known races and, under the fire of Cancer, from this unlikely mixture flows blood of molten lava in a body supported by muscles of steel. The Jarocho is a herdsman who also harvests whatever Mother Nature is willing to offer, without too much help, in the enclosure around his bamboo hut, since he is not much inclined to work, but such Creole idleness is paired in him with an energy for pleasure so typical of Negro blood. Such furious enjoyment is for him the last word of life: his leisure is absorbed by play, drink, music, dance and love" (Vigneaux 1863, pp. 541-542).

Similarly, the Italian painter Claudio Linati, known for having introduced the art of lithography to Mexico where he stayed in 1825 and 1826, clearly showed the connotation of poverty and rurality associated with Jarochos as well as their historical relationship with "Blacks" (Linati 1955(Linati [1828]]).

Illustration 1: Negro de Alvarado recostado en su hamaca haciendo trabajar a su mujer (1828).

Lithographs by the Italian artist Claudio Linati Ricardo Pérez Montfort shows how, starting in the 1940s, there subsequently emerged an attempt to move away from this representation, which entailed in particular imposing another Jarocho cliché, originating this time in the post-revolutionary political apparatus: that of the "Jarocho dancing La Bamba" dressed in white (Pérez Montfort 2007), a cliché which excluded the historical relationship with "Blacks" and "negritude": "The dress and accessories worn by those representing these Jarochos had nothing more to do with the rural world or lower classes of the coast. From then on, the term "Jarocho costume" referred to the very elaborate costly immaculate-white clothing worn by the hispanophile elites of the Port, main towns and former haciendas of Veracruz. [...] Such a depiction of the Jarocho Fandango found its definitive place in the repertoire of regional stereotypes in 1940 when a group from Veracruz chose the lyrics and music of La Bamba as the leitmotiv for political campaigning between 1945and 1946" (Pérez Montfort 2001, p. 156-157).

Illustration 2: Typical illustration reasserting the image of Jarochos in the mid-20th century (in R. Pérez Montfort, 2001)

From "Ethnic Whitening" to the "Third Root" of mestizaje in cultural policy

This post-revolutionary period and its homogenizing centralist cultural nationalism came to an end between 1970 and 1980 [START_REF] Jiménez | Políticas culturales en transición. Retos y escenarios de la gestión cultural en México[END_REF]. It was followed by a process of cultural decentralization driven by the Federal Administration and the gradual creation in all Mexican States of Secretariats, Institutes and Councils of Culture. The Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura (IVEC) was founded in its wake in February 1987. This was followed in subsequent years by the definition of major orientations and the implementation of what was to become a decentralized cultural policy applied to the State of Veracruz (García Díaz, Guadarrama Olivera 2012). In particular, this policy, which entailed highlighting the Afro-Caribbean dimension, privileged three main orientations: revaluing "rural" Son Jarocho and its African influence; revaluing Danzón [START_REF] Malcomson | Creative Standardization: Danzon and the Port of Veracruz, Mexico[END_REF] and Son Montuno of Afro-Cuban origin as the urban culture of Veracruz; and local promotion of the national programme centred on the "Third Root" of mestizaje.

In 1994, implementation of this policy led to launching the International Afro-Caribbean

Festival, which has since contributed to producing another stereotypic image of Veracruz, as can be seen in the design of the Festival"s different posters emphasizing phenotypic traits and body movements associated with stylized Africanity.

Illustration 3: Posters from the Festival Internacional Afrocaribeño (1997,1998,2001,2004,2008,2009) Over the years, the development of this cultural policy contributed to the emergence in both academic research and public action of different orientations which were beginning to surface in the local public arena. The first is linked to the launch by the Dirección General de Culturas Populares of the national programme known as "Our Third Root." Aiming to recognize the Latin American world"s

African cultural heritage, it originated in an academic and political focus on the history of slavery. In this perspective, it was a matter of promoting the "Third Root of mestizaje", i.e. the historic contribution of slaves and their descendants to national Mexican culture. In Veracruz, this orientation was borne by Luz María Martínez Montiel, Cultural Heritage Director at the Institute of Culture when it was founded, and in charge of renovating the Veracruz City Museum (Martínez Montiel 1994).

A second orientation for local cultural policy vis-à-vis the issue of mestizaje, very influential in Veracruz, was associated with the historian Antonio García de León"s insistence on the diversity of cultural heritages in the "Afro-Andalusian Caribbean." Defining mestizaje as central to the formation of the region"s folk culture, it entailed recognizing the importance of the African heritage without boiling down to it. Thus, García de León"s texts evoke this "folk civilization" which generated mestizaje in Colonial times against the Spanish conquistadores and the city"s White elite. He refers to a "folk culture stoked by various influences: African, Caribbean, European," which developed on the fringe of the elitist culture of the dominant class. He views Veracruz as the "tropical Babel of the Indies where all possible races and mixtures coexist" (García de [START_REF] García De León | El Caribe afroandaluz: permanencia de una civilización popular[END_REF][START_REF] García De León | Con la vida en un danzón: notas sobre el movimiento inquilinario de Veracruz en 1922[END_REF].

Finally, a third orientation in this game of defining and implementing local cultural policy is borne by researchers close to militant Afro-Mexican movements [START_REF] Cruz Carretero | Yanga and the Black Origins of Mexico[END_REF]. In this case, it is a matter of assuming the cultural and somatic specificity linked to the African presence in Mexico, not only as a heritage common to everyone, but as a characteristic that can be reasserted today in the context of a multi-ethnic vision of Mexico and considering "Afro-Mexicans" as one of the ethnic components of national society. This third racializing orientation elicited little response in the region of Veracruz whose inhabitants generally showed little interest in interests specific to the actions conducted in the framework of this kind of cultural policy [START_REF] Rinaudo | Afro-mestizaje y fronteras étnicas. Una mirada desde el Puerto de Veracruz[END_REF] and are more sensitive to accounts highlighting "mestizaje" specific to "folk civilization." Despite the efforts deployed by certain militants to impose the existence of identification as "Afro-Mexican",6 it did not succeed in crystallizing in the form of a collective conscience focusing on the African origin alone. It developed more successfully on the Pacific coast, however, as we will see in the second part of this paper.

Costa Chica, mestizaje through the prism of ethnicization

We refer here to populations residing in the small region known as Costa Chica, on the Pacific coast of the States of Guerrero and Oaxaca. According to its residents, cultural and ethnic diversity seems to be part of the landscape. These so-called "Black", "Moreno" or "Costeño" inhabitants, more rarely dubbed Afromestizo or Afro-Mexicans, live in villages relatively isolated from the main coastal road. Indian villages are more often located in the hinterland, while the main road which crosses and structures this small region is strewn with small towns controlled by Mestizos. This apparent spatial splitsince the real picture is obviously more complicatedfunctions as a geographic configuration which long acted as a clear-cut naturalizing element of the "differences" imagined to be radical between the three "ethnic groups" inhabiting the region. In regional collective representations, each group is associated with a specific space (Indian villages, Black ranchos, Mestizo market towns).

As always, there is nothing neutral about such associations with a space which entails implicit values, functions and hierarchies leading historically, in this particular case, to the development of an image of Costa Chica as an "Indian region." It is in this region that one of the first regional INI (Instituto Nacional Indigenista) centres was set up in the 1940s; cultural and linguistic diversity is greater here than elsewhere and, until very recently, the political and administrative approach to multiculturalism concerned only groups qualified as "Indian" and officially listed as such.

It is this context of poor legitimacy and visibility that certain well-structured Black groups sought to change in the late 20th century. The dynamics of mobilization remain weak, as attested by the persistent instability of the designations: Black, Afromestizo, Afro-Mexican or of African origin.

None of these many terms actually refers to a very specific set of significations or even connotations.

These people"s social and political mobilization, however, long denied or ridiculed, can no longer be ignored. This is not the place to describe in detail the drivers and obstacles to this mobilization (see Hoffmann & Lara 2012) beyond the simple fact of its existence thanks to the resources deployed by militants and their organizations. Despite their small numbers, they are beginning to appear as interlocutors capable of joining national and international Afro-militancy networks. The emerging debate is reinforced every day by the actions of local militants (México Negro, Africa associations), foundations and non-governmental organizations (Ford Foundation), government institutions (Conapred, CDI), academics and researchers (universities and research centres) in Mexico and abroad, international Afro activists, etc. The interactions of such "experts" contribute to legitimizing a field and a set of "Afro" spokespersons in Mexico.

On what ethnic and/or racial paradigm is this new social and political field built? What is the place of mestizaje as a concept? Two strong trends stand out, either in succession or interlaced.

Ethnicization: the normalization of identity linked with mestizaje

In the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle of Black activistsaccepted as such by themselves and their interlocutors, independently of their phenotype as they perceive itdeveloped above all from the historical marginalization they suffered and the demand for better, fairer, more equitable and more dignified integration in the Nation. In this, their slogans and rationale for social claims are quite comparable to those of Indian mobilization which intensified over the entire continent at the same time [START_REF] Gros | Políticas de la etnicidad: identidad, estado y modernidad[END_REF]. Thus, México Negro meetings, organized yearly for some fifteen years by the association of the same name in one of the villages in Costa Chica, underscore strong social and economic demands in terms of health, education and housing, as well as access to land, political representation and culture. The debate on "Black identity" places racism and discrimination at the heart of the "explication" of regional inequalities, granting them a potential for mobilization. In the regional context evoked above, this debate "logically" places Black identity in the open available ethnic range alongside and with the same status as the region"s "ethnic groups" (Amuzgos, Chatinos, Mixtecos, etc). Thus, in the past twenty years, we can see the rise of a political argument based on the dynamics of ethnicization which claims equivalence between "Afro-Mexican"although the terms are not yet stabilized -"Indian" and "Native" categories, with the corresponding ethnonyms commonly used in the region and country.

Ethnicization is explicitly devised as an instrument for visibilization and conscientization, as well as a political mechanism for the emancipation of the populations claiming it. It is opposed to the former racialization which held "Black" individuals and groups in a particularism to make them feel inferior, stripped of all civic, political or even cultural value. Ethnicization claims to replace this and even surpass it in a way without ignoring it, however. The Afromestizo category, first used by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (Aguirre Beltrán 1972[START_REF] Aguirre Beltrán | Cuijla: esbozo etnográfico de un pueblo negro, México[END_REF], corresponds well with this aspiration. It would act in a way like "being different to be like others," claiming recognition as an ethnic group to become part of the areas of negotiation considered to be legitimate both regionally and nationally. This re-elaboration agrees with interpretations proposed by historians and ethnologists, greatly stimulated by official programmes like the "Third Root" (see above, and Martínez Montiel 1994). Here, however, unlike Veracruz, it acquires a collective dimension which is clearly political. Cultural particularities (music, dance) are highlighted and staged to build and consolidate the notion of "group."

In this phase as shown by the very term Afromestizo, ethnicization is very logically accompanied by an inclusive representation of mestizaje. In fact, this reflects a constant in the history of Conquest and Colony in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, for Blacks as for Indians:

ethnogenesis based on mixing and subversion of the initial categories. Some cases are more emblematic or better known than others, like that of the Métis in Canada, legally recognized as a specific group with the same rights as "Natives" on the basis of mestizaje or miscegenation. As Rivard explains, far from seeking "pure identity, the group is built up by its margins and constantly renewed by opening to others (Rivard 2007). 7 In this case, mestizaje creates the conditions of ethnicization.

Other, less well known cases illustrate the possible articulations between phenomena of ethnogenesis and mestizaje, as in an article on pre-Colonial mestizaje between Indian groups in Bolivia [START_REF] Combés | Les métis les plus purs. Représentations chririguano et chané du métissage[END_REF]. It reveals processes that may oppose or nurture each other, with no predetermined harmony or conflict: "Born of mestizaje, the Chané and Isoseño not only deny it; they also denigrate it, diluting it in a deceptive rhetoric of purity and using it as an argument for interethnic discrimination (between themselves) (…) There is no absolute dissolution of collective identity -nor has it ever existed -in the magma of mestizaje, nor has there been an absolute negation of the very fact of mixture as implied in ideology; adrift between these two extremes, we discover on the contrary selective hierarchical discrimination which opens and closes alliance networks (military, economic, matrimonial) according to context and circumstances, which never stray from the need to consolidate ethnic identity proper" (Combés & Villar 2008, p. 6 & 9 of the electronic version). Here, mestizaje is a practice, an ideology and a scenography more or less activated and made coherent according to context. We can see that fluid, contrasting configurations of identity, extensively studied for trans-Atlantic Black diasporas [START_REF] Gilroy | The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness[END_REF], are not the prerogative of these de-territorialized societies only, but account for phenomena widely shared by local so-called "Indian" or "Native" societies, whether pre-Colonial, Colonial or contemporary. Mestizaje is historically coercive and politically constructed. Similarly, "Black" or "Afro" identification in Mexicoand probably elsewherehas never been univocal. Ethnicization relates to criteria of belonging that may be "racial", sometimes local or regional, criteria combined according to a balance of power which may be violent and aggressive in contexts of alliance renegotiated according to short-term circumstances. At the end of the 20th century, such interests shape a "Black" complex built no longer on mestizaje but on the "ideological suppression of hybridity" (Combés & Villar 2008, p. 4 of the electronic version), via racialization.

Racialization as a factor of exclusion

Indeed, in the first years of the 21st century, several phenomena are challenging the viability of the process of civic integration through ethnicization and reintroducing openly racialized terminology.

The issue of exhaustion of the ethnicizing/mestizosé paradigm far exceeds the scope of this article.

Suffice it to say that it satisfies a historic convergence between global factors (lack of true democratic or economic opening despite ethnic recognition; the development of transnational Afro-descendants" networks) and national factors (Mexico"s participation in International Conventions and the necessary respect of certain ethnic-racial recognition measures), or even local factors (the emergence or consolidation of associations advocating mobilization), all of which now place their bets on the racialized option to fight inequalities and acquire areas of expression and power.

This development implies a new discourse, in particular with standardization of the terms of the debate used in all arenas of international negotiation, and polarization which structures the world on a binary racialized "Black-White" basis, leaving little room for "mixed" or "unusual" situations.

The argumentation observes the failure of inclusive options in Black identification as they could have been built up fifteen years ago around the shared experience of subjection, the memory of slavery or the fight against exclusion.8 It moves away from political stances where "race" was a complex concept inherited from historical conceptions combining colour, prestige, social position and kinship, in conditions which are always singular in determining the "definition" of "Blacks" in a given place and time, never out of context. Thus, the Black experience in Colombia differs from that of Mexico;

that of plantations has little in common with urban Blacks" living conditions, not to mention the different modalities and rhythms of gradual emancipation from slavery, which varied greatly from one country or region to another. This complexity is now limited to the field of specialists and historians, for the benefit of simpler visions to transmit to a broader public and more efficient in negotiating arenas. The diversity of conceptions of identity and even "race" is substituted for by a standard international vision focusing mainly on colour as an indicator of potentially inferior position.

The trend towards simplification is logically accompanied by polarization of identifiers between Black and White. Today, militants can often be heard to claim binary criteria, which overlook the entire range of terms used to describe the infinite nuances of skin colour, hair type and other supposed physical markers of the "Afro difference." To this end, some militant groups in Mexico already want to "switch from Afro to Black",9 like some of their Brazilian correspondents [START_REF] Boyer | Une forme d"africanisation au Brésil[END_REF]. Thus, they claim to avoid euphemization linked to the multiplication of designations to prefer only one: the colour black. Such concepts completely exclude all references to mestizaje.

It is legitimate to express a certain apprehension in the face of these racializing trends if we place them in a historical and regional context long known for violent antagonism between Indian and Black populations [START_REF] Flanet | Viviré si Dios quiere. Un estudio de la violencia en la mixteca de la costa[END_REF]. It cannot be forgotten that, in Costa Chica, inhabitants and militants are faced with widespread appreciations often expressing exacerbated racism. We can take the case of two neighbouring villages, El Pitahayo and "La Colonia", whose violent historic clashes we studied with their verbal expression [START_REF] Hoffmann | Las narrativas de la diferencia étnico-racial en la Costa chica, México. Una perspectiva geográfica[END_REF]. El Pitahayo is a little village founded and inhabited by the descendants of the neighbouring village of San Nicolás considered to be "Blacks", while the inhabitants of the nearby village of "La Colonia" are, as expressed in the name, Mestizo farmers and Colonists brought there in the context of land distribution in the mid-20th century. The Colonists" discourse is full of racist appreciations alluding to the "primitive uncivilized" state of their "Black" neighbours in the mid-20th century:

"Here, the people were very primitive (…) They (the inhabitants of El Pitahayo today) were not hardworking; they were lazy; they sowed only one litre of maize; they formed gangs and spent their time killing people (…). They were very primitive people; they went about naked and lived amid pigs and dogs. They built their houses with bits of wood; the people slept in tapextles (wooden shelters on piles and covered with palm leaves) with the pigs sleeping underneath; they were poorly educated; they used teconte (a maize substitute in case of scarcity) to make tortillas. (…) They lined up one behind the other, like onion skins, to pick each other"s lice and eat them. I kept hoping "they would not invite me for a meal." Now, they are sharper because they have begun migrating northward. Now, it seems the inhabitants of El Pitahayo are more refined." (Reina Pita, daughter of the founder of "La Colonia", interview in 2005) 10

In the accounts, peaceful coexistence and daily exchanges, whether social, economic or matrimonial for example, are systematically overlooked in favour of radical representation of "difference." The emphasis on alterity refers to a socio-racial order commonly accepted on a national level, which presents Blacks as intruders and foreigners. In this context, racist ethnic-racial identification is taken up locally to create a "didactic image" that can be easily understood by interlocutors. Thus, there emerges a selection process for collective representation which excludes certain options (here, union between inhabitants of different villages and ethnic groups, day-to-day coexistence, alliances) while privileging others (racialization, racism, antagonisms). In their relations with the outside, it is more advantageous for both communities to emphasize an established "difference": for inhabitants of La Colonia, this means maintaining their position of superiority in social hierarchies and privileged ties with the spheres of power associated with them as White or

Mestizo; for El Pitahayo, it means preserving their identity as "Black" descendants of the community of San Nicolás and, as such, the legitimate heirs of Black authenticity in the region, which enables them to channel certain cultural or economic assistance programme services. The Dirección General de Culturas Populares"s "Third Root" programme began in San Nicolás in the late 1980s with the foundation of a Casa de la Cultura and the town has since become emblematic of the dynamics of "Black" identity in the region, to the advantage of El Pitahayo indirectly. It should be recalled that exploitation of Black identity on a community level does not preclude the existence of far more diverse and complex behaviours in daily relationships between individuals and social groups identified as "Black" or "Mestizo". Thus, discourses targeting the outside and intended to express collective representations of identities give more than their due to ethnic normalization and racialized polarization which force people to define their identity from a univocal base and convert "differences" into more or less naturalized and therefore indisputable "truths". Thus, quite logically, they have great difficulty in handling complex situations arising from interactions and mixing, a configuration which prevails nonetheless in Latin America, whether on local or national levels, public or private, touching on economic, political or obviously cultural areas. Just as the "Mestizo model" invisibilized Blacksand marginalized Indiansjust as the discourse on difference invisibilizes those who are in-between and claim to organize the Nation"s understanding of polarized figures. In such circumstances, how can the collective emancipation "of the Nation" shift towards more justice and equality if it is built on exclusion-even if only symbolicof the majority?

Conclusion

In a recent text provocatively titled The Return of the Native, J.-L. Amselle asserts that it is possible to recognize opposing dynamics between a dominant society imposing ethnicization and dominated groups subject to and sometimes circumventing it: "In both Africa and Latin America, against the primitivism or ethnicization ascribed to folk categories by international organizations, NGOS and local cultural and political elites, there exists, if not a reaction on the part of such categories to this attribution, at least forms of cultural expression going against such projections imposed from the top. In this sense, ethnicization phenomena may be properly analysed only if they are placed in their original context encompassing both national and global considerations and only if they are seen as an instrument of power in the service of dominant society in a process intended to trigger the fragmentation of society" (Amselle 2010, p. 137). We would like to give our full support to this assertion, but this is no easy task since things are not always as clear cut: Black versus White, elite versus folk, political versus social. Our case studies show the contrary: what is true in Veracruz does not apply in Costa Chica. There may be radical differences within a single country at a given time. It is clearly the strength of local societies to be able to develop their own specificities, whether one agrees or not. Thus, as we could see from these two case studies in Mexico, a project impulsed from "the top"

(the official "Third Root of mestizaje" programme) started in Costa Chica a process of awareness and emancipation among certain inhabitants claiming their African origin and representatives of a "group" which had been kept until then on the margin of the political mechanisms of national integration. This led these people first to valuing cultural specificities contributing to forging a collective awareness of belonging to a single "group", then hardening this choice of identity to shift from the notion of Afromestizaje to that of Negritud (Blackness) and reject the national ideology of mestizaje, i.e. a shift from defining the group as "Afromestizo" to defining it as "Black." In Veracruz, the same "Third Root of mestizaje" programme provided a chance to develop cultural policy emphasizing the town"s place in the Caribbean region, while valuing forms of cultural expression broadly identified with mestizaje. In this case, it has rather contributed to the shift from a historical period characterized by accepted negation of the African heritage and attempts to "whiten" Jarocho stereotypes to another identity, where the "African roots" of mestizaje are now included in the representations of local society, without resulting however in "groupness". This does not mean that everyone accepts this representation as such, but that it is now taken as a legitimate norm for defining and accounting for local identity.

Subsequently, the role of players in concrete situations entails positioning themselves with respect to this norm whether they accept it or not, whether they acquiesce or endure it, and with respect to this specific dimension of the representation of mestizajethe so-called "African roots."

As we have seen, there is no reason here to seek to define mestizaje with a new metaphor (rhizome, hybridity, creolity, mosaic...) or look into the renewal of the issues involved. 11 We do not claim to re-legitimize an obsolete paradigm, but rather reintroduce the questions it raises and which remain uncertain when it comes to the mechanisms of construction and negotiation of hegemonies, ideological disputes and strategies anchored in daily life shaped by relations of domination. This enables us to eschew the spurious dilemma that claims to oppose the representation of an "ethnocidal mestizaje" 12castrating mestizaje imposed from the topdenounced by Rita Segato, to that of a liberating mestizajemestizaje from the bottomcalled for by Anibal [START_REF] Quijano | Colonialidad, poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina[END_REF]. The problem is the same in both cases: claiming moral qualification for mestizaje, condemned by the original rape and Conquest, or conversely praised for its potential for cultural creativity and subversionand even resistance.

In the end, these two case studies clearly show that matters of racial identification and mestizaje are not mutually exclusive but, on the contrary, nurture each other in ways that may vary with the historical period, local context and social situations. The configurations of mestizaje can be grasped only in their articulation with other conditions of organization and representation of the world: regional situations, class and gender relations, rationales of identification and ethnic labelling.

11 See, for example, Paula [START_REF] Caballero | Altérités intimes, altérités éloignées: la greffe du multiculturalisme en Amérique latine[END_REF] on the concept of a national regime of alterity or the analysis of relations between mestizaje and eugenics proposed by Marta Saade (2009) 12 "Ethnocidal mestizaje, used to erase memory and delete the original genealogies, whose strategic value for elites is now gradually becoming reversed today by identifying in non-White -mestizo -features clues for the persistence and possibility of returning to a latent pulsating subliminal past whose eradication they once sought" (Segato 2010, p. 20); original in Spanish: "Mestizaje etnocida, utilizado para suprimir memorias y cancelar genealogías originarias, cuyo valor estratégico para las elites se ve, a partir de ahora, progresivamente invertido para hallar en el rostro mestizo, no-blanco, indicios de la persistencia y la posibilidad de una reatadura con un pasado latente, subliminar y pulsante, que se intentó cancelar" (Segato 2010:20).

  These three orientations with respect to the issue of mestizaje and the African heritage in local cultural policy resulted in producing different accounts of the history of populations of African origin in Mexico. The first two can be analysed from the renovations and changes in the museographic design of the Veracruz City Museum. Inaugurated in 1970 to display the "Four Times Heroic" city against foreign invasions, the Museum soon fell into disrepair. At the time the Veracruz Institute of Culture and the national "Third Root" programme was founded, the Museum was taken over from the City by the Institute of Culture which opened a room dedicated to the history of slavery in the region alongside the existing collection. Following this episode, the City Museum was again managed by the Municipality, which lost interest and virtually abandoned it; the room dedicated to the history of slavery and Black populations was finally dismantled. At the end of the 1990s, the Municipality of Veracruz undertook to renovate the Museum again, calling on several historians who had promoted the second orientation borne by A. García de León. Relying on museographic instruments emphasizing the role of images (photographs, paintings, multimedia presentations), they sought to introduce historical information on the City produced in the past fifteen years. They highlighted the working class, folk culture and districts, urban expansion and its consequences, industrial development and changes in trade unions and the place of Veracruz in the Caribbean: all elements evoked still marginally during the first renovation which, with the notable exception of the room dedicated to slavery, was still very much within the historiographic trend of narrating "major events" and "great men." Inaugurated again in December 2000, the Museum has since found a major place in Jarocho folk culture. This time, rather than the socio-racial boundary between famous figures in the history of Veracruz highlighting their Spanish origins on the one hand and the "forgotten" figures of history including slaves and their descendants on the other, emphasis was put on the African, Amerindian and Spanish cultural universe characterizing the region, including both its rural (Fandango, Son Jarocho...) and urban (Danzón, Son Montuno, "Afro-Caribbean" or "Afro-Antillean" music...) facets. The third orientation evoked above is clearly expressed in the foreword to an exhibition organized in 2006 by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago which travelled to different parts of Mexico: "Being Afro-Mexican means descending from the African population which played an essential part in the history and culture of Mexico since the early 16th century. Despite the African participation in the formation of Mexico as a nation, few people are aware of the existence of Afro-Mexicans." This exhibition, titled The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present, took a militant stance in tracing historical continuity between the enslavement of African populations, the heroism of fugitive slaves and claiming an Afro-Mexican identity against the ideology of mestizaje.

In both regions of this study as in all Mexico, the historic miscegenation of populations from different origins (indians, peasants from other regions, slave descendants, mullatoes, foreigners, hacendados, etc) is a fact we are trying neither to debate nor to measure here.

As emphasized by Alfredo Delgado Calderón, the term Jarocho has become a symbol of regional identity, which was derogatory at first, associated in the dictionary of synonyms with "boor", "lout", "insolent" and "rude:" applied in the past to mulatto peasants and cowherds on the Sotavento Coast in the south-centre of the State of Veracruz. The word Jarocho later referred to all individuals with Negroid features and applies today to the inhabitants of the coast, who are proud to be called Jarochos(Delgado Calderón 2004, p. 78).

"The Caribbean I call Afro-Andalusian produced the Campesino, Jíbajo and Guajiro genres, all of which appeared in the rural hinterland of these port complexes open to international and Colonial trade. This is shared by their expressions along with many other traits: they include musical and poetic genres fostered by cow-herding peasants and Afromestizo fishermen, a blend of three ethnic origins: Spanish (mainly Andalusian), Black and Indian. They were generally associated with stockbreeding and formed strongly mixed cultural niches as early as the 17th century: Guajiros in Cuba, Jíbaros in Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, Llaneros in Colombia and Venezuela, Creollos in Panama, Jarochos in Veracruz" (García de León 1992, p. 28).

The position supported by Afro-Mexican militant movements has developed mainly in certain villages of the region, in particular in the region of Yanga, near Córdoba, where a Carnival called "Black Identity Festival" founded in the 1980s with support from the Dirección General de Culturas Populares de Conaculta is organized every year by the municipality and various associations.

What may seem obvious to theoreticians of Constructivism is an "initial" policy which is not without posing a whole series of very concrete issues, starting with the impossibility of certifying a person"s belonging to a groupthereby opening access to certain specific rightsaccording to criteria for belonging that happen to be changing and indeterminate.

In the 1990s, in particular around the Colombian experience of recognition of Black communities and the intense activity of developing and conceptual recomposition on the themes of race, social exclusion and the Nation.

See Lara 2011