In July of 2005, MemĂn Penguin, a black Mexican comic book character who resembles Curious George, or even a little black Sambo, was celebrated with a postage stamp in his honor. The stamp was well received by many sectors of the Mexican public, representing a fond image of childhood. But the stampâs image offended African Americans in the United States and a wide segment of the international community, since it smacked of discrimination. The stampâs release came only months after Mexican President Vicente Fox made disturbing public remarks that Mexican immigrants to the United States take jobs "that not even blacks want to do."2 The public attention that both episodes garnered on each side of the border reveals interesting new dimensions of the ongoing, shifting saga of race relations. For the first time, within the context of high-level forums, Mexican images of blackness were pitted against those of African Americans. Notably, the ways that Mexicans of African descent might have responded to these episodes did not appear to be part of the public relations considerations. Our extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Afro-Mexican communities over the past decade affords us an additional vantage from which to analyze the unfolding of these racially charged events.3Â
