Professor receives grant
Lewis writes second book on Mexico
By Kaleigh Maher, staff writer 
Posted on February 12, 2007

When Professor Laura Lewis wants to show you her research, it’s like looking through a photo album of San Nicolas, Mexico.

“It’s really hard to explain what a cultural anthropologist does,” Lewis said. “It’s not quantitative; it’s about interaction with people, just living day to day and becoming part of their routine.”

Lewis, an associate professor of anthropology at JMU, won a $40,000 National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship. She will spend the 2007-08 school year working on her second book, “History, Race and Place in the Making of Black Mexico.”

“The central issue of my field work is about identity formation,” Lewis said. “The majority of the community is descended from Mexico’s free-owned slave population. I’m interested in how people in San Nicolas define themselves.”

Lewis submitted a project proposal to the NEH and was awarded one of 15 grants for Virginia scholars. The NEH awarded 288 grants, totaling $10.7 million.

The San Nicolas Community is located in the State of Guerrero, near Acapulco.

“It’s near the coast, but not on the coast,” Lewis said. “It’s a farming community.”

Lewis has been going to San Nicolas for 10 years. Her first book, “Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico,” was published in 2003 and won the American Society for Ethnohistory’s Wheeler-Voegelin Best Book Award in 2004. It focused on the colonial period and the relationship between the indigenous population and those of African descent.

While working on her first book she became interested in the contemporary relationship.

“Before finishing [the first book] I started doing the field work,” Lewis said. “The two projects overlapped.”

Lewis said that Latin America’s history is different from U.S. history since it was colonized mainly by the Spanish and Portuguese, and regional history within Latin America varies.

“Mexico has one of the smaller populations,” Lewis said. “Every culture has to be looked at on its own terms.”

According to Lewis, her research of Afro-indigenous identities is just a small part of research. Lewis joked that she has already written too many articles on the topic.

“I’ve published about as many articles as I can,” Lewis said. “Now I need to write the book or else no one will want to read what’s in it.”

Lewis has become a part of the San Nicolas community through her time there. She describes herself as having “ritual kin ties” there. She has plans to visit again over Spring Break to reconnect with the community before going down for the 2007-08 academic school year.