Little Black Angeles
In 1948, a film was shown in Mexico called “Angelitos Negroes” (Little Black Angels), in which a poem was used to reveal racism in Mexico. The poem turned into a movie and was later sung in Spanish by Black singer Roberta Flack and earlier by Eartha Kitt (1953). The words of the song sung in the movie and the plot is almost like “Imitation of Life,” an American film that talks about a light skinned Black woman that tries to pass as white in the racist United States. The words of the song in English are: “Painter born in my land, With the foreign brush, Painter that you follow the course, of so many old painters, Although the virgin is white, Paint little black angels, that also go to heaven, All the good Blacks, Painter if you paint with love, why do you despise its color? If you know that in heaven, God wants them too, Painter of the saint’s bedroom, if you have a soul in your body, why when painting in your paintings? You forgot about the blacks, whenever you paint churches Beautiful little angels’ pictures, but you never remembered to paint a black angel.”
In the movie’s plot, a famous Mexican singer meets a woman, falls in love with her, and the two get engaged. She is blond haired and looks white. Then he starts to understand that his future spouse is racist, since she does not like the fact that he performs mulatto artists. His sweetheart has a babysitter that has really focused on her for her entire life and is a person of color, and she straightforwardly cannot stand her. The spouse makes an honest effort to improve a horrible situation that his better (worse) half’s racist disposition brings to their loved ones. The plot thickens however, when his wife soon gives birth to a daughter who, shockingly, turns out to be dark-skinned.
Because of her dark skin color, the child suffers greatly because her mother does not love her. To be accepted by her mother, the child paints her face white as a result of this racism. The mother and wife attribute her husband’s African ancestry to him. However, the husband is aware of the truth. A minister uncovered to him that his significant other’s genuine mother is the caretaker who in her childhood engaged in extramarital relations with her chief. The wife’s mother wanted to be close to her daughter and became a servant for her daughter to receive an inheritance.
The servant (the mother of the wife) became ill and the husband got a friend to help the child since her mom hated her. The wife then violently throws her own Black mother (the nanny) down the stairs when she thinks that her husband wants to keep his lover in their home. She tells the truth about her parents on her deathbed. The wife accepts her heritage following this shocking revelation and mourns her mother’s passing. In addition, she decides to begin loving her daughter. All of this is what racism was like even in parts of Mexico due to the racism of Spain and their slave system that held Mexico under control for centuries. This was interesting research for me as my father came from a Mexican mulatto heritage. My DNA research took me back to the 1700s where my Black ancestry in Mexico began. Of course, one can trace Blacks in Mexico back to Africa and Spain (the Moors) as a result of the Canary Islander, Spanish, and Portuguese slave trade.
