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Whoever said, "It ain't where you're from," sure didn't know Marco Villalobos. Together with his co-creator Ayana Jackson, Villalobos created El Negro Mas Chulo: African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth, an in-depth field study of the African influence in Mexico. Although the traveling exhibit, which incorporates film, photography and poetry, focuses primarily on Mexico, it creates a dialogue for all Latinos to participate. We'll just let Villalobos tell it. Listen up!

"I was born in northern California and my parents are Mexican. My identification with being Mexican was basically not being White. Although it wasn't based on skin color, because I'm pretty light skinned, it was based more on culture. Culture wasn't skin-based, it was always element based, with things like music and dance. There were all these natural connections from African American culture to Mexican culture which led me to look at the people in my family and think, ‘Yo, my Tia Julia's got hair like Diana Ross, what's up? How come she can have a natural afro and my mom has straight hair and has to perm her hair to have an afro?' It was those little things that just turned my gaze inward when I was younger. That identification led me to this project and to question what connections Black culture has with Mexican culture.

People have been doing this work for years but we're bringing our perspective on this subject area, and continuing this tradition that starts way back. This project, African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth, started in January of 2002, when I met the photographer, Ayana. Our first conversation was about the diaspora in Latin America and we were already thinking about the connections between black and Latino both in and outside of the States. In terms of Mexico specifically we went down and started to do the footwork in 2003. In Mexico, the [ratio] of Africans to Europeans was 10 to one. I'm not making this up, these are numbers from censuses. What happened to all those Black people? They didn't just disappear or die off, they remained in Mexico. It's hard for me to think that there's any Mexican without some Black in them because the numbers were just that high.

I haven't come across any strong resistance to [African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth]. When we show our work to Mexicans in particular, older people are surprised. Sometimes when we were taking their picture and interviewing them they were like, ‘[Are] people are really interested in this?' The younger people are becoming more politically active so they actually encourage the work and to some degree they question when they'll be able to do similar work for themselves.

Since we started this, it's always been about connecting with people and trying to decrease tension between black and brown [people], which is just complete bulls--t. There wouldn't be any democracy without black and brown cooperation 500 years ago. I mean there wouldn't be hip-hop without black and brown cooperation. It's not about black and brown specifically, there's always friction between groups of human beings trying to compete for resources. I would love it if this project could help squash some of that stuff but in the end it's really about individual people's ability to confront themselves and their own racism and to deal with it."