The unexpected face of Mexico

Race is not an issue for Tony Gleaton, the photographer told students at Loyola Marymount University recently. Yet an irresistible musing on the meaning of race has been his destiny. Born with blue eyes and a fair complexion, Gleaton, 59, has spent his life explaining to people that both of his parents were black and that he is "not biracial," while wondering why anyone should care. It's not surprising, perhaps, that Gleaton has made his reputation with a series of portraits of black Mexicans, descendants of slaves brought to Mexico by the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago, "before the first black slaves came to Colonial Williamsburg," he pointed out.

He began taking the photographs in the 1980s, and exhibitions, sponsored in part by the Smithsonian, have carried them across Southern California, the nation and the world for the last 15 years and now back to Los Angeles, where "Africa's Legacy in Mexico" is on exhibit at LMU's Laband Art Gallery through Nov. 18.

The relevance of Gleaton's fine-art photographs of these people from villages on the Pacific Coast has not diminished as immigration and multiculturalism continue to challenge traditional views of what it means to be an American. The exhibition, in fact, is part of a larger colloquium on migration and immigration taking place this fall at the university.

Before his informal lecture in the gallery, Gleaton spoke about his work in an interview and wanted to make clear that he does not take credit for discovering that descendants of African slaves were living in Mexico. "What I did was provide the first visual depiction of something scholars had written about," he said.

A native of Detroit who moved with his parents to Los Angeles when he was 19 and attended UCLA and the Art Center College of Design, Gleaton learned his trade working in fashion photography in New York City but at the age of 35 made a course correction. In the world of fashion photography, he said, he came to feel that he was "propping up an aesthetic that was not in my best interests, photographing 15-year-old ingénues."

He left New York and set out to apply his skills to more thematic subject matter, hitchhiking through the West while photographing cowboys, Native American ranch hands and black rodeo riders, "reconstructing an American myth," part of the title of that collection.