Blackness in Mexico

Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica

Anthony Russell Jerry

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780813080123, 9780813069661
• eBook ISBN: 9780813072814
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: Social Sciences

An up-close view of the movement to make “Afro-Mexican” an official cultural category

 

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black Mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico’s Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined.

 

Jerry’s study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make “Afro-Mexican” an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the Mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as “other.” Jerry also demonstrates that while official recognition can potentially empower African descendants, it can simultaneously reproduce the same logics of difference that have brought about their social and political exclusion.

 

One of few books to center Blackness within a discussion of Mexico or to incorporate a focus on Mexico into Black studies, this book ultimately argues that the official project for recognition is itself a methodology of mestizaje, an opportunity for the government to continue to use Blackness to define the national subject and to further the Mexican national project.

 

 

A volume in the series New World Diasporas, edited by Kevin A. Yelvington

 

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Citizenship and Black Recognition in Mexico
• 1. Chasing Blackness: Racial Geography and a Methodology for Locating Blackness in Mexico
• 2. Dark Matter, Ideology, and Blackness in the Conceptualization of Mestizaje
• 3. Recognizing Culture and Making Difference Official
• 4. Citizenship, Black Value, and the Production of the Black Subject in Mexico
• 5. A Black Subject Position and Narrative Representations of Blackness in the Costa Chica
• Conclusion: Black Visibility and the Limits of Black Recognition in Mexico
• Notes
• References
• Index
• New World Diasporas