Introduction

Summary

The introduction to Finding Afro-Mexico explores how to combine the histories of modern Mexico and the African Diaspora. It contends that scholars need to consider the cultural and spatial constructions of race in order to understand Mexican conceptions of blackness as Mexican intellectuals, cultural producers, and policy makers did. Celebrating the Mexican state’s announcement that 1.4 million citizens self-identified as African-descended in 2015, scholars and activists in Mexico and the United States have examined the history of Mexico’s African-descended peoples through the trope of racial disappearance, a tenet of nineteenth-century liberalism that has not been deconstructed into its social, demographic, cultural, and spatial dimensions. The introduction outlines the political, social, cultural, and methodological stakes of exploring blackness in Mexico exclusively through the social and demographic visibility yearned for before 2015 and heralded after. In particular, it argues that a focus on whether black bodies were -- and are -- socially and demographically present silences Mexican racial formations that highlight blackness culturally as symbols of racial egalitarianism, postrevolutionary social justice, and national modernity.