Finding Afro-Mexico
Race and Nation after the Revolution

A global cultural and intellectual history of African-descended Mexicans who gained social and demographic visibility after the Revolution of 1910.

Theodore W. Cohen (Author)

9781108730310, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 May 2021

349 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

'Cohen's is not a microhistory, not an effort to detail the actual lived experiences of these communities, but an effort to detail the intellectual project of documenting Blackness in Mexico, and in that it succeeds.' Alexander Dawson, H-Net Reviews

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

List of Figures and Maps
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Part I. Making Blackness Mexican, 1810-1940s
Introduction
1. Black Disappearance
2. Marxism and Colonial Blackness
3. Making Blackness Transational
Part II. Finding Afro-Mexico, 1940s-2015
4. Looking Back to Africa
5. Africanizing “La bamba”
6. Caribbean Blackness
7. The Black Body in Mexico
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Subject Areas: Social discrimination & inequality [JFFJ], Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], History of the Americas [HBJK], African history [HBJH]