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Blackness in Mexico

June 9, 2024 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT

The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the efforts underway in Mexico to recognize African-descendant Mexicans as a distinct cultural group. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.

About the Book

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico (University Press of Florida, 2023), 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 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. PURCHASE BOOKS HERE.

About the Author

Anthony Russell Jerry is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests are Blackness, citizenship, subject-making, and Black entrepreneurship in the “Americas.” Professor Jerry is the founder and director of the Cultural Media Archive and The Empathy Archive–online platforms designed to promote racial literacy and social and emotional learning through empathy and awareness. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an MA in applied anthropology from San Diego State University, and an MBA from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at University of California, Riverside.

Register Here for Zoom Lecture

Details

Date:
June 9, 2024
Time:
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
Event Category:

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