Theodore W. Cohen - Böcker

As the first book-length examination of abolition and its legacies in Mexico, this collection reveals innovative social, cultural, political, and intellectual approaches to Afro-Mexican history. It complicates the long-standing belief that Afro-Mexicans were erased from the nation. The volume instead shows how they created their own archival legibility by continuing and modifying colonial-era forms of resistance, among other survival strategies. The chapters document the lives and choices of Afro-descended peoples, both enslaved and free, over the course of two centuries, culminating during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Contributors examine how Afro-Mexicans who lived under Spanish rule took advantage of colonial structures to self-advocate and form communities. Beginning with the war for independence and continuing after the abolition of slavery and caste in the 1820s, Afro-descended citizens responded to and, at times, resisted the claims of racial disappearance to shape both local and national politics.

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.