| dc.description.abstract | During the past three decades or so both national and international scholars have placed a great deal of attention on the history and lived experiences of peoples of African descent in Mexico. Researchers initially showed themselves intrigued about the absence of black or African-derived identities in modern Mexico, despite the well-documented presence of these population groups since colonial times. Following scholars, organizations, and individuals’ efforts to spark an Afro-Mexican identity, this context has gradually changed. Despite these efforts, however, it is still common to hear in interactions with non-specialists statements such as “there are no blacks in Mexico” or even “there were no blacks in Mexico.” Under this light it is worth asking: how did we get to this situation? How did people who during the colonial period used social classifications such as negro, mulato, morisco, or lobo stopped using such designations? How did African peoples and their descendants, who had their own forms of identification, become negros, mulatos, moriscos and lobos in the first place? Did they experience individual or collective identities structured around these classifications? How and why did people, who used these ascriptions for centuries, abandon them and substitute them for a homogenous label of “citizens” at the end of the colonial period? And what was the relationship between this process and the elision of Afro-Mexicans from the historical imaginary of the nation over time?
Using the case of Afro-Mexicans from Guadalajara between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Becoming Citizens offers an extended answer to these questions. This study places Afro-descendants at the center of the processes of construction, transformation, and disappearance of the categories of difference that served to assign them a place in the social hierarchy. It demonstrates that Afro-Mexicans strategically appropriated Spanish terminology about human difference, used it in creative ways to carve a social space for themselves, and ultimately dismissed it before independence in the midst of emerging political opportunities. | |
