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Anthony Russell Jerry, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recogni5on and the Produc5on of 
Ci5zenship in the Costa Chica. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2023.   

Since the Revolu@on, Mexican elites have privileged a racial ideology that promotes mes5zaje--
the mixture of indigenous and European peoples.  Yet in more recent years, both interna@onal 
and domes@c groups have called for new, more inclusive approaches to iden@ty poli@cs.  The 
guardians of the Cosmic Race were summoned.   

Marginalized people of African descent have increasingly figured into the Mexico na@onal 
discourse on “race.”  Yet, as anthropologist Anthony Russell Jerry argues, government efforts to 
locate and fully recognize “blacks” have been rela@vely half-hearted and superficial: mostly 
playing to al corriente interna@onal iden@ty poli@cal trends. “Blackness,” Jerry writes, “is a 
[largely] unrecognized racial and cultural form,” in Mexico, [one that] “interrupts the neatly 
organized ethnic geography” of na@onal society (27).   

The 2011 United Na@on’s Interna@onal Year for Peoples of African Descent and ensuing General 
Assembly’s resolu@on 68/237 called for a decade long honoring of African peoples to be 
observed from 2015 to 2024 issued a challenge to governments and NGOs across the world. To 
this, many wondered closer to home, how would Mexico respond?     

Conduc@ng field research in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca and Guerrero, Jerry tells how a 
federal government ini@a@ve called the Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos 
Indigenas (CDI) set out, in conjunc@on with local outlets of Secretaría de Asuntos Indigenas 
(SAI), to engage Afro-Mexicans.   

The state led program manifested a series of consultas that temporarily brought together 
government officials, regional community ac@vists, scholars, and various people of color.  
Mee@ngs took place in Costa Chica town centers where ac@vity saw government types seeking 
to uncover “cultural elements that were imagined to be unique to Black Mexican communi@es” 
(2).  According to Jerry, the official aim of these municipal convoca@ons was to “inform the 
African-descendent communi@es of the Costa Chica about the process of [state] recogni@on and 
to gather informa@on on the cultural repertoire of Black Mexicans within the region” (1).  One 
wonders what was in it for the na@onal commission.   



Consulta experience differed widely. Visitors pursued an agenda that recast people of African 
descent as “Afro-Mexicans”—now a recognized status category in the larger na@onal 
ethnoscape. Black community ac@vists meanwhile used the occasion to call out racist altudes, 
prac@ces and policies.  At the same @me, they raised concerns about possible unintended 
consequences of state-led “racial” programming. 

In the end, black townspeople largely eschewed much of the outsider’s talk—perhaps 
recognizing that bureaucrats were mostly interested in excava@ng only symbolic and superficial 
informa@on to fulfill predetermined expecta@ons about a “black Mexican experience.”  Public 
rela@ons rather than social reform seemed to be the order of the day.   

“The official conversa@ons,” Jerry writes, “rarely involved deep discussions about slavery in 
Mexico, or the manner in which African descendants arrived in the Costa Chica or racial 
discrimina@on or the historic roles that Black people and Blackness had played in the 
produc@on of the Mexican na@on” (2).    

From the start the overall agenda was clear: newfound federal efforts at documen@ng and 
acknowledging Mexican people of African descent was an elite affair. The consultas, first and 
foremost, served the interests of the state. Whatever patronizing no@ce of a “black presence” 
was made, results tended to leave subjects dismissively “trapped” within their own regional 
context while “newly discovered” ideas about blackness were “put to work” and u@lized 
elsewhere.  The author’s frequent theore@cal flights occasionally serve to distance the reader 
from the ethnography at hand.  

Refreshingly, Jerry’s last chapter returns to the real people of the Costa Chica. Here, individual 
commentary by residents on issues pertaining to ideas of race, percep@ons of color, status and 
power solidly ground Jerry’s work. Perhaps not surprisingly, he suggests by way of conclusion 
that “[t]he project of Black recogni@on seems to make it easier for Mes@zos to reconcile the 
existence of Blackness in the na@on, rather than making it easier to be Black in Mexico” (158).   
Nevertheless, Jerry finds hope in the tes@monies he records. He sees these as provid[ing] 
evidence of “narra@ves of the process of construc@ng a Black iden@ty that is underway and 
con@nuing to develop in the Costa Chica.”  In @me, we may find that these individuals have 
served as an important founda@on for a “poli@cal project of Blackness” in Mexico (179). One 
need not—and should not--wait for the government to act for—as Jerry shows--there is real 
power in the black Costa Chica communi@es.    

 

 

 



Andrew Grant Wood 

Rutland Professor of History 

University of Tulsa 

 

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2025 Andrew Grant Wood © 


