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social media has led to digital spaces where black mexican nationals can assert themselves and build with other black folk in the diaspora, primarily inside the country and in latin america and the caribbean. because much of the discourse is archived on social media,
there's a rise of United Statian academics and artists inserting themselves in black mexican discourse but, unfortunately, utilizing terms that only make sense within the racial conditions in the connected 48-states informed by U.S. law. and not at all by conditions in mx.
i often re-read barbara christian's "the race for theory," and when it comes to scholarship on black mexican communities, there's a violent race in the U.S. to theorize about black mexican nationals without engaging black mexican academics and artists.
often, black mexican activists are cited and when their words are translated, the translations are sloppy because those translations rely on united statian epistemological frameworks & understandings.
blackness is not a monolith and to insist that black mexicans move & experience the world in the same way as black folk do in the U.S. is to be a U.S. essentialist. blackness is so messy in MX particularly when you look at black geographies that speak Spanish + an Indigenous lang
and areas where black Mexicans have moved to in order to be safer from the anti-black violence they were facing in their previous municipality, or in MX city where 1st, 2nd, and 3rd gen Black MX from the southern part of the country have grown to call home yet still displaced.
or in migrant spaces, where blackness comes from a non-Mexican parent from another country in the Americas, the Caribbean, or the continent of Africa. i am getting so tired of witnessing lazy research on Afro-Mexico being led by U.S.-based academics.
the fight for racial recognition in the census was messy AF in the country and that messiness is important because the messiness reflects the multi-sensorial and multidimensional experience of black mexicans who despite many differences organized around recognition.
i often wonder why U.S. academics who research on afro mx never collaborate with academics in mx, many who theorize outside the university system, especially black scholars who start at unam & then see themselves forced to leave b/c of unam's intolerance for non-white scholars.
there's so much i want to say and also so much i'm willing to tweet into the cyber sphere b/c at the end of the day, i'm a black migrant from oaxaca currently living and producing scholarship in the u.s., but i do want to send out this thread to make others reflect.
