The erasure of Afro-Mexicans from Mexico has been key to the construction of a national identity that cast Mexico as a mestizo nation. Since the earliest days of colonization, both free and enslaved Africans inhabited New Spain and were employed in work tied to the global capitalist economy. Africans were concentrated in ports and cities, in western Oaxaca, in the eastern city of Veracruz, and on sugar estates. But when nineteenth-century state crafters “proclaimed that all Mexicans should be defined by their vice or virtue, not their racial heritage (9),” they erased African-descended people from the national narrative. Consequentially, Afro-Mexicans ceased to exist as a sociological category.
Cohen employs the traditional methods of intellectual and cultural history with a transnational conceptualization that ties African-descended people to Mexico. This lens allows him to connect a vast community of Black intellectuals and artists outside of Mexico to mestizo intellectuals. This detective tale...