New Books In Anthropology

Through historical and ethnographic research, Blackness in Mexico: Afro-Mexican Recognition and the Production of Citizenship in the Costa Chica (UP of Florida, 2023) delves into the ongoing movement toward recognizing Black Mexicans as a cultural group within a nation that has long viewed the non-Black mestizo as the archetypal citizen. Anthony Jerry focuses on this process in Mexico's Costa Chica region in order to explore the relational aspects of citizenship and the place of Black people in how modern citizenship is imagined. Jerry's study of the Costa Chica shows the political stakes of the national project for Black recognition; the shared but competing interests of the Mexican government, activists, and townspeople; and the ways that the state and NGOs are working to make "Afro-Mexican" an official cultural category. He argues that that the demand for recognition by Black communities calls attention to how the mestizo has become an intuitive point of reference for identifying who qualifies as "other."