1 - Black Disappearance

Summary

Chapter 1 describes the political, historical, and archeological currents that rendered blackness socially and demographically invisible from the wars of independence (1810-1821) to the 1920s, when the nation began to reunite after the violence of the Revolution of 1910. It traces the evolution of the trope of black disappearance, a hallmark of postcolonial Mexican thought that began when Father Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and Vicente Guerrero, all heroes from the struggle for independence, fought for the abolition of race and caste. These ideas acquired a comparative aspect when nineteenth-century liberals juxtaposed Mexican abolitionism and mestizaje with the expansion of slavery, then segregation in the United States. This chapter argues that liberal racial formations that decreed blackness had -- or would soon -- disappear from society left intellectuals, like sociologist Andrés Molina Enríquez, anthropologist Manuel Gamio, and philosopher José Vasconcelos, without a coherent ideology on which to construct blackness as Mexican or as part of Mexican history in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their constructions of blackness were the unintended by-products of the nineteenth-century conceptions of race and world history that postrevolutionary social scientists and selectively embraced and rejected.