Conclusion

Summary

The conclusion traces the evolution of blackness in Mexico—its spatial orientations, histories, and relationships to culture, society, and the black body—from 1968 to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography’s 2015 intercensal survey, the first state-sponsored recognition of the nation’s visible African-descended population for the first time since independence. It examines the competing diasporic authenticities that have developed in the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca on the one hand and in the state of Veracruz on the other since the 1980s. In broad terms, the conclusion uses the transnational histories detailed throughout Finding Afro-Mexico to examine recent debates about the legacies of the long 1960s, ‘post-racial’ societies, Afro-diasporic methodologies, and the politics of racial comparison in Western Hemisphere.