Chapter 3 turns to cultural expressions -- music, literature, art, and film -- to show the transnational manifestations of Mexico’s black radical tradition, especially as explored by caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, composer Carlos Chávez, and historian and novelist José Mancisidor. This complex geographic matrix, with cultural centers in Mexico City, Cuba, Harlem, and Spain, was more visible in the interdisciplinary threads of culture than in the dense footnotes of historicism. Music -- jazz, in particular -- came to symbolize the simultaneous recasting of postrevolutionary nationalism and blackness in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. This chapter traces these cultural conversations from Mexico’s first encounters with jazz in New York City through its incorporation into the Marxist cultural politics of 1930s Mexico and then abroad again, as Mexican cultural producers working with African American and Afro-Cubanist (afrocubanista) intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén fought against global fascism in Mexico, New York City, and Spain.

Chapter 2 explains how the constructions of blackness in Mexican history and society described in Chapter 1 coalesced in the 1930s, when Mexican politics radicalized and Marxist historical materialism established a basis for new social justice initiatives and a revised national narrative. With class conflict animating Mexican historiography and political and economic reforms, African slaves and their descendants entered a national pantheon that embraced blackness for the first time. Amid this historiographic consensus, slave resistance, epitomized by the maroon community founded by Gaspar Yanga, laid the foundation for Mexican anticolonialism and independence, the liberal claim to racial egalitarianism, and the Mexican Revolution. Focusing on the 1930s, this chapter argues that historians and historically oriented intellectuals -- chiefly Andrés Molina Enríquez, Rafael Ramos Pedrueza, Alfonso Teja Zabre, and José Mancisidor -- celebrated black bellicosity within a broader cross-class rejection of racial exploitation. With a materialist scaffolding to construct blackness as Mexican, they depicted historical figures, such as José María Morelos and Emiliano Zapata, as African-descended national heroes, symbols of the 1910 Revolution, and political theorists who set the stage for socialism in the not too distant future.