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.

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.