Professor Karma F. Frierson will give a Boas lecture on: "Reckoning with the Third Root: Blackness Before Recognition in Vera Cruz, Mexico". A light reception will follow in 465 Schermerhorn Extension.
Decades prior to the recent constitutional and census recognition of Afro-Mexicans, the Mexican government created a multiculturalist program called “Our Third Root” to recognize Mexico’s Black history and culture. In the Gulf Coast port city of Veracruz, this cultural discourse flourished, sensitizing locals to the idea—and expectations—that they are representatives of Mexico’s Blackness without transforming them into Black Mexicans.
In this talk, we explore how everyday people reconciled received information about their Black heritage with their personal conceptions, narratives, and practices. In examining how new commitments to recognizing Blackness brushed against longstanding assumptions about Mexican identity, we see the development of a Mexican Blackness that compels us to reckon with Blackness, groupness, and identification anew.
Karma F. Frierson is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Her forthcoming book, Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz, is an ethnographic examination of how everyday people have transformed Blackness into a local trait rather than a racial identity as they internalize and embody the official discourse that the Gulf Coast city of Veracruz is both a cradle of Mexican Blackness and a part of the broader Afro-Andalusian Caribbean.
