Chapter 4 explores how transnational, antifascist constructions of blackness in Mexico allowed anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and artist-cum-ethnographer Miguel Covarrubias to trace Mexican cultural expressions back to Africa. It shows how Mexican and Afro-diasporic politics converged during the Second World War, when Mexico transformed into an ideal site for the inter-American study of indigenous and African-descended peoples and cultures. With Mexico City as the headquarters for the International Institute of Afro-American Studies, an impressive cohort of scholars concerned with blackness in the Americas -- including W. E. B. Du Bois, Melville and Frances Herskovits, and Fernando Ortiz -- came into direct contact with Mexican social science. As other nations took inspiration from Mexico’s cultural brand of race, these Aguirre Beltrán and Covarrubias adopted the ethnographic theories and methods prevalent elsewhere used to recognize the presence of African cultural retentions, or Africanisms, in the Western Hemisphere. For the first time, ethnographic data and archival research about African slaves and their descendants from the United States, Cuba, and Brazil were relevant to Mexican history and ethnography.

Chapter 7 explains how African Americans and Mexicans, especially Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and Miguel Covarrubias, looking to make blackness socially visible, articulated two disparate definitions of what and who was authentically African-descended. With the nation’s African heritage outlined by 1946, ethnographers and cultural producers began to identify African-descended communities in the contemporary ethnographic landscape, thereby integrating the descendants of African slaves into the political debates about mestizaje, socioeconomic modernization, and social justice nationally and regionally. To render blackness socially visible, a Mexicanized variation of the black body, usually the racially and culturally mixed mulatto, emerged in the national imaginary and in specific locales in Veracruz and along the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Conversely, among Black Nationalists in the United States, Mexico blossomed into an archeological, historical, and ethnographic site for the study of Afro-diasporic peoples and cultures. Concerned with the silencing of black cultural ingenuity and historical agency globally, they articulated a vision of racial identity oriented more toward a corporeal definition of the black body than the cultural constructions of social visibility expressed by Mexican social scientists and policy makers.