I introduce readers to Raúl Grigera, to master narratives of race (Whiteness and Blackness) in Argentina, and to the hundreds of defamatory stories by which Raúl came to be known and remembered. I use this corpus to sketch the composite story of his life that the book goes on to debunk and rewrite: his supposedly unknowable or inexplicable origins, his early orphandom and wayward youth, his spurious fame as a buffoon of the city’s elite, his oft-anticipated decline and death. Engaging with literature in psychology, critical race studies, literary theory, and other fields to explore narrative’s singularly persuasive power, the introduction develops the concept of “racial stories” and makes the case for the urgency of crafting new, critical counter-stories. It goes on to explore the problem of Black celebrity in a White nation where that idea was almost a contradiction in terms. Finally, it considers my own role as one more narrator of Raúl’s tale – yet another racial storyteller – and provides an overview of the book’s arguments and structure.

The introduction to Finding Afro-Mexico explores how to combine the histories of modern Mexico and the African Diaspora. It contends that scholars need to consider the cultural and spatial constructions of race in order to understand Mexican conceptions of blackness as Mexican intellectuals, cultural producers, and policy makers did. Celebrating the Mexican state’s announcement that 1.4 million citizens self-identified as African-descended in 2015, scholars and activists in Mexico and the United States have examined the history of Mexico’s African-descended peoples through the trope of racial disappearance, a tenet of nineteenth-century liberalism that has not been deconstructed into its social, demographic, cultural, and spatial dimensions. The introduction outlines the political, social, cultural, and methodological stakes of exploring blackness in Mexico exclusively through the social and demographic visibility yearned for before 2015 and heralded after. In particular, it argues that a focus on whether black bodies were -- and are -- socially and demographically present silences Mexican racial formations that highlight blackness culturally as symbols of racial egalitarianism, postrevolutionary social justice, and national modernity.