Unpacking Blackness in Mexico’s Costa Chica

When Marina Guerrero Salinas, 62, left her hometown and went to the city, people would constantly ask her where she was from. “I’d say, ‘I’m Mexican’, and they’d say, ‘But here in Mexico there aren’t black people,'” she says. “I would tell them, ‘Look how you don’t know everything about your own country. Because I’m from a place where there’s lots of black people.'”

It’s a question Afro-Mexicans are used to getting as they navigate being both black and Mexican in a country that doesn’t believe that such a thing is possible. Never mind that Africans and their descendents have been present in Mexico for over 500 years and have been a major force in the nation’s history. Still, Mexico has forgotten them. (Click here for more)