It could be called a revelatory moment, learning about the presence, history, and culture of Black people in Mexico. For Jorge Gonzalez, a college course on the ethno-history of Oaxaca first gave him answers to questions that had been tugging at him for a long time.
“There was a day where we talked about the African presence in Mexico, and I had never heard of any of that. It blew my mind and a lot of things started connecting for me…(It) explained why one of my aunts has very kinky hair, and there are Black features in some of us,” he says. “I started realizing that the Black presence has been around since colonization, since Cortez arrived to Mexico, and has played a fundamental role in shaping the culture, from the very depths of what it means to be Mexican and everything that has to do with Mexican pride.”
Gonzalez has been studying the African diasporic presence in Mexico since the early 2000s, tracing his own family’s roots in Sahuayo, Michoacan, Mexico in the 18th century when it was majority Black, to the recent government recognition of Afro-Mexicans on the country’s 2020 census (for the first time in at least 200 years, according to Minority Rights Group). On Feb. 26, he’ll discuss “Afro-Mexicanos: Mexico Officially Recognizes its Black Citizens” at 6:30 p.m. at the Shiley Special Events Suite at the Central Library in downtown San Diego (registration is free). Gonzalez, who is the director of the Afro-Mexican department at the WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park, is also the author of “The (Re)construction of Blackness in Costa Chica, Oaxaca: NGOs and the Making of an Afro-Mexican Ethnic Group”; his work has been published in “Converging Identities: Blackness in the Modern African Diaspora”; and he shares African diasporic global music when he’s spinning tracks as DJ Mafondo . He took some time to talk about his upcoming lecture, why its taken so long for Afro-Mexicans to be recognized and acknowledged in their own country, and how this recognition is a step toward dismantling anti-Black racism in Mexico. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )