My dissertation project, “Possessing Blackness: The Presence and Potential of the ‘African Root’ in Veracruz, Mexico,” is an ethnography of the Gulf Coast port city of Veracruz, Mexico, that traces how blackness functions as a genealogy, an expectation, and a cultural resource for the regional identity known as jarocho. Contrary to the argument that jarochos are in denial about their African roots, I instead unpack the ways those actively involved in what I call “jarocho publics” rationalize, rely on, and relate to the Afro-Caribbean aspects of their local culture. I ultimately argue that by placing blackness at the root of the more popular jarocho identity marker, people in Veracruz necessarily inflect ideas of self through a localized blackness.

My second project will attend to how the aforementioned jarocho publics reconcile their localized blackness with the newly available political identity of the “Afro-Mexican.” I return to the same site in order to track changing processes of identification across time. It asks: What possibilities of identification are newly made available and unavailable in the age of the Afro-Mexican?

Previous research projects have focused on heritage tourism in the American South and traveling exhibitions across urban, ethnic museums.  What unites my research program is an interest in how an expectation is first created and then managed.

 

Check out: Black and Bronze in Veracruz