Information, Medium & Society: Twenty-second International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

In 1946 a seminal ethnohistoric study about Afro descendants was published in Mexico and aside from few scholars, policy makers, and educators who lauded the work, the groundbreaking research was ignored. Mexico had built by then a powerful sense of being a mestizo—mixed race—nation founded on the encounter of the Spanish conquerors and the native population. For three centuries Mexicans lived under a caste system, abolished upon independence in 1821. The new country began to shape its ideology of nationhood based solely on the notion that those two groups conformed the roots of its existence. It completely erased the contributions of thousands of the Afromexicans. It took two hundred years after independence to formally begin to recognize that Mexico is a mestizo country based on three broad groups: Indigenous, African, and Spanish. This paper examines Afromexican development and the current efforts to resurrect the “third root” of the nation’s mestizaje.