Against Mestizaje: Articulations Towards a Black/Indigenous Sense of Place in Mexico

Abstract In this paper, I sit with the different modes of relation that Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous/Afro‐Indigenous women have to community, to each other, and to land and sea. In particular, I demonstrate the ways in which Black, Indigenous, and Black/Indigenous women contend, refuse, and negotiate racialised identifiers on their own terms, extending beyond Mexico's rubrics of inclusion and exclusion. I ask: How does one insist on existence, and do so on your and your community's own terms? What does it mean to be inseparable from the land and water that your community inhabits? I weave together Black and Indigenous feminist thought, with an analysis of language use, to unsettle hegemonic mestizo understandings of place, racial and state formation in the land known as Mexico and beyond.