Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0009-4089-2457

Graduation Year

2024

Date of Submission

4-2024

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

International Relations

Reader 1

Jessica Zarkin

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2024 José A. Chiquito

Abstract

In 2019, the Mexican National Congress amended Article 2 of the national constitution to recognize Afro-descendants as part of Mexico’s pluricultural constitution and grant them collective rights. With this, Mexico joined a group of five other Latin American countries to explicitly recognize Afro-descendants in the text of their constitution. Current Latin American scholarship analyzes Afro-descendant inclusion resulting from the creation of new multicultural constitutions. This literature, however, fails to take into consideration those cases where Afro-descendant inclusion happened via reforms to an existing constitution. This paper contributes to existing literature on constitutional multiculturalism by analyzing why the Mexican government recognized Afro-descendants. In explaining the 2019 amendment, this thesis addresses the following three questions: Why did Mexico fail to recognize Afro-descendants during its process of modern state formation (early to mid-19th)? Why did Mexico fail to recognize Afro-descendants during democratization (the 1990s and early 2000s)? What explains Afro-descendant recognition by the Mexican state in 2019? To answer these questions, my thesis provides an in-case analysis of the degree of Afro-Mexican political and legal inclusion through time. In the first chapter, I demonstrate how anti-Black racism led to the exclusion of Afro-descendants from national narratives of a mestizo identity. In chapter 2, I argue that visible and intense Indigenous mobilization, coupled with limited Afro-Mexican mobilization contributed to the disregard of Afro-descendants’ rights from the democratic reforms of the early 2000s. Finally, I argue that the rise of MORENA played a significant role in shifting political incentives in favor of Afro-descendants, facilitating the adoption of the 2019 constitutional amendment. Overall, this thesis highlights the centrality of anti-Black racism in shaping the government’s approach to Afro-descendant rights before and after the 2019 constitutional inclusion.

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