Chasing Blackness explores how Mexico’s current multicultural political arena and persistent racial economy continues to dictate the forms by which blackness can take shape in the present moment. Chasing Blackness argues that race and culture have a historic value that continue to define their worth within the present neo-liberal multicultural state and therefore can be exploited in predictable ways towards a limited strategy of social and political incorporation. In this way, the logic of difference, based on an inheritance and colonial logic of race and ethnicity, dictates particular potentials and perspectives on the value of race and ethnicity as a cultural, social, and political commodity. This inheritance acts as the foundation of state sanctioned strategies for the official recognition of difference within the Mexican nation state. 

Anthony Russell Jerry’s current ethnographic work focuses on issues of blackness, ethnicity, and indigeneity and the modern intersections between blackness and citizenship in Mexico and the US/Mexico border region, as well as the broader US Southwest. Discussant Yousuf al-Bulushi is a political geographer trained in urban studies, global political economy, African and African diaspora studies, social movements in Africa and the Americas, and political theory. 

Jerry’s in-progress manuscript is available online at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zkv4AgOhLqfFx5tOnbk7SicBLY6XPwAO-Lq3Rb-LJRQ/edit?usp=sharing.