Black Mexicans

As my wife is a historian of Mexico and thus I’ve spent a good bit of time in the southern part of the nation, I’ve become fairly familiar with Afro-Mexicans, who have never been seen as a distinct group of people per se but then have faced a lot of discrimination–and casual racism against black people in Mexico is almost ubiquitous. So I am glad that the Mexican census for the first time is actually counting the number of Afro-Mexicans in the nation. Turns out it is 1.4 million people, or 1.2% of the population, largely residing in the southern states of Guerrero, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. Economically and socially, they are less discriminated against than indigenous Mexicans, although that is a very, very low bar.