Ashley Agbasoga

ASHLEY NGOZI AGBASOGA, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, was awarded a grant in May 2018 to aid research on “Citizenship and Belonging: Blackness, the State, and Geography in Afro-Mexico,’ supervised by Dr. Aida Benton. This dissertation, retitled ‘ We Dance with Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as M’xico and Beyond,’ illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and (nation-) statehood in M’xico. Merging ethnographic and archival research conducted in 2019-2020 in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz and Mexico City with theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Black Studies, and Native/Indigenous Studies, the grantee argues that Black-Indigenous placemaking practices create two critical ruptures: first, in the (re)produced bifurcation of blackness and indigeneity, and second, in the Mexican state’s racialization of its territory as mestizo. These ruptures generate space to think about alternatives for Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous communities throughout what is known as ‘The Americas.’