Description: Chocolate and Corn Flour explores the history and contemporary culture of African descended Mexicans in the agricultural village of San Nicolás on the southern Pacific Coast of Guerrero (the Costa Chica). This ethnography emphasizes that local history is crucial to understanding identity and explores how racial categories are complicated by globalization and the influence of outsiders.
Review Quotes: "In the 1940s, when Mexican anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán first brought Afromexicans into academic and public discussion, African presence in Mexico had been under erasure for so long that Mexican national identity had elided Africa altogether. Today, Mexico's 'Third Root' has gained national and international recognition. This process has gone hand in glove with a new politics of identity. Laura A. Lewis's ethnohistorical study of race probes the local politics of autochthony, nationality, and citizenship in the Pacific heartland of Afromexico."--Claudio Lomnitz, author of Death and the Idea of Mexico