Bitch Nigger, go Back to your Country! Experiences of Erasure in Black-Afromexican Women's Narratives

Abstract

Since the 1990s, a movement began advocating for the recognition of Black-Afromexican people and communities. This movement boosted the political participation of Black women, who went on to establish their own organizations to advocate for their own recognition and specific demands. In this context, and using the "racist-patriarchal erasure" as an analysis axis, from the perspective of the critical theory, we present results derived from our research into the bodily experiences of four Black-Afromexican women activists from the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca as they combat racism within a patriarchal society. The research, using a qualitative approach, unfolded in four stages: 1. Field visit; 2. Construction of a "Public Memory" for each activist based on public documents; 3. Co-production of narratives from semi-structured interviews using photos as support; and 4. During narrative production, we scrutinized allusions to "racist-patriarchal erasure." We identified three dimensions of this erasure: Structural, Relational, and Corporal-Subjective. In the Structural dimension, we grouped narratives related to women's experience of the historical denial of the existence of Black people in Mexico. In the Relational dimension, we identified allusions to the foreignization, exclusion and self-erasure experienced in different spaces of interaction. And, in the Corporal-Subjective dimension, we analyzed the subjective impact of experiences of exclusion and stigma on Black-Afromexican women, as well as the objectification and fragmentation of their bodies associated with their hyper sexualization. The work explores the consequences of Black women's diverse experiences of resistance against patriarchal racist erasure, leading them to become activists fighting for their own recognition and acknowledging their self-determination as "proudly Black" women.