This panel offers AHA attendees an introduction to Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2025), a coedited volume which examines the intertwined and contingent histories of enslavement and freedom, grassroots community building, and Mexican nation-state formation. These different points of entry into the history of Afro-descended peoples, cultures, and identities in the long nineteenth century require varied archival sources including viceregal documents filled with references to caste identities, post-emancipation sources that attempt to work within a colorblind society; and twentieth-century cultural expressions that respond to these multifaceted histories of Afro-descended identity formation. The panelists reconsider how to explore and use sources relevant to the lives and worldview of Afro-descended Mexicans, no matter how they were classified in archives and in other primary sources, written or otherwise. They mined archival repositories for clues about the lives of Afro-descended communities but also how to wrestle with the social constructions, racial representations, and historical silences about who was—or might have been—Afro-descended. Panelists may approach this history from the intellectual and cultural histories of race, colony, and nation produced by the lettered elite before, during, or after the abolition of caste and slavery. Or they take a social approach based on the lived experiences of Afro-descended individuals and communities, their political affiliations, and their economic situations. Or they move between the two. This panel addresses these issues and more... especially the complexities our panelists encountered in telling this history. The panelists will discuss topics including how Mexican constitutionalists discussed slavery at the precise moment that Anglo slave owners settled in Texas and how, ultimately, Guerrero’s 1829 abolition of slavery contributed to Texas’ independence movement. Panelists will also discuss print culture, chiefly newspapers, to show how the postcolonial condemnation of Spanish rule and the celebration of the abolition of slavery simultaneously recognized the presence of Afro-descended peoples and set the stage for them to be rendered socially invisible by the 1850s. The panel includes work on the Costa Chica of Oaxaca and Guerrero to explore how Afro-descended communities navigated the rise of liberal politics and global capitalism, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a focus on the racialization of space. For example, Mexico’s integration into the capitalist world system gave Afro-descended communities with historical ties to cotton production a means to ally with liberal elites. As a result, they chose a more conservative approach to the revolutionary 1910s than the Indigenous communities who were not as integrated into these cotton networks. Lastly, our panel examines oilseed production in and around Azoyú, Guerrero, as an archival repository to understand Afro-descended ecologies and Mexican anti-Blackness.