This session presents two new digital platforms – Trayectorias Afro and the AfroChicanx Digital Humanities Project – that have been designed with the intent of uncovering the past, present, and future of Afro-Mexican history, movement, memory, and identity. As public-facing initiatives, both projects speak to the demand to engage and acknowledge the African diaspora in ever-more specific and personal registers across space and time. The presenters of this session, representing their respective research collectives, will explain their motivations for participating in these digital projects. During the second half of the session, the public will be invited to interact and engage with these public-facing tools for research and teaching.

Trayectorias Afro: La circulación de afrodescendientes esclavizados y libres en la Nueva España, a digital project launched by scholars from the University of California system and INAH (Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History) provides a new tool through which to study the complexity of Black life in colonial Mexico. Unfortunately, much cutting-edge research on Afro-Mexican people remains siloed in the footnotes of specialized journals, out-of-print publications, and doctoral dissertations. In particular, the primary sources and abstracts that enable studies of afrodescendiente history are mostly inaccessible to interested students, professors, and the general public. This is especially true of the painstaking research conducted in notarial archives, where rich and texture documentation is available yet difficult to access. Overall, the absence of shared source materials has hindered the elaboration of studies on individual people of African descent, their mobility, families, and legal concerns throughout the expansive viceroyalty of New Spain. In response to this void, thirteen scholars from various U.S., Mexican, and European universities have contributed their research to construct Trayectorias Afro, an open, text-searchable database of free and enslaved Black Mexicans. Researchers interested in studying afrodescendiente life in Guadalajara, Antequera (Oaxaca City), Puebla, Colima, Mexico City, Aguascalientes, Veracruz, Tlaxcala, and Zacatecas will be especially drawn to the abstracts described in the database.

Moving decisively north and into the twentieth and twenty-first century, the creators of the AfroChicanx Digital Humanities Project: Memories, Narratives, and Oppositional Consciousness of Black Diasporas explore the identities, experiences, and histories of people of African descent within Chicana/o/x and Mexican communities in diaspora. The transdisciplinary project platform speaks broadly to processes of migration, adaptation, and reinvention, but is especially attentive to those experiences in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tucson, Arizona, and Santa Bárbara, California. This oral history and multimedia database examines how people who self-identify as AfroMexican, Blaxican, AfroChicana/o/x, Black and Mexican understand, navigate, and shape Blackness across the US/Mexico Borderlands. In the context of the Mexican government’s 2019 historical recognition of Black communities and their inclusion in the 2020 federal census, the AfroChicanx Digital Humanities Project delves deeply into what this affirmation means for those exposed, educated, but increasingly resistant to the antiquated discourse of mestizaje in Mexico and beyond.