Karma F. Frierson, "Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz" (U California Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Karma F. Frierson, Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz (University of California Press, 2025)
Date: December 23, 2025
Host: Regan Gillum
Guest: Dr. Karma Frierson

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Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Karma Frierson discussing her new book Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz. The book explores how blackness is understood, performed, and integrated into the identity of Veracruz, Mexico, not solely as a matter of individual identification but as a crucial element of local culture and history. The discussion navigates the complexities of blackness in a locale often characterized by both its cosmopolitan openness and historical amnesia towards its African roots.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal & Academic Origins of the Project

• How the Project Began:

  • Dr. Frierson traces her research back to her undergraduate experience, mentorship in African American Studies, and exposure to the book Silencing the Past, which shaped her view of history and academic writing.
  • Influence of the Mellon Mays Fellowship, which supports underrepresented scholars in academia ([02:23]).

  Quote:

  “My mentor at that time was Professor Motori... And he gave me this book, I'm sure you've heard of it, Silencing the Past when I was writing my BA thesis. And that book changed my life because it was so accessibly written and it helped me conceive of history, right? The narration of history in these new ways.” [03:02]

• Choosing Veracruz:

  • Inspired by seeing the exhibit "The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present," and noticing a research gap regarding the Gulf Coast.
  • Expectations of finding a large Afro-Mexican community were upended by the city's reality: locals denied black presence, yet constantly referenced blackness.
  • Decision to explore why blackness is spoken of rather than simply seeking black-identified individuals ([05:30]).

2. Book’s Central Arguments

• Locality and Blackness:

  • Local interpretations and expressions of blackness predate Mexico's federal recognition of Afro-Mexicans.
  • Blackness in Veracruz is less about individual self-identification and more about communal narratives, cultural practices, and localized history ([08:22]).

  Quote:

  “What I argue in the book is if we look at these criteria of culture, history and traditions, this is what people were using to access blackness for decades prior to formal recognition.” [10:28]

• Beyond Individual Identification:

  • Through census questions and local tradition, blackness is accessed culturally and historically, not just through ancestry or by self-labeling as Afro-Mexican.

3. Veracruz: Geography as a Gateway to Blackness

• City Between Worlds:

  • Veracruz is metaphorically and culturally “between the Caribbean and Mexico”; locals feel a kinship with Havana.
  • The regional identity of Jarocho serves as a conduit for conversations about blackness, even when individuals do not identify as black ([12:50]).

  Quote:

  “The Jarocho was a... term for people of mixed race... people of indigenous African and European descent. ...The Jarocho as a type is understood as being an Afro-descendant character, even though individual Jarochos do not necessarily self identify as being black.” [15:10]

• Research Pivot:

  • Shift from searching for black people to studying blackness in everyday practices, discourse, and the crafting of local identity ([16:40]).

4. Dance, Music, and Performing Blackness

• Dance Communities and Accessing Blackness:

  • Public dance, music (e.g., Son Jarocho), and festivities function as tools for entering into and expressing blackness.
  • Frierson warns against framing this as appropriation—community members are not “taking” blackness but accessing layers of their own history and locality ([19:47]).

  Quote:

  “...what was fascinating to me is that people weren't trying to invent a tradition. Instead, they were doing, looking at things they were already doing...and this is an example, an instantiation of our blackness.” [21:25]

• Essentializing vs. World-Building:

  • While certain practices can be read as stereotypical or essentializing, Frierson focuses on blackness as a means to deepen local belonging, not mimicry or 'performing blackness' in a superficial sense.

5. Interludes: Writing Practice and the Fieldwork Experience

• Stylistic Experimentation:

  • Dr. Frierson intersperses the book with narrative interludes that capture fieldwork moments not easily woven into academic argumentation ([23:20]).
  • These vignettes blend personal and ethnographic storytelling to render Veracruz itself as a vivid character and emphasize the “local color” genre.

  Quote (Reading an Interlude):

  “Although he considers himself black, he complains he is not black enough. Interestingly, it is his palms, not his skin or hair, that tell the tale... Robert wishes I were blacker too.” [24:10]

• Authorial Voice:

  • Humor, short punchy sentences, and close observation mark Frierson’s writing style, designed to be accessible to both undergraduates and academics ([39:02]).

  Quote:

  “My uncle, very early in my grad career said, karma, jargon is slang. Just say what you... Let’s say what you’re trying to say.” [40:50]

6. Ethnography in Practice: Challenges & Opportunities

• Research Methods:
  • Frierson worked with four main communities:
    1. Son Jarocho musicians and dancers
    2. Public dance groups
    3. Danzón dance classes
    4. Audiences at cultural events (state-sponsored and informal)
  • Emphasizes the importance of immersion, rapport-building, and accepting vulnerability—“being bad at something in public” ([29:58]).

7. Scholarly Interventions & Theoretical Implications

• Main Contribution:

  • The book challenges a purely quantitative or self-identification approach to blackness.
  • Argues for recognizing the impact and legacy of the African Diaspora even in contexts where self-identified black populations are numerically small or historically silenced ([43:34]).

  Quote:

  “If we only think that the black, that the African Diaspora matters in communities where people are currently contemporarily self identifying as black, we're going to miss a lot. And that is one of the main interventions that I hope this book makes...” [45:00]

• Local Lived Experience:

  • Stresses that diaspora, while transnational, is always locally lived and negotiated in specific contexts and historical moments.

8. Future Directions

• Next Project:

  • Dr. Frierson plans to research the experiences of African American expatriates and other black migrants in Mexico, examining cross-community blackness and new forms of diaspora in the context of recent Afro-Mexican recognition ([47:45]).

  Quote:

  “You have Afro Mexicans, you have lots of Haitians in Mexico... So how are these different ethnic black people interacting with each other? How are they seeing themselves as similar and different?” [48:07]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On finding her research focus:

  “My expectation was that there would be a lot of Afro Mexicans in the city based on what the scholarly research was telling me. And when I got there, people kept telling me that I need to go other places... There are no longer black people here. And at the same time, they kept talking about blackness.” [05:47]

• On the meaning of ‘reckoning’ in the subtitle:

  “And reckon, it means multiple things. It means to count, which is really what we see with the census. It means to estimate or determine... So I was really reckoning with what blackness means for these different constituencies at these different time periods.” [06:50]

• On writing style and purpose:

  “I wanted to write a book that an undergrad could come to and then a scholar like you could come to as well... so it could meet the reader where they are.” [41:26]

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Timeline of Key Segments

• [01:57] Introduction, Frierson’s academic beginnings
• [02:23–07:09] Origin story, choosing Veracruz, evolving research questions
• [08:22–11:40] Central arguments: locality, blackness, and the census
• [12:50–17:16] Veracruz’s Caribbean connections, Jarocho identity, shift in research focus
• [19:47–23:20] Dance communities, music, and the notion of accessing vs. appropriating blackness
• [23:50] Frierson reads the “A Hand to Hold” interlude
• [25:24–29:21] Purpose of interludes, painterly writing, ethnographic moments
• [29:58–36:58] Research communities, methods, fieldwork challenges
• [39:02–41:54] On writing: practice, clarity, accessibility
• [43:34–47:29] Scholarly interventions: black absence, self-identification, diaspora’s expanded impact
• [47:45–49:37] Future research directions: Black American expats in Mexico

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Conclusion

This episode provides a nuanced, lively exploration of how Afro-descended histories, practices, and discourses shape contemporary identities and senses of place in Veracruz, Mexico. Dr. Frierson uncovers blackness as a shared repertory of cultural, historical, and social meaning—something that exceeds checkboxes and census figures. Through her ethnographic lens, vibrant writing, and innovative narrative style, Frierson offers both a theoretical intervention for scholars and a moving portrait for anyone interested in the lived realities of the African Diaspora in Latin America.

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Transcript

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

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[Podcast Host/Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Regan Gillum]

Hello everyone, and welcome to New Books in Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Regan Gillum, and today I'm talking to Dr. Karma Frierson, who is the author of the book Local Color Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz, published by the University of California Press. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Frierson.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah, thank you so much for being here. And I'm really excited to talk about your book. And so, just to begin with, the book examines part of the local culture. It examines blackness as part of the local culture in Veracruz, but not necessarily as part of individual identity, which we'll get into. But can you tell us about yourself and how you came to write Local Reckoning with blackness in the port city of Veracruz?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Oh, yeah, of course. That's such a great question. And I could go about it a number of ways, but I suppose I should start half a lifetime ago. So picture this. I'm an undergraduate. I am a joint concentrator in African and African American studies and social anthropology, and I have the great fortune of Being a Melloma fellow. So for people who don't know, Mellon Maze is a program that is interested in diversifying the professoriate by introducing students, undergrads to academia as profession and then supporting us on this journey. And my mentor at that time was Professor Motori, and he is both an anthropologist and a black studies scholar. So I had a model of what I would want to be. And he gave me this book, I'm sure you've heard of it, Silencing the Past when I was writing my BA thesis. And that book changed my life because it was so accessibly written and it helped me conceive of history, right? The narration of history in these new ways. So that book really encouraged me to keep going to say, actually I do want to become a scholar and try to write something as legible and beautiful as science in the past. Which I'm not saying local color is that yet, but it's a goal to have. And so that's us too start re getting this book from Matori and saying this is what I want to do moving forward. And then the next start, there's multiple starts. Starts and stuffs would be when I started grad school. So I came to grad school not with a firm question or even a firm sight. I thought I could either work in Brazil like you do, or I could work in Mexico. And my mentor Stephane Palmier said, oh, karma, you should go, should go to Mexico and explore this question you have. And this question was really because of a museum exhibit I saw in the gap year between undergrad and grad. It was called the African Presence in Mexico from Yanga to the Present. And what I noticed at the time was that a lot of the ethnographic research or the contemporary work was in the Pacific coast of Mexico, but the historical stuff was based on the Gulf coast, which is where Veracruz is. So the question I had, as ignorant as I was at the time, was, well, what's happening in Veracruz? How are people using this narration today? And so I got to Veracruz, had to relearn Spanish, and I really just fell in love with the site and my question. I talk about this in book and I think we'll talk about it more in the conversation. My question shifted because I had this expectation that there would be a lot of Afro Mexicans in the city based on what the scholarly research was telling me. And when I got there, people kept telling me that I need to go other places. Like, oh, you should go here, you should go there. There are no longer black people here. And at the same time, they kept talking about blackness. And so instead of going to these different places, which would have been a great project, I stayed in the city and I said, well, what is this talk doing here? Why do people keep talking about blackness? What is it doing for people? And that was really when it took off. There was many years since I first got there, almost 15 years. I was thinking about that next year will be 15 years since I first went to Veracruz. So a lot has happened in the world in my life and in Mexico specifically, with recognizing Afro Mexicans since then. And all of that has influenced what local color became. I was very fortunate to have a postdoc in Latin American studies after I got my PhD in anthropology. And since then I've been working in Black studies departments. So I've been talking and being in conversation with great colleagues in anthropology, Latin American studies and Black Studies, which has helped me figure out, what is it that I'm trying to say? What assumptions do I have about what's going on? What are my blind spots? What piques people's interest? And having these various conversations, both in the United States and in Mexico, has really led me to this book, Local Color. Just to finish this question briefly, the subtitle, as you mentioned, talks about reckoning with blackness. And that's really what I had to do and what the people in the field were doing. And reckon, it means multiple things. It means to count, which is really what we see with the census. It means to estimate or determine. I'm from the south, so it also means to think or suppose. So I was really reckoning with what blackness means for these different constituencies at these different time periods. And how do I articulate that for a U.S. based audience? Yeah.

[Regan Gillum]

Wow. Thank you so much for that answer. I love that, that it seemed to start with the Melon Mays, because I've also been involved with Melon Maze as a mentor. And I think many of us wonder, like, is will anything come of this? Not. Not that we don't enjoy working with students. Of course, that in and of itself is very valuable. But, you know, given the goals of Mellon, one wonders, like, you know, you don't see that happen for many, many years out if the student decides to go to grad school and things like that. And so that's. So I just love that you started the story with your story with that because it just shows that, you know, what can come out of these programs and that, you know, what can bloom out of them is really great. Yeah. So thank you. And so in the book you can conduct this ethnography with people in the port city of Veracruz, as you've just said, and it's about blackness, but not always with people who identify as black. And you write that quote, locality has been of utmost importance in how people fashion Mexican blackness. And I thought this was really interesting. And so I wondered if you could talk about this as part of the larger arguments of the book and what the larger arguments of the book are.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah, of course. So there's been a lot of research actually on Afro Mexico, on blackness in Mexico. And that research actually predates the formal state recognition of Afro Mexicans. So when I said that locality is really important, it's partly because on the federal level, there was an erasure on an invisibility that Afro descendants in Mexico were facing or fighting at the time in my field work. And now we have formal recognition. They're in the Constitution, they're on the census. It's a new world. It's an exciting new world, actually, for Afro descendancy in Mexico. But before that, people really were taking the knowledge and the mobility, the mobilization, and it was locally grounded. One of the really good ethnographies of Afro Mexico that I read was Chocolate and Cornflowers by Laura Lewis. And it's based on the Costa Chica and the Pacific coast of Mexico. And she's also looking at people, they called themselves Morenos, and how they were tying themselves to the nation through blackness in this really interesting way. That's not what was happening where I was working, but I did notice that blackness was still their avenue toward place making of settling to say, yes, Veracruz, as you mentioned, is a port city, which means it's very cosmopolitan. There's lots of flux, there's people coming in and out constantly. Yes, all this is happening, but I have roots here like I have generations here. And that generational presence had something to do with blackness. And you mentioned that I'm working with people who might not necessarily identify as black, but as I argue in the book, they're always identifying with it at some level. And that level is not the same for everybody. I really, in the book, make this broader argument that that 2015 moment where they first changed the census to include Afro Mexicans came from decades of what came before it. So the question asked, based on your culture, history and traditions, do you think of yourself as Afro descendant or Afro Mexican? And what I argue in the book is if we look at these criteria of culture, history and traditions, this is what people were using to access blackness for decades prior to formal recognition. And then the unspoken access point was ancestry. And you saw that in the census taker's guide, not necessarily in the question itself. So my chapters really break down on how, prior to formal recognition of Afro Mexicans, did people think about blackness as culture? How do they think of it as history, how to think of traditions? And how does that not necessarily lead to the second clause of the question? Do you think you are black so you can have an understanding and an awareness and a love for. For the blackness that you have without necessarily claiming that you are Negro or Afro Mexican, which was the terminology in the census at that time? So those are those larger arguments with the book. Great.

[Regan Gillum]

And so in the book, you also kind of place Veracruz as like a city. And you write that it's between the Caribbean and Mexico. And when you wrote that, it kind of reminded me. So I teach Intro to Latin American Studies. And one thing I teach is. Is how Fidel Castro, when he kind of sparked the revolution in Cuba, he. He sailed there from Mexico. And. And. And we always have to look on a map with. With the students, me and the students, because you start to see how close that. That. That tip of Mexico is to Cuba and. And to the Caribbean. And so I think many times we don't think about Mexico and the Caribbean being, like, so close to each other. But as you said, too, you did your research in a place that's not a black town in Mexico. And you write that when you stop looking for black people and started attending to blackness, your questions changed and you began to ask people, what does harocho mean? And so I imagine that was a really big aha moment. And so I wanted to ask, what does harocho mean and what does it indicate about the relationship between blackness and the city?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah, thank you for that question. Just really quickly, since you mentioned Castro, you're right. He sailed from Veracruz, from Tukspan. That's where Grandma started. So it's quite close. And the people in the city of Veracruz where I work really think of themselves as being a sister city to Havana. So their relationship to Havana is actually quite important to how they articulate themselves as unique within the nation. When I got to Veracruz, and actually Veracruz was the first place in Mexico I'd ever been, so I didn't really have a perspective of how it's similar or different from the rest of the nation. What I noticed that people were very proud of their regional identity, that we are special among the pantheon of different types of regional characters in Mexico. And that character is called the Jarocho. Which is what part of what you were asking me. And I do want to describe who and what a Jarocho is. But before that, I wanted to go back to this question of a black town. So I've noticed that the rurality of blackness in Mexico has become the predominant way of thinking about it because those black towns tend to be smaller places. And Veracruz is a big city. It's not as big as Mexico City, of course, but it's over half a million people. And not all of the people in the city, city of Veracruz are thinking about blackness. That is not at all what I'm trying to say. But there are key communities within that cosmopolitan space that are really paying attention to what they call their third route. And those were the people that I were working with. And the avenue that most people got to that question was through the identity of Jarocho. So again, Jarocho ness does not mean you're thinking about your blackness, but it is a way that people got to their blackness. The Jarocho was a, it was a custard term. So it was a term for people of mixed race during the colonial period of people of indigenous African and European descent. And as the official narrative in the city museum would say, the black aspect was quite important in the colonial period, but it was deracinated. And in fact, this question of how the blackness fell out of importance was part of what I wanted to explore when I was doing my research. But the curiosity that stopped me from going that path is it never disappeared. And actually the Jarocho ness is how people got back to it. The Jarocho as a type is understood as being an Afro descendant character, even though individual Jarochos do not necessarily self identify as being black. So that tension is really where this book is, is interested. It's like, okay, great, Vijarocho has something to do with Mexican blackness, but individual Jarochos could or could not tap into that. I'm not sure if I answered your question in totality. So you asked me, you know, the aha, moment of moving away from blackness. Yeah. So when I first went to Veracruz, I wanted to study how this, this attention to the third route or the African presence and contribution to Mexico impacted the lives of self identifying Afro Mexicans. But as I told you, many people told me I had to go other places to find Afro Mexicans. And I decided instead of going to those other places to change the criteria I was using to ask the question, which means the question of what's the uptake, what's the impact? Is still there. I just don't necessarily have to delimit who I ask it to, to people who are self identifying as black. And that was the aha moment. It's like, wait a minute. All these people are really invested in talking about the Te Serrais, the third route. The third route. All these people are going out of their way to look at the Caribbean ness of this Mexican town. What is this doing for them? What does this mean for the people? What kind of world building is being done by accessing or tapping into blackness? And so that was the moment, the shift from oh, I need to go find some black people in a black town in a small place in Mexico to oh, actually let me stay here in this great city of Veracruz and explore what this discourse is doing for the people here. Why is it important? What are they taking from it? What are they building with it?

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah, and so you mentioned that too. There are different communities that are thinking about blackness in Veracruz. And one of the. It seems like one of those communities are like dance communities. And you take us through your practices and performances with a particular dance troupe that it seemed like you were affiliated with.

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[Regan Gillum]

And. And of course, you're looking at blackness, you know, without people who identify as black. And this could become a place where sort of blackness is being appropriated. And. And you talk about this in the book, but the realm of music, you know, is a particular place where. Where blackness has been appropriated, like, generally, not just not, you know, talking about your case in particular. But. But the situation is more complex. And so. So the question is, like, how do people, you know, relate to blackness through these dance performances?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah. Thank you for bringing up this question about appropriation. I think that when we think about appropriation, we think about someone taking something for their own use, something that doesn't really belong to them. There's this. This narrative of exclusivity or possessiveness that's associated with the word appropriation, at least the way that we use it in common discourse today. And honestly, I don't think that quite applies to the people I was working with in Veracruz. Of course, there's some people who are doing what Cristian Ronaldo calls elective Africanity, where they are trying to access a coolness factor in playing up their blackness. But I really, really think that appropriation misrecognizes what is going on in this site because people are accessing their blackness. And again, I'm already using this possessiveness of their blackness in that terminology. But really, what was fascinating to me is that people weren't trying to invent a tradition. Instead, they were doing, looking at things they were already doing. Take the dancing that you mentioned. So there's already this. This common practice of dancing in public, public dancing, which is not exclusively black. Right. It's not exclusively Mexican. It's quite common. And yet they're saying, look, we. We like to dance. And this is an example, an instantiation of our blackness. So they were taking this discourse of the third route that was coming top down from the state and laminating it onto practices that they were already doing. And that's why I think that access rather than appropriation is the better way to think about what they were doing, how they were engaging with their blackness. As I said, identifying with, instead of identifying as black. Yes. This meant a lot of times I was looking at music and dance, which are those common areas of appropriation and these common kind of spheres of essentialization. And there was a lot of essentializing that I thought of as seeing in the site. But what I think makes Veracruz unique in our larger conversations about appropriation or essentialism or stereotyping is that people were not necessarily performing blackness, which. And by that, I mean they weren't trying to be black. Instead, I argue that the blackness was a means to an end, not the end itself. And it was their path toward being more themselves, being more local, being more Jarocho. And that what that is why I think looking at the dancing, the music, the fun lovingness, the. All of these stereotypes that could be read as problematic is really how people are working over this narrative that they have received to say, okay, you're telling me that, for example, Son Jarocho, which is a folklore tradition, it's a tradition that gave the word La Bamba. So sonjarocho has a third root. Has something to do with the third root. Does that mean that Son Jarocho is black? It's like. Well, no, it just means it has blackness baked into it. And by me being invested in it, learning how to play it, learning how to dance to it, or learning the verses to sing it, I am accessing this part of my heritage that was overlooked for decades when the third root was not part of the everyday conversation that people had.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah, great. So I wanted to take you to one of the interludes in the book, because you include these, you know, in between each chapter, you include these, you know, these shorter kind of like, interludes between the chapters. And I wanted to ask you to read from one called A Hand to hold. And it's on page 117, and you're talking about a subject named Robert and how he wishes he was more black.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah, of course. Just to set up this scene really briefly. I had met Robert at a cultural event, and he was one of those few people who said, yes, I am Negro, I am black. So I was like, oh, let me talk to you. So it turns out he's a merchant marine, and he really wanted to talk. So we were at that cafe for quite some time. And I'll just read very briefly this section reflecting on our conversation. Although he considers himself black, he complains he is not black enough. Interestingly, it is his palms, not his skin or hair, that tell the tale. They should be whiter. For Robert, the slight ruddiness of his palms is undeniable proof that he is not, quote unquote, pure, but instead mixed. He demands to see my hands. Confused and intrigued, I surrender myself to this unorthodox palm reading. I wonder what he will find as he looks to my past instead of my future. Disappointment, it turns out. Upon inspection of my not wide enough palms, Robert wishes I were blacker too.

[Regan Gillum]

Okay, thank you for that. And I loved this aspect of your writing where that scene I wrote, like, lol. Beside it. Like, I chuckled out loud. I thought it was. It was both, you know, humorous, but also, I think, demonstrative. And so I wondered, why do you include these interludes, you know, in the book? Generally because you just read up a portion of the interlude. So why do you include these interludes in the book? And then what was that interlude, in particular, demonstrating for the reader?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Oh, yeah. So I'm pretty sure I got the idea to write these little snippets again from Silencing the Past. So at the beginning of each chapter, he has these paragraphs that are italicized, that are really from his lived experience that relates to what the argument of the chapter is. And at first, I really wanted to do it like that, to just start each chapter with a vignette and anecdote, you know, as we anthropologists like to do. But I found that I couldn't write through it. And so when you're in the revision process, you know, people tell you to kill your darlings, to say, okay, you might really like this turn of phrase. You might really like this passage, but it's blocking you. It's actually an obstacle. Just remove it. And these interludes are the darlings that I just couldn't let loose. I was like, I can't. I can't not include it. I haven't really figured out what I want to do with it in the body of the chapter, but I don't want it to get lost. Not lost, you know, in my drafts, but also not lost in the body of the chapter, because I think that they're curious. Some of the interludes I wrote to resonate with a chapter, but most of them were moments that I already felt that resonance, but I couldn't quite fit them in, so. So I got the idea of a full interlude from Bianca Williams, the Pursuit of Happiness. I actually just taught that book in one of my classes. And the students really like these interludes. They're like, oh, anthropologists are humans. You're people, too. It's like, yes, we are. Let's talk about it. But the interlude for me was an opportunity to put these moments here, moments that in the writing, I still was thinking through and hope that after the person reads the next chapter and the chapter that followed the robber anecdote, sanguine blackness. To retrospectively think back on that interlude, it's like, oh, there's something there. Maybe it's still half baked or it's not quite fully realized, but these moments of encounter mean something. This is the ephemerality of the field site. And then the last reason from the writing standpoint is because the book is called Local Color. And Local Color was a literary genre that said that place matters, that the particularities, the idiosyncrasies of a place in a particular time is how you really give. Paint the picture of what that space is. And I wanted these interludes to paint the picture of Veracruz. And someone like Robert, who was asking me to look at my palms and then telling me I wasn't black enough, as he wasn't black enough, was like, okay, this is a moment. What do I do with this? And in the interlude, it's called a hand to hold. Say, maybe he just wanted a hand to hold right as he was figuring out what it meant for him to be black with someone else that he recognized and self recognizes as black. How this relates to that following chapter. The next chapter is about ancestry. So I mentioned earlier that I really took that 2015 census criteria as the organizing structure of the book. Culture, history, tradition, and then this hidden criterion, which was ancestry. And in the chapter that follows, I'm following different people and how they talk about people in their family and connect those people or name those people as being Afro descended, even though the person I'm talking to might not call themselves Afro descendant, They'll say, yes, my grandfather, yes my mother, yes my father. So sometimes, yes, my daughter looks like you. So they would often look at my body, read my body, and say, oh, you remind me of a family member. So that chapter is really looking at how people are individually thinking about grappling with their ancestral relationship to blackness instead of this collective blackness, which is what most of the book is about.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah. And so also in that scene, you read like it demonstrates your engagements with locals. And I like how you said that the students are like, yeah, anthropologists are people. And in those scenes, you really come out like, you know, as a person there sitting with people, talking to them. He grabs your hands. And so. And of course, in the book, you're talking about, you know, your dance lessons, your music lessons, you talk with people about carnival. And so I wondered if you could talk about, like, conducting the research, what were the. Any challenges or any opportunities that you. That you encountered along the way?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah, absolutely. So the Jarocho publics that I worked with were really four groups. The first group was the Sonjarocho community. And this was actually, for a while, going to be the only place that I thought about the third route, because that's where people took me. They're like, oh, well, if you're interested in the third route, look at Son Jarocho. Because there's a very robust discourse about how all three roots, and by three, I mean the indigenous, the African and the European, have come together to make this musical tradition. In that group, I was introduced by Gilberto Gutierrez, who is the leader of Mono Blanco. He said, oh, go to Cazon. It's a cultural center. Go to this class. I went to the class called Tayeres, and it was a group of mostly men, but there were some women as well, usually older people. And they were in a circle, and they said, have a seat. And they gave me an instrument, and I learned how to play. This is literally my introduction. That people opened up space for me in a circle of conviviality and taught me how to play my first song, which was Los Enanos. And I kept going back. In the Son Jarocho community, there's these things called fandangos, which are moments where people will bring their instruments and collectively interpret music. So you know, all the sones, but the order in which a verse will be sung is in the moment. So it's improvisation, but a shared base, a shared canon of knowledge. And the first fandango I went to was again, the first time I was in Mexico, a woman comes up to me, and I was like, oh, you know, I'm an anthropologist, and I think I'm going to study this thing. And she told me, she's like, don't be one of those people. Don't be one of those people who comes and extracts and never comes back. I said, okay, I do not want to be one of those people. And I'm really glad. At first it felt a little aggressive because I'd just gotten there. But I'm really glad she told me that, because that ethos is what carried me through the years of going to Veracruz, because I did not want to be an extractive presence. I wanted to be a community member. And Son Jar Ocho gave me that because it's such an open space where people will meet you where you are and help you along the way. In my tair the people would come and go. The members changed throughout the years, but the space was the same. So when I was doing pre field work, I could go back to this tired, even though there were new people, people I didn't know who didn't know me. I knew enough of the people to become welcomed again. And those were the folks who introduced me to second Harocho public, which is, as I mentioned, the public dancing. The public dancing is very different from the other ones because it's just people who want to dance. They want to have a good time and pay very little money to do it because it's usually free. They are the least conversant in the third route because there's not as formal of avenues to talk about blackness. But when you were between a set or between different songs, people would talk about the Afro Antillian music. So this was song music, which is the mother rhythm of salsa, Salsa, the danzon, those were the main genres that people were dancing. And so I was mainly an observer and a hesitant participant when I was asked to dance in those spaces. And seeing how people were engaging with the musicians and how the musicians were interpreting their art form through the lens of the third root. I also was involved in a Danson tayer. So the danzon is an Afro Cuban ballroom dance that has taken off across the Mexican Republic. It's not just in Veracruz. It's very, very well practiced. And I took the same model from San Jarocho of being in one group. And it was important for me to have depth of relationality with the groups instead of breadth. There's many tayeres of the ranzon, but I mainly stuck with one, sometimes branch out to a second one because people didn't talk about the questions I was interested in, which was the third route. Every day or casually, you really needed to build the rapport. And it came up in sometimes very weird moments. So being a member first and a investigator second helped me to capture these moments when people would bring it up or they'll say, oh, karma, I know you're doing this. I thought of this thing. So with the danson, I learned how to dance the danzon. I'm not saying I'm great, but you know, I can. I can go on the dance floor and hold my own. And then the fourth group was being audience members. So this is mainly observational research of cultural programming. So there's the Veracruz Institute of Culture, or EVEC as it was called at the time, that had many events across the year that they were telling local people about themselves, learn about your culture, learn about your history, learn about the Caribbean ness of the site you call home. And it was important for me to be in these audiences first, to meet people that were interested, like I met Robert at one of these events, but also to see what is the official narrative, what is the state saying to people and then how is that traveling word of mouth, what stays the same, what changes as people recite or reinterpret what they're hearing and why does this matter? So those were the four main communities that I was deeply engaged with during the field work. And the challenge was learning how to do these things and being bad at something in public. I stood out. I'm very clearly foreign. There was a level of surveillance that I had not anticipated because I was who I am in that space, which, yes, it's a big city with hundreds of thousands of people, but it's also, it feels like a small town because people are very tmoso, very gossipy. They're in your business. And I had to understand that I was being observed as I was also observing other people. And so to make sure that I wasn't. Yeah, doing something untoward. But also know that I'm going to make mistakes in public and people are going to laugh at me and know it and that's okay as well. So that was one of the challenges, but it was really an opportunity to follow where the discourse took me. When I started in 2011, I had no idea that those would be the type of communities that I would be involved in. I really did think I was going to work with Afro Mexicans and, and some people self identified at the time, some people didn't. And some people might now identify as Afro Mexican when they didn't a decade ago. And I think that's part of the beauty of ethnography of the research.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah, no, that's definitely part of the beauty. And as you said, you never know when people are going to bring these things up. And so it speaks to the necessity sometimes of being in the field for a long term so that you can be there to catch when, you know these like impromptu moments. Yeah. So thanks for describing that for us. And then can I ask a follow up question? Is, did you already know how to play the instrument that you, that you took up in the, in the music circle or.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

I had never seen this instrument before. I had never played a stringed instrument before. But you know, I was a percussionist in a past life, so I could understand pattern recognition. They don't use sheet music. It really is doing it's learning in the. Doing the same thing with the choreography. So I thought it was fun. I think it's a challenge for some people. But not everyone in the group was good. So I would never want to play the harana by myself. I'd feel very exposed. But I would happily play it in a fandango space among other people. Yeah.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah. No, that's amazing. The places that anthropologists and researchers find themselves is fascinating. And so I want to just also go back to that interlude that you read, because it also, I think, demonstrates your writing voice. And so you infuse your writing, like, with this sense of humor. At times, sometimes you use these really, like, short, punchy sentences that get to the point. You have this knack for describing people and conversations. In the interlude you read, you talked about, like, the unorthodox palm reading. Is he gonna. You know, what is he gonna read about your future from your. From your past? I mean, you know, just your rendering of the whole scene was just like, you know, I loved it as it unfolded. And so I wondered if you could just talk about your process of writing. You know, whatever you wanna say, like drafting passages, you know, your writing practice, you know, anything you can share about that.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I will say that I come from a family with writers. My sister is an author. And so I want to rise to the occasion of the example that my sister, Savannah Frierson, has made. And also, I am in the best writing group in the world, and all of us are beautiful writers. So really, I just had to keep up. I do think that the writing became important to me or how it sounded, because I wanted the text to be accessible and evocative. It was really important to me for people to get a sense of Veracruz, because Veracruz is a bit of a character in the ethnography as well. I am firm in believing that what I saw could happen other places. Sure. But because it happened in Veracruz, it manifested in these different ways. And so the writing, or having to get, you know, a beautiful turn of phrase, maybe it was overwrought. Sometimes. A beautiful turn of phrase was my way of trying to bring people to the site to say, you should go to this place that's on the Gulf coast of Mexico. There's this saying that Pope John Paul II said, only Veracruz is beautiful. And it really is beautiful in this way that is uncanny. It's a beauty of places falling apart and life growing in the detritus. And I wanted the writing to give that kind of sense. And also, I did want to write something for an interested audience, but not necessarily fellow academics, in the same way that songwriting can be a little dry. My uncle, very early in my grad career said, karma, jargon is slang. Just say what you. Let's say what you're trying to say. And I really wanted to write a book that an undergrad could come to and then a scholar like you could come to as well and get maybe something deeper, something different, so it could meet the reader where they are. And yes, I ideally in the future would love to get it translated so that the people that helped me, the generous spirits that let me in their lives for all these years, will be able to read it. And I've noticed that some of these things are really hard to translate, so I should rewrite it, thinking first how it would write, how it would read in Spanish, because some of it's actually maybe too pretty in the writing and not as clear cut as it. As it potentially could be. But I think that having my writing group, having my family, has helped me look at the practice of writing and try to write something that is pleasant to read so that people can get to the heart of the argument more easily.

[Regan Gillum]

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was very pleasant to read. I really enjoyed it as I was like, as I was going through. And then, so this is, I guess, kind of the second to last question, and I wanted to ask you, like, what kind of interventions you were making with the book or what you want people to take from it. And I asked this because for me, I read the book as kind of a bridge between these ideas of like, black absence in Mexico and sort of black self identification. And what I mean by that is, you know, there are of course, these like, local discourses, and maybe they're sort of changing because of the national changes you mentioned, but there were these local discourses of like, well, we just don't have black people in Mexico. Like, they're just. They're just not here. And so there's that and then there's sort of another aspect of like, as you've said, like the, the black self identification. Like, I have to find black people. And so your book to me was kind of a bridge between that, where you can sort of find people talking about blackness in a. In a place, and you can find blackness as part of the identity of the, of the region, but and not necessarily as part of people's self identification, although you do have people who identify as black as well. And so your book kind of, you know, it raises these questions about how to write about blackness in Latin America and in countries particularly where there are fewer numbers of black people. And so I wondered again, I'll come back to like, so what interventions were you trying to make from, with the book or what did you want people to take away from it?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Yeah, that's such a great question, Regan. And I want to flag something you just said about writing about blackness in places where there are fewer numbers of black people. And as I mentioned, when I did the research, when I started my research in Veracruz, there were no official counts because they hadn't asked a question on the census yet. And when I wrote the book, the census had been out. So now we know that 2.2% in 2020 self identified. The number is probably going to go up in the next census because people, as you were saying, are hearing it, they're being more, becoming more familiar with the possibilities of what it means to, to self identify. But my, if I were to pick an intervention, I would say that it's too tempting to look at the quantification of blackness and ignore or downplay, not ignore, but maybe downplay the other manifestations of it. So while self identification is hugely important both politically right now and scholastically in the field of Afro Latin American studies, I do hope that this book intervenes to say, well, yes, and, and the, and is that the impact and the legacy of the African Diaspora goes well beyond self identifying populations of African descent. As you mentioned, we have a region where for decades and centuries, even for some people, it didn't make sense to be black. And yet these people lived and they have an understanding of themselves in the world and they have an understanding of their history. If we only think that the black, that the African Diaspora matters in communities where people are currently contemporarily self identifying as black, we're going to miss a lot. And that is one of the main interventions that I hope this book makes is that Veracruz, these Veracruzanos that I worked with at the time were very conversant and very proud of their African heritage or their, their blackness is what I call it in the book because I wanted to include their Afro Caribbean ness as well and not look just back to the continent. So they're very proud of their blackness and it matters to them and it matters to their understanding of themselves and their understanding of their place in the world. But it isn't how they self recognize or it wasn't at the time for many people. And that's okay. It's not that they're in denial because they're Going out of their way to acknowledge it, to make these ties, to make these connections. And so it's doing something in the world. My intervention say, well, what does blackness or knowledge of the African diaspora and African heritage do? Not who is black? Which is a very important question. And I'm glad that the state is catching up with the rest of the world and counting that. But what does it do? What does it do for people? Not just who counts as it. So that's one main intervention. And the second one, I think it goes back to that earlier question you asked about localities, that even though the African Diaspora is important to look at with the ties across, the ties that bind us, like who, why we think of ourselves as being kin, diasporic kin, or in community, how it's lived is almost always local. So what does it mean for those people in that context? How do we understand Veracruz at this particular moment? This moment between cultural recognition of the 90s and political recognition of the 2010s? How do we understand what it was doing for people? So it is a small story in some way that has, I hope, larger ramifications. So those would be those two interventions to think more expansively, right, about what the African Diaspora's impact has been, but also to think locally about how it's lived.

[Regan Gillum]

Thank you. Thank you for that. So, finally, thank you for telling us about this book. And so now that local color is out in the world, what are you working on now? Or what projects are you thinking about working on in the future?

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Oh, yeah, I'm very excited. I have not done any fieldwork yet. I'm very excited, though, to look at the presence of African American, Black American expats in Mexico, because you have this. This interesting discourse that is connecting flight into Mexico with the broader history of marinage. And, you know, the fact that the underground railroad also went south into Mexico. So they're connecting their lifestyle choices to a larger history of freedom seeking. Right. But you also have this great moment in Mexico where we finally have recognition of Afro Mexicans. And there's so many different types of blackness in the country that people are now confront, not confronting. That sounds aggressive. People are now interacting with different ways of being black. So you have Afro Mexicans, you have lots of Haitians in Mexico. You have people from the continent in Mexico. You have these black Americans coming down into Mexico. So how are these different ethnic black people interacting with each other? How are they seeing themselves as similar and different? So those are the questions that I'm interested in. How are black Americans imagining Mexico what is the Mexican dream that they're bringing with them when they go down? And then also what's the interaction or the reality of engagement between these different members of the African diaspora within a country that just so recently made space for, for blackness within the Mexican imaginary? So that's what I'm really excited to get into, moving forward. I got to go back to Mexico. I love it so much, and I'm interested to see how Americanness inflects upon blackness there. Great.

[Regan Gillum]

So we will wish you luck on that project and on that next journey, that next research journey, and we will look out for it as well.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

So thank you so much. So much.

[Regan Gillum]

So I'm Regan Gillum. I've been speaking to Dr. Karma Frierson, who is the author of the book Local Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz, published by the University of California Press. Thank you so much for writing this book and thanks for sharing it with us on the podcast.

[Dr. Karma Frierson]

Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. Sam.