Written by Adam Mahoney orginally published digitally by Capital B Press on April 1, 2024

….“Anti-Blackness and the exclusion of people with darker skin is global,” said Danielle Elizabeth Stevens, who first moved to Mexico from Los Angeles in 2016.

Anti-Blackness flows through Mexico’s history, whether it is acknowledged or not. “There’s an idea here that if you’re Black, you can’t be Mexican,” Stevens said, explaining how her Afro-Mexican friends are constantly othered and discriminated against. (Afro-Latinos make up less than 5% of the Mexican population.)

In the U.S., Stevens said she could not trust the government or those around her to regularly “protect and safeguard” her as a Black woman. While she can’t say she fully trusts those in Mexico to do so, either, she now has more of an ability to do it for herself because of greater accessibility in CDMX. (Gender-based violence is on the rise in Mexico, as the country has one of the world’s highest femicide rates.)

But Stevens understands that stability can only shield you from the harmful realities of anti-Blackness and gendered violence for so long. She said she’s seen an uptick in “Black Americans [being] really eager to disprove that they’re Haitian,” but ultimately what she has found is there is no escape to what comes with being registered as Black. In her years living in Mexico, she said she’s regularly been accosted for photos and “fetishized” and openly discriminated against at restaurants and other public places.

Nevertheless, she was quick to say that building a life with more freedom, autonomy, and a loving community has been “seamless” in Mexico, as she connects deeply to her spiritual practices to guide her journey.

Full article can be found here.