Anti-Blackness/Nativeness and erasure in Mexico: Black feminist geographies and Latin American decolonial dialogues for U.S. urban planning

Abstract

Latin American decolonial scholarship highlights the importance of time, space, and relationship variables in theoretical frameworks, notably different from white-settler philosophical underpinnings that rely on objectivity and modernity. Understanding race and gender in these frameworks has been elusive. I expand urban planning's decolonial project to earnestly engage with race and gender through expanding dialogue with Black feminist geography scholarship. I document the intense and ongoing process of Black/Native erasure and anti-Blackness/Nativeness in Mexico. I claim that if planning practitioners understood the way that white praise and the idea of mestizo travel with Mexican communities in the U.S. along with the afterlife of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, they could link narratives of Black and Native Mexican epistemologies. Planners would be able to more effectively plan with these communities to eliminate exploitative policies and practices and bring planning theory, pedagogy, and practice closer to their decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist aspirations.

Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Black Feminist Geographies

“…Mainstream scholarship has an equally long history of erasure followed by ‘wonder’-filled rediscovery of Black presence (McKittrick, 2006: 93; see also Sweet, 2021 on the erasure of Black and Indigenous histories in Mexico), and particularly of Black women’s political leadership (Covington-Ward, 2021). Therefore, the work of documenting the changing spatialities of Black women’s creative activism is still key (Greenidge and Gahman, 2020).…”

Storytelling otherwise: Decolonising storytelling in planning

“…The legacies of this rich corpus of decolonial and postcolonial critique have been in a fertile dialogue in the work of urban scholars around planning in Africa (Oldfield, 2020; Parnell et al, 2009; Watson, 2009; Winkler, 2018), India (Bahn, 2019), the Arab region (Laurie and Philo, 2020), Latin America (Ramirez and Pradilla, 2013; Vainer, 2014; Rolnik, 2017), Canada (Sandercock, 1998), Australia (Porter, 2010), or the cross-context cities framings (Robinson, 2016), etc. Most recently, an interesting work has emerged around planning in Settler colonial cities (Porter and Yiftachel, 2019) and framing US cities as part of the post colony (Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Sweet, 2021). They have drawn from multiple intellectual genealogies according to imperial powers involved in the territorial control 1 .…”