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Original Articles

The Mascogo/Black Seminole Diaspora: The Intertwining Borders of Citizenship, Race, and Ethnicity

 

This article presents the case of Mascogos/Black Seminoles, a group with multiple layers of diasporic belonging which originated from the mixture of Maroons and Seminole Indians who are currently dispersed across the Mexico–United States border. It argues that forms of racism are intensified when two different systems of racial and ethnic classification overlap in people’s everyday lives, resulting in dispossession of economic, social, and political rights. The clearest manifestation of these processes of CLASSification is Mascogos/Black Seminoles’ relations of citizenship. Citizenship has been the relation allowing for the institutionalized exclusion of Mascogos/Black Seminoles in Mexico and in the United States, since they have not benefited from political or other forms of recognition. On the contrary, it seems that the strategy has been to erase them as a group in order to avoid the provision of such rights. This article will discuss alternative forms of diasporic citizenship as a means for framing Mascogos/Black Seminoles’ demands for recognition and access to resources.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous People (ERIP) conference in San Diego, California in November 2011. I would like to thank Andrés León for his insightful input in the early development of the ideas in this article and for accompanying me during the process of making sense of my words and thoughts. I also want to thank Fabio Mattioli for his critical and illuminating comments in the transition of this text from a scholarly paper to a publishable article. Many thanks to Marc Edelman, Renato Rosaldo, Jeff Maskovsky, Ruth W. Gilmore, Federico Besserer, and the members of the Transnational Studies Seminar in Mexico City for their comments on different versions of this article. My biggest debt is to Leith Mullings, who introduced me to the discussion of the African Diaspora, commented on the early version of this article, and inspired me to develop this case study as an academic project. The faults in this article are entirely my own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rocío Gil

Rocío Gil is at the Department of Anthropology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

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