Black and Indigenous (and in a double bind): Rocío Gil Martínez de Escobar, Becoming Legible: The Racial Making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People in the Coahuila-Texas Borderland, PhD Dissertation, CUNY, 2019 | settler colonial studies blog

Black and Indigenous (and in a double bind): Rocío Gil Martínez de Escobar, Becoming Legible: The Racial Making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole People in the Coahuila-Texas Borderland, PhD Dissertation, CUNY, 2019

11May19

Abstract: This historical ethnography analyzes the making of the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as part of the production of the Coahuila-Texas borderland. In the quest to become legible to improve their living conditions and maintain a sense of dignity, Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles use history and racialization as tools of negotiation between themselves and the two nation-states where they live: Mexico and the United States. I analyze the Negro Mascogo/Black Seminole people as a case of racialization that illustrates the ongoing mechanisms of settler colonialism (dispossession, exploitation, and elimination via genocide or assimilation), as they play out in specific socio-historical contexts.

The main argument in this work is that Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles have been in a double bind since the nineteenth century. Numerous external forces have put them in the position to choose between Blackness and Indianness, doing violence to the ways they understand themselves. However, this apparent paradox does not completely negate the possibility of Black-Indianness. Negros Mascogos/Black Seminoles have understood the double bind and have made their racialization more flexible to claim Blackness in relation to some socio-historical processes, and Indianness in relation to others.

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