The Black Diaspora in Latin America: An Interview with Ben Vinson III

By AAIHS Editors October 6, 2025 0

*Ben Vinson III (Photo: George Washington University)*

In today’s post, editors of Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interview Dr. Ben Vinson III about his research and writing. A distinguished historian, Dr. Vinson served as the 18th president of Howard University. He is currently president of the American Historical Association (AHA). Dr. Vinson’s scholarly work centers on the African diaspora with a focus on Latin America history and culture. His latest book, Frank Etheridge: Musician of the African Diaspora, chronicles Etheridge’s experience playing in interracial orchestras and for mixed audiences while traveling abroad during America’s Jim Crow era. As a historian and author on Latin America, he is a recipient of the 2019 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History for his book, Before Mestizaje: The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico (2018). He has also co-authored and served as an editor of numerous other publications and journals.

Global Black Thought (GBT): How has the study of race in Latin America and the Caribbean evolved since you first entered the field?

Ben Vinson III (BV): When I started, there was almost a predictable focus on slavery, and it was heavily influenced by social and economic history. Those methods drove the field. Inasmuch as there were conversations about race, they were centered on indigenous populations. Therefore, any kind of Black history outside of slavery was not in vogue at the time, but I was looking at free Black populations in the region and really thinking about other types of ways in which Black life manifested itself. [Nevertheless, among studies of free populations,] there was a lot that had been written about the caste system, but it arose from a specific perspective that eschewed the ability for Black identity to be perceived. There was kind of an infatuation with a particular dialectic—that racial mixture in Latin America made race operate so differently. That the region is exceptional because of this mixture, and the concern over mixture became almost a blinder on being able to see other possibilities of racial existence.

I would also say, in my early days, I remember visits to the archives where archivists actually scoffed when I said that I wanted to study the Black population in Mexico. In one case, an archivist told me, “You’re not going to find anything here, you might as well go home.” Well, that did not have the effect that I think was intended. It only made me more curious. I also found the publishing climate pretty challenging. There were editors who were not willing to support my first book on Black soldiers in Mexico because it was just so different from what were the norms for the field [as I was] going beyond Spanish, mestizo, or mixed populations. Stanford Press took a chance on that first book.

When I look at the evolution [of the field] there has been just a proliferation in the ways in which Black life has been examined. There has been a deeper appreciation for the cultural lives of Black populations throughout Latin America in the colonial period as agency has grown in importance as a theme.

And so the shackles of slavery in some ways have been liberated in at least the way we examine Black life. I have also been very impressed at the methodological sophistication that has been utilized to explore the Black experience. We are devising all kinds of new approaches to really penetrate the archives and find novel ways of approaching documents. This has been incredibly important for our field and our ability to see unforeseen corners of Black life. Previously, it was very hard to organize or even attend conference panels about Black life in colonial Latin America. That’s changed remarkably. Lastly, there’s a far wider acceptance and greater knowledge within Mexico of the nation’s Black legacy.

GBT: What drew you to the study of Black experiences in Mexico?

BV: It started with a deeper appreciation of the Black diaspora in Latin America. Also, when I was coming up, I really started understanding just how transformative the surge in immigration from Latin America was going to be for changing the United States. I realized that immigration was going to have an impact on race relations at a profound level. And I wanted to understand the potential points of connection between the emerging Latino populations and the African American populations in the United States. How could we bridge divides? This was a question that was frequently on my mind as an undergraduate. When I was a sophomore, I remember it kind of hitting me like a lightning bolt. And I thought, maybe I can have something to offer in that because I grew up speaking a foreign language, Italian, and I was learning Spanish. I eased into the field with that basic question. How do we improve race relations in the future between Black and brown populations? That was basically it. I loved history. It was always my favorite subject. So, I said, maybe the answer was within history. Do we have a shared history in some way?

I was fortunate in college to do a research project in Venezuela where I studied Afro-Venezuelan culture. While investigating the festival for St. John the Baptist, I was introduced to a scholar named Jesus “Cucho” Garcia, who was also a scholar-activist. He was working on projects examining cultural identity through religious festivals and how cultural and regional identity fostered racial identity. This left a huge impression upon me. So, I wanted to continue studying the history of Venezuela in graduate school, but I learned that the types of documents that I needed for a deep history of the Festival of St. John the Baptist were not there in the volume that I had hoped. My advisor at the time was Herbert Klein, who was working on the demography of Mexico City in 1810, and he sent me to the archives in Mexico City to hunt some documents. That’s when I started to encounter Black caste categories in Mexico; they captivated me because I had not thought much about them. In fact, I hadn’t heard a lot about them prior, and that eased me into focusing on Black Mexico.

But something else happened too. In the archives, you run into people, and you talk to people at the coffee shop. And I had the good fortune of meeting Linda Arnold, who was studying the Mexican bureaucracy in the colonial period. She was talking to me about Black soldiers in Mexico whose documents she had stumbled across and said, “Hey, you may want to take a look.” Wow, that turned the light bulb on. My father was in the military. This seemed like the right project for me. As soon as I saw the documents myself, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. And I kind of knew that there was there was more to be had there. That’s really how I got started. From a coffee shop conversation, I started a five-year journey of learning everything I could about Black soldiers in colonial Mexico. Some of it is serendipity in terms of meeting people at the right time and then pursuing and following these questions against the grain. Especially when people told me that this is the kind of work that you can’t do.

GBT: What is the most influential text about race during the colonial period that has shaped your work? How did/do you engage with it?

BV: There were a couple of texts that influenced me. One was the classic 1946 book by Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán. It’s amazing what he was able to achieve in the 1940s [because he] set the table for the study of Black people in Mexico. It’s a book that we continually turn back to. I think everyone who is writing in my field is in some way writing to complement, expand, or counter that book. But also, for me, there was a book by R. Douglas Cope. It argued that racial identity was nearly impossible because of the caste groups and how slippery those caste categories were; at the same time, I was reading this book, I was seeing something radically different in the archives. The Black soldiers that I was studying were so confident about their Blackness within military circles. They created communities and fraternities, which gave me the lens to see what couldn’t be seen in Cope’s book. He just didn’t have the documents that I had.

And to this day all my work has that underpinning in caste. I’m always trying to understand mestizaje and caste better. And in some ways, I’ve been in a very long conversation with Cope. Just a small aside for those reading Global Black Thought who are not Latin Americanists—consider the question of access to the archives and the ways that we as Latin Americanists can either have access or not. [For instance,] the questions Cope was asking led him to a certain collection and set of documents that were different from the documents that I found. I was looking specifically at an institutional history and expressions of Blackness within it, so I discovered another narrative. His methodology was very different and led to different outcomes.

If he had seen the documents I located, perhaps Cope would have had a different interpretation or read on this project. It probably never occurred to him to look there. And that’s important about scholarly conversations. We all must look at each other and read each other to understand where those alleys and gaps are and to place our work in more perspective. Without the broader context, you miss things. Another scholar that influenced my work is Colin A. Palmer. His book, Slaves of the White God, along with Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, really set the chronology, the template, and framework for studying Black Mexico, at least when I was coming up. So those were the books as a graduate student that I found myself really working with—and against.

GBT: What are some of the current trends in scholarship on race and colonial Latin America and the Caribbean you notice today?

BV: We can get far more specific than we ever have about Black life in the past. We’re talking deeply about individuals now. We know where they live. We know what they did. We know who they interacted with. That level of specificity is exhilarating from my perspective, and we didn’t have as much of that when I was coming up. The questions frequently grappled with the macro themes, or hovered at the society level, so they blended Black life until it lost its some of its individuality. We know far more now about the details of family life than we ever did. There is more cultural history.

I think the advances on what we know about Black life in Africa during this time allows us to link that to Latin America and elsewhere in far more sophisticated ways. Because we understand cultural practices in Africa better and in their regions, it gives us new insights into the smallest things that we can trace in the archives in Latin America.

I think we’ve also come to read through the thickness of the bureaucracy better. We understand mixture better. We understand agency better. We understand power better—economic and political power and how Black people in Latin America shaped it and were impacted by it. We understand the environment far better than we ever did and how that conditioned elements of Black life.

GBT: Where do you think the field of race and colonial Latin America is headed? How do you see yourself as a part of that conversation?

BV: Well, I think this field is going to continue to mature. I think there are so many documents that we have left to find and to go through. You go to any parish archive in Latin America, and I guarantee that there’s a ton of stuff that has never, never, ever been looked at by scholars. And that just speaks to an incredible richness for the future. As historians, good history never forces the present into the past. But we learn from experiences in the present to ask questions of the past. This is a healthy practice. That’s why history as a discipline continues to unfold, evolve, and be vibrant over time. I think we’re going to understand power differently because of what’s happening in the world now. We’re going to imagine race differently and see more subtleties in the archival record. I do think AI and digital tools are going to allow us to understand and process documents better as well.

I’ll never forget when I was first in the Mexican archives and being able to do keyword searches on databases. I was part of the early wave of scholars who had access to digital databases. That literally happened while I was a graduate student in Mexico. People before were looking through card catalogs, and I was able to go through far more documents than my predecessors. Much faster. I did years of work within a year. And that’s only going to grow. I also am excited about the transcontinental work that is possible now across empires, using comparative analysis with greater sophistication to connect to the Philippines, India, you name it. Colonial Latin American history is, I think, going to increasingly become far more global in how it’s informed and how it impacts other fields. The silos of yesterday are going to be breaking down even more than they have.

But I confess that I am worried about cursive. There are so many students who are coming up and they cannot read cursive. Who’s going to be able to read the documents? So, imagine if you must first learn cursive and then the paleography. That’s hard. Paleography itself is hard enough. If you grow up without cursive, wow. But [most likely] there’ll be an AI or digital answer to that too.

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