In its fourteenth year, the Tepoztlán Institute seeks to interrogate the structural, political, cultural, and social features of black lives and black deaths. Across the Americas, we witness the continuation and exacerbation of political and racial tensions through diverse phenomena such as the mass-incarceration of people of color, controversial police killings of unarmed black men, the disproportionate violence towards black transgender individuals and the profound structural violence of economic disparities affecting the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, more recent migrants, and larger contemporary black communities. At the same time, the frontiers of black and indigenous identities in places as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, and the Southern Cone are shifting as the reevaluation of racial legacies in post-Castro Cuba unfolds. Networks such as the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora have been organizing for decades for social justice, along with newer voices, including the Movement for Black Lives. In 2015, the UN proclaimed the International Decade for People of African Descent to address the effects of centuries of racial violence. Our focus at once aims to reflect and engage more deeply with the imbrication of race, racism, and racial difference in processes of state formation and administration, migration and exile, racial segregation (as well as forced congregation), and representations of race in culture and the arts. We invite scholarship that approaches and analyzes these topics and themes in the interdisciplinary intersections of the social sciences and humanities, whether these reflections lead us to the microhistories of local and regional dynamics in the Americas or the philosophical underpinnings of universalism, humanism, science, and religion.

Broadly, this year’s theme acknowledges the degree to which the dispossession of black people has historically created—and continues to create—the very conditions of archival fragmentation that work to obscure black histories from view. Writing blackness from the archive necessarily makes several demands: that we complicate our understanding of terms like “agency” and “resistance,” instead learning to think beyond projects of recovery; that we interrogate the violence of the archive’s very creation; and that we acknowledge our own complicity in the spectacularization of suffering by repeating and proliferating these accounts. How can activists, historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and others theorists challenge the archival and epistemic violences of erasure and confront our complicity in black deaths?

Connecting the past, present, and future of histories of racial violence and enduring acts and movements of resistance, this year’s Institute examines our inheritance of race and racisms, acknowledging the relative erasure of Afro-Latin American experiences within the divergent histories and historiographies, ethnographies, literary work and further knowledge production of/in the region.