Mexico Has Started Counting Its Afro-Mexican Population in the National Census Ana Campoy - Quartz
go to original December 10, 2015

Everyone counts. (Pharmpro)

For the first time ever, people of African descent living in Mexico were able to identify themselves as black in the national census.

Mexico’s 2015 population survey, released Dec. 8, counted 1.38 million people of African heritage, representing 1.2% of the country’s population. Most live in three coastal states, including Guerrero, where they account for nearly 7% of the population, and overall they are poorer and less educated than the national average, Mexico’s census bureau (INEGI by its acronym in Spanish) has found.

Including an “Afro” category in the census is part of a push to recognize Latin America’s black communities. Like the US, Latin America and the Caribbean have a history of slavery that resulted in a large number of residents of African descent - about 150 million, accounting for about 30% of the region’s population, according to the United Nations.

Similar to their American counterparts, Latin America’s black population also has been the target of racism, something that some countries are starting to address with anti-discrimination laws and affirmative-action policies. Governments have also committed to making more improvements to protect black Latin Americans as part of the UN’s international decade for people of African descent, which started this year.

But there’s still a long way to go for black Latin Americans to achieve equal status. Earlier this month, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, speaking at a meeting in Brasilia, said he was “struck by the enormity of the task before us.”

Read the rest at Quartz

Related: Mexico: 1.4 Million Afro-Mexicans Counted in Their First Census Survey - INEGI (Mexico Voices)

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