Afro-Mexican activist among U.S. global anti-racism honorees

• This year's award recognizes six civil society leaders from Bolivia, Ghana, North Macedonia, Mexico, Nepal, and the Netherlands for their courage and leadership in advancing racial equity and human rights.

Zoom in: Duarte leads seminars on gender, reproductive health, and human rights and has fiercely advocated for public policies that promote equity for Afro-Mexicans.

• She has told stories of being stopped by authorities in Mexico and threatened with deportation even though she's a Mexican citizen.
• She is among the activists who convinced the Mexican government to recognize Afro-Mexicans in the government's census a few years ago for the first time.

Zoom out: "The work she's done for over three decades now to raise the visibility, the exposure, the representation of Afro-Mexicans is just remarkable," Desirée Cormier Smith, the State Department's special representative for racial equity and justice.

• Smith says Duarte has put herself at great risk to help other Afro-Mexicans around education, health care and economic development.
• That's because talking about the discrimination brings up other issues around equality and racism in Mexico, Smith says.

What they're saying: "The Mexican government has tried to comply with the quotas at the international level, pretending that it 'recognizes us'," Duarte tells Axios.

• "But the population has never been properly educated, and most of the country is ignorant of the history" of Afro-Mexicans.

• She says says only some communities in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz are recognized as Afro-Mexican.

Background: Two out of 100 Mexicans, or around 2.5 million people, identified as Black in Mexico's 2020 Census.

• Black communities are primarily found in Veracruz — where the Spanish disembarked enslaved people from Africa — and the coast of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where Afro Indigenous traditions from colonial times endure.
• Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles and of people who fled U.S. slavery in the 1830s after Mexico outlawed the practice, live in Coahuila state, which borders the U.S.

Yes, but: An unknown number of Mexicans and Mexican Americans also are descendants of those who took part in the Underground Railroad to Mexico — loosely organized paths allowing enslaved Black people in the U.S. to escape bondage by fleeing south.

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