Alan Malfavon
Alan Malfavon’s first book, Men of the Leeward Port: Veracruz’s Afro-Descendants in the Making of Mexico (under contract with the University of Alabama Press), examines the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and its Sotavento hinterland to rethink the transition from the late colonial to the early national period. Drawing on correspondence, military reports, notarial, ecclesiastical, and judicial archives, his research argues that Afro-Mexicans were central actors in the socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its borderlands, challenging narratives that marginalize Black participation in Mexican state formation.
More broadly, his research situates Mexico within the Atlantic World and Greater Caribbean through the lens of the African diaspora, combining social history and critical archival methodologies to interrogate the silences that have obscured Afro-Mexican agency. By foregrounding the voices and practices of Afro-descendants, he seeks to revise dominant narratives of mestizaje and national identity and to highlight the continuities linking colonial and national histories. His current and future projects extend this work by exploring Veracruz’s connections to the Greater Caribbean culturally, the connections between Veracruz and New Orleans during and after the Spanish colonial period, and the preservation of late-colonial archival sources from Veracruz.
