On Gentrification and Black Community in CDMX: An Excerpt in Context

On Thursday, October 29th, an excerpt in Provecho Magazine from my forthcoming essay, “How Black Americans in Mexico City Gentrified Our Own Vibe,” circulated and sparked an intended conversation about Black Americans in Mexico City.

If the goal was clicks and comments, that’s been achieved. The problem is the excerpt, selected by the Editor without my involvement, implies that I’m blaming the CDMX Black community for the broader impacts of gentrification on an entire city, when the essay in full is actually an observation of the impact of our (privileged immigrant) community’s explosive growth on the social fabric within our own community over the last six years I’ve called CDMX home, including two years owning and operating Blaxicocina, the city’s very first Soul Food restaurant.

A more thoughtfully-chosen excerpt could have represented what this piece actually is: a post-Blaxicocina deeply personal rumination set against two very different Juneteenth experiences that speak to the essay’s broader points about the current state of the U.S. Black American experience in Mexico City.

It centers on how the nature of our community has changed alongside CDMX, and how the competition to capitalize on that growth and capture each others’ dollars has complicated the very sense of softer life and community many of us came here seeking. And it asks, what, if anything can we do about it if we even want to?

Below I’ve included an extended excerpt of the nearly 5,000 word piece. The full essay will appear in print in the upcoming edition of Provecho Magazine. Ahead of publication I’ll also be discussing this and other thoughts about it on my YouTube channel so I invite you to follow me there.

In the meantime, I invite you to look through the Blaxicocina highlights on the top of my Instagram page to see the legacy of the community space I dreamed of, built with my own money, and ultimately walked away from. And I did all this in a new country, in my second language, and out of sheer will and desire to explore the little-known connections between Black Americans from the U.S. and Mexicans through food. If you were there, you were there, and you know BLX was something special for Black & Brown folks alike. Nothing like it has existed since, and I’m not sure anything like it ever will.

Thanks for reading.

“How Black Americans in Mexico City Gentrified Our Own Vibe.” : An Extended Excerpt

The elephant in the room is that I’m one of the Black Americans who came to Mexico City looking for a softer life, found it, and saw the writing on the wall that told me that, if I built a soul food restaurant, my people would come, and I’d be able to continue to live the life I wanted in Mexico City.

Blaxicocina, despite all the love and intention I poured into it trying to be the most considerate and self-aware gentrifier I could be, existed within the very wave of migration that has transformed the city and angered its residents to the point of collective protest. La mera neta–I still have an apartment in CDMX that I sublet to mostly other foreigners (because I can’t afford to live in it either since closing the restaurant, nor can I afford to let it go either without knowing with certainty where I’m moving next). That reality weighs on me daily, especially as more and more Chilangos take to the streets to forcefully demonstrate against the presence of the English language everywhere, the rising cost of living and the way entire neighborhoods have been reshaped to accommodate people like me (as opposed to the demands our country puts on immigrants to assimilate in every aspect of daily life). That said, I’m not trying to write this piece from a place of moral superiority. I’m guilty too. I benefited from the same conditions that allowed me to build the life I loved here, but I’m clear-eyed about the depth of my American privilege and asking my kinfolk to join me in introspecting and scrutinizing our community too.

As Black people from the United States, we know what gentrification looks and feels like because many of us have lived through the experience in the cities we come from. We know it when the neighborhood we’ve always known suddenly doesn’t feel like it’s for us anymore. We know it when the corner mom-and-pop shop becomes an “artisanal” coffee shop, and when the people who made a place feel like home slowly stop showing up to the spots we always came together in. And yet with all that in mind, somewhere along our respective “blaxit” journeys, I think we unwittingly recreated our own version of that dynamic in Mexico City. It didn’t necessarily happen by pricing each other out of apartments or pushing out small, vulnerable businesses (though we’ve contributed to that too). No, instead it looked, and continues to look, like disinterest in knowing our host country beyond the ways we can benefit economically from it, turning our community into a commodity by monetizing our vibe, creating events and developing opportunities that, through English or other non-verbal cues, present as welcoming of everyone across the diaspora and Mexico while simultaneously alienating Brown folks in their own country, at times including Afro-Mexicans, and then selectively claiming anti-Blackeness (whether justified or not) when we’re called out on it and asked to do better, as if it’s impossible for us to also (knowingly or unknowingly) engage in some of the same behaviors we criticize the yts for back home on the Plantation, the United States. It’s the tacit consent or outright defense of scammers and predators that live and party among us plus inviting anyone and everyone into our sacred spaces for the sake of “getting the bag,” even if it means courting white tech bros or other monied cultural voyeurs.

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Tiara Darnell is a food writer, chef, and multimedia journalist whose work explores the African diaspora through food and travel. She founded Blaxicocina, formerly Mexico City’s first Black American soul food restaurant, now a platform for food writing, immersive culinary tours, and storytelling rooted in Afro-diasporic foodways. Her work highlights the people, places, and recipes preserving culinary traditions across Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond.