Juan D. Delgado is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is interested in the political recognition of Afrodescendent populations in Latin America to understand how processes of nation-state formation shape the emergence of political actors, cultural categories and social groups. Juan’s dissertation focuses on the politics of ethno-racial politicization in Colombia and Mexico and explains, in comparative perspective, why only some Latin American states have extended group-differentiated rights to people of African descent. His dissertation developed a mixed-methods strategy that combined data from official reports, in-depth interviews, archival sources, and ethnographic observations collected during more than 18 months of multi-sited fieldwork. Juan’s findings suggest that divergent trajectories of ethno-racial recognition can be explained by differences in long-term projects of nation-state formation, practices of ethno-political organization, and critical junctures of regime change. This project has received generous support from the UCLA Institute of American Cultures (IAC), the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).