Serving React frontend and Flask backend using Nginx as a reverse proxy - reactjs

Question

I've been trying to set up a React frontend and a Flask backend using Nginx as a reverse proxy to differentiate the two. I have the flask backend running a Gunicorn server on localhost:5000, but I can't seem to get the Nginx location block to register it. My config file looks like this:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/[react-app-domain-name]/html;
index index.html index.htm;
access_log /var/log/nginx/reverse-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/reverse-error.log;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ = 404;
}
location /api {
include proxy_params;
proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
}
}
My understanding is that this should route all traffic through my react app at root, except for requests that have "/api", which should then be routed through my backend Flask api. However, when I try to access a /api route, all I get back is a 404 response. This also happens if I true to access it through curl on the command line.
Here's the 404 error log that I have:
2020/09/09 21:03:05 [crit] 36926#36926: *114 connect() to unix:/home/[name]/backend/backend.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: , request: "GET /api/ HTTP/1.0", upstream: "http://unix:/home/[name]/backend/backend.sock:/api/", host: "[hostname]"
Any help would be very much appreciated. I'm tearing my hair out here. Thanks.