Blacks & Blackness in Central America

by Gudmundson, Lowell; Wolfe, Justin; Lokken, Paul (CON); Lohse, Russell (CON); Offen, Karl H. (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822347873
• ISBN10: 0822347873
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-27
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted the majority of non-indigenous populations in the region long thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development ofmestizoor mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African roots and participation in favour of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region's history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed race majorities as "Indo-Hispanic," or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of a region considered by many to be one of the most successful cases of African American achievement, political participation, and power following independence from Spain in 1821. Contributors: Rina Caacute;ceres Goacute;mez; Ronald Harpelle; Juliet Hooker; Catherine Komisaruk; Russell Lohse; Paul Lokken; Mauricio Meleacute;ndez Obando; Karl H. Offen; Lara Putnam

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Colonial Worlds of Slavery and Freedom

Angolans in Amatitlán: Sugar, African Migrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala

Cacao and Slavery in Matina, Costa Rica, 1650-1750

Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600-1787

Slavery and Social Differentiation: Slave Wages in Omoa

Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation and Mestizaje in Colonial Guatemala

Nation Building and Reinscribing Race

"The Cruel Whip": Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua

What Difference Did Color Make? Blacks in the "White Towns" of Western Nicaragua in the 1880s

Race And The Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast And The Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua

Eventually Alien: The Multigenerational Saga of British West Indians in Central America, 1870-1940

White Zones: American Enclave Communities of Central America

The Slow Ascent of the Marginalized: Afro-Descendants in Costa Rica and Nicaragua

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

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