Gudmundson, Lowell and Justin Wolfe, eds.

Blacks &
Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, pp.406. ISBN: 9780-8223-4803-0.
This collection of essays begin to recover the forgotten and
downplayed histories of people of African heritage in Central
America, demonstrating the centrality of African people to the
regions history from the earliest colonial times to the present.
They reveal how modem nationalist attempts to define mixedrace majorities as Indo-Hispanic, or as anything but African,
clash with the historical record of the first region of the
Americas in which African people not only gained the right to
vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency,
iDiitn I m-rOGudmumtum (r [,unn Wolfr
following independence from Spain in 1821. Hence, this work
tells the story of how 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
African people. Furthermore, the postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race
ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and
political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a
powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central
America to identify as something other than African, reinforcing the tendency of local and
foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African world community in the
Americas. The contributors to this volume include Rina Cceres Gmez, co-editor Lowell
Gudmundson (professor of Latin American Studies and History at Mount Holyoke College),
Ronald Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul Lokken, Mauricio
Melndez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam, and co-editor Justin Wolfe (the William
Arceneaux Associate Professor of Latin American History at Tulane University).

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The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.4, no.4, December 2011