Book Reviews

Gudmundson, Lowell and Wolfe, Justin (eds.) (2010) Blacks and Blackness in Central
America: Between Race and Place, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), + 406 pp.
70.00 hbk, 16.99 pbk.
Some of the most fascinating and necessary research that has come out of Latin American
studies in recent years arises from painstaking archival work that has reshaped our
understanding of slavery and colonisation for indigenous and African peoples in the
Americas. This valuable collection of essays convenes historians and social scientists
whose work examines the history of race relations particularly the apparent erasure
of African origins in Central America. Both highly informative and a pleasure to
read, the edition provides abundant new archival research that addresses the question
of how African slaves, free people of colour and their many generations of descendants
who have lived in Central America since the sixteenth century have disappeared
into the socio-cultural landscape or been cast into marginal spaces of geographical,
racial and cultural difference. Not surprisingly, many of the contributors identify
racial mixing as a relevant factor. During the colonial period, for example, slaves and
free people of colour formed mixed families together as well as with indigenous and
mestizo populations. They also forged strategic matrimonial bonds in order to secure
freedom, property and power for themselves and their children. These unions partially
explain the integration of Afro-descendants into Central American societies. Perhaps
more significantly, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Central
American countries participated in the wider project of Latin American nation-building
and promoted national myths of mestizaje that celebrated Amerindian and European
origins while excluding African presence.
Mestizaje may seem an obvious explanation for the gradual diminishing of a racial
or ethnic group over time; but the research in this collection is fresh, nuanced and hardly
trite. The essays point to multiple complex forces that converge to suppress blackness.
Each contributor has undertaken careful documentary research on a particular country,
geography or strictly delimited time period. As such, the eleven chapters stand as unique
pieces of scholarship, but they are also highly complementary and together comprise an
instructive representation of racial dynamics in Central America from the seventeenth
2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research 2012 Society for Latin American Studies
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Book Reviews
to the twentieth century. In short, the researchers reveal how untenable a denial of
blackness and black historical agency is for Central America or any part of the
Americas, for that matter when countered with patent historical evidence.
The eleven essays in the collection are divided into two historical timeframes. Five
chapters that treat the colonial period reinforce what archival research on Africans
in the Americas has consistently revealed: that categories of slavery and freedom and
notions of race were highly fluid. Both slaves and free people of colour wielded power
through skilled labour, selective matrimony, property holding, manipulation of the law
and the strategic exploitation of tensions between Spaniards and British. Six essays
on nation-building and race relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show
that although nationalist ideologies of mixing coupled with exclusionary race- and
place-based practices intended to erase blackness, the reality is that many central actors
in Central American history and culture have been Afro-descendants, even when they
have not self-identified as such.
A few omissions in the book by no means minimise the importance of this research
to the fields of Latin American studies and race studies in the Americas. The edition
contains a few maps, graphs and images. This reviewer, however, would have welcomed
even more maps, particularly to identify some of the Central American sites less familiar
to specialists of other regions of Afro-Latin America who will likely form a significant
portion of the books readership. Similarly, readers who undertake their own archival
research would benefit from an explicit list of the various national, regional and local
archives in Central America that contributors have consulted for their work. (This
information can be found with some effort in the endnotes for each essay.) Another
possibility might have been to divide the editions bibliography into primary and
secondary sources so that researchers could more easily locate documents of particular
interest. This reviewer also wondered why Panama received relatively little attention
while Nicaragua and the Mosquito Coast appeared to occupy such centrality in the
research. Perhaps the editors determined that Panama has more readily embraced its
African origins while Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador
have yet to discern their racial pasts. Finally, it is curious that an important transnational
Afro-descendant population such as the Garifuna receives barely a mention in the book.
Notwithstanding these reservations, Blacks and Blackness in Central America offers
exemplary archival research on Latin American race and ethnicity that will certainly
appeal to students and scholars alike.
Margaret M. Olsen
Macalester College

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2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research 2012 Society for Latin American Studies
Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 2