Blacks and Blackness in Central America , livre ebook

417

pages

English

Ebooks

2010

Écrit par
Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe (Editors)

Publié par
Duke University Press

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417

pages

English

Ebook

2010

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

18 octobre 2010

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822393139

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

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 nonindigenous 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 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 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 the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.Contributors. Rina Caceres Gomez, Lowell Gudmundson, Ronald Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul Lokken, Mauricio Melendez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam, Justin Wolfe

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

18 octobre 2010

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822393139

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

blacks&in central america blackness

Between Race and Place

edited byLowell Gudmundson&Justin Wolfe

duke university press

durham& london

2010

©2010Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paperb Designed by Katy Clove Typeset in Minion by Achorn International, Inc. Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

contents

acknowledgments vii introduction Lowell Gudmundson&Justin Wolfe1 lpart i colonial worlds of slavery& freedom

angolans in amatitlán Sugar, African Migrants, andGente Ladinain Colonial Guatemala Paul Lokken27

cacao and slavery in matina, costa rica, 1650–1750 Russell Lohse57

race and place in colonial mosquitia, 1600–1787 Karl H. Offen92

slavery and social differentiation Slave Wages in Omoa Rina Cáceres Gómez130

becoming free, becoming ladino Slave Emancipation andMestizaje in Colonial Guatemala Catherine Komisaruk150

lpart ii nation building&race reinscribing

the cruel whip “ ” Race and Place in NineteenthCentury Nicaragua Justin Wolfe177

what difference did color make? Blacks in the “White Towns” of Western Nicaragua in the1880s Lowell Gudmundson209

race and the space of citizenship The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua Juliet Hooker246

eventually alien The Multigenerational Saga of British West Indians in Central America,1870–1940 Lara Putnam278

white zones American Enclave Communities of Central America Ronald Harpelle307

the slow ascent of the marginalized AfroDescendants in Costa Rica and Nicaragua Mauricio Meléndez Obando334

bibliography353

contributors385 index389

acknowledgments

This book emerged out of an international conference hostedl at Tulane University. We invited scholars from Central Amer ica, the United States, and elsewhere to explore the history of people of African descent throughout the mainland Caribbean in an effort not just to insert Central America into the African diaspora, but to expose the deep connections between this region and the wider Caribbean. Our re lated goal was to challenge diaspora scholars everywhere to expand their analytical approaches to include areas whose own diasporan histories do not always t so readily into traditional frameworks. This effort would not have been possible without the generous support of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane and the Dean of Faculty’s Ofce at Mount Holyoke College. Support was also provided by Tulane University’s Center for Scholars, the Department of History, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Latin American Library. Thomas Reese, director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, always understood the importance of this research and championed our cause. Thanks to him and the staff of the Stone Center, our contribu tors found a welcoming reception at Tulane and the conference reached a wide and engaged public. Denise Frazier, Amisha Sharma, RichardConway, and Edith Wolfe at Tulane and Dawn Larder and Mary Heyer at Mount Holyoke all contributed to the smooth running of the confer ence. The research leading to the essays by Cáceres, Meléndez, and Gud mundson was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Program (Grant #RZ2070401), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. Gudmundson translated from the Spanish original the essays by Cáceres and Meléndez for this volume. The map for

our introductory essay was prepared by Donald Sluter of the Department of Geography at the University of Massachusetts. The participants in the conference made for an exceptionally rich ex perience. In particular the commentaries by George Reid Andrews, Jane Landers, Paul Lovejoy, and Christopher Lutz helped us and our authorssharpen our arguments and our comparative perspective. We particularly thank our contributors, without whom neither the conference nor this collection would have been possible. Bringing together scholars working in disparate time periods and geographies challenged us all and has made our work better for the effort. Throughout the editorial process Valerie Millholland has been helpfuland enthusiastic, as well as patient at the right moments. So, too, were Miriam Angress and Neal McTighe as we headed toward nal produc tion, and Scott Smiley, whose index marvelously bridges our themes and ideas across the chapters. We thank the anonymous readers, whose cri tiques pressed for the collection to speak more widely across elds and regions. With their help we hope to offer novel perspectives to a broad social science and historical readership. At the same time we offer fresh paths and clues for those inhabitants of the region seeking to remember and reframe historical legacies and processes so assiduously forgotten by Central American nationstates and citizens alike.

viii Acknowledgments

introduction Lowell Gudmundson&Justin Wolfe

The remarkableﬂowering of scholarship on the history of Af l ricans and their descendants in the Americas produced since the Second World War has been one of the most fruitful developments of historical and sociological knowledge worldwide. The great majority of that scholarship has focused on nations and areas where Africandescent populations are both recognized as such today and comprise the majority population either regionally or nationally. The islands of the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil have been the preferred setting for this ex traordinary expansion of knowledge and remain so for scholars today. On the margins, both geographically and conceptually, of that emerging Black Atlantic framework can be found the Hispanic mainland Caribbean nations from Mexico through Central America and Panama, to Colom bia and Venezuela. Here one ﬁnds little recognition, in either popular or scholarly terms, of the region’s dominant role in the earliest colonial slave trade or of the fact that people of African descent constituted the majority of nonindigenous populations long thereafter. Similarly, despite (or per haps because of) the centrality of these people and imageries of blackness in the later development of national identities and historical conscious ness, these same nationstates have often countenanced widespread prac tices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. These histories should trouble our analyses of race and diaspora. This region is not an anomaly or a marginal case, but rather the setting of historical trajectories that necessarily challenge both empirical and theoretical scholarship. Re search on the isthmus must be seen as more than additive—the inclusion of forgotten peoples and histories; it has been transformative. Histories of slavery, segregation, and racism in the mainland Hispanic Caribbean un derpinned the emergence of new ideals of freedom, equality, democracy,

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