{"id":7707,"date":"2010-06-24T21:47:12","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T21:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=7707"},"modified":"2012-10-01T20:23:29","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T20:23:29","slug":"blacks-and-blackness-in-central-america-between-race-and-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=7707","title":{"rendered":"Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Duke University Press<\/a>
\nSeptember 2010
\n400 pages
\n21 photographs, 14 tables, 4 maps
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4787-3
\nPaperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4803-0<\/p>\n

Edited By:<\/p>\n

Lowell Gudmundson<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Latin American Studies and History
\nMount Holyoke College<\/em><\/p>\n

Justin Wolfe<\/a><\/strong>, William Arceneaux Associate Professor of Latin American History
\nTulane University<\/em><\/p>\n

Contributors: Paul Lokken, Russell Lohse, Karl H. Offen, Rina C\u00e1ceres G\u00f3mez, Catherine Komisaruk , Juliet Hooker, Lara Putnam, Ronald Harpelle, Mauricio Mel\u00e9ndez Obando<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to Central America<\/a> 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 roots and participation in favor of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions.<\/strong> 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\u2019s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed race majorities as \u201cIndo-Hispanic,\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n

Acknowledgments
\nIntroduction \/ Lowell Gudmundson<\/strong> and Justin Wolfe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part I. Colonial Worlds of Slavery and Freedom<\/strong><\/p>\n