Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (review)

This collection of essays came out of a 2004 conference on the history of the African diaspora in an area stretching from Panama to Guatemala. It includes five articles on the colonial period and six that focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were written by 11 of the leading scholars in the field, three of them from Central America. By compiling the articles into a single volume the editors remind scholars of Latin America, as well as those who study the African diaspora, of the role that African people and their descendants have played in shaping these societies. Blackness is much more typically associated with the insular Caribbean and Brazil. The editors suggest, however, that an examination of the Central American experience will not only help to fill in gaps within African diaspora studies, but by highlighting different kinds of experiences may even break new conceptual ground.

The first five articles are solid and together provide a good picture of the Caribbean coast in the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, most of them are centered on slavery, although they acknowledge the importance of free blacks. They show that many of the region's slaves had a great deal of autonomy, a condition apparently rooted in the subordinate role of slavery, especially on the frontier. Russell Lohse recounts how, in the absence of their owners, slaves in Matina (Costa Rica) managed cacao plantations, which needed sometimes as little as two slaves. These men (for slave women remained in the Central Valley) provided for their own needs and participated in Caribbean trade networks. In this manner they blurred the distinction between slave and peasant. So did the slaves building the port of Omoa in Honduras, as studied by Rina Cáceres: they received wages and were responsible for their own reproduction. Both Cáceres and Lohse attribute the flexibility of slavery partly to what they call the humid and unhealthy climate of the coast. It made plantation owners live elsewhere and contributed to the replacement of subsistence rations by daily wages in Omoa. In a similar setting—the hot, humid, and forested Pacific coast of Colombia—slavery, although of paramount importance, was also relatively flexible. Catherine Komisaruk gives further evidence of slaves' autonomy through freedom of movement and maintenance of crops, but away from the coast in Guatemala and into the nineteenth century. She concentrates on slaves' ability to use the legal system to negotiate the conditions of their servitude.

Slavery lost importance relatively early in Central America and as Komisaruk reminds us, the descendants of Africans mixed with other Hispanicized free people and were eventually considered to be part of the general category of ladino, an umbrella term used to designate those considered non-indigenous. In his study of the sugar plantations of Amatitlán (Guatemala), Paul Lokken emphasizes that the category gente ladina, which emerged during the second half of the seventeenth century, included persons of African descent. He shows, therefore, that ladinos are not simply mestizos (understood as the mixture of Spanish and Indian), as has been generally thought. Alfonso Múnera (Fronteras imaginadas, 2005) has made a similar claim for the term libres de todos los colores in New Granada, which has been equated to mixed-bloods by many historians. He reminds us that free blacks were also part of this category. Both Múnera and Lokken seek greater recognition for the role that African descendants played in the histories they study, a role partially masked by social classifications and the ideological readings of them.

In his fascinating study of the Mosquitia, Karl Offen contributes to our understanding of colonial social categories as he delves into the ways that Mosquitos classified themselves internally and vis-à-vis others. Mosquito understanding of social divisions owed much to the complex Caribbean realities of migration, trade, and war that several articles in this volume highlight. They divided themselves into Sambo (those who...