The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship by Jason McGraw (review)

This well-researched, passionate study focuses on the negative attitudes of literate white elites, particularly in Colombia’s interior, toward the black population in the Caribbean zone and on the struggle of coastal blacks for social recognition and citizenship (including the long-delayed right to vote. McGraw examines the whites’ contempt for the Caribbean blacks’ population via their frustration with, and anger about, the lack of discipline of the bogas—black males who painfully propelled their boats up the Magdalena River with poles. He suggests that white elites in Colombia’s interior welcomed the introduction of steamboats on the river because it lessened the necessity of relying on the bogas. Steamboats could go upriver in eight or nine days compared to the more than a month that the poled boats took.

Also examined are the cases of two Caribbean blacks who became educated: Candelario Obeso became a writer; his literary status among the white literati appears to have been at best ambiguous. Luis A. Robles, who became governor of the State of Magdalena, appears to have been an unmitigated success.

In treating Colombia’s “Regeneration” years (1884–1898), McGraw undoubtedly is correct in emphasizing the damaging effect of extreme monetary inflation on the black population of the Caribbean. Other poor people in Colombia must have been similarly affected. The role of blacks who fought for the defeated Liberal rebels in the War of a Thousand Days that followed the Regeneration years (1899–1902) was compromised by the inability of Liberal elite leaders to communicate effectively with the black rank and file in the Caribbean zone.

This book is based on deep and original research and explores in considerable depth social themes not previously treated in the literature. Other scholars, notably Helg and Lasso, have also dealt with the social or political status of black populations in Colombia’s Caribbean zone but in earlier periods.¹ McGraw’s literary analysis of Obeso’s work is as close as the book gets to interdisciplinary work.