Negotiating Identities in Modern Latin America (review)

In Negotiating Identities in Modern Latin America, Hendrik Kraay has brought together scholars from varying stages in their career (many of whom have a Canadian connection) to reflect upon Latin America’s fluid notions of individual and collective self. ‘Identity’ is a very loose concept, as the editor acknowledges, difficult to pin down, and difficult to study. A boom in the field of ‘identity studies’ in the 1990s has given us many useful axes of analysis – gender, class, age, sexuality, and habitats, among others. The authors of this collection draw upon this literature and make advancements of their own. The editor wishes to move away from the highly politicized and visible ‘identity politics’ to the day-to-day meanings of identity. The key to this book is the use of plural, identities. One can be both Indigenous and Mexican, Bolivian yet Argentine at the same time. Identity is a social construct, not necessarily ordained from the top down but worked out on the ground.

The first section, composed of three chapters, focuses on elite projects of national identity. Kraay contributes an essay on civic rituals in the streets of mid-nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, celebrations that limited who would be included in the new nation. Similar themes of exclusion from the nation are played out in the following two chapters – one by Stephen Neufeld on the modernization of the Mexican army and changing masculinities during the years of Porfirio Díaz, and a chapter by Gregg P. Bocketti on the transition of football (soccer) from an elite-based and European-styled pastime to a national sport that included non-white and lower-class players.

Section 2 turns from local elites to foreigners in Latin America. Louise H. Guenther studies how Brazilians remained aloof from British abolitionists and investors, despite admiring their mercantile and technical success in Bahia. In neighboring Peru, it was the Americans who tried to keep themselves apart from their Peruvian hosts by maintaining distinct culinary practices, as evinced by Ronald N. Harpelle’s close read of a cookbook used by wives of us oilmen stationed there. But foreigners did not have to come from far away to be different. As María Eugenia Brockmann Dannenmaier shows in her interviews with migrant Bolivians, who had returned after decades of working in Argentina, that identity remained fixed to an identifiable Bolivian home, despite years abroad and with family members who had permanently settled in the host country.

Section 3 turns to race and identity. Here Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz argues for a more complex understanding of tensions within the early Rio de Janeiro’s labour movement that does not reduce struggles to differences between black Brazilians and white immigrant coffee and warehouse workers. Jennifer J. Manthei interviews female Brazilian youth of various socio-economic backgrounds to show how the image of the mulatto woman – a central racialized and gendered figure in tourism and carnival – is interpreted according to one’s aspirations, rather than established national symbolic meanings.

Section 4 looks at Indigenous communities and their negotiation over identity. Denise Fay Brown considers Chemax in Mexico and how Maya members maintained a localized identity, despite economic migration, through the maintenance of property and celebration of local festivities. Located in the Mayan Riviera, distant from the capital of Mexico City, Chemax might be considered a frontier region. Such is the case for the community of El Angosto on the Argentine border of Bolivia. Yet the contrast between these two Indigenous communities is striking, for while in Brown’s chapter the Maya members of Chemex seem far from trying to bolster a Mexican identity, the Angosteños studied by Marjorie M. Snipes see themselves as defenders of Argentina. The chapter by Julie Gibbings offers yet another study in contrast, for while the state seems relatively far away in the two previous chapters, it is the Guatemalan state that has defined Uaxactún options since the 1980s state-led violence to the more recent state-controlled environmentalism...