Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present ed. by Laura Gotkowitz (review)

Originating out of a conference held in 2002, this anthology brings together a multidisciplinary and international group of scholars interested in the articulation, enactment, and contestation of race in the two subregions of Latin America most closely associated with indigenous people. Bolivia receives the lion's share of the attention (the subject of seven of the book's 14 case studies), and considerable attention is also devoted to recent historical developments (nine chapters concern the period from the 1920s onward).

With its sweeping geographical and chronological coverage, the volume could easily have fallen prey to centrifugal forces. That it does not owes a great deal to Gotkowitz's editorial hand, and to the framework she establishes in the book's introduction. She argues convincingly that the rise in racialized rhetoric and violence targeting the region's contemporary indigenous rights movements reveals the resiliency of presumably long-discredited biological notions of race. The virulence of this onslaught not only calls into question the supposedly distinct (and softer) form of Latin American racism posited by many scholars, which in extreme form can deny its very existence, but also draws attention to how the state and elite have continually redeployed race's constituent elements to buttress social hierarchies along spatial, occupational, and gender lines, among others. Race of course can cut both ways, becoming a vehicle of empowerment and solidarity for the subaltern. Yet, as Florencia Mallon argues in the volume's conclusion, even those historical junctures that gave rise to the most serious challenges to the status quo (early nineteenth-century liberalism and later socialist movements) "have let racial hierarchies back in through the side door" through their reliance on "enduring teleologies of 'progress,' 'education,' and 'modernity'" (p. 335). The volume thus takes its cue from historian Thomas Holt by shifting the discussion away from the nature of race to questions concerning "what kind of work race does" and what effects race has (p. 10).

The collection makes especially clear how race worked through labor, education, and cultural production from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Arturo Taracena Arriola and Rossana Barragán, for instance, argue that discriminatory labor practices and state censuses reinforced and perpetuated racial distinctions in Guatemala and Bolivia by equating Indians with agricultural workers. Segregation proved attractive to elites threatened by indigenous mobilization, a position that seemingly contradicted liberal calls for Indian assimilation in the name of national unity. This point is made most powerfully by Brooke Larson, who details the abandonment of Bolivia's early twentieth-century rural literacy program in favor of schools that emphasized the manual arts. The shift was prompted by anxieties concerning the uptick of rural migration to cities, which had been envisioned as non-Indian spaces of privilege, and by Indian leaders and activists who understood that literacy empowered communities to protest the liberal assault on communal landholding (Esteban Ticona Alejo's profile of a contemporary urban Aymara activist nicely complements these findings). Finally, Seemin Qayum and Deborah Poole offer fascinating analyses of how Bolivia's Tiwanaka monument and Mexico's Guelaguetza festival have been deployed by outsiders to construct a selective reading of the indigenous past for nationalist aims. Together they show the appropriation of indigenous heritage and history, and the resulting tightening of existing hierarchies through the exclusion of marginalized groups and the establishment of criteria for judging cultural authenticity.

In short, this is an anthology whose whole is clearly more than the sum of its parts. Especially noteworthy is how well the essays speak to one another, placing in sharp relief both the similarities and differences at play across space and time. It is unfortunate that a similar effort was not extended to updating many of the individual bibliographies so that the pieces might engage more directly with scholarship produced since the original conference...