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

The Work of Recognition is about the free and equal citizenship for which people of African descent persisted in struggling on the Caribbean mainland of Colombia. It covers the period from the moment “Congress passed the final emancipation act, which went into effect 1 January 1852,” to the early 1900s. Jason McGraw introduces his subject by quoting black intellectual Candelario Obeso (1849–1884), whose poems were characterized by “a dual vision of citizenship as multiracial belonging and black freedom” that was hard for lettered elites to accept (p. 2). The stubbornness that the book depicts was responsible for the fact that only 17,000 people were still enslaved in the region by 1850. The runaways and the slaves who fought in favor of self-manumission since colonial times were responsible for those numbers and for the prestige that the republic of New Granada earned as a haven for liberty.

McGraw brings forth little-known facts concerning Colombian history, telling, for example, the story of black Brazilians who found refuge in the Caribbean port of Cartagena. However, he also stresses the contradictory nature of those positive moments. While unrelenting injustice and racism continued to force black and indigenous people to flee from the urban centers to the hinterland, where they formed rochelas or autonomous settlements, the educated elites applied the abolition law at a “glacial pace,” manumitting each year only four percent of the remaining slave force. Therefore, the reader will understand the relevance of the manumission ceremonies that different regional governments began to stage during the late 1840s as means to propagate the idea that an age of freedom, equality, and universal citizenship had been inaugurated in the New Granada. Politicians arranged those spectacles to coincide with religious feasts highly relevant to former slaves, such as the Immaculate Conception and Christmas. They consisted of the public liberation of not more than ten slaves in front of as numerous a crowd as possible, assembled in public plazas by the beating of drums.

While McGraw argues that those public performances had a role to play in creating an ethos of equality, his data on the mixed-race bogas, market women, stevedores, and artisans demonstrates that the incorporation of “multihued” workers and peasants in the nation was far from optimal, and that those people persisted in rallying in favor of their full citizenship. Their protest was through unorthodox means. Carnival is mentioned repeatedly, due to its power to attract festive protesters who drew attention not for their political aims but for the supposed immorality of their performances. The book traces back to 1860 the attempts to effectively ban those expressions, adding historical perspective to contemporary attempts to prohibit popular cultural manifestations such as the champeta, a dance based on an African soukus matrix, which is very popular in Cartagena and Palenque.

McGraw contests the general stereotype of the Afro-Caribbean costeños as nonviolent folk by focusing on the violence of which followers of the Enviadista and the Gaitan messianic movements were capable. This violence they directed against opponents such as orthodox priests and nuns, some of whom were killed for not joining their cause. In The Work of Recognition one finds how these millenarian movements partially nourished the Liberal guerrillas, who became active in 1886 and went on to become protagonists of the One Thousand Days War. Unlike mainstream historiography, McGraw gives visibility to Afro-Caribbean commanders who, despite their loyalty and significant efforts to fight within the limits imposed by growing pauperization of their ranks, were nonetheless considered inferior by Liberal commander-in-chief Rafael Uribe Uribe and by other generals from the Andean regions of Antioquia and Tolima. Uribe and the generals therefore they behaved according to the pattern by which people of the tempered geographies of the Andes promote whiteness and civilization, to the disfavor of people of...