Book Reviews / General and Sources

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Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. Edited by
lowell gudmundson and justin wolfe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 406 pp. Paper,
$24.95.
This ambitious volume aims to explore new territories by taking on the intellectual task
of remapping the forgotten and downplayed history of people of African descent in the
Americas. Primarily focusing on Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua,
Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe put together a compelling collection of essays
that, as a whole, aims to demonstrate how historians have consistently misrepresented
the importance of African Americans to the history of Central America. Gudmundson
and Wolfe have gathered the leading scholars on the topic for Blacks and Blackness in Central America, so that every chapter of the text contributes to the collective goal of putting
Central America on the African diaspora map.
Gudmundson and Wolfes introduction situates the book within the larger historiography on slavery and race relations in the Americas from colonial times to the
present, highlighting how historians have primarily focused their research on blacks
and blackness in countries such as Brazil, Cuba, the United States, or the islands of the
Caribbean. According to the editors, the history of African-descended peoples in Central America has been doomed to play a marginal role in the construction of what Paul
Gilroy defined as the black Atlantic framework, a framework itself within the margins
of academia. This book responds to the necessity of pushing for novel understandings
of the African diaspora, an area of study that has been dominated by North Atlantic and
Anglophone scholarship. Thus, this project aims to move beyond the tendency in Latin
American historiography to focus on what Frank Tannenbaum described in the 1940s as
slave societies. As this volume demonstrates through its analysis of the black populations racial identification and political participation in the construction of the Central
American nation-state, Central America played an important role during the slave trade
from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, an insight that revitalizes
the discussion of black diaspora studies. The collection forces scholars to develop new
working definitions in order to understand the historical trajectories of people of African
descent in the Americas, trajectories that have been marginalized by not only states but
also academia.
The volume is chronologically divided into two sections: Colonial Worlds of
Slavery and Freedom and Nation Building and Reinscribing Race. The first section
depicts slave labor in Guatemalas sugar plantations and in cacao plantations in Costa
Rica. Paul Lokken, Russell Lohse, Rina Cceres Gmez, and Catherine Komisaruk share a common interest in understanding the dismantling of slave labor and the
strategies used by slaves to obtain freedom. Karl H. Offen portrays the racial relations
between the Tawira Mosquito peoples, the Afro-A merindian Sambos, and the British
and Spanish empires, tracing a unique identity situated between empires. The second
section incorporates Nicaragua into the analysis through Juliet Hooker, Lowell Gud-

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mundson, and Justin Wolfes shared interest in understanding that countrys social and
racial construction during the postslavery period. Lara Putnam and Ronald Harpelle
explore the development of race and gender relations after 1870 by studying black workers at banana plantations, railroads, and the Panama Canal. These last two articles serve
as fine examples of how to write transnational histories of race and gender in Central
America. Lastly, in the course of what is, in my opinion, the weakest article of the volume, Mauricio Melndez Obando traces the African roots of some notable Costa Ricans
and Nicaraguans. Unfortunately, Melndezs article seems a lost opportunity to further
explore the importance of race in the nation-building processes of Nicaragua and Costa
Rica through the use of genealogies.
Finally, I believe that the book could have benefited from the inclusion of a theoretical discussion on the place of black Central Americans within the larger analytical
scope of either the black Atlantic or the African diaspora. In spite of this theoretical
weakness, these articles constitute a solid point of departure for further research on the
role of blacks in Central Americas nation-building process. The work of this group of
scholars should encourage others to undertake similar academic projects, and it serves as
proof of the importance of building academic networks and organizing conferences on
understudied fields.
Clearly, such an abbreviated summary of the books contents does not do justice
to the complexities of an edited volume. Blacks and Blackness in Central America aims to
question the processes through which Central American historians have misrepresented
the role of blacks in the construction of their nations. This by itself makes this volume
an indispensable text for anyone interested in Latin American history.

cristin castro garca, Universidad Diego Portales

doi 10.1215/00182168-2351789

Mesoamerican Memory: Enduring Systems of Remembrance. Edited by amos megged

and stephanie wood. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Photographs.
Illustrations. Maps. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. viii, 320 pp. Cloth, $55.00.
Two generations of ethnohistorical scholarship have successfully challenged the notion
that the Spanish conquest was a cultural cataclysm for Mesoamericas indigenous peoples. The proof is in the provincial, municipal, and village archives of Mexico as well as
repositories in Europe and North America, which contain a treasure trove of colonial-
era codices, lienzos, maps, and native-language written records. The question of how
native people modified their methods for recording the past in response to pressures
imposed by conquest, colonialism, and evangelization, and to what end, has occupied
center stage in this vein of scholarship. Amos Megged and Stephanie Woods rich collection of essays, organized around the theme of social memory, provides an overview of the
state of the field through an interdisciplinary methodology and a longue dure approach.
Wood acknowledges in the introduction that the volume owes its primary intel-

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