Review: Review

Author(s): Frank Trey Proctor

Review by: Frank Trey Proctor
Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 110-112
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0110
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Journal of American Ethnic History / Winter 2013

categories of borderline Americans to white Americans. I highly recommend

Borderline Americans and predict that, in time, Benton-Cohens masterful social
history of the Southwest Borderlands will be recognized for its significant contribution to the broader historical narrative of masculinity, labor, and race-making
in the United States.
Sabrina Sanchez
South Texas College

Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place. Edited by
Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010. viii + 416 pp. Tables, photos, maps, bibliography, and index. $89.95
(cloth); $24.95 (paper).
This volume successfully inserts Central America into the African Diaspora.
More importantly, it encourages us to expand our analytical approaches to include
regions where African-descended populations no longer self-identify as such and/
or have been written out of national histories. Yet as the subtitle suggests, the contributors also highlight the centrality of place in conceptualizations of blackness
and diaspora to demonstrate that there was no universal experience of blackness in
Central America or in the Americas more generally.
Race in colonial Spanish America was elaborated by the sistema de castas, a
pseudo-hierarchical classificatory system that recognized mixture between Spaniards, Natives, and Africans. The boundaries between classifications were never as
rigid as the black-white binary in the United States or the East Indian caste system.
Following independence, the new republics rejected those classifications and made
official distinctions only between the indigenous and nonindigenous population
(defined asladino or mestizo.). By the early twentieth century, significant debates had ensued as to whether ladino, and therefore the nation more generally,
was white or mixed (Spanish and Indian), but blackness was always excluded
from the articulation of those identities.
The first five essays examine colonial slavery. Those by Russell Loshe, Rina
Cceres, and Catherine Komisaruk all explore slavery in very distinctive contexts
to demonstrate how the boundaries of colonial slavery and race were more flexible
and porous than might be expected. Whether it was the nature of cacao production
in Matina, Costa Rica, the experiences of royal slaves paid minimal wages for work
on a fort-building project in Omao, Honduras, or the way slaves in colonial Guatemala pressed the limits of slavery in the final decades before abolition in 1824,
all three authors see slaves as socially and racially upwardly mobile and partially
in control of their own destinies.
Paul Lokken charts transitions within the early colonial Afro-Guatemalan population from distinctive African diasporic ethnicities (e.g., Angola), to mulattos, and

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Reviews

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eventually to ladinos within a few generations, debunking the notion that the terms
ladino and mestizo were synonymous because Afro-descendants dominated among
colonial ladinos. Karl Offen considers the Mosquito Coast distinctive because of
the polyglot society created there by an English, not Spanish, slave-based colonial
project contending with the African Amerindian Mosquito Kingdom (itself divided
into Afro-descended and indigenous sections) and surrounded by Spaniards. In both
cases, generalized racial classifications fail to explain how race manifested itself
in the overlapping experiences of these peoples.
The next three chapters focus on blacks and blackness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nicaragua. Juliet Hooker explores how elites racialized the Mosquito
Coast, allowing them to formulate a white Nicaraguan national identity. By defining the Mosquito Coast as savage and barbarous, where racial others lived,
elites simultaneously excluded that regions inhabitants from political participation
and erased the blackness and indigeneity of the western and central regions. Justin
Wolfe reinserts race into conceptions of nineteenth-century Nicaraguan political
struggles by arguing for a sea change in the prominence of Afro-Nicaraguans, who
emerged as radical leaders in the Liberal challenge to the Conservative oligarchy.
These leaders, nurtured in the historically black neighborhood of San Felipe in
Len, denied or sublimated a racialized sense of self, because to claim that identity would have both undercut their liberalism and opened them up to Conservative attack. Lowell Gudmunson, using an 1883 census that atypically included
six racial classifications, contextualizes the arguments of important mixed-raced
Liberal proponents of mixed race nationalism who both advocated for equality
and scorned indigeneity as unmodern and savage. These Liberal leaders hailed
from western towns where Afro-Nicaraguans represented a slight majority among
non-Indians and all non-Indians exhibited high rates of racial endogamy combined
with a propensity for exogamy, but not with Indians. This points to a much more
complicated racial history than the indigenous/ladino binary suggests.
The final three chapters take wider views. Lara Putnam examines British West
Indian immigration to Central America, demonstrating that the latter region imposed unprecedented anti-black legislation after 1920 following decades of fairly
open immigration policies and elaboration of social hierarchies that did not rest on
claims of black inferiority. She finds that new immigration policies in the 1920s
allowed regional elites to be proud collaborators in rather than targets of the U.S.led project of eugenic exclusion and to define themselves against the blackness
of West Indian immigrants (p. 295). Ronald Harpelle explores the experiences of
white company wives in housing enclaves created by U.S. companies. Mauricio
Melndez traces the African ancestry of some of Nicaraguas and Costa Ricas political, intellectual, and artistic elite to suggest that most, if not all, Central Americans
have Afromestizo roots.
Paradoxically, perhaps, the colonialists here treat mestizaje as upward mobility and
agency, whereas the modernists generally argue that mestizaje was disempowering,

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Journal of American Ethnic History / Winter 2013

obscuring the experiences of Afro-descended peoples. A consideration of colonial

free Afro-descendant peoples or of modern groups for whom blackness is central
to their identities would have enriched this deep and compelling set of essays.
Frank Trey Proctor
Denison University

We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848. By Mischa Honeck. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xiii + 260 pp. Photos, map, notes, index, and bibliography.
$59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
In this book, Mischa Honeck is seeking to place the debates over the abolition
of slavery in the antebellum United States into a transatlantic context by examining the relationships that developed between American abolitionists and German
Forty-Eighter revolutionaries. He finds a two-way transfer of ideas taking place as
exiled German revolutionaries brought their ideas to the United States and American abolitionists visited the German states during their European tours. Honecks
intervention here is useful, given how much of the previous scholarship on transatlantic abolitionism has focused on American-British relations despite the deep
involvement of German Forty-Eighters in the abolitionist cause.
Honecks methodology draws on traditions from both microhistory and collective biography. In examining these transatlantic ties, he investigates the networks
created by individual abolitionists in specific communities. The books structure
follows this pattern as Honeck devotes one chapter to each of his case studies
central Texas, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Boston. This approach works well with
the abolition movement, given that it was decentralized and heavily influenced by
local conditions. Looking at individual lives is also useful for his purposes, since
it lets Honeck examine the process by which transnational ties were formed out
of individual interactions. This study is a good example of combining local and
global perspectives and how the very local phenomenon of organizing antislavery
efforts could be simultaneously part of a transatlantic conversation about freedom,
equality, and nation building.
Honeck identifies several areas of misunderstanding between German FortyEighters and American abolitionists, despite their common goal of abolishing slavery, as each group approached this goal from different cultural roots. American
abolitionists were frequently very motivated by religion, particularly evangelical
Protestant beliefs which asserted that all men were equal in the eyes of God. They
often tried to work through the church and saw religion as a tool for social justice.
The German Forty-Eighters, on the other hand, were frequently anticlerical, and
their prior experiences with organized religion in Europe had led them to see it as

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