A Review of Afrocentroamérica: Entre memoria y olvido

Afrocentroamérica: Entre memoria y olvido by Lowell Gudmundson, Russell Lohse and Maurico Meléndez (San José, Costa Rica: EUNED, 2024)

In graduate school at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, I knew that I wanted to work on Central America, on U.S. involvement there, and on social or labor history. What I knew about Central America came from the news, from the Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees whom I worked with as a volunteer with the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and from local solidarity events, visiting speakers and documentaries.

I read Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit when it first came out in 1982 (since reissued by DRCLAS in 1999/2005). There I learned about the United Fruit Company’s land grabs and role in the 1954 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Guatemala’s brief experiment with democracy, land reform, and labor rights and led directly to the genocide of the country’s Indigenous communities that we learned about, often firsthand from survivors and refugees.

When I decided to look at the labor history of United Fruit’s Central American plantations for my dissertation, I had no idea that these plantations hugged the region’s Atlantic/Caribbean coast. I didn’t imagine how isolated they were from the interior, and that many of the company’s workers were Black—British West Indian migrants.  I focused on Costa Rica, since the obstacles to doing research there felt far less daunting than in the other, war-torn countries of the isthmus. I looked at how the workers’ Afro-Caribbean histories turned them into migrants and shaped their experiences, organizational lives and forms of resistance on the U.S.-owned plantations.

I finished, graduated, started my first teaching job, sent my manuscript off for publication and waited with some trepidation to see what anonymous expert readers would think of it. Even before I heard back from LSU Press, I received an enthusiastic email from Ralph Lee Woodward, whose 1976 classic Central America: A Nation Divided, was like a Bible for my generation of Central Americanists. He congratulated me on my work and said he was recommending it for publication.

The second reader—who initially remained anonymous—was also kind and enthusiastic, but suggested an addition that they felt would strengthen the work. I was looking at the Caribbean coast plantations and their workers as an enclave, isolated from the rest of Costa Rica. How did Costa Ricans, whose patriotic narratives emphasized their country’s whiteness and homogeneity, understand these immigrant workers and their place in national history, they asked.

The reader, I later learned, was Lowell Gudmundson (whose Costa Rica Before Coffee I knew as the best English-language work on Costa Rica), and his question led me not only to writing a new chapter for what became my first book, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, but to what has become a decades-long fascination with questions of immigration and racial and national identities. Lowell too has continued to wrestle, along with a pathbreaking cohort of Central Americanists, with questions of race, nation-building, identity and memory in the region.

Central America’s post-independence leaders were proud of themselves for granting citizenship to their Black and Indigenous populations, abolishing slavery, and avoiding U.S.-style Jim Crow and racial violence. Widespread “myths of mestizaje” celebrated their populations’ pluri-ethnic roots and racial mixing that created what Mexican educator José Vasconcelos called a new “cosmic race.” Yet celebration of mestizaje also meant the denigration of Blackness and Indigeneity and, along with the promotion of European immigration, constituted part of a larger continent-wide cultural project of racial whitening.

The erasure of Indigeneity included large-scale massacres, as in El Salvador in 1932 and Guatemala in the 1980s, as well as assimilation campaigns, dismantling of Indigenous institutions and legal erasure as individuals and communities were reclassified as “ladino” or “mestizo.” The erasure of Afro-descended populations involved less violence, but in many ways was far more thorough. The three authors of Afrocentroamérica—Gudmundson (Mt. Holyoke College), Russell Lohse (Amherst College)  and Maurico Meléndez (University of Costa Rica)—continue the work of challenging that erasure.

While anthropologists had long studied Guatemala’s Indigenous communities, historians like Jeffrey Gould in Nicaragua, Gould and Aldo Lauria Santiago in El Salvador, and Darío Euraque in Honduras, looked at how national myths of mestizaje erased whole populations in the 19th and 20th centuries.  In Memorias del mestizaje: Cultura política en Centroamerica de 1920 al presente (Miami: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, 2005) Gould and Euraque joined anthropologist Charles Hale to bring together some of this pathbreaking research, connecting the process of historical erasure to the newly visible explicitly “ethnic” (Indigenous and Black) organizing in the years following the 1980s wars. This was followed by Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe’s anthology, Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Duke University Press, 2010), which as the title suggests, highlighted the still-understudied Black (as opposed to Indigenous) presence, continued to connect histories of Black people with histories of ideas about Blackness, and pushed the timeline even further back to the colonial era through the mid-20th century.

Afrocentroamérica travels from Guatemala to Costa Rica and from the colonial past to the present. Chapters form a cohesive whole not only in their subject matter—the African presence in Central America—but also in their thematic attention to memory and erasure: how Afro-Central America has been, as Gudmundson suggests, “hidden in plain sight” if only we can remove the blinders that prevent us from seeing it (p. 168).

The book consists of five historical chapters, two by Mauricio Meléndez, two by Lowell Gudmundson, and one by Russell Lohse, each followed by a reflection entitled “pasado y presente”—past and present—that explores contemporary traces of Central America’s African history, whether in architecture, maritime archeology, or the faces and experiences of the region’s peoples today. Each of the authors asks how historical assumptions shape our understanding of the present, and how our common-sense understanding of the present shapes what we look for, and what we see, in history. Thus the subtitle: “Between Memory and Forgetting.”

Lohse delves into the myth and history surrounding Costa Rica’s Black Virgen de los Ángeles, who, the story goes, appeared to residents of an Afrodescended “Puebla de los Pardos” in the 1600s. For many in Costa Rica, the story symbolizes the country’s racial harmony and tolerance. Lohse shows how its uses have changed over time. It emerged with the colonial government’s attempts to enact territorial control over free Black communities: Puebla de los Pardos was established as part of their forced resettlement after the Virgen’s supposed apparition. The religious brotherhood (cofradía) that formed around the Virgin was a permanently contested site where Spanish colonial projects to assimilate and control the region’s “pardo” populations collided with the pardos’ complicated struggles for autonomy, access and justice in their racially divided world.

Three contributions by Meléndez use baptismal and marriage records, wills and legal transactions to reveal the fluidity of supposedly rigid colonial racial categories, as designations like mestizo, mulato, mulata blanca, mulata zamba, pardo and others proliferated and varied, even over the course of an individual’s lifetime. The general trend, though, was toward whitening. One chapter traces the Porres family of Santiago de Guatemala (today’s Antigua), through a “Spanish and noble” ancestor (p. 89) and his legitimate and illegitimate descendants—the latter often identified as mulato in the documentation and living in racially mixed popular neighborhoods. Many of these Afro-descended, mixed-race descendants worked in colonial building and architectural guilds, and Meléndez’s “past and present” interlude offers images of Antigua’s imposing colonial architecture that they designed and built. “This icon of Hispanic colonial heritage has very strong roots in the history of its Afrodescended population,” he concludes, “invisible in plain sight” (pp. 125, 135).

Gudmundson authored two historical chapters and four of the six “past and present” interludes. “Mulatos and Nations in Central America” addresses how Afro-Central Americans’ anti-slavery, land and other 19th-century resistance movements have been downplayed in de-racialized national narratives. In their struggles for rights, mulatos collaborated in the creation of “supra-ethnic citizenship” (p. 147) that erased their historical presence. Gudmundson’s second historical chapter uses an 1892 assault in San Jerónimo, a Guatemalan sugar plantation and town, to explore how militia service and local identities enabled multiracial collective claims to the rights promised by urban, Hispanic liberal institutions.

This body of work joins a larger pan-American conversation about histories of racial and ethnic fluidity, slippage and erasure. I was particularly struck by comparisons with Daniel Mandell’s Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), which showed how free Afro-descended men, especially, were incorporated into local Native communities as Native men were enslaved, deported, drafted or left to work in whaling and other industries. African American men who married Native women often advocated land privatization to fulfill their own freedom dreams and assert patriarchal authority in their households. Meanwhile Native Americans who left their communities became absorbed into the category of poor people of color. Claudio Saunt’s Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (Oxford University Press, 2005) explored how the encroaching plantation economy transformed poor, rural, multi-ethnic communities in the American South, creating wealth and opportunity for some, and enslavement and deportation (“removal”) for others. His sprawling family history showed how close relatives followed different paths into whiteness, Blackness and Indigeneity as racial categories hardened. Throughout the United States, many of these histories are hidden, or remembered only in fragments, as evidenced by the surprise of many outside New Orleans when they learned of newly elected Pope Leo XIV’s “creole” (African/mixed-race) ancestry in French Louisiana.

In Afrocentroamérica, Gudmundson’s final “past and present” essay describing his experience interviewing descendants from San Jerónimo about the history of the community provides a fitting conclusion. Over the course of several years, he explains, he missed hint after hint of the contemporary “family secret” that replicated colonial patterns of elite men fathering children with subject women. “Every family is a world,” he concludes, encompassing the region’s colonial legacies (p. 221).

Aviva Chomsky is a professor in the Department of History, Salem State University. Her recent books include Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions about Climate Justice and Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration. She is currently working on a book on Indigeneity and extractivism in northeastern Colombia. Contact: achomsky@salemstate.edu

A version of this review is appearing in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (NWIG).

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