MATTHEW RESTALL, editor. Beyond Black and Red: African- Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. (Dia- logos.) Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 303. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.95

Abstract

This newly published collection is a welcome addition to the University of New Mexico Press's Diálogos series, designed specifically for course-adoption books on Latin America. Essays included in the volume encompass the diverse regions of Latin America under European colonial rule. In his introduction, editor Mathew Restall discusses the book's predominant theme of the “hostility-harmony dialectic,” which is articulated in the three “arenas of identity, community, and cultural change” (pp. 4–5). Restall's introduction is followed by Ben Vinson III and Restall himself (chapter one), who maintain that in colonial Spanish America black and native soldiers fought together as comrades as well as against each other. Jane Landers (chapter two) observes similar black-native relations in the case of colonial Spanish Florida borderlands. Stuart B. Schwartz and Hal Langfur (chapter three) meticulously trace the extremely complicated history of native-black interactions in the case of Brazil, where “[b]eing ‘Indian’ is sometimes a way of not being black” (p. 107). In chapter four, Norma Angélica Castillo Palma and Susan Kellogg examine the important gender roles among Nahuas and Afro-Mexicans in the Central Mexican town of Cholua during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both Renée Soulodre-La France (chapter five) and Chris Lane (chapter six) focus on the mines, where legally free natives and enslaved Africans worked side by side. According to Soulodre-La France, black-native relations in Nueva Granada (Colombia) were conflictive and antagonistic as both subordinate groups attempted to benefit from the colonial legal system. By contrast, Lane maintains that in the Spanish American gold and silver mine camps, African slaves and indigenous peoples widely cooperated, intermixed, and even intermarried, “to survive and to keep digging” (p. 180). Black-Mayan relations in colonial Guatemala and Yucatan is the topic of chapter seven by Christopher Luz and Restall, who examine various intensified intragroup interactions in both urban and rural settings. The result was the breakdown of the original group boundaries, despite the Spaniards' attempts to keep blacks and Mayans apart from each other by fostering prejudice between them. Anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead contributes an outstanding essay (chapter eight) on ethnic transgression in the case of northern South America and the Caribbean, where “black” phenotypes in the indigenous populations have been read as “red.” Patrick J. Carroll (chapter nine) also finds that in colonial Mexico the “natives” and “blacks” lived more in harmony than in constant conflict and antagonism. Carroll attributes the Spaniards' official reports of allegedly frequent black-native confrontations to their continuous efforts to keep power in their own hands.