Race and Transnationalism in the Americas

Abstract

Questions of ethnicity and race have always been a central issue of research on colonial and postcolonial Latin America. The contributors to the book Race and Transnationalism in the Americas seek to broaden the debate by focusing on the transnational and transcultural dimension of ethnic or racial inclusion and exclusion throughout Latin America and beyond. The authors explore diverse topics of migration, state policies, and citizenship, as well as sports, music, and film production, from the late nineteenth century to the present.Despite the fact that Latin America was the first world region to have been systematically colonized and ruled by European powers during the early modern period, the region has only recently entered the historiography of global and transnational history, especially with regard to scholars born in the region. Apart from the strong tradition of national history and limited access to academic resources (research centers, libraries, or funds) in some Latin American countries, there has always been skepticism in Latin America and in the global South in general toward what sometimes is deemed a new imperial history. Despite this, recent years have shown a renewed interest in an inter-American perspective among historians of Latin America, and the present collection of essays is just another expression of this trend. As Marc Hertzman rightly points out in his introduction to the volume, transnational history offers new perspectives on the political, social, and cultural history of Latin America when it succeeds in addressing the transnational entanglements of local phenomena in a combined look on connections and disconnections. Hertzman highlights the book's focus on “how . . . race and the categorization of race functioned as mechanisms or organizing frameworks for cultural, political, and social inclusion in the Americas” (p. 3). By contrast, the volume's editors, Benjamin Bryce and David M. K. Sheinin, point in their epilogue to the spread of racial narratives and politics of racial discrimination in the wake of recent transnational migration throughout the Americas.Alexander Dawson and Stephen Lewis analyze the inter-American indigenista movement of the first half of the twentieth century in Mexico and the United States; both scholars focus on misreadings of and tensions between different views of Indigenous culture and mestizaje. While Elaine Carey's essay highlights the transnational dimension of US and Mexican debates on drug consumption and trafficking, health care, and racism from the 1920s to the 1950s, David M. K. Sheinin focuses on the construction of the “criollo baseball player” in Venezuela via different US role models and national narratives of whiteness and Blackness from the 1940s onward. Somewhat misplaced given the book's transnational perspective is Waskar Ari-Chachaki's interesting case study on the construction of an Indigenous nation by Gregorio Titiriku's Indigenous movement in the Bolivian Altiplano, which contested assimilationist state policies during the 1920s and 1930s.Several contributions to the book address transnational migration and its political, social, and cultural dimensions. While Benjamin Bryce points out the racial hierarchies within immigration debates and policies in Argentina toward different Asian countries from 1890 to 1920, Lara Putnam discusses political debates over citizenship and legal rights for Black migrants from the British Caribbean in the wider Caribbean, the United States, and Britain from 1918 to 1962. Sonja Stephenson Watson focuses on the emergence of reggae en español in Panama following the immigration of railroad and canal workers from the Caribbean and transcultural networks in the region and to the United States from the 1960s onward. Finally, Raanan Rein analyzes the construction of a mosque in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo in 2000 in the context of historical immigration from the Middle East, the subsequent growth of an Argentine Muslim community, and integration policies toward ethnic minorities from Juan Perón to Carlos Menem.Marc Hertzman presents an interesting example of cultural appropriation by the male African Brazilian carnival association Filhos de Gandhy formed in Salvador, Bahia, in 1949, whose syncretic symbolism and performance combined cultural elements of anticolonialism, communism, and candomblé with essentializing notions of Orientalism and masculinity. Kevin Coleman and Julia Irion Martins analyze the 2015 documentary film Damiana Kryygi from Argentine filmmaker Alejandro Fernández Mouján, which shows the alliance of local settlers and European anthropologists against Indigenous people in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paraguay alongside contemporary Ache Indigenous community activism.Overall, Race and Transnationalism in the Americas is a fine collection that offers insights into various issues, disciplines, and methodologies that go beyond traditional approaches focused on the nation-state.