OUR interest in the comparative study of race and culture contacts in the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions is predominantly an interest in the comparison of race relations in the Anglo-Saxon and Latin subregions of the Caribbean region. That this is so becomes clear from a definition of what we understand by Mediterranean and Caribbean regions or, in other words, the European and the American Mediterraneans. In both cases, a centrally located, that is to say, a truly Mediterranean sea unites rather than separates the surrounding coastal rimlands. Sicily is nearer to Tunisia than to Savoy, as recent events have taught us anew, and Morocco is facing Spain across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar while it is separated from the Sudan by the desert belt of the Sahara. Likewise, Louisiana is closer to Cuba than to Massachusetts, as Colombia is closer to Puerto Rico than to the republics of La Plata from which it is separated by the Amazonas jungles. Mediterranean civilization may be said to reach as far as the olive tree is grown while its outer frontiers are marked by the northernmost and southernmost extension of vine cultivation. It should be noted that this coincides with the extension of ancient Roman penetration. The Caribbean region, in turn, although known as the world's sugar bowl and coffee pot, with cotton fields, tobacco crops, and banana plantations of probably equal importance, is best defined by the prevailing human factor connected with it. Sociologically speaking, the Caribbean region may be said to extend as far as dense rural settlement of former African slaves is found; and the settlement of Africans, again, coincides with the lowland area of plantation economy. The Negro has become the leading phenomenon of the Caribbean region as the olive tree has always been the leading phenomenon of the Mediterranean region.' This definition would put the highland areas of Mexico, sociologically as well as geographically and historically, closer to the highlands areas of Peru than to the lowland areas of Costa Rica. Mexico belongs to the Pacific region of America, so much so that even the Philippines were at some time subjected to the Vice-Royalty of New Spain. The same is true of the highland areas of Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. Neither the Indians nor the Mestizos, nor the Spaniards moved in any appreciable numbers into the humid lowland regions on the Atlantic coast of Central America, so that these regions finally were settled by a mixture of Indians and runaway Negro slaves on the Mosquito Coast and by black Jamaican workers on the plantations of the United Fruit Company.2 On the other hand, the definition which we have presented would include the southern regions of the United States, as far as the lowland region of plantation economy is extended, along with the British, Dutch, and French possessions in the West Indies.3 About the same way as Cross and Crescent are facing each other in the Mediterranean, so Latin and AngloSaxon civilization are interlocking in the Carib-
Read full abstract
Jun 1, 1955
W J Cahnman 
Open Access