Many of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas came to
Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and people of African descent constituted
the majority of nonindigenous populations in the region long
thereafter. Yet in the development of national identities and
historical consciousness, Central American nations have often
countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and
regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of
mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have
systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political
involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and
contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging
has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to
identify themselves as something other than African American,
reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see
Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the
Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the
forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America,
demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region's
history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They
reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race
majorities as "Indo-Hispanic," or as anything but African American,
clash with the historical record of the first region of the
Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to
vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency,
following independence from Spain in 1821.
"Contributors." Rina Caceres Gomez, Lowell Gudmundson, Ronald
Harpelle, Juliet Hooker, Catherine Komisaruk, Russell Lohse, Paul
Lokken, Mauricio Melendez Obando, Karl H. Offen, Lara Putnam,
Justin Wolfe
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