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

After Nicaragua achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it suffered a series of conflicts culminating in the two-year National War. When that war ended in 1857, Nicaragua was in ruins. The Everyday Nation-State explores what followed: the intersection of nation-state formation and everyday life in nineteenth-century Nicaragua. Rather than focus on the "invented traditions" of anthems, marches, and memorials that convey and reproduce an established sense of national identity and belonging, this work analyzes how such feelings emerged in the struggles of local communities over political authority, identity, and legitimacy. Based on extensive research of court cases, land registries, census materials, correspondence, government publications, and newspapers, The Everyday Nation-State connects the local with the national, prizing the narratives of commoners, while placing them in the larger regional and historical context, and challenging the way we approach the study of the nation-state. Justin Wolfe's exploration of quotidian social life and politics in nineteenth-century Nicaragua reveals how the diversities of economy, ethnicity, and geography engendered multiple experiences of nation. In turn, these experiences invigorated a new Nicaraguan citizenry as it fragmented local community power and autonomy in the face of a nascent modern state. This local perspective also provides a key to understanding the rise of twentieth-century figures such as revolutionary Augusto C. Sandino and dictator Anastasio Somoza.