Choosing a Color for the Cosmic Race:
African Americans and National Identities in Central America
Even
before the Mexican Minister of Education José Vasconcelos penned
his famous ode to the virtues of Latin America's mixed race heritage the
region's intellectuals had invented numerous paths to reconciling European
and North American disdain for race mixture with their own national aspirations
(Vasconcelos 1925; Graham 1990). Nearly all of these paths, however, involved
a marked preference for mestizo(1) descendants from a romanticized and exoticized
past of Iberians and Indians, without dwelling on the region's African heritage.
This was particularly so for the more "civilized," urban upper
classes, the very groups specially chosen to lead in the formation of ever
more homogenous mestizo nations. Where once Bolívar had warned of
the difficulties in uniting the children of a single American mother(land)
whose fathers were European and African, all would be set right by ceasing
to note either the earlier tripartite racial structure of white, red and
black or their infinitely complex mixtures. Central America constitutes
a particularly misunderstood case of such racial reinvention. Today it is
commonly thought, both at home and abroad, that African American populations
exist only on the Atlantic Coast, products of more recent immigration of
West Indians (the Garifuna or Black Carib after the 1790s and Jamaicans/Barbadians
since the 1870s). And yet, Afro-Americans were a larger share of the population
than Euro-Americans and mestizos combined in the colonial capital of Central
America, Santiago de Guatemala, until at least 1650 (Lutz, 1994). Not all
later observers were unaware of this fact, especially those European and
North Americans who traveled to the region in the first half century after
Independence in 1821. Nearly all of their published commentaries disparaged
the non-Indian, Hispanic upper classes as hopelessly retrograde, owing not
so much to their intermixture with the Indian populations they lived among,
but rather to widespread intermixture with their own African slave and freedmen
populations (Parker 1970). It fell to the filibusterer William Walker in
the 1850s to attempt the quixotic enterprise of reinstituting African American
slavery in the very society, Nicaragua, that he and his North Atlantic contemporaries
so vehemently denounced as ruled by a "mongrelized" mixed race
leadership masquerading as white.
Walker failed and paid for his misunderstandings with his own life, but
those who defeated him would thereafter construct national ethnic identities
in five separate republics all of which paid homage to their victory by
militantly asserting two related claims: the emergence of a majoritarian
Hispanic cultural heritage within mixed race mestizo or ladino(2) society,
displacing an ever more minoritarian Indian populations being assimilated
both culturally and biologically; AND the essentially Iberian/Indian heritage
of mixed race populations.
While
the first of these claims has been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny,
especially in the recent past, the second has remained largely unchallenged.(Euraque
1998; Gould 1998; Hale 1996; Palmer 1991, 1996; Smith 1995, 1996) Choosing
red and white as the primary, indeed only, colors for the palette with which
to paint the cosmic race's portrait was, in Central America, every bit as
much a purposeful elision on the cultural and political battlefields as
the associated claim of an irresistible tide of mestizo majority rule.
During the 19th century the terms mulato and pardo(3), commonly used to both refer to and categorize for fiscal purposes African American mixed race populations during the colonial period, fell into disuse and were systematically replaced by the seemingly more generic, inclusive, or elastic terms mestizo and ladino. However, in this process one can readily document a pattern of suppression in which any mention of African heritage represents both a negation of this new national identity and an admission of precisely what racist opinion abroad had long claimed about Central America's elites.
Recent blood group analysis has shown that even in Costa Rica, the national population in Central America most commonly thought to be overwhelmingly European in origin, the general population in every region and at all socioeconomic levels, including the upper classes, is made up of roughly 60% European, 30% Indian, and 10% African genetic heritage (Barrantes, Marín, and Morera 1995). How much more ironic, then, that many of those who most vehemently asserted this claim of a negligible African contribution to their vision of a mestizo society and culture were themselves descendants of pardo and mulato populations, both slave and free, seemingly oblivious to their own (at the time) well known genealogical tree (Lobo and Meléndez 1997; Meléndez 1999).
The proposed study will situate Central America's invention of regional and national ethnic identities within the burgeoning historical literature on "invented tradition" and ethnicized nationalisms (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; and Anderson 1983 were two of the earliest sources of the current trend among historians). It will draw heavily on the recent work of scholars not only in history but in literature and anthropology to reinterpret the process by which Central Americans, and particularly their cultural and political elites, have chosen to represent themselves in one rather than another ethnic category. Not only will this work challenge the dominant nationalist versions of ethnic identity, increasingly disputed by scholarly research from many different quarters, but also the highly influential historiographic claims made for elite marital endogamy as both empirical reality and the source of much of the region's repressive, exclusionary traditions (Casaus 1992; Stone 1975, 1990). Perhaps most important, it will contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the increasingly strident, polarized, and simply dichotomous form of ethnic politics in Central America. Increasingly the categories of Indian or Maya versus ladino or mestizo appear as timeless and immutable categories, alongside the denial of African American presence and agency. The evasion of serious discussion of historically discriminatory if subtle practices within the heterogeneous and relatively recently constructed ladino-mestizo majority cultures has contributed, perversely, to precisely this polarized, simplified, and confrontational contemporary debate (Arenas Bianchi, et al 1999; Warren 1998).
Coming to grips with the fact that many of these elite family lines of
descent have their origins in well documented unions of slave and freedwomen
with elite males requires much more than an asterisk in studies that argue
for 
essentially
unchanged elite rule (for a pathbreaking analysis of this phenomenon throughout
late Colonial Spanish America see Twinam 1999). No equivalent to the current
Jefferson-Hemmings controversy in the U.S. need be sought in Central America.
Widespread race mixture both within and outside marriage, within and outside
the institution of slavery, has long been recognized and even celebrated
in Central America. No such powerful need for purportedly more objective,
"scientific" evidence via DNA testing has seemed necessary to
the region's elites or common people (although recent studies, such as those
of Meléndez, et al, 2000, would provide ample evidence), so much
less given to any puritanical self-delusion that denies the interracial
and extramarital sexuality at the heart of national origins and history.
However, the celebration of race mixture in the abstract has been joined
to a decided reluctance to recognize African ancestry within this same tradition
and ideology. Thus, the exploration of family histories, their public imagery,
and their contemporary memory, especially at the elite level, will form
an important part of this study. Racial classification schemes and the historical
memory of them, from "passing" to its denial, from ethnogenesis
(Bateman 1990) to "situational race," (McCaa, Schwartz, and Grubessich
1979) will be addressed with documentary and oral history evidence via diverse
narrative strategies, including autobiographical accounts.
The basic questions of this project seek to elucidate the history of African
American populations so long submerged in dominant nationalist accounts
throughout Central America. By focusing on key sites of concentrated populations
during the 19th and 20th centuries we will be able to offer for the first
time a detailed account of both these populations' contributions to and
transformations within the process of nation-state formation. Moreover,
we will explore the complex issues of race mixture and social identity so
powerfully obscured by the pattern of denial of one particular constituent
element in modern Central America's human equation of supra-ethnic citizenship.
The documentary and archival strategies we propose are two-fold:
1) Research on three key historically African American populations whose apparent "disappearance" is largely a function of the suppression of racial identification (entirely, or any beyond the Indian versus Ladino or Mestizo dichotomy) in most post-Independence census and tax records.
a) Guatemala's sugar plantation towns (Amatitlán, Palencia, San
Gerónimo) dominated by the Dominican Order, sites of the largest
concentrations of African American slave and freedmen laborers in the
isthmus and some of the largest such operations in all of mainland Spanish
America;
b) Granada, Nicaragua where not only were African American populations
predominant in Colonial times but where census records from the late nineteenth
century continue to distinguish individuals by ethnicity;
c) Omoa, Honduras and the militia populations of enslaved Africans who
built and defended its castle in late Colonial times. The history of these
groups did not so much prefigure the reception of the deported "Black
Carib/Garifuna" populations from the British island of St. Vincent
in 1797 as provide the basis for later, nineteenth-century Honduran assertions
of territorial sovereignty that proved far more effective in the face
of Anglo-American interference than those of their neighbors (Guatemala
and Nicaragua) at the same time (Tompson 2000). The documentation discovered
so far establishes these populations as the most "African" (in
terms of both naming patterns and place of birth) and least "creole"
of Central America's African Americans during the nineteenth century,
thus allowing for a whole series of comparisons that have not been possible
to this point.
2) Genealogical studies of elite families where slave or freed(wo)men ancestors are readily identifiable, alongside historical memory studies of portraiture, monuments, their "whitening" of hero figures, and (auto-)biographical studies of racial (re)categorization and "passing."
Work done so far has made it clear that the frequency of African American
roots within most elite family trees in Central America is even greater
than the subsequent efforts to silence or simply to "forget" that
fact. Moreover, the very pattern of denial of any African American heritage
for iconic and heroic symbols of Central American nationhood offers the
basis for a counter-hegemonic, reading against the grain of the same basic
narrative of mestizo, mixed-race nationalism. This we propose to do by deconstructing,
and in the process reconstructing, family histories using parish records,
oral histories, and our own personal experience in these matters over several
decades. We will use both iconic figures, such as Founding Fathers and cultural
heroes like Rubén Darío, and common citizens whose family
albums reveal an African American heritage, whether embraced, ignored, or
vehemently denied. What we propose to construct is a counter-narrative to
the one whose flattened and homogenized version is so familiar to students,
the often reluctant consumers of these unproblematic Hispanic nationalist
traditions.
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