This essay explores the new geographies of multicultural citizenship and democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, emphasizing how Blacks, women, and Indigenous peoples are challenging old hierarchies of discrimination while creating new forms of civic participation and citizenship. The late anthropologist John Burdick argued that history weighs heavily on the peoples of the Americas, and that for the poorer, the darker, and those considered Indigenous, the historical weight was greater given the history in the region of these marginalized identities. Burdick’s analysis was a sharp commentary on the thorny and tangled history of racialization and class and gender inequality across the Americas. The books reviewed in this essay spotlight how the region is being radically transformed by Afro and Indigenous groups: in realms from media, literature, and print images to racialization and anti-racism, gender, and labor. Written and researched from different disciplinary angles—Africana and media studies, anthropology, history—the books remind us that the struggle against centuries of racial and gender inequality is far from over, and they illustrate how new geographies of multiculturalism are being constructed and renegotiated across the region.

Juliet Hooker and Charles Hale, among others, have pointed out that state-led initiatives regarding multicultural democracy have tended to be vacuous if not disingenuous.Footnote ¹ Therefore, I use the term multiculturalism here with some qualification. In this review essay I refer not to state-led initiatives per se but to the new geographies of citizenship and multiculturalism that are arising from the ashes of centuries of discrimination and emerging from the cultural rebirth of civil society groups and social movements. Multiculturalism, citizenship, and democracy are polyvocal, with intricate layers and histories that move beyond formal constitutions and state initiatives. Through media use, literature, social movement organizing, and more, Afro, women’s, and Indigenous groups are constructing new ways to challenge hegemonic structures of class, racial, and gender oppression.

Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar’s Black in Print: Plotting the Coordinates of Blackness in Central America examines race and ethnicity with a focus on Central America. Gómez Menjívar underscores how mainstream print media from the nineteenth century until the present has helped shape Central American Blackness. Using race, identity, linguistics, and geography, she tracks the history of Central American Blackness in the postindependence era, paying close attention to how Blackness was articulated during various periods. She explores print media and visual images—newspapers, novels, and digital media—to illustrate how constructed notions of Blackness have evolved. Independent print media began to appear in the region in the early twentieth century. The book shows the centrality of Blackness to national discourses throughout the twentieth century and continuing in the present. Across the Americas, discourses on Blackness have shifted according to the prevailing social and political logic of the period, or what the historian Ben Vinson III refers to as the moving target.Footnote ²

The book’s main questions revolve around the axis of race, geography, place, mestizaje, and identity: What happened to the Afro-descendant slaves trafficked to Central America? Why has their destiny in Central America been markedly distinct from that of Black people of the Caribbean? How have the media—print, visual, and digital—as well as social geography shaped ideas of race, ethnicity, and mestizaje on the Central American isthmus? Why are the stories about Blackness plotted in the Pacific Coast areas distinct from the stories charted in the Caribbean coastal region?

In five well-organized thematic chapters, Menjívar identifies a series of moments in the histories of Central America, with each chapter focused on visual or media representations from the nineteenth century to the current period, which includes independence, postindependence, and the modern period (1950s–1980s) and the current digital age. Each period offers a glimpse into how Blackness was represented. These chapters examine how mestizaje was incorporated into national discourses after 1824, how Blackness challenged dominant national ideas of mestizaje in the early twentieth century, and how Blackness coexisted with Indigenousness as a subaltern subjectivity in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Menjívar uses a transregional and conceptual frame that underscores the regional and racial divides, emphasizing, for example, how identity and notions of citizenship were constructed differently for Blacks on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Menjívar notes that, after 1824, Afro-descendants on the Pacific coast in the first five Central American states were considered members of the citizenry, quickly establishing stories of the new nation-states, whereas Afro-descendants residing on the Caribbean coast were largely invisible in print during this period. The issue of de facto or de jure citizenship depended on place, language spoken, and the historical period in question. Thus language, geography, and an ethnolinguistic divide became a marker as the Pacific coast was home mainly to Hispanophone speakers, whereas Anglophone (Black) speakers on the Caribbean coast were not folded into this category. In Central American thought and discourse, Pacific coast areas are considered the cradle of Central Americanness, and the region’s inhabitants as unquestioned citizens. Using textural analysis, Menjívar first aims to identify the various constructions of Blackness in Central America in different periods; second, to analyze the works of several prolific writers like the Costa Rican author Quince Duncan, the Nicaraguan poet Carl Rigby, and the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna poet Wingston González. All these native-born writers were raised on the Central American coast. Using the work of these authors and others, she demonstrates how constructions of Blackness depended on the period, geography, and the writers in question.

The research makes clear how the Black body, however problematically, has been imagined temporally, linguistically, and geographically. Menjívar joins robust debates on how Blackness is negotiated and problematized across the African diaspora. She acknowledges the work of Lélia Gonzalez, an Afro-Brazilian intellectual and activist who used the term Amefrica to underscore the legacy of Black and Indigenous cultural contributions to the Americas. She brings her work into conversations with Richard L. Jackson, who was one of the first to raise some of these questions in his various works, and she builds on the work of Santiago Valencia Chalá and Dorothy Mosby.Footnote ³ These works—all groundbreaking but in different ways—provided a deep textual analysis of identity, mestizaje, race, and ethnicity, and of how these constructs at times served to marginalize and at other times to vindicate and open new ways to understand Afro peoples in literary genres in Central and South America. As do these writers, she challenges mestizaje discourses on Blackness, examines the myth of whiteness and how it contributes to the invisibility of Blackness, and charts the coordinates of Blackness. She does so while providing an analysis of several important writers from the region.

The strength of this research is that it explores the ideological and geographical landscape of Central American countries, showing how the meaning of Blackness was articulated and how it evolved via print and digital media across different historical epochs and geographical regions. The transregional analysis adds to the depth and breadth of the scholarship and provides a fresh lens for understanding the construction and articulation of Blackness in Central America. Moreover, it builds on traditional literary and media studies by incorporating racial geography, maps, and other artifacts. Given the relative lack of studies on the Black presence in Central America, this excellent scholarship adds to literary, media, social history, Afro-Latinx, and Latin America and Africana studies, as it builds on literary and political constructions of Blackness in Central America. It is easy to read, thematically organized, and appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate classes.

Raising Two Fists: Struggles for Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia focuses on the thorny issues of citizenship, Black political mobilization, and multicultural reforms that swept Latin America and Colombia in the 1990s. Cárdenas examines what multicultural citizenship looks like in the current period and the contradictions of Black citizenship in Colombia and other parts of the African diaspora. In 1991, due to grassroots mobilization from Afro-Colombians, the Constituent Assembly of Colombia adopted a landmark constitution that recognized Afro-Colombians as an ethnic group. Law 70, or La Ley de Comunidades Negras, affirmed the cultural identity of Afro-Colombians and, in theory, granted collective land rights and promoted Black economic development. In the following decades, other governments in the region passed similar laws aimed at both Black and Indigenous communities. Moving beyond state-led discourses and discussions of rights and citizenship, Cárdenas focuses on Afro-Colombians’ pursuit of peace, fight for Black territorial rights, challenges to structural racial violence, and rearticulation of citizenship rights. She traces how various struggles unfolded and overlapped and the roles of social movements and civil society organizations like the National Association of Displaced Colombians (AFRODES) and the Process of Black Communities (PCN).

The research covers the period from the 1980s to the present, a crucial period in the struggle for Black rights in Colombia. It is an ethnographic study based on fieldwork following two of Colombia’s largest Black organizations, PCN and AFRODES. These groups are recognized nationally and internationally for their work with Afro-Colombians on the Pacific Coast and in other regions. The volume traces the emergence of state-led multicultural efforts, which coincided with the institutionalization and deepening of neoliberal development policies. Using anthropological and political methods, Cárdenas meticulously shows how racialized structural violence is experienced as normative and, at the same time, is challenged by Afro-Colombians as they seek to claim citizenship and territorial rights long denied to them. The work places Afro-Colombian activism in the context of the constitutional reforms, showing Black Colombians’ long struggle for collective recognition and the complex challenges of achieving peace.

Given the uneven nature of Black citizenship in the African diaspora and Colombia, Cárdenas argues that Black citizenship is an incomplete project whose outlines are sometimes clearer and at other times obscured by the thorny logic of racial politics. Citizenship rights are defined as the legal guarantee of civil, political, and social rights, the active participation in political institutions, and membership in a political community that furnishes a sense of identity. The focus on rights and citizenship is the conceptual basis of the research, as these were the terms that the activists in her research used. Cárdenas underscores that citizenship is grounded in Black cultural practices in ways that function as powerful sources of oppositional agency.

The book revolves around the axis of Black citizenship and is based on three political demands: Black territory, differential reparations, and Black peace. These demands involve defining Black territories as rights, the meaning and significance of reparations for Afro-Colombian war victims, and the struggle for lasting peace in their territories following negotiations. Cárdenas argues that Black citizenship is employed as a pragmatic strategy by Afro-Colombian civil society to address contemporary inequality and structural violence. The research shows how Afro-Colombians adapted their local practices to the language of ethnic difference embedded in Law 70, thus making a clear statement about their right to be included within Colombian national structures and national identity.

Blackness as a form of ethnicity therefore became embedded as the dominant articulation of Blackness in recent history, as it addresses the political interests of Afro civil society. Therefore, the embrace of Blackness is part of the multicultural struggle that asserts Afro-Colombians’ rights to social, political, and economic citizenship. According to Cárdenas, Afro-Colombians have a deeper, more inclusive vision of multiculturalism than the state does. Because state multicultural initiatives only maintained and reaffirmed patterns of racial exclusion, Afro-Colombians had to use Law 70 to redefine citizenship in a more dynamic and inclusive way. These demands include calling for the implementation of reparations and restitution for war victims (Law 1448)—thus the term differential reparations, as different communities may invoke different claims; the demand for territorial rights and immediate return to their territories due to displacement by civil war; the right to be included in all negotiations concerning peace accords; and the right to stakes in building a postwar nation, to name a few.

Given the complexity of its history, geography, and politics, Colombia is not easily understood and makes for a difficult case study. However, in four tight chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, Cárdenas covers the contradictions and limits of state-led multicultural citizenship and Afro-Colombian movements’ alternative articulations of Black citizenship, territoriality, and reparations. The scholarship is rigorous and makes a significant contribution to the study of Afro-Colombia, the African diaspora, racialization, multiculturalism, Black politics in Latin America, and Latin American studies. Her research suggests the utility of an African diasporic frame for centering human rights and a vision of justice emerging from the lived experiences of the violence that people in the Americas have endured over many centuries. She notes that Black women in particular exercise this vision through gendered strategies of survival and adaptation. Her research is rooted in a progressive social vision that addresses social justice not only for the people of Colombia but also for the whole African diaspora. As a wide-ranging anthropological and political study, it will be useful in both undergraduate and graduate classes and is highly recommended.

Continuing the discussion of citizenship, Takkara K. Brunson’s Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba charts how Black women were integral to constructing modern Cuban identity. This timely volume focuses on Afro-Cuban women and the Cuban political system between abolition in 1886 and 1956. Brunson analyzes the history of Black women from both privileged and poor backgrounds during this period, using newspapers, personal letters, photographs, and other materials. She underscores how women shaped legal reforms, political movements, and ideologies as they negotiated the racial terrain of Black civic culture, women’s public roles, labor rights, and Cuban national identity, as well as how women from different social classes and political organizations with varying political currents communicated given their different class locations.

The focus of her scholarship is on the citizenship practices employed by Black Cuban women, what these reveal about racial and gender dynamics between abolition and the 1959 Revolution, and how such practices contributed to shaping national political development. She underscores how Black women confronted gender and racial exclusion in their efforts to obtain rights. By including Black women from a diverse range of class backgrounds and political communities, the volume highlights the crosscurrents of political philosophies, activism, and social thought. Whereas many scholars and activists of the African diaspora have engaged national and international politics, this study focuses on how racial ideologies have figured into Black political strategies. Examining the language of citizenship, like other works in this volume, adds nuance to understanding the gender dynamics among elite Black civic activists and how patriarchal norms circumvented ways that Afro-Cuban women center activism. It thus shows how citizenship rights evolved in Cuba from after slavery to the Cuban Revolution. Brunson argues that a gendered analysis of racial citizenship reveals how tensions between traditional and modernizing ideas of femininity played out in Black elite social life. In doing so, she shows how race shaped citizenship practices for women across racial lines, demonstrating how they evolved across various periods.

Brunson’s case studies demonstrate how Black women activists at times affirmed the dominant social norms and other times challenged them. The women profiled hailed from suffrage movements, labor unions, and Black political parties. Thus, the book is able to compare the shifts from racial silence, as when, after independence, racial matters were not openly discussed, to critical perspectives on how these women confronted social discrimination at the intersection of racism, sexism, and economic exploitation.

The volume traces the patterns of racial discourses, underlying tensions, and contradictions in the long arc of struggles for citizenship. Moving beyond the stale parameters of legally defined citizenship, it explores the political strategies employed by women for racial and gender equality—from labor and political movements to the movement for women’s suffrage—and demonstrates how the construction of citizenship unfolded in twentieth-century Cuba. Citizenship therefore is a process of social and political constructions that involve different sets of political actors.

As demonstrated in the other books reviewed in this essay, citizenship for peoples of the African diaspora is a long and uneven process that is riddled with the contradictions of slavery, race, class, gender, and current neoliberal models of governance. The intersection of race, gender, and citizenship is understudied across the Americas; this volume is a major contribution to Black women’s social movements, Cuban history, and Latin American and Afro-diasporic studies. Its most important contribution lies in showing how the struggles of Afro peoples—in this case, Black women in Cuba—have expanded the scope and meaning of citizenship as well as the formation of modern national identities.

Joan Flores-Villalobos’s The Silver Women explores the central role of West Indian women’s labor in the construction of the Panama Canal. In 1903, the Republic of Panama, with US military intervention, declared its independence from Colombia, and a few weeks later, the US gained sovereignty over the ten-mile-wide strip of land that would become the Panama Canal. Thus, 1903 marked the legal birth of the canal and the US colonization of Panama. Historians have not appreciated the extent to which West Indian women’s labor contributed to the canal. Flores-Villalobos examines why so many West Indian women took jobs in the Panama Canal Zone despite the often-harsh work conditions, unequal pay and living conditions, and risk of tropical disease, and how they managed their daily lives. She also shows how they negotiated and challenged the system of legal segregation and discrimination.

The US canal’s payroll system divided the wages and benefits of the workforce: Skilled workers, almost entirely white and American, were placed on the “gold roll” and received wages in gold American dollars, whereas the canal’s multinational migrant workforce, made up of mostly West Indian men and women, was placed on the “silver roll,” paid less and in Colombian silver pesos. These migrant workers hailed from different parts of the Caribbean—Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, and Grenada—and were referred to as “silver workers.” Officials, employees, and residents alike came to understand these as racialized—“gold as white,” “silver as Black.” Moreover, the “unskilled” silver workers were assigned the most dangerous jobs (mining and plantations) with pay differentials, provided substandard housing and food, and subjected to harsh and unequal treatment. Despite their class and national differences, all West Indian employees had to deal with a roll system that had differentiated pay rates for skilled and unskilled workers on the gold roll and the unskilled West Indians on the silver roll. Working without formal contracts, West Indian women’s labor was the primary domestic labor and served to facilitate the larger matrix of the Panama Canal. They served as cooks, laundresses, tavern and household keepers, and much more. Flores-Villalobos argues that the Canal Zone had a perverse social and political logic that heavily depended on Black women’s labor while simultaneously creating a discriminatory legal framework. The silver women did the domestic work that sustained the West Indian male laborers who worked in the mines, on the plantations, and on construction sites. They were the invisible auxiliary labor force that allowed for the social reproduction of labor. Moreover, the newly arrived had to deal with and negotiate competing ideas of race: first, the idea of racial democracy, the foundation of Panamanian national identity, which argued that racial discrimination did not exist, and second, US-style legal segregation, two competing forms of racialization. The construction of the canal thus intensified the workings of racial capitalism in Panama and the Caribbean, ushering in a new social geography of racialization, as pay scales, living quarters, and working conditions revolved around the axis of US racial constellations.

In seven chapters, Flores-Villalobos analyzes labor, sexuality, gender, morality, and empire, bringing into sharp focus how women negotiated and challenged racial and gender hierarchies while covering various aspects of social life in the canal zone. Using archival material that usually denigrated Black women—criminal investigations, letters written by white women, administrative correspondence, and other sources—Flores-Villalobos uncovers the everyday strategies of survival and negotiation. Her research reveals the interlocking racial structures and realms of sovereignty that Black women were forced to confront. Black women, while subject to the harms of racial discrimination, were not deeply integrated into the formal regulatory system of labor relations, nor did they have formal contracts. This excellent piece of scholarship rewrites labor history with a focus on gender and expands our understanding of how and why Black women took jobs related to the canal project. This book is perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in areas of labor history and Latin American, Africana, and gender studies.

Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Peter Wade’s coedited book Against Racism: Organizing for Social Change in Latin America is a groundbreaking volume analyzing anti-racism through the lens of organizations in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. The book is the product of a collaborative research project, Latin American Anti-Racism in a Post-Racial Age (LAPORA), funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council Grant. The project finished in Manchester in 2018, when invited guests from the UK, Europe, Latin America, and the US provided comments and analysis, which are included in the text. Additionally, the project had four academics in each country and four postdoctoral researchers. The editors and researchers worked with a broad and diverse range of organizations to formulate key questions, examine how they worked against racism, and evaluate how their agenda was implemented. These groups included Black, Indigenous, and mestizo social movement organizations.

The project stemmed from the researchers’ dissatisfaction with the current thinking about how to address racism and racial inequality. Many poignant questions are raised in the volume, especially revolving around the central debate of how social movements can best confront racism and racial inequality. A recurring theme is the tension between integrating marginalized populations into the existing order and more radical approaches that seek to transform the basic structural features of that order.

The research team employed the term alternative grammar to capture the actions and discourses in which racial inequality and racism were not explicit but not absent. Alternative grammar is defined as an organizational matrix referring to elements that, when verbalized or excavated, do not seem to talk about anti-racism or even perhaps racism. This meant that racism is not absent but does not form the key organizing frame for the organization or struggle in question. The “absence of presence” is more deeply constitutive of racial orders where racialized practices may be buried, or what I refer to as the textural submersion of racialization.Footnote ⁴ According to the volume, the fact that racism is constantly present and deeply embedded, while very often veiled, unacknowledged, misrecognized, or texturally submerged, means that anti-racism in the region can take on many heterogeneous forms and shapes. Therefore, according to the researchers, what is needed is a broad, open-minded, and inclusive approach to grasp the nuances and range of how anti-racism can operate—at times violent and visible, and other times less visible—across the Americas.

The researchers used a comparative lens, focusing on themes rather than a single country, because it allowed them to analyze different strategic approaches to anti-racism, their strengths, and areas where they could be reinforced. From the discourses of Black and Indigenous groups, four threads emerged: the publicly mobilized body (i.e., how the Black and Indigenous body or image is socially constructed), the struggle for territory, the search for upward mobility, and mobilization for redress. The body emerged as a key theme in the work of Black and Indigenous women’s organizations; territory was central to both Black and Indigenous groups, given the long history of land rights struggles; social mobility in the workplace and education emerged, as they underscore some of the structural elements of Black and Indigenous disempowerment, both individually and collectively; and last, the mobilization to redress antidiscrimination through laws.

The introduction provides an excellent but brief discussion of various theoretical and conceptual frames to understand racism by recognizing the seminal works of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, C. L. R. James, Angela Davis, and Stokely Carmichael—scholars not typically associated with Latin America. Also, they note the importance and centrality of decolonial and critical race scholars like Derrick Bell and Patricia Williams, and critics of settler colonialism, such as Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, and more. The book covers seven chapters, all paying attention to structures of racialization. Chapter 1 presents movement and theoretical narratives on the racial formation of mestizaje in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. Chapter 2 explores structural intersectionality as central to anti-racism with particular attention to the relation between racial and gender hierarchies. Chapters 3–6 are case studies, and chapter 7 focuses on anti-racism in predominantly mestizo societies.

Taken as a whole, the volume is impressive for its comparative scope, depth, breadth, and intricate layers. The scholarship on racialization, gender, anti-racism, and social movements rarely focuses on both Black and Indigenous organizations or puts their concerns into direct conversation, let alone in a single volume. The normal lack of cross-fertilization makes this volume unique, particularly because its analytical focus reflects themes identified by anti-racist movement organizations rather than the researchers themselves. In doing so, it illustrates the value of studying anti-racism, racism, and social movements in a way that accounts for the broad and diverse range of opinions, methods, and strategies. This volume is groundbreaking for both Latin American studies and the social sciences.

Reighan Gillam’s Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media revolves around the construction of media images in southeastern Brazil and how Afro-Brazilian media producers use visual cultural productions to not only challenge dominant images but also create their own stories. With ethnographic field research, mainly in São Paulo, and employing textural analysis using semistructured interviews—with over thirty-one media producers—and participant observations, the author weaves together a fresh and nuanced understanding of an anti-racist visual culture. Gillam focuses mainly on how Afro-Brazilian media producers pursue anti-racism through their work, as she examines what anti-racist visual politics look like in films, documentaries, and digital platforms. The main idea is to understand how Afro-Brazilians create their own stories and images.

She argues that Afro-Brazilian media producers create visual images that offer new possibilities for highlighting Black subjectivities as they articulate images that contribute to anti-racist activism and perspectives. This process is referred to as “anti-racist visual culture,” and it describes the ways media producers and the visual media create, identify, challenge, and break with racist practices, ideologies, and structures. Anti-racist visual politics are enacted through calling into question who controls the media, what meanings are associated with Blackness, and how racism is represented. The book moves beyond critiquing how Brazil’s media depict Black people to examine the ways the media producers challenge racialized images by calling for more representation and inclusion. The book includes four well-organized chapters with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 sets the context for understanding how the Afro-Brazilian media has challenged the distortions and one-sided depictions presented by mainstream Brazilian film, television, and other images. Chapter 2 focuses on the television station TV da Gente, the first channel in Brazil to present racial diversity as part of its mission. Chapter 3 analyzes images and videos of structural racism in a YouTube series, and chapter 4 analyzes four short films. The conclusion highlights the three elements of anti-racist visual culture organizing: first the role of visual politics and the means of different representation of protest and denunciations by calling attention to who is included and who is not; second, how Afro-Brazilians are involved in the rearticulating of racist practices by moving from the surface to show how racism operates at many levels; third, she underscores the agency of Afro-Brazilians in the media by breaking from dominant forms of representation.

Anti-racism work in the media is part of the broader Afro-Brazilian struggle, which also includes anti-racist grassroots and educational campaigns and other strategies. By putting anti-racist visual culture in that context, Gillam expands how we understand social movements in Brazil and the African diaspora. She places anti-racist visual culture at the center by showing how media producers use their lens to interpret and critique racial dynamics. Visualizing Black Lives contributes to understanding the racialization of Blackness and to media and literary studies. It will be useful in both undergraduate and graduate classes in courses in Latin American, Afro-American, and Afro-Latinx studies.

In different but complementary ways, these books suggest new methods to think about racialization, gender, human rights, citizenship, women’s labor, and anti-racist struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean. Written by anthropologists, historians, and media scholars, they sharply illustrate how Blackness in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and several Central American countries is being reimagined and reinscribed, and they highlight from different angles the struggles of Afro-descendants across the region. They reflect the emergence of new geographies of multiculturalism, democracy, and citizenship across the Americas. Collectively and individually, these books challenge and repudiate state and mestizo notions of identity and multiculturalism as they advance our understanding of the Americas by weaving the political and social histories of Afro peoples into the national identities of Latin American and Caribbean countries. As John Burdick commented, history weighs heavily on the Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples in the Americas, but they continue to challenge systems of domination.