Alex Borucki offers a stunningly textured and comprehensive account of the lives and shifting social identities of African slaves and their descendants in the late colonial and early national Río de la Plata. The book focuses primarily on areas of what is present-day Uruguay, especially the city of Montevideo, but demonstrates that the histories of slavery and freedom, and of black mobility and mobilization, were inseparable from those of neighboring Buenos Aires and, in turn, from the broader Atlantic itineraries linking those cities to Brazil and to Africa.

This book lends hefty support to a broader movement underway among academics and activists to place the Río de la Plata on the map of the African Diaspora, and, conversely, to re-Africanize the histories of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Among the book's principal contributions is its reassessment of the place of the Río de la Plata in Atlantic slave trading networks, which brings to light the region's “long but neglected history of slave trading and slavery” (1). This neglect is owed partly to Uruguay and Argentina's self-portrayal as white nations unburdened by histories of slavery and racism, but it also reflects a tendency by scholars of the diaspora to focus principally on plantation societies where slavery was at its most extensive.

Borucki begins his reassessment quantitatively, using databases and archival data. The result is an upward revision of the previous estimates of the slave trade to the Río de la Plata that includes not just the direct trade routes from Africa but also the significant, yet shadowy, inter-American trade through Brazil. To flesh out a range of African trajectories to the Río de la Plata, Borucki then takes a qualitative approach, using marriage files in which witnesses explain when, where, and how they met an enslaved groom. These documents confirm the importance of the route through Brazil, especially Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, and they set the stage for Borucki's examination of the regional and trans-imperial and trans-local networks of mobility and cultural exchange. These networks shaped the emerging social identities of enslaved and free Africans who resided in and often moved among Rioplatense cities like Montevideo, Colonia, and Buenos Aires. A second major contribution of this book, then, is to bridge the stubborn historiographical frontier between the Spanish and Lusophone Americas—one buttressed not only by linguistic and national boundaries, but also by imaginary racial geographies that map blackness almost exclusively onto the latter. Borucki's archival and historiographical references reflect the history of the Banda Oriental history at the intersection of the two Iberian Americas.

The documentary base Borucki has developed allows him to make an innovative argument about the importance of shipmate ties in shaping social networks, and emergent ethnic and meta-ethnic identifications, in the Río de la Plata. Bonds created from shared migratory experiences overlapped with and strengthened patterns of membership and leadership in colonial black militias, Catholic lay brotherhoods, and African “naciones.” Moving into the national period, Borucki documents the decisive participation of black soldiers and officers in the stormy conflicts through which the Banda Oriental became independent Uruguay and their political weight in factional politics. Despite a tendency in Rioplatense historiography to ignore black military and political participation or to assimilate it into the actions of plebeian sectors in general, Borucki highlights black leaders and points to their constant emphasis in public discourse on a range of African, pan-African, or black identities as bases for social and political demands.

Just as memories and performances of military prowess shaped African descendants’ claims to citizenship in this period, they also gave specific local meaning to diasporic cultural manifestations like the Day of Kings celebration, which combined traditions from West Central Africa and Brazil. The efforts of black participants to frame these celebrations as thoroughly patriotic helped deflect persecution and made them central icons of a creolized Uruguayan identity. Borucki's final chapter, on the extraordinary life of Jacinto Ventura de Molina, black man of letters and soldier, charts his struggle to create vertical bonds with white patrons while speaking on behalf of “el pueblo negro” and advancing its claims to public dignity. Borucki deftly presents this intellectual history as an exemplary microcosm of its time and at the same time points out its value as a foreshadowing of future struggles by black thinkers and activists to navigate the narrow straits between assimilation and erasure, respect and ridicule. A third great contribution of this book, then, is to bridge the colonial and national periods, showing deeply contextualized changes in the ways Africans and their descendants sought to connect and self-identify, while highlighting the ongoing importance of the politics and social connection shaped by experiences of racial slavery and resistance to it.

The book's impressive detail and erudition, its thematic chapter structure, and its (intentionally) uneven attention to different sites might make it a challenging read for undergraduates and some non-specialists. One could imagine giving more weight to the story of Buenos Aires alongside that of Montevideo (even if only in abbreviated form and from secondary sources) to round out the narrative's trans-local scope. But the book's revelation of the intricacies of black social life and self-fashioning in an area of Latin America insistent on its exceptional whiteness, and its meticulous documentation of processes of creolization in-the-making, from slave ships through leadership in republican institutions, makes it a must-read for scholars of slavery, race, and black identities and politics in the Atlantic world.