Testimonios afropuertorriqueños: Un proyecto de historia oral en el oeste de Puerto Rico (Afro-Puerto Rican testimonies: An oral history project in western Puerto Rico) is a collaborative research project launched in September 2006. Its purpose is recording the voices, memories, and histories of contemporary Afro-Puerto Ricans in order to fertilize debates about racial constructions and discourses in Puerto Rico and democratize the forum of discussion, representation, and analysis of Afro-Puerto Rican history and identities.
An excerpt from by Winston James' book Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London: Verso, 1998) is presented
In 2004, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva published an article in which he argued that the US system of race is beginning to resemble that of Latin America. This article is a critical reply to Bonilla-Silva’s Latin Americanization thesis. The author introduces a Latin American perspective.
Christina A. Sue commented on my 2004 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies on the Latin Americanization of racial stratification in the USA. Almost all her observations hinge on the assumption that racial stratification in Latin American countries is fundamentally structured around ‘two racial poles’. I disagree with her and in my reply do three things. First, I address three major claims or issues in her comment. Second, I point out some methodological limitations of American-centered race analysis in Latin America. Third, I conclude by discussing briefly the Obama phenomenon and suggest this event fits in many ways my Latin Americanization thesis.
The article focuses on the interactions between anglophone blacks, black Caribbeans, and indigenous southern Mesoamericans during the second half of the 18th century. The author discusses the history of race relations between Europeans, Africans, and Indians within the British and Spanish empires, examines the relationship between Mayas and Spanish colonists, and analyzes the role of religious differences within their encounters.
"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
The concept of a unified African-Caribbean community or identity is a modern construction in that it emerged in its present guise during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to this, the identity politics of the ‘black’ people from this region were largely polarized. They were frequently divided along lines of island identities (Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts etc.). Focusing on the period between 1970 and 1979, this article sketches out the ways in which the black experience within local-level football also contributed to identity change among a particular group of young sportsmen in Leicester.
Deals with two interrelated topics. The first one is the extent to which the rejection of racism has led to a rejection of racial self-identification, and its group-differentiated dimension: for indigenous people in the countries under study, the rejection of racism did lead to a rejection of racial self-identification; for people of African descent, by and large, it did not. The second topic is the extent to which collective action and the political claims voiced by minority groups rely on cultural distinctiveness and, again, its group-differentiated dimension: the paper suggests that for indigenous people, the politicization of culture has been both more extensive and more successful than for people of African descent.
