Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds. Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xvi + 329 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-5441-9.
Reviewed by Eric W. Rose (Department of History, University of South Carolina)
Published on H-Nationalism (November, 2006)
Since Benedict Anderson stirred the waters with his chapter on "The Creole Pioneers," successive waves of scholarship on national identity in Latin America have threatened to overwhelm the explanatory power of his Imagined Communities (1983). But Anderson's influence persists; two decades later, it is still necessary for a volume of essays on Race and Nation in Modern Latin America to begin with a challenge to "Anderson's claim that nationality and race occupy different conceptual space" (p. ix). The nine essays that follow are impressive indictments of Anderson's theoretical separation, thorough explorations of the historical space determined by the overlap of race and nation.
Thomas Holt's foreword is exceptional in its explicit reference to Anderson. For the other contributors, the works of scholars like Florencia Mallon, Ada Ferrer, or Claudio Lomnitz-Adler are of more immediate influence. Mallon is among the mentors that the editors credit with instilling the collegiality that made such a collection possible. As soon becomes evident, the book's scholarly debt to Mallon (and the also acknowledged Steve Stern and Francisco Scarano--all three served as graduate advisors to the editors as well as at least one contributor) is much more significant than professional decorum. The most consistent thread linking these essays, otherwise varied in geographical, chronological, and theoretical scope, is their devotion to the goal of Mallon's Peasant and Nation (1994): "to see how universal ideals met contradictory realities" in the historical forge of (race and) nation.[1] Each essay presents a chapter in the relationship between liberal nationalisms that deny racial differentiation (ideals) and racially-determined power structures that persist nonetheless (realities).
The analytical key to understanding this historical relationship is racialization, defined by Alexandra Minna Stern as "the process by which the signifier of 'race' acquires social and historical value" (p. 205). Lillian Guerra's piece on the early Cuban Republic provides an exemplary account of racialization at work. She describes a four-year period that begins with the ascendancy of a "war-tested discourse of race-less social unity" championed by liberal elites and appropriated by "the popular classes" (p. 134). Several years of political maneuvering among purveyors of three competing national visions (liberal, conservative, and popular) culminated in a re-racialization of Cuban society. In pursuit of the stability and progress modeled by other hemispheric powers, the Cuban state abandoned a national ethos of racial fraternity in favor of a monochromatic white vision of the national future. Racial observations interlaced themselves with contemporary perceptions of the "richest, most civilized, progressive, and powerful" American Union and the "stationary, backward, poor" nations of Latin America in the minds of Cuba's political elite (pp. 154-155). They concluded that European immigration was the fuel that fired the engine of North American progress.
In her interpretation of this racialized comparison and the circumstances that surrounded its authorship, Guerra comes close to fulfilling one of the promises made in the book's introduction. The editors cast their focus on racialization as a novel methodology, a means to refresh understanding of a number of issues, including "how racial ideas have constructed dichotomies between North and South" (p. 3). Though somewhat opaque in its phrasing, this question of racial dichotomies is tantalizing. Guerra's essay lends itself to this type of inquiry, but seems to go against the grain of the editor's etiology. In her interpretation, racial ideas did not construct perceptions of North-South dichotomy; perceptions of that dichotomy incorporated racial ideas.
If the editors mean the "dichotomy" question to describe a means of de-constructing the legacy of comparative scholarship dominated by the likes of Frank Tannenbaum, then they must be referring to Aims McGuinness's chapter exploring race and its bearing on national sovereignty in the nineteenth-century Americas. In perhaps the most complete and compelling of the book's essays, McGuinness sets forth an accessible and meaningful array of racialized worldviews, and shows how these various elements contributed to the construction of a new geopolitical category: "América Latina." Centering on vignettes from the mid-nineteenth-century culture clashes that punctuated North American travels through the Isthmus of Panama, the essay builds outward to include contemporary Pan-Latinist perceptions from intellectuals like the New Granadans J.M. Torres Caicedo and Justo Arosemena.
When a drunken white man from the U.S. refused to pay a darker-skinned Panamanian vendor for a watermelon slice, the vendor offered a firm reminder that "we are not in the United States here" (p. 91). The vendor's meaning was more than geographical. North Americans experienced their travels in Panama as extensions of their home reality and the racial hierarchy that entailed. The watermelon vendor asserted his place in a less-racialized Panamanian society, and violence ensued. A day of rioting was fed by both the affront to North American racial assumptions and anxieties among residents of Panama City about how these Yankee expectations might encroach on local sovereignty. These particular concerns about the aggressive North Americans in the Panamanian region were symptomatic of broader hemispheric trepidations about U.S. expansionism. Intellectuals like Arosemena and Caicedo articulated these trepidations to prideful racialized (or at least ethnicized) definitions of the Latin American people vis-à-vis the ever-encroaching Latin American "other."
There is little else in the volume that commends itself explicitly to a deeper understanding of comparative racialization in the Americas, North and South. There is, however, a good deal of material that accords to a parenthetical promise attached to the editor's statement about dichotomies North and South. The introduction also lists an understanding of racialized dichotomies "in and among Latin American nations" as one of the benefits made possible by the book's approach (p. 3). The essayists evince this benefit in a number of ways, most notably through deconstructions of regional dichotomies.
In twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, respectively, Gerardo Renique and Barbara Weinstein make compelling use of regionalism as a complicating factor in the historical play of race and nation. Renique's piece on anti-Chinese racism in Sonora explains the role that Sonoran-borne anti-Chinese sentiment played in blurring the lines between Sonoran region and Mexican nation, helping to forge a racialized common sense of Mexican national identity. Weinstein examines the material and ideological basis for Paulista regionalism surrounding the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932. She concludes that Brazil's national philosophy of racial democracy developed in opposition to a whiter, less resonant, regional (and national) mythology of the Paulista elites.
Sueann Caulfield explores another dimension of this triumphant Brazilian ideology, revealing racially determined ruling patterns beneath the race-less discourse of court proceedings in Rio de Janeiro. Caulfield penetrates the oblique racial language to find that Brazilian judges were less likely to enforce the familial obligations of interracial unions. Through her essay, the reader is able to discern a racially coded understanding of sexual honor that "allowed jurists to espouse racial democracy while practicing discrimination" (p. 182).
Caulfield's contribution is essential to the volume in a number of ways. Her deft interpretation links her essay to the rest through its depiction of universal ideal meeting contradictory reality, but surpasses them in its incorporation of gender as a third analytical dimension. This volume is advertised as a historical investigation of the "complex play of race, gender, and nation" in Latin America, but only Caulfield and Anne Macpherson realize the full explanatory power of gender analysis.[2] Whereas Caulfield builds upon sexual union as the foundational myth of Brazilian national identity, Macpherson sees sex trumped by war as the mythological means of unifying the races in nineteenth-century Belize.
Though some readers may take issue with the under-explored role of gender constructs or the limited treatment of "dichotomies between North and South," most of this volume's imperfections are in this category of inevitable omissions, based on the reader's subjective assessment of historical importance. In the afterword, Peter Wade adds a couple of items to this list of worthy additions. He writes that matters of racialized cultural appropriation, discussed anecdotally by a few of the essayists, merit further consideration. For example, the "museumification" of Afro-Cuban culture in Cuba during the re-racialization process described by Lillian Guerra is full of unexplored meaning (pp. 267-268). Wade also asks questions about religious belief, church politics, and how they must have impacted the ways Latin Americans experienced interracial fraternity and the national family.
Wade's anthropological perspective fuels his culturalist critiques and reminds the reader of the importance of this volume. Historical identity cannot be understood apart from the cultural constructs that feed its development. In its deconstructive analysis of nation-building, racialization, and gendering, this collection of essays provides a crucial tool for understanding the historical processes that frame identity construction. It is essential reading for any advanced student of history and culture in modern Latin America.
Notes
[1]. Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994), 14.
[2]. Quotation on p. ix. Similar phrasing of the "race, gender, nation" triad is repeated elsewhere in foreword, throughout the introduction, and appears on back cover of the paper-bound version as praise from Fernando Coronil.
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Citation:
Eric W. Rose. Review of Appelbaum, Nancy P.; Macpherson, Anne S.; Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12525
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