is mostly missing from this volume; Barrow limits hisattention to professional naturalists, a necessary con-cession for a single volume. Readers should not assume,however, that conservation has only been a preoccu-pation of scientific elites. Rather, from its earliest daysconservation secured broad public appeal. The largerstory of how mass social movements addressed the ex-tinction issue remains to be written. When such a vol-ume appears, it will greatly benefit from Barrow’s im-portant work.

KEVIN C. ARMITAGE

Miami University

CARIBBEAN AND LATIN AMERICA

LOWELL GUDMUNDSON and JUSTIN WOLFE, editors.Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Raceand Place. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2010.Pp. viii, 406. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.

This collection of essays aims to make space in the his-toriography of the African diaspora for those areas ofthe Central American isthmus colonized by Spain orlater absorbed into the nations that emerged fromSpanish rule. It successfully contributes to documentingthe extensive presence of Africans and their descen-dants in these areas, to exploring these Afro-CentralAmericans’ struggles for security, freedom, and power,and to tracing the erasure of blacks and blackness inelite constructions of national identity focused on“Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions” (p.2). A second aim is to overcome the marginalization ofthese histories from Spanish Central American histo-riography.

This volume, the product of a 2004 conference ofMexicanists, Colombianists, and Central Americanists,is divided into two sections: the first on the Spanish co-lonial period, comprising five chapters, and the secondon the period since independence from Spain to about1940, comprising six chapters. There is dialogue amongthe chapters both within and between sections. The vol-ume does not cover all of Central America but ratherfocuses attention on non-coastal Guatemala and Nica-ragua, and the Caribbean coasts of what became Ni-caragua (Mosquitia), Panama, and Costa Rica. The oneclear exception to this is Rina Caceres Gomez’s essayon the port of Omoa in modern-day Honduran terri-tory.

The first section analyzes slave labor on sugar plan-tations in south-central Guatemala and in cacao pro-duction in eastern Costa Rica, the complex ethnic andpolitical region of the Mosquitia, waged slavery atOmoa’s fort, and urban slavery and processes of eman-cipation in Guatemala. Paul Lokken shows how slavesdeveloped mechanisms for escaping sugar plantationslavery and how, as they blended into the free non-In-dian population, bases for a strong collective blackidentity weakened. Russell Lohse demonstrates how asimilar process in Costa Rica resulted from the extremeautonomy of male cacao slaves, which bred social con-

fidence and eroded slavery. Caceres Gomez likewiseshows how the economic and political strength ofOmoa’s slaves resulted in early mass manumission, al-though she does not comment on post-slavery issues ofblack identity. Catherine Komisaruk documents arange of strategies deployed by slaves in late colonialGuatemala to obtain freedom. Komisaruk confirmsLokken’s findings and concludes that “crossing overinto free Hispanic society helped occlude consciousnessin the nineteenth century of African heritage in Gua-temala” (p. 170). Karl H. Offen acknowledges “the in-tersection of British and Spanish empires” in the isth-mus (p. 92) and provides a lucid explanation of the wayMosquitia’s power relations nurtured racial prideamong the Afro-Amerindian Sambo and Tawira Mos-quito peoples, who “interacted with the British and theSpanish as equals” (p. 121). As in Matthew Restall’swork on Afro-Yucatecans, indigenous people are not abackdrop in Offen’s chapter.

Section two has a stronger emphasis on Nicaragua.Juliet Hooker extends Offen’s analysis by showing howthe post-independence Nicaraguan elite was obsessedwith physically incorporating the Mosquitia into the re-public while denying full citizenship to its supposedlyuncivilized indigenous, black, and mixed peoples. Sheshows how coastal leaders, especially Creoles, elo-quently contested such discursive and legal discrimina-tion. Among the Nicaraguan elites disparaging thecoast were Liberal politicians of black descent fromwestern Nicaragua analyzed by Justin Wolfe, who linksthe erosion of their radicalism to their self-distancingfrom a specifically black identity. Lowell Gudmundsonexamines the 1883 Nicaraguan census, which was un-usual in the non-British isthmus of the time for includ-ing categories that captured black appearance if notidentity, to demonstrate the extent of black presence inthe population of four western towns, including in theirlocal elites. Mauricio Melendez Obando uses genealog-ical records to succinctly trace the often unacknowl-edged African roots of many notable Nicaraguans andCosta Ricans.

Lara Putnam’s and Ronald Harpelle’s essays dealwith the new infusion of people of African descent after1870 into the isthmus to work on the Panama Canal,banana plantations, and railroads. Putnam providesrich evidence of their presence in coastal Panama andCosta Rica. She explains those nations’ restrictions onblack immigration and internal migration from the mid-1920s with reference to their elites’ practical and ide-ological attractions to U.S.-fueled eugenic thinking. In-deed, the eugenic character of emerging projects ofnational mestizaje in formerly Spanish Central Americamerits further analysis. Harpelle’s account of whiteUnited Fruit Company wives living in company com-pounds in eastern Honduras, Costa Rica, and westernGuatemala relates best to the volume’s core themewhen he discusses these women’s fraught relations withblack English-speaking maids and cooks, who wereclearly as much protagonists of their own lives as were

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the enslaved women of colonial Omoa who “struck” ef-fectively in 1800.

This book is a major contribution to the scholarly lit-erature, but its conceptual framework leads to a lostopportunity that arguably impoverishes its goals of doc-umenting the diversity of black histories in the isthmusand of impacting African diaspora and Spanish CentralAmerican historiographies. Second only to the Carib-bean archipelago and perhaps northeastern SouthAmerica, the Central American isthmus has been azone of competing imperialisms, regionalisms, and na-tionalisms since the early 1500s. This reality is implicitin many of the book’s chapters, and explicit in Offen’sand Hooker’s, but it is absent from the editors’ intro-duction and thus does not frame the collection as awhole. Although both editors and other contributorsrather frequently write as if their subject is the entiregeographical isthmus (pp. vii, 5, 9, 147, 209–210, 335),the opening definition of “the Hispanic mainland Ca-ribbean nations from Mexico through Central Americaand Panama, to Colombia and Venezuela” (p. 1) clearlyserves to exclude Belize, the one British territory thatwas never absorbed into a ladino-dominated nationalterritory or a project of mestizaje. El Salvador is alsomarginalized. Mentions of Belize and its colonial an-tecedents are far more frequent than indicated in theindex, but the contributors’ disinterest in learning fromthe historiography of Belize, integrating Belize intocomparative analyses, or using their own scholarship toinspire new work on Belize is disappointing, especiallyas the exclusion of Belize is never acknowledged or jus-tified.

Five of the many ways in which the Belize case couldbe usefully integrated into this volume are as follows.Offen’s portrayal of the Mosquito kingdom’s strengthand how it weakened British, Spanish, and Nicaraguancolonial projects bears comparison to how the ItzaMaya kingdom documented by Grant D. Jones pre-vented effective Spanish colonization of the Belizearea. Lohse’s analysis of male cacao slaves in CostaRica would benefit from comparison with Nigel Bol-land’s pathbreaking analysis of similar gender dynamicsin forestry slave labor in Belizean territory from themid-1600s to emancipation in the 1830s. Wolfe will findother politically ambitious Afro-Central Americans dis-tancing themselves from their black ancestry in my workon middle-class Belizean Creoles and their late nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to extractgreater political rights from Britain. Putnam and Har-pelle could attend more deliberately to the presence ofBelizeans and Bay Islanders in the canal and bananazones; among them in the 1940s was Belizean laborleader Antonio Soberanis Gomez, who returned hometo articulate a vision of a historically black and indig-enous nation. Finally, Hooker’s concluding discussionon contemporary tensions among mestizos, Creoles,and indigenous people in eastern Nicaragua would beenriched via dialogue with Laurie Kroshus Medina’sand Mark Moberg’s work on dynamics among BelizeanCreoles, Garifuna, Maya, and mestizos, and immigrant

Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans in post-in-dependence Belize’s citrus and banana industries. In-deed, a chapter on the Garifuna version of CentralAmerican blackness would have facilitated the inclu-sion of Belize in this collection, which in turn wouldhave transformed the meaning of “Central America”from an imperially bounded space to a geographicalplace.

ANNE S. MACPHERSON

College at Brockport,State University of New York

PAUL K. EISS. In the Name of El Pueblo: Place, Com-munity, and the Politics of History in Yucatan. (LatinAmerica Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations.)Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2010. Pp. xv,337. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.

The Spanish term pueblo cannot be translated into Eng-lish by a single word as it may either mean “village” or“people,” referring to a place, a community that inhab-its a place, or a political collectivity. The term becamea standard reference in political discourse starting inthe late eighteenth century, when a rhetoric of popularsovereignty emerged in opposition to the ancien regimeand colonial rule. El pueblo, Paul K. Eiss argues, hasbecome “a focus of contention . . . within which diver-gent conceptions of community and collectivity cameinto conflict” (p. 5). Eiss combines historical and an-thropological data, methods, and approaches (micro-history, ethnography, and the history of the present) toexplore the concept as realized in the Hunucma regionlocated in the northwest of Mexico’s Yucatan penin-sula. His book is not a classic community study but “astudy of communalism in a defined region” (p. 10). Eisswants to show that practices of making or claiming elpueblo were elaborated “in dialogue with the wider po-litical rhetorics and frameworks of governance” (p. 11).Following Michel Foucault, he does not consider com-munal identifications as stable but holds that presentand previous modes of communal and collective iden-tification may be radically different.

The book develops in chronological order. The firstthree chapters span the period from late colonial rulein the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Mex-ican Revolution in the early twentieth century. They il-lustrate the—sometimes legal and at other times vio-lent—struggle of Hunucma’s indigenous villagers indefense of their communal lands against dispossessionby mestizo landlords and the colonial and postcolonialstate. Among other things, the rise of haciendas basedon the production of henequen and the industry’s re-percussions on the indigenous peasants and workers arediscussed. Subsequent chapters scrutinize how el pueblobecame “a subject of politics and an object of gover-nance” in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary pe-riods until the 1990s. Eiss’s analysis shows how the com-munalists’ struggle changed from a fight against thehaciendas into a revolutionary war for land and free-dom. Indeed, an agrarian reform was realized and the

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