oin us for an international and interdisciplinary conference to explore the history of African Americans in Middle America and to work to create a framework for the comparative discussion of historical experiences shared by and perhaps unique to the nations of the mainland Hispanic Caribbean.

	José Agustín Arrieta, "La Sorpresa," 1850

he post-World War II explosion in scholarship on the history of Africans and their descendents in the Americas has been one of the most fruitful areas for the development of historical and sociological knowledge worldwide. However, the great majority of that scholarship has focused on nations and areas where African-descent populations are both recognized as such today and comprise the majority population either regionally or nationally. The islands of the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil have, in effect, been the preferred setting for this extraordinary expansion of knowledge and remain so today in scholarly terms.

M. Lapie, "A map of the West Indies and of the Mexican-Gulph [sic]," 1806. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4390.ct000348

n the margins, both geographically and conceptually, of that emerging Black Atlantic framework, can be found the Hispanic mainland Caribbean nations from Mexico through Central America and Panama, to Colombia and Venezuela. Here one finds little recognition, in either popular or scholarly terms, of the region’s dominant role in the earliest Colonial slave trade or of the fact that people of African descent constituted the majority of non-indigenous populations long thereafter. Similarly, despite (or perhaps because of) the centrality of these people and imageries of Blackness in the later development of national identities and historical consciousness, these same nation states have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of Blacks.

	"De negro é india sale lobo," 18th-century casta painting Original located at: http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/ CULPEPER/BAKEWELL/thinksheets/castas.html

ach of these nations has witnessed the post-Colonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity that have systematically downplayed African roots or participation in the process, in favor of Spanish and Indian antecedents and contributions. Thus, both their Colonial history, so central to the peopling of the Americas with Africans, and the very contributions of mixed-race populations of African descent since then, have been relegated to an episodic, peripheral rendering of one after another of the individual national histories. Indeed, the very success of such an assimilationist blurring of ethnic categories in the more recent past has played a large part in a relative lack of scholarly interest in research on these cases, as well as profoundly misguided popular images of their historical past. Moreover, that same nationalist success story has worked as a positive disincentive for any understanding of the story of African Americans in Middle America in a larger, regional framework or for scholarly discussions of these topics across those same national boundaries.

Detail from Street Scene, Cartagena, Colombia, 1933 Latin American Fotofolio, Album 4 Courtesy of The Latin American Library, Tulane University

hrough discussions among colleagues whose work on the nations perhaps most identified with a non-African, mixed-race or mestizo national identity in modern times, we will engage each other in the common goal of revising notions of hybridity whose historical importance and precocity can hardly be overstated. If Mexico set the terms of this conversation with its early 20th century development of post-revolutionary imagery, it is no less true that each of the other nations pursued similarly complex processes of identity formation thereafter. However common the mestizo prototype that resulted, a sustained comparison will allow us to better contextualize our individual and collective research, subjecting relatively isolated, nationally-based research to commentary and criticism from “foreign” but similar fields and cases. Indeed, overcoming the professional and geographic separation which characterizes the group of proposed participants is a major goal of the conference, its discussions and subsequent publications.

Conference Organizers:

Rina Cáceres Universidad de Costa Rica

Lowell Gudmundson Mount Holyoke College

Justin Wolfe Tulane University

This conference is sponsored by:

	Stone Center for Latin American Studies Tulane University
	Mount Holyoke College