This book has many strong points to recommend it. First, it deals directly with the concept of race in Latin America, not just past but also present. As Gotkowitz notes, more and more scholars and activists are ‘finding it impossible not to use the word “race” ’ (p. 2), which is not quite the same as using the word ‘racism’. Second, it combines historical and anthropological approaches to provide a satisfying longue durée account of the work that race has done and still does in the region. Third, its 16 chapters are written by a mix of scholars, some of them based in Latin America, others based in the North; this gives great coverage and an interesting variety of styles, some more traditionally ‘academic’ than others. Each chapter is fairly short, concise and very well honed, reflecting an effective editorial hand.
Weaker points are few. The book focuses strongly on Bolivia, with six chapters on this country alone (Mexico and Guatemala get two chapters each, Peru and Ecuador one apiece). This bias is justified in terms of the recent overt manifestations of racism in Bolivia, such as the events of 24 May 2008 in Sucre, described by Calla and the Research Group of the Observatorio del Racismo, when ‘forty people of indigenous and peasant origin were dragged into the main square … and publicly punished and humiliated’ (p. 311). The book also deals with race and racism almost exclusively in terms of indigeneity, with passing nods to blackness. A single book cannot do everything, but the overall effect is to reproduce once more the division between the ‘Indio’ and the ‘Afro’ in Latin American studies, even if the division is undermined by looking at indigeneity in terms of race.
Gotkowitz's excellent introduction includes a perceptive account of the way in which scholars have dealt with ‘biology’ and ‘culture’ in thinking about race. She outlines four approaches: (1) race is a discourse of biology; (2) race used to be about biologisation, but is now a discourse of culture that masks continued racism; (3) race is (and always has been) about the intersections of ideas of biology and culture, meaning there has been no simple historical transition from ‘biology’ to ‘culture’; (4) race is a combination of (2) and (3), such that culture and biology always intertwine, but there has been a historical shift towards a more cultural discourse. To this preferred approach, Gotkowitz adds the post-Second World War persistence of biologising idioms of race in popular domains (and indeed in some areas of science), despite an official shift away from biology or, indeed, from any mention of ‘race’. Given that there is ‘no clear consensus about what race means’, Gotkowitz prefers to ask, ‘what work does race do’ – that is, what are its effects in practice (p. 10)? This is a fine approach, as long as one keeps an eye on what constitutes a racial effect, as opposed to one not related to race at all; we have to have some idea of what race ‘means’, even while acknowledging that this is a moving target.
The subsequent chapters do a varied job of developing this conceptual framework. Burns and Thomson both interrogate in depth what ‘race’ (or something like ‘race’) meant in colonial times, showing the complex interweavings of ideas about appearance, heredity, ‘blood’, human nature, religion and origins. Burns argues that, in early colonial times, divisions between Jews and Christians were sometimes more significant than between Africans and indios. Yet ideas about being Jewish, Moorish and Christian were laced with notions of heredity in ways that were feeding into ideas about ‘race’. Simpson argues that early colonial concepts of human difference deployed collective categories that depended on ancestry and territory and were similar to the ones that we readily recognise as ‘racial’.
Other chapters are less clear about these natural-cultural imbrications, focusing more on the work of cultural criteria and less on how idioms of naturalisation did (or did not) operate. Barragán shows that in late nineteenth-century La Paz race and occupation were mutually defining, such that a shoemaker was a priori a ‘mestizo’, while indios were seen as agriculturalists. Larson traces the pedagogical work done by early twentieth-century Bolivian elites to ‘purify’ the category of indio, attempting to remove the threat of the lettered, acculturated, troublesome cholo and reinstate the rural indigenous labourer. In both cases, categories such as indio are taken for granted as ‘racial’ categories, as are the idioms of naturalisation that help make them such.
Better is Poole's rich analysis of the way in which twentieth-century Oaxacan elites balanced two complementary strategies for thinking about their region's identity: mapping genealogical links to ancient indigenous roots in order to specify a local singularity, and mapping contemporary cultural diversity as a set of indigenous ethnological types or ‘cultures’. The balance between these two modes, with their different temporalities, was and still is an anxious one, as the mestizo is always potentially genealogically linked to the indio and ‘the surface appearances of culture must be scrutinized for evidence of the racial substance that might reveal a subterranean link between the mestizo self and the indigenous (excluded) Other’ (p. 197).
Also satisfying is Hale's chapter on the emerging intermediate categories of mestizos and cholos that are breaking up the established Guatemalan ethnic ideology which divided the world into ladinos and indios. Hale's focus is on the identity politics of the new conjuncture, but he consistently references the way in which ideas about genealogy, heredity and physical appearance intersect with class, culture and politics.
This is a superior and important book, which will be widely used and cited. There is no room to do justice to the other excellent chapters: those by Colleredo-Mansfield and Lomnitz stood out for me, but I enjoyed every single one.
