Any author who ventures into the minefield that is race and ethnicity in Latin America is faced with the problem of definitions and the tendentious debates over politically correct language. Vincent C. Peloso skirts the issue to some extent by avoiding definitions and imaginatively shifting terms over the centuries. Thus, the native inhabitants at the time of Columbus’ landfall are Indians while after independence they become the indigenous. There are whites in Latin America who over time become creoles. But there are no blacks. Rather, they are Africans or African descendants or African-Colombians and their equivalents in other nations, or even Afro-Latins, although the use of this last term can spark a whole new debate. And then there are the mixed majority, the mestizos, castas, mulattoes, pardos, zambos, ladinos, and so on who, along with the other groups, are introduced, their lives followed, and their interactions explained over five hundred years, all in less than two hundred pages.

Peloso takes a largely chronological approach to his subject, although the chronology becomes a bit flexible at times. He begins with the sixteenth-century encounters, covering numerous developments and features including the establishment of white dominance, the encomienda and colonialism, colonial courts and communication, Inca resettlement, and the role of the Church. The seventeenth-century decline discusses Indian and African slavery, the slave trade, resistance, intellectuals, and cofradías, while the transitional eighteenth century covers more of the Church's role, scientific interest that manifested itself among other things in the casta paintings, the expulsion of the Jesuits, the Andean rebellions, Brazilian growth, the Haitian revolution, and the wars of independence. The chapter on struggles for nineteenth-century racial-ethnic hegemony charts the problems of the new states and the barriers created in them, as well as the abolition of slavery particularly in Cuba and Brazil, the struggles for citizenship, the efforts, often futile, to retain indigenous community viability, and Asian and European immigration that added new faces and complications to racial politics. The following chapter on race, ethnicity and national identity takes the story to the middle of the twentieth century and discusses modernisation, populism, the Mexican revolution, American intervention, and the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. The late twentieth century brings us up to date with comments on national inclusion, ‘the recovery of ethnicity’, the Zapatista and Sendero Luminoso movements, repression in Colombia, carnivals, and the Duvalier rule in Haiti. All the Latin American countries and Haiti are covered to some extent and most of the major developments are discussed as they relate to race and ethnicity. There is some duplication of points and the subdivision of the chapters into numerous sections results in a somewhat disjointed narrative, but one ends the book with a definite sense of the central role of race and racial problems in Latin America's history.

However, Peloso's picture is largely a negative one. He presents a story of conquest, rape, pillage, exploitation, degradation, segregation and more, which began with the conquest and continued after independence to the present day, now often reinforced by American intervention. Non-white ethnic identity managed to survive in some areas but only at enormous cost and numerous concessions. No one would deny that there is truth to all of this, but at the same time there must have been instances of harmony, some examples of love and affection between the races that accounts for the multihued reality that is Latin America. In his final chapter, the author finally gives some examples of successes, although these are related principally to indigenous and black not mestizo accomplishments. One wonders whether the negative should be leavened with more references to some of the earlier interracial success stories, such as the wide appreciation of black artists in pre-revolutionary Cuba or the multiracial adoption of black music and dance that John Chasteen has detailed. Whites may have dominated the political, economic and social lives of their nations, but there were non-whites who joined those ranks and that story also needs to be told. The problem is that in his limited number of pages the author paints in broad strokes that ignore the nuances, leaving the reader constantly asking, ‘Yes, but what about?’

With its maps, illustrations, timelines, boxes describing specific figures, reiterated points, and short length, this book is obviously designed as a textbook for undergraduate courses, despite the astronomical price for the hardback. But students may be confused by some of the author's sentences, such as when he writes: ‘Mestizos emerged from the castas and at first glance were the product of sexual mixing of Europeans and indigenous’ (pp. 109–10) and ‘For Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru, where the indigenous population was at its largest, Cuba did not have a similar experience’ (p. 188). Teachers may be concerned by the book's numerous historical errors. They include: Túpac Amaru's execution in 1781 was preceded by the execution of one son, not three; in 1815 Francisco Miranda was in chains in a Spanish prison, where he had been for three years, not on his way into exile in Europe; Juan Manuel Rosas was never president of Argentina; Pedro II did not abdicate before the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888; Fidel Castro returned to Cuba in 1956 not 1957; and Ramón Castilla not Alberto Fujimori was Peru's first non-creole president. Ultimately, any work on Latin America must address the issues of race and ethnicity. Certainly, most general histories do so to some extent or another, and their length permits them to cover the subject in greater detail and with a better idea of the context and surrounding realities than this brief overview of a complicated topic.