The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States
Edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores
2010, Duke University Press
566 pages
THE STUDY of Afro-Latino groups has grown considerably in recent years to develop with some predictability into something of a sub-discipline of identity politics, inevitably driven by academics in the US. The merits of this development go without saying, but it is important to note that, given this evolution and the agendas that tend to underpin identity politics more generally, this subject has responded overwhelmingly to US political and social priorities and the country’s own racial and ethnic history. Its prominence speaks volumes about how the US has come to terms with its own history of slavery and apartheid as a Protestant, Anglo-Saxon society in which racial categories were determined as much by its own, unique economic and political development as by its emerging imperial pretensions. While this collection edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores is therefore a welcome and comprehensive introductory source for those interested in the theme, and for making the point that Afro-Latin are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between African Americans and Latin@s, there is absolutely no real case for the US academic approach and categories to be superimposed upon Latin American academia itself. Other societies in the Americas have experienced entirely different histories, and have roundly different traditions and inter-ethnic dynamics. If the social divide between African Americans and Latin@s in the US itself is indeed widening, it must be bridged in terms that address the root causes of this phenomeno. These can be found in an approach that studies the growing antipathy towards Latin@ immigration in white Middle America and how the latter has employed a familiar strategy of ethnic divide and conquer to ensure its political hegemony among an increasingly diverse electorate. – GO’T
