"This important collection of essays puts Central America firmly on the African Diaspora map. "Blacks and Blackness in Central America" is the one-stop volume that gathers together the leading scholars of the topic. They offer clear windows into their many years of research and discovery, collectively convincing the reader that Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica were far from marginal to the historical trajectories of people of African descent in the Americas."--Matthew Restall, author of "The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan"

Acknowledgments viiIntroduction / Lowell Gudmundson and Justin Wolfe 1Part I. Colonial Worlds of Slavery and FreedomAngolans in Amatitlán: Sugar, African Immigrants, and Gente Ladina in Colonial Guatemala / Paul Lokken 27Cacao and Slavery in Matina, Costa Rica, 1650-1750 / Russell Lohse 57Race and Place in Colonial Mosquitia, 1600-1787 / Karl H. Offen 92Slavery and Social Differentiation: Slave Wages in Omoa / Rina Cáceres Gómez 130Becoming Free, Becoming Ladino: Slave Emancipation and Mestizaje in Colonial Guatemala / Catherine Komisaruk 150Part II. Nation Building and Reinscribing Race"The Cruel Whip": Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua / Justin Wolfe 177What Difference did Color Make? Blacks in the "White Towns" of Western Nicaragua in the 1880s / Lowell Gudmundson 209Race and the Space of Citizenship: The Mosquito Coast and the Place of Blackness and Indigeneity in Nicaragua / Juliet Hooker 246Eventually Alien: The Multigenerational Saga of British Western Indians in Central America, 1870-1940 / Lara Putnam 278White Zones: American Enclave Communities of Central America / Ronald Harpelle 307The Slow Ascent of the Marginalized: Afro-Descendents in Costa Rica and Nicaragua / Mauricio Meléndez Obando 334Bibliography 353Contributors 385Index 389