Kent Russell Lohse's "Africans and Their Descendants in Colonial Costa Rica, 1600–1750" (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005) explores the lives of enslaved Africans in one of the Spanish Empire’s smallest and most isolated colonies. Unlike plantation societies, colonial Costa Rica received only sporadic shipments of enslaved Africans, resulting in a small, diverse, and dispersed African population. Drawing on Atlantic slave trade patterns and local social dynamics, the study examines how ethnic origins, gender, labor roles, and social relationships shaped the experiences of Africans and their descendants. It argues that assimilation into a broader creole culture, rather than the maintenance of distinct African or Black identities, defined the trajectory of Afro-descendant life in colonial Costa Rica.
Melanie White's "A Caribbean Coast Feeling" (Small Axe, 2023) explores the visual cultural production of three twentieth-century Black Caribbean Central American women painters: June Beer and Judith Kain, both from the Miskitu Coast, and Iris Abrahams, from San Andrés and Providencia. Specifically, it contextualizes these artists’ landscape portraiture against the historical backdrops of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and autonomous struggle in the isthmus. Understanding the political and the cultural as inextricably intertwined, this essay reads their place-based visual art as a critical form of anticolonial critique and social organizing in a region that remains marginalized in the historiography and scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean and radical Black diasporic politics.
Lowell Gudmundson's "Africanos y afrodescendientes en Centroamérica" (Nuevo mundo, mundos nuevos, 2010) analyzes novel forms of researching Afro-Central American history during the 19th and 20th centuries. Comments on the sources, strategies and results of recent studies that recover the history of African-descent populations traditionally identified with the mestizo or ladino majorities and not only those of the Atlantic coast commonly recognized as Afro-Americans. Top of page
This paper aims to engage readers with artist-activist-scholar-librarian June Beer of Nicaragua via a close reading of her poetry while tracing connections of field-specific library pedagogical practices that may be drawn from the ancestral calls evident within her work. Her geographic location informs her embedded community role as artist and librarian as well as her socio-cultural connection to her ancestral lineages. Using a close reading of Beer’s poetry, this article gives power to the language of poetry, and aims to draw conclusions of poetic form which identifies ancestral calls, and may be applied to library and pedagogical practice. Informed by Beer’s subversive work of poetics, activisms, and artmaking, sentipensante pedagogy, storytelling, place, and time, this article aims to reveal that within her writings are embedded useful tools for library and pedagogical practice, as informed not via traditional and normative librarianship, but via ancestral teachings, revelatory within the poetic articulations.
Paul Joseph López Oro's "Black Caribs/Garifuna" uses Kamau Brathwaite’s conceptualizations of the “inner plantation” and “neglected Maroons” in his field-making 1975 essay “Caribbean Man in Space and Time” to meditate on the multiple meanings of home within Garifuna political subjectivity. St. Vincent holds epistemological status as the Garifuna homeland associated with ancestral marronage. The author looks at how public performances of Garifuna Settlement Day in Central America and the United States (New York City is home to the largest Garifuna communities outside Central America’s Caribbean coasts) open an alternative—ancestral—terrain within the interior geographies of Indigenous Blackness. By framing ethnographic vignettes of Garifuna ancestral memory throughout the diaspora as an embodied archive of knowledge production, this essay demonstrates how Brathwaite’s mapping of an intellectual genealogy creates space for reimagining the geographies of marronage, resistance, and survival within the interior landscapes of Caribbean expressive culture and life.
David McField’s “Black is Black” affirms Black identity across geographies, blending Spanish, English, and Creole to highlight the everyday realities, labor, and struggles of Black people worldwide while insisting on dignity and recognition.
June Beer’s poem “Chunkuu Faam” captures the struggles of a rural Afro-descendant family in Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast as they try to secure a future for their children through education. Written in Miskito Coast Creole, the poem weaves a vivid picture of subsistence farming, community resilience, and the barriers posed by systemic exploitation. As the couple seeks a bank loan to support their children’s schooling, they encounter deception and dispossession, ultimately losing their farm. Through sharp social critique and intimate storytelling, Beer exposes the predatory nature of financial institutions and the structural inequalities faced by Black coastal communities.
Nicole Ramsey and Melanie White's "Diasporic Intimacies" (Forum for Inter-American Research, 2022) reflects on the multiple, varied, and overlapping iterations of Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous identities along Central America’s Caribbean coast. Employing the experiences of Garinagu and Creoles in Belize and Caribbean Nicaragua as case studies, the essay makes the case for a regional conception of Black Indigeneity based not on primordial or biological conceptions of Indigenous identity but on a historically contingent process of social and political identification.
"Doreth’s Cay" is a haunting and poetic short story by Deborah Robb Taylor that blends memory, myth, political history, and Caribbean folklore into a narrative of supernatural possession and gendered violence on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. Set primarily in Pearl Lagoon, the story’s narrator recounts a strange and violent episode in which she becomes overtaken by the spirit of Doreth Fox, a legendary woman murdered in the 1930s, and nearly kills a young man with ancestral ties to Doreth’s past. As the lines blur between historical vengeance and spiritual possession, the story explores themes of Black womanhood, ancestral justice, and the lingering legacies of colonial violence in Afro-Caribbean Nicaragua. Winner of the “Centennial of the City of Bluefields” literary prize, "Doreth’s Cay" is both an intimate reflection and a chilling tale of embodied memory and resistance.
Carlos Agudelo's “Estudios sobre afrodescendientes en Centroamérica: Saliendo del olvido” (Tabula Rasa, 2017) provides a critical overview of the evolving field of Afrodescendant studies in Central America. Tracing the histories of African-descended populations from the colonial period through the 19th- and 20th-century nation-building eras, Agudelo highlights key scholarly contributions and thematic trends in the literature. The article also examines contemporary research on the social, political, and cultural experiences of Afro-Central Americans, with particular attention to the Garifuna due to their prominence in regional scholarship. It serves as both a historiographic review and a call to address the long-standing marginalization of Afrodescendant communities in Central American studies.
