The Silver Women (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion.
The Times and Life of Bluefields: An Intergenerational Dialogue by Deborah Robb Taylor (Academia de Geografía e Historia de Nicaragua, 2005) explores the social history, everyday life, and leading figures of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Featuring intergenerational reflections, short biographies, archival documents, and a wealth of black-and-white and color photographs, the book offers a vivid portrait of the city’s cultural and historical fabric. With over 470 pages and extensive appendices, notes, and a bibliography, it serves as both a local history and a celebration of Bluefields’ diverse community life.
The Unity Archives – Moravian Archives Herrnhut, located in Herrnhut, Germany, is the central historical repository of the worldwide Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum). Founded in the 18th century, the archives hold extensive records documenting the Church’s global missionary activities, including detailed correspondence, diaries, and reports from missions in the Caribbean, Central America, southern Africa, and among Indigenous peoples in North America. A vital resource for scholars of colonialism, religion, and transnational history, the Unity Archives offers unparalleled insight into the Moravian Church’s role in shaping cross-cultural encounters and recording the lives of Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities during the colonial period.
In The West Indians of Costa Rica (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), Ronald Harpelle examines the ways in which people of African descent reacted to key issues of community and cultural survival from 1900 to 1950. He shows that the men and women who ventured to Costa Rica in search of opportunities in the banana industry arrived as West Indian sojourners but became Afro-Costa Ricans. The West Indians of Costa Rica is a story about choices: who made them, when, how, and what the consequences were.
To Defend This Sunrise (Rutgers University Press, 2023) examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression.
Voces Caribeñas is a multiethnic women-led organization based on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, with presence in Bilwi-Puerto Cabezas, Bluefields, and Managua. Formed ahead of the 1998 regional elections, it has grown into a vital political and community space for Black, Indigenous, and mestiza women and youth. Caribbean Voices promotes human rights, gender equity, sexual and reproductive rights, and anti-racist advocacy. Through collective organizing, education, and national and international engagement, the organization works to empower young women and amplify their voices in political, social, and economic spheres across Nicaragua’s autonomous regions.
Walasaha is a politics podcast by Dominique Noralez, an Afro-Indigenous Belizean of Garifuna descent. As a storyteller passionate about the intersections of art, history, and humanity, Noralez uses the platform to explore political issues through a cultural and personal lens rooted in Garifuna identity and Belizean experience.
Walter Ferguson, also known as Mr. Gavitt, was a legendary calypsonian born in Panama in 1919 and raised in Cahuita, Costa Rica, where he lived most of his life. A self-taught musician, Ferguson became a foundational figure in Costa Rican calypso, composing over 200 songs in English Creole that captured daily life, humor, and the social realities of the Afro-Caribbean community on the country’s Caribbean coast. Though he supported his family as a farmer, his calypsos became widely known, initially distributed through hand-recorded cassette tapes and later celebrated through vinyl, CD releases, and international recognition. His influence shaped generations of Costa Rican musicians, and his legacy is honored annually through the Festival Internacional de Calypso Walter Ferguson.
In Women of Belize (Rutgers University Press, 1996), Irma McClaurin reveals the historical circumstances, cultural beliefs, and institutional structures that have rendered women in Belize politically and socially disenfranchised and economically dependent upon men. She shows how some ordinary women, through their participation in women's grassroots groups, have found the courage to change their lives. Drawing upon her own experiences as a black woman in the United States, and relying upon cross-cultural data about the Caribbean and Latin America, she explains the specific way gender is constructed in Belize.
