Melissa A. Johnson's Becoming Creole (Rutgers University Press, 2018) explores how people become who they are through their relationships with the natural world, and it shows how those relationships are also always embedded in processes of racialization that create blackness, brownness, and whiteness.
Set in Belize, Central America, Beka Lamb (Heinemann, 1982) is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. The story is built around Beka's victory over her habit of lying and her relationship with her friend Toycie. The politics of the colony and the presence of the Catholic Church are featured.
Nigel O. Bolland's Belize: A New Nation in Central America (Routledge, 2004) provides an introduction to the historical background and the contemporary culture, economy, and society of this microstate in light of the country's internal politics and regional relations with other Commonwealth Caribbean nations and the Central American republics.
Primarily through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Jerome F. Straughan's Belizean Immigrants in Los Angeles (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2004) describes how a diverse and representative group of Belizeans (and U.S. raised Belizean Americans) in Los Angeles see themselves, and how they are seen by others. In many ways, their sense of identity (ethnically/racially, nationally, and regionally) and how they are identified has a significant impact on their experiences, especially in the economy and society. This was the other focus of this dissertation. Economically, it focuses on their employment experiences and the extent to which they experienced socioeconomic mobility. And socially it describes and discusses their social life and relationship experiences with other Belizeans and non-Belizeans. Lastly, it addresses their perspectives on Belize and the United States (L.A.).
In this essay, Nicole D. Ramsey explores how Belizean independence brings into focus the lasting complexities of colonialism. She draws on personal and diasporic experiences to examine how British colonial influence continues to shape national identity, particularly for Black and Indigenous communities. Through reflections on language, culture, and memory, Ramsey considers how Belizeans navigate belonging both within the nation and across the diaspora.
In this essay, Nicole D. Ramsey examines how Belize’s cultural and historical distinctiveness disrupts dominant narratives of Central American identity. Drawing on her perspective as a Black Belizean American, she explores the erasure of Blackness in regional discourses and highlights Belize as a site that embodies multiculturalism, diaspora, and alternative frameworks for understanding belonging in Central America.
Mark Anderson's Black and Indigenous (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) explores the politics of race and culture among Garifuna in Honduras as a window into the active relations among multiculturalism, consumption, and neoliberalism in the Americas. Based on ethnographic work, Anderson questions perspectives that view indigeneity and blackness, nativist attachments and diasporic affiliations, as mutually exclusive paradigms of representation, being, and belonging.
Jennifer Goett's Black Autonomy (Stanford University Press, 2016) examines the race and gender politics of activism for autonomous rights in an Afrodescendant Creole community in Nicaragua. Weaving together fifteen years of research, Black Autonomy follows this community-based movement from its inception in the late 1990s to its realization as an autonomous territory in 2009 and beyond. Goett argues that despite significant gains in multicultural recognition, Afro-Nicaraguan Creoles continue to grapple with the day-to-day violence of capitalist intensification, racialized policing, and drug war militarization in their territories.
