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.).
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.
Based in Colón, FEN is dedicated to promoting Afro-descendant culture, educating Afro-Panamanians about their rights, and equipping youth with skills to overcome racial discrimination. The organization has collaborated with international partners to strengthen its advocacy and amplify the voices of Afro-Panamanians across the country.
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 Carolina Gómez Menjívar's Black in Print (State University of New York Press, 2023) examines the role of narrative, from traditional writing to new media, in conversations about race and belonging in the isthmus. It argues that the production, circulation, and consumption of stories has led to a trans-isthmian imaginary that splits the region along racial and geographic lines into a white-mestizo Pacific coast, an Indigenous core, and a Black Caribbean. Across five chapters, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar identifies a series of key moments in the history of the development of this imaginary: Independence, Intervention, Cold-War, Post-Revolutionary, and Digital Age. Gómez Menjívar's analysis ranges from literary beacons such as Rubén Darío and Miguel Ángel Asturias to less studied intellectuals such as Wingston González and Carl Rigby. The result is a fresh approach to race, the region, and its literature. Black in Print understands Central American Blackness as a set of shifting coordinates plotted on the axes of language, geography, and time as it moves through print media.
This short documentary aims to capture the factors influencing Nicaraguan Creoles to identify themselves as Black and as members of the Black diaspora.
The essays in Blacks and Blackness in Central America (Duke University Press, 2010) begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region’s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.
Breena Nuñez is a queer Afro-Central American cartoonist and educator from the Bay Area whose work explores themes of race, identity, queerness, and the complexities of growing up Central American in the United States. Through self-published zines and comics, she uses humor and personal storytelling to unpack the awkwardness of racism, cultural belonging, and diasporic memory. Breena co-founded the small press Laneha House and teaches Race & Comics at California College of the Arts.
The Endangered Archives Programme captures forgotten and still not written histories, often suppressed or marginalised. It gives voice to the voiceless: it opens a dialogue with global humanity’s multiple pasts. It is a library of history still waiting to be written.
