Insurgent Cuba, Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898. by Ada Ferrer, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, 296 pp., $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paperback

The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation.

by Greg Grandin, Duke University Press, 2000, 368 pp., $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paperback

GERARDO RENIQUE

Issues of race and racism are emerging as pivotal to the political and cultural debates fueling the contentious re-imagining of Latin America's national identifies. Long subdued by the rhetoric of the official discourses of mestizaje and "racial democracy," denied by the cynical posturing of Creole elites too quick to denounce U.S. or apartheid-era South African racism, or subsumed in radical or progressive analysis as secondary expressions of class, questions of race and racism have at best occupied a marginal place in contemporary Latin American intellectual and political debates. But now, in the face of indigenous uprisings in Mexico and Ecuador, Afro-Brazilian protest against official celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese conquest and the ongoing Mapuche mobilizations in defense of their lands in Chile, racial issues have dramatically and forcefully been brought to the fore.

The two books reviewed here constitute remarkable examples of the critical and revisionist analyses that have recently tested the long-established assumptions of the nonracialist nature of Latin American states and cultures. Through painstaking scrutinies of archival and contemporary nationalist sources, and careful ethnographic observations and compilations of oral history, the authors have recovered and reconstructed the epic and ordinary deeds by which nonwhite subaltern classes have left their imprint in the histories and cultures of Cuba and Guatemala. Moreover, drawing sensibly and creatively on a vast array of literature, Ferrer and Grandin probe the political and historical trajectory of blacks and Indians as a means to explore and unveil the racialization by which the "dangerous nonwhite classes" have been incorporated into the supposedly nonracialist nationalist discourses and nation-state formations of Cuba and Guatemala.

In her Insurgent Cuba, Ada Ferrer offers a stimulating and animated narrative of the unprecedented movement that unified the black, mulatto and white individuals who for three decades carried on an unrelenting struggle for freedom and independence in the last stronghold of Europe's oldest American empire. The movement had its origins in the eastern part of the island when a sugar planter, slave owner, poet and lawyer emancipated his own slaves and invited them to participate as citizens in the struggle for independence and emancipation. Defying the racist and colonialist understandings of the times, tens of thousands of white and nonwhite men, planters and slaves, artisans and professionals joined forces in the creation of an unusual liberation army. Although during its early stages the hierarchy of the patriot army tended to reproduce the social structure, by the eve of the 1895 third--and-final--insurrection, its leadership was in...