Racial Justice Initiative Lecture with Dr. Dario A. Euraque (Trinity College)

This talk will present a general historiographical perspective on approximately 500 years of racial and ethnic history in Central America. It begins with the indigenous collapse under the onslaught of Spanish colonialism, intra-regionally differentiated, and the relevance of the African Diaspora to that process. It engages the rise and hegemony of the concept of castes and colonial classificatory diversity, while not neglecting “Blackness” under Spanish colonialism in Central America. Between independence in the 1820s and the end of the 19th century the following themes are addressed: new nation-states lacking racialized national identities; incipient intra-national racialization and categorizations; and the incipient transition between the concept of caste and the concept of race in the face of the decline of Spanish imperialism. Between the end of the 19th century and the mid-20th century the following problematics are discussed: modernist racialization of national identities and their articulations with English, French, and North American Darwinist evolutionism. Emphasis will be placed on tracing the persistence of the concept of Ladino and the emergence of “national” miscegenation, known locally as mestizaje. Finally, neoliberalism, postmodernism, and the cultural turn’s impact on contemporary racialized identities is briefly presented.

Dario A. Euraque is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College.

This event is part of the Centroamérica speaker series and is in connection with the Racial Justice Initiative.

Sponsored by: Melvin L. Oliver Racial Justice Initiative at Pitzer College; Chicano/a Latino/a Transnational Studies; Intercollegiate Department of Chicano/a Latino/a Studies; Latin American Studies Program at Pomona College; and Latin American Studies Lectureship. For more information, contact Janet.Hernandez@pomona.edu.