Odile Hoffmann

Beyond reified categories: multidimensional identifications among ‘black’ and ‘Indian’ groups in Columbia and Mexico

Abstract Analyses of multicultural state-dictated social categories are often governed by those same categories, even while they deconstruct them. Nonetheless, these categories are often used in public spheres such as national imaginary or ethno-political activism. Taking a different point of departure, that of representations rather than the categories themselves, the aim of our paper is to understand the modes of classification that are relevant among four populations in Colombia and Mexico who would, a priori, be categorized as ‘black’ or ‘Indian’. The daily reality of these groups indicates other possible internal, sometimes even intersecting, kinds of categorizations, which, far from naturalizing the ‘Indian’ and ‘black’ categories, in fact reveal place-based social identifications. These identifications seem closer to the everyday lives and practices of the people in question, and underscore the local conceptions of their presence and agency in a given spot.

The Issue of Blackness and Mestizaje in Two Distinct Mexican Contexts: Veracruz and Costa Chica

The construction of new nations in Latin America has triggered debate on the definition of national identity with a view towards reconciling the reality of mestizaje with the attribution – inherited from Colonial times – of specific ‘characteristics’ to groups and individuals (Spanish, Indian, Black, mulatto, etc.). It was also confronted with racist connotations which, in the early 19th century, included the ideas of progress and modernity, hence the difficulty in legitimizing its own ‘brand of mestizaje.’ We will address these issues through empirical examination of two contexts in Mexico: the State and City of Veracruz, and Costa Chica on the Pacific coast of the States of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Strongly associated with Mexican national identity, what these two case studies share is the issue of mestizaje from the standpoint of the African presence which, though considerable from the start of colonization, was not included in ‘classic’ views of national mestizaje. This analysis helps reveal various ways in which populations of African origin were incorporated into the Nation. Thus, we can see how the local configuration articulates with the overall discourse to privilege one facet or dimension of (cultural, or social, or political) Afro identification over another.

From Colonial Domination to the Making of the Nation: Ethno-Racial Categories in Censuses and Reports and their Political Uses in Belize, 19th-20th Centuries

This paper presents an analysis of the processes of classification and racial-ethnic categorization of Belize’s population during the 19th and 20th centuries, based on population censuses and government reports. We are not too interested in figures as such but in the categories of counting and their evolution, as indicators of the political rationale of building a colonial and later a national society. While the censuses for the 19th century relate to different forms of population management (transition from slavery to freedom, affirmation or denial of ethnic and racial diversity), the administrative reports paint a static and stereotyped demographic-territorial model as a tool of the political project. For the 20th century, we analyze the difficult road to independence and the changes introduced by the new Belizean state (categories, methods) in the process of creating a “national identity.”