Key Issues and Texts: Race, Racism and Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Issues and Texts: Race, Racism and Anti-Racism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Seminar 1: Introduction: Researching Race, Racism and Anti-Racism (Rachell Sanchez-Rivera) 

This section provides an introduction to critical studies of race and racism in Latin America and the Caribbean. It will provide an overview of the course and signpost what our teaching team will be focusing on throughout the term. This section will touch upon the construction of race and racism through ideas around ‘purity of blood’, the coloniality of power, and the role of science in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Key issues

  • Definitions of race and racism
  • Researcher positionality
  • Objectivity/subjectivity in science

Required reading:

Seminar 2: Capitalism, Race and Identity in Andean History (Rafael Shimabukuro Cabrera)

This session will provide a historical overview of the relationship between capitalism, race and identity in the Andes, focusing on Peru and Bolivia. We will examine how Spanish colonialism simultaneously produced an extractive economic system and an unjust racial hierarchy. We will then trace how these structures evolved together – and apart – since independence, before examining the debates on ‘the land question’ which raged during the 20th century. Throughout, we will interrogate the relationship between race and class.

Required reading:

  • Mariátegui, J. C. (1928). Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Amauta. (Primer ensayo: Esquema de la evolución económica; Segundo ensayo: El problema del indio; and Tercer ensayo: El problema de la tierra).
  • De la Cadena, M. (2000). Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. Durham: Duke University Press. (Past Dialogues About Race: An Introduction to the Present).
  • Soliz, C. (2021). Fields of Revolution: Agrarian Reform and Rural State Formation in Bolivia, 1935-1964. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Seminar 3: (In)visible Lines: Racialisation and Domestic Work in Latin America (Raquel Rojas)

Paid household work has long been a key source of employment for women in Latin America. While often framed as a gendered occupation, it is also deeply shaped by racialised social hierarchies. In this session, we will draw on a range of case studies to explore how racialisation operates across diverse local contexts in the region, both within and across national borders. Moving beyond contexts where racial boundaries are immediately visible to the naked eye, we will explore how domestic work also reveals subtler and less easily discernible dynamics of racialisation in other societies. Special attention will be given to contexts where phenotypic differences are minimal or ambiguous, and where cultural markers, regional origins, or class become key tools for drawing racial boundaries. Through this discussion, we aim to unpack the intersections of race, labour, gender, and mobility, highlighting the shifting contours of racial hierarchies across Latin America.

Required reading:

  • Gorbán, Débora and Tizziani, Ania (2014) “Inferiorization and Deference. The Construction of Social Hierarchies in the Context of Paid Domestic Labor”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 46, 54-62.
  • Mora, Claudia and Undurraga, Eduardo A. (2013) “Racialisation of immigrants at work: labour mobility and segmentation of Peruvian migrants in Chile”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 32 (3), 294-310.
  • Rojas, Raquel (2020) “Same Work, Same Value? Paid Domestic Workers’ and Housewives’ Struggles for Rights in Uruguay and Paraguay”, Current Sociology, 69 (6), 843-860.

Additional Readings:

  • Casanova, Erynn Masi de (2013) “Embodied Inequality. The Experience of Domestic Work in Urban Ecuador”, Gender & Society, 27 (4), 561-585.
  • Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Encarnación (2014) “Domestic work–affective labor: On feminization and the coloniality of labor”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 46, 45-53.
  • Radcliffe, Sarah A. (1990) “Ethnicity, patriarchy, and incorporation into the nation: female migrants as domestic servants in Peru”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8, 379-383
  • Ramos-Zayas, Ana Yolanda (2020) Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America. Duke University Press (Especially Chapter 1 and Chapter 7)
  • Rojas, Raquel (2020) “Physically Close, Socially Distant. Paid Domestic Work and (Dis-) encounters in Latin America’s Private Households”, Mecila Working Papers Series, 27, São Paulo: Mecila.
  • Staab, Silke and Hill Maher, Kristen (2006) “The Dual Discourse About Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race, and a Nationalist Project”, Latin American Politics and Society, 48 (1), 87-116.
  • Wade, Peter (2013) “Articulations of eroticism and race: domestic service in Latin America”, Feminist Theory, 14 (2), 187-202.

Seminar 4: Diasporic Latinidades: Latin Americans Across the Global Colour Line (Rafael Shimabukuro Cabrera)

This session will explore the place of Latin Americans in global processes of race-making in and beyond Latin America. We will first examine how racialised immigrant communities in Latin America negotiate their complex ethnic identities and their Latin Americanness. We will then examine Latinx subjectivities, tracing how Latinx individuals and communities in the United States use mestizaje as a trope which gravitates from racial democracy and an assumed racelessness to the (re)production of ‘race-based’ hierarchies.

Required reading:

  • Lesser, J. (1999). Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. (Chapter One: The Hidden Hypher; Chapter Three: Constructing Ethnic Space and Chapter Seven: A Suggestive Epilogue).
  • Ortiz, P. (2018) An African American and Latinx history of the United States. Boston, Beacon Press. (Introduction).
  • Anzaldua, G. (1999). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

    Seminar 5: Seeing race from an intersectional perspective: articulations with gender, class and sexuality in Latin America (Aiko Ikemura Amaral)

    This session takes an intersectional approach to explore racialised social hierarchies and everyday experiences in Latin America. As a concept, intersectionality highlights how race works through and in relation to other dimensions of exclusion or ‘vectors of power’ such as gender, sexuality, class, origins, citizenship status etc. As an analytical lens, intersectionality allows us to observe how inequalities, practices, spaces and everyday lives are built on the multiple articulations between these dimensions. In Latin America, superposing forms of domination – colonialism, patriarchy, neoliberalism – have created variegated experiences of exclusion and privilege at the intersections, as well as new identities and potentials for struggle. In this session, we invite students to look at different case studies in order to discuss different articulations between race, sex, class and gender across the continent.

    Key issues

    • Intersectionality
    • Gender
    • Sex and sexualities
    • Race
    • Class

    Required reading:

    • Collins, Patricia H and Bilge, Sirma (2020) Intersectionality [second edition]. Polity Press. Chapter One: What is intersectionality?, 1-36.
    • Viveros-Vigoya, Mara (2016) La interseccionalidad: una aproximación situada a la dominación, Debate Feminista, 52, 1-17

    Additional Readings: 

    • Acciari, Louisa (2021) Practicing Intersectionality: Brazilian Domestic Workers’ Strategies of Building Alliances and Mobilizing Identity. Latin American Research Review, 56 (1), 67–81
    • Anderson, Mark (2009) This is Black Power we wear: Black America and the Fashioning of young Garifuna men, in Mark Anderson, Black and indigenous: Garifuna activism and consumer culture in Honduras. University of Minnesota Press, 172-200.
    • Babb, Florence E. (2012) Theorizing gender, race and cultural tourism in Latin America: a view from Peru and Mexico, Latin American Perspectives, 39 (6), 36-50. 
    • Canessa, Andrew (2008) Sex and the citizen: Barbies and Beauty Queens in the age of Evo Morales, Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 17 (1), 41-64. 
    • Cannon, Barry (2008) Class/race polarisation in Venezuela and the electoral success of Hugo Chávez: a break with the past or the song remains the same?, Third World Quarterly, 29 (4) 731-748.
    • Di Pietro, Pedro José Javier (2016) Decolonizing travesti space in Buenos Aires: race, sexuality, and sideways relationality, Gender, Place and Culture, 23 (5), 667-693. 
    • González, Lélia (2018) Primavera para as rosas negras: Lélia Gonzales em primeira pessoa. Diáspora Africana. Chapters 02 and 35: A mulher negra na sociedade brasileira & Por um feminismo afrolatinoamericano, 34-53 & 307-319.
    • Maclean, Kate (2018) Envisioning gender, indigeneity and urban change: the case of La Paz, Bolivia, Gender, Place & Culture, 25 (5), 711-726.
    • Mollet, Sharlene (2021) Hemispheric, Relational, and Intersectional Political Ecologies of Race: Centring Land-Body Entanglements in the Americas, Antipode 53 (3), 810-830.
    • Mora, Claudia and Undurraga, Eduardo A. (2013) Racialisation of immigrants at work: labour mobility and segmentation of Peruvian migrants in Chile, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 32 (3), 294-310.
    • Perry, Keisha-Kahn Y. (2016) Geographies of Power: Black Women Mobilizing Intersectionality in Brazil, Meridians 14 (1): 94-120.
    • Radcliffe, Sarah A. (1990) Ethnicity, patriarchy, and incorporation into the nation: female migrants as domestic servants in Peru, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8, 379-383.
    • Stølen, Kristi Anne (1996) The power of gender discourses in a multi-ethnic community in rural Argentina, in Marit Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stølen, Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London: Verso, 159-183.
    • Viveros-Vigoya, Mara (2013) Género, Raza y Nacion. Los Réditos Políticos de la  Masculinidad Blanca en Colombia. Maguaré 27 (1): 71-104.
    • Wade, Peter (2013) Articulations of eroticism and race: domestic service in Latin America, Feminist Theory, 14 (2), 187-202. 
    • Weismantel, Mary (2001) Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. University of Chicago Press. Chapter 4: Deadly Intercourse.

    Seminar 6: Contemporary forms of Racism: From the Multiculturalist Turn to Environmental Racism (Kieran Gilfoy)

    Since the 1980s, many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have progressively adopted multicultural policies and constitutions that recognize the distinct cultural contributions of Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations and offer them certain legal resources and protections. These policies break with the myths of racial democracy and post-racial ideologies promoted by twentieth-century Latin American governments, yet many argue that the "multicultural turn" has enabled new state-led strategies of exclusion and oppression toward racialized communities. In this session we will critically explore the contemporary developments of multiculturalist practices to observe the ways in which post-racialism affects communities from different angles: from environmental racism in the region (with a special focus on Puerto Rico) to meme production and the use of ‘jokes’ in a ‘post-racial’ era.

    Readings

    Additional Readings:

    • Hale, C. (2002). ‘Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala’, Journal of Latin American Studies 34: pp. 485-524.
    • Hale, C. (2004). ‘Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the Era of the “Indio Permitido”’, NACLA Report on the America 38 (2): pp. 16-21.
    • Cepek, M. (2018). Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia. Autin, TX: University of Texas Press.
    • Bashford, A. (2018) ‘World Population from Eugenics to Climate Change’, in N. Hopwood, R. Flemming, and L. Kassell (eds) Reproduction. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press, pp. 505–520. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107705647.043.
    • Sasser, J.S. (2016) ‘Population, Climate Change, and the Embodiment of Environmental Crisis’, in Godfrey, P. and Torres, D., Systemic crises of global climate change: intersections of race, class, and gender. London, UK: Routledge (Routledge advances in climate change research).
    • Jarrín, A. (2017) The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
    • Hoffman French, J. (2009). Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
    • Melville, E.G.K. (1997) A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
    • Mitman, G., Armiero, M. and Emmett, R.S. (eds) (2018) Future remains: a cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
    • Price, K. (2010) ‘What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm’, Meridians, 10(2), pp. 42–65. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.42.
    • Conklin, B. (1997). ‘Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism’, American Ethnologist 24 (4): pp. 711-737.
    • Vergilio, C. dos S. et al. (2020) ‘Metal concentrations and biological effects from one of the largest mining disasters in the world (Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil)’, Scientific Reports, 10(1), p. 5936. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62700-w.
    • Escobar, A. (2008). Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life Redes. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
    • Gilfoy, K. (2023). ‘Global Ideals and Restorative Extraction: Negotiated Indigeneity on the Margins of a Peruvian Copper Mine’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 28 (31): pp 21-31.