Contact Zones: Heterogeneity and Boundaries in Caribbean Central America at the Start of the Twentieth Century

• Main Author: Putnam, Lara
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin 2006
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/20862/; http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/20862/1/23_Putnam.pdf; http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/20862/8/licence.txt; http://www.iai.spk-berlin.de/en/publications/iberoamericana/previous-issues/ano-vi-2006-numero-23.html

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as direct foreign investment in bananas and other exports boomed, migrants from the British West Indies, French Caribbean, South America, Western Europe, China, Syria, and India reached Caribbean Central America, as did Spanish-speaking mestizos who crossed provincial or regional rather than international borders to do so. This essay examines the conceptualization of racial and cultural difference by North Atlantic travelers to the banana zones, on the one hand, and Caribbean denizens of the same, on the other. European and U.S. observers insisted that racial distinctions were real and self-evident. In contrast, Afro-Caribbean migrants, though they used the same racial labels to describe the social world around them, insisted that power difference rather than cultural or biological difference determined the fate of racial collectives.