ed. by Mabel Moraña and Miguel A. Valerio Vanderbilt, 2025
Anthropologist Peter Wade’s Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997) has long served as a standard in the field. Yet, nearly 30 years later, and with understandings of identity continuously evolving, a reassessment of the field is both timely and necessary. Rather than offering a synthetic treatment like Wade’s, Moraña (Washington Univ. in St. Louis) and Valerio (Univ. of Maryland, College Park) have curated an impressive collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars that together provide an excellent overview of the current state of the field. One advantage of this edited volume over a single-author study is its broad scope, both temporally, extending back to the colonial period, and disciplinarily, incorporating perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences. The essays also address historically understudied dimensions of Latin America’s ethnic diversity, including Asian, Syrian-Lebanese, and Jewish communities. This volume effectively complements and updates earlier collections such as Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt’s Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (CH, Nov'03, 41-1741) and Laura Gotkowitz’s Histories of Race and Racism (2011).
Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
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