Miguel A. Valerio – författare

Mapping Diversity in Latin America offers ample critical coverage of recent approaches to the historical study of race and ethnicity in Latin America since the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to the present. Bringing together the work of leading scholars, this volume presents readers with a thorough and updated examination of the formation and evolution of ideas surrounding race and ethnicity, social movements, and political processes in Latin America that provides multiple routes for future research on the topic. The book’s nineteen chapters establish the basis for a productive comparative analysis of racial developments in the whole continent to allow for a combination of diachronic and synchronic study of regional processes. Both the scope of the book and the historical and geocultural coverage on these topics are unique in the field of Latin American Studies.Taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding issues of collective identity, otherness, alterity, and the like, Mapping Diversity in Latin America sheds light on histories that have been traditionally overlooked in texts on race in Latin America, such as the rich history of diasporic Asian, Syrian Lebanese, and Jewish communities, and the more recent emergence of Latinx populations in the United States. The book includes a critical examination of fundamental concepts such as mestizaje, mulataje, creolization, negritud, and blanquitud, as well as critical and theoretical approaches to the study of these issues in postcolonial societies.

Mapping Diversity in Latin America offers ample critical coverage of recent approaches to the historical study of race and ethnicity in Latin America since the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers to the present. Bringing together the work of leading scholars, this volume presents readers with a thorough and updated examination of the formation and evolution of ideas surrounding race and ethnicity, social movements, and political processes in Latin America that provides multiple routes for future research on the topic. The book’s nineteen chapters establish the basis for a productive comparative analysis of racial developments in the whole continent to allow for a combination of diachronic and synchronic study of regional processes. Both the scope of the book and the historical and geocultural coverage on these topics are unique in the field of Latin American Studies.Taking an interdisciplinary approach to understanding issues of collective identity, otherness, alterity, and the like, Mapping Diversity in Latin America sheds light on histories that have been traditionally overlooked in texts on race in Latin America, such as the rich history of diasporic Asian, Syrian Lebanese, and Jewish communities, and the more recent emergence of Latinx populations in the United States. The book includes a critical examination of fundamental concepts such as mestizaje, mulataje, creolization, negritud, and blanquitud, as well as critical and theoretical approaches to the study of these issues in postcolonial societies.

Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.