After Brazil and the United States, Colombia has the third-largest population of African-descended peoples in the Western hemisphere. Yet the country is commonly viewed as a nation of Andeans, whites, and mestizos (peoples of mixed Spanish and indigenous Indian ancestry). Aline Helg examines the historical roots of Colombia's treatment and neglect of its Afro-Caribbean identity within the comparative perspective of the Americas. Concentrating on the Caribbean region, she explores the role of free and enslaved peoples of full and mixed African ancestry, elite whites, and Indians in the late colonial period and in the processes of independence and early nation building. Why did race not become an organizational category in Caribbean Colombia as it did in several other societies with significant African-descended populations? Helg argues that divisions within the lower and upper classes, silence on the issue of race, and Afro-Colombians' preference for individual, local, and transient forms of resistance resulted in particular spheres of popular autonomy but prevented the development of an Afro-Caribbean identity in the region and a cohesive challenge to Andean Colombia. Considering cities such as Cartagena and Santa Marta, the rural communities along the Magdalena River, and the vast uncontrolled frontiers, Helg illuminates an understudied Latin American region and reintegrates Colombia into the history of the Caribbean.

Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia: Land, Violence, and Ethnic Identity provides a vivid account of how the indigenous communities of Cauca in southwestern Colombia engaged with the Colombian central state. Troyan begins with the question of how 3.4 percent of the Colombian population obtained legal rights to close to a quarter of the national territory. Her in-depth study of the correspondence between the central state and indigenous communities of Cauca reveals that the nation state played a key role in the legitimization of land claims based on ethnic identity. Starting with the indigenous movement led by Manuel Quintín Lame in 1914, this book shows how, in contrast to the local authorities of Cauca, the central state adopted a more sympathetic albeit contradictory approach to indigenous communities’ grievances throughout the twentieth century. Land, Violence, and Cauca's Indigenous Movement in Southwestern Colombia presents an examination of state initiatives in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s toward indigenous communities in Cauca, whichsheds light on the political and social construction of Colombian indigenous identity. Troyan also reveals how violence and the representation of violence shaped the conversations between the central state and indigenous communities of Cauca; the central state’s inability to exert a monopoly on violence, Troyan argues, places indigenous communities and their leaders in jeopardy despite the discursive legitimization of land claims based on ethnic identity.

This volume renews the political sociology of land. Chapters examine dynamics of political control and contention in a range of settings, including land grabs in Asia and Africa, expulsions and territorial control in South America, environmental regulation in Europe, and controversies over fracking, gentrification, and property taxes in the USA.

This book looks at how citizenship has been imagined and transformed in Latin America through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from different disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, history, urban planning, geography and political studies. It looks beyond citizenship as a formal legal status to explore how ideas about citizenship have shaped political and historical landscapes in different ways through the region. It shows how conceptions of citizenship are intertwined with understandings of natural spaces and environments, how indigenous politics are ‘de-colonizing’ western liberal conceptions of citizenship, and how citizenship is being transformed through local level politics and projects for development. In addition to showcasing some of the novel, emerging forms of citizenship in the region, the book also traces the ways in which historical narratives of citizenship and national belonging persist within present day politics. Collectively, the chapters show that citizenship remains an important entry point for understanding politics, projects of reform, and struggles for transformation in Latin America. This book was published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

The nineteenth century was an era of breathtakingly ambitious geographic expeditions across the Americas. The seminal Chorographic Commission of Colombia, which began in 1850 and lasted about a decade, was one of Latin America's most extensive. The commission's mandate was to define and map the young republic and its resources with an eye toward modernization. In this history of the commission, Nancy P. Appelbaum focuses on the geographers' fieldwork practices and visual production as the men traversed the mountains, savannahs, and forests of more than thirty provinces in order to delineate the country's territorial and racial composition. Their assumptions and methods, Appelbaum argues, contributed to a long-lasting national imaginary. What jumps out of the commission's array of reports, maps, sketches, and paintings is a portentous tension between the marked differences that appeared before the eyes of the geographers in the field and the visions of sameness to which they aspired. The commissioners and their patrons believed that a prosperous republic required a unified and racially homogeneous population, but the commission's maps and images paradoxically emphasized diversity and helped create a "country of regions." By privileging the whiter inhabitants of the cool Andean highlands over those of the boiling tropical lowlands, the commission left a lasting but problematic legacy for today's Colombians.

How does a culture in which writing is not a prominent feature create historical tradition? Researcher Joanne Rappaport answers the question by tracing the past three centuries of intellectual history of the Nasa--a community in the Colombian Andes. Originally published in 1990 but of continuing interest to all scholars of Latin America. 21 illustrations.