Review Essay Ethnicity, Identity and Nationality in Latin America

Abstract

This essay surveys recent scholarship on the history of ethnicity in Latin America and the Atlantic World, exploring ways in which Jewish, Japanese and Middle Eastern minorities have transacted nationhood, identity and integration. This historiography of ethnicity offers compelling paths for understanding how transnational identities are negotiated. These include the analysis of patterns of slaveholding by Jewish communities on both sides of the Atlantic and the ways in which these communities understood blackness; the use of memory in understanding experiences of immigration; the relationships between national foreign policy and domestic ethnic politics; and the extent to which the issues of negotiating identity and asserting ethnicity are shared by a variety of immigrant ethnic groups. Together, this body of literature reflects the substantial ways in which ethnic histories interplay with other facets of national histories and with the process of historical analysis.