This article points to the 1820s as a crucial period that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. The article employs two inflection points—first, an 1822 case of ‘Indian’ slaves from Mosquito Shore, and second, slave desertion in 1825—to point to unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize that arose during the 1820s. While British amelioration allowed the metropolitan government to bring frontier and borderland regions within its legal purview, thus challenging settler autonomy, the concurrent event of Central American emancipation provided enslaved people in Belize additional opportunity to desert their masters at a moment when restitution of runaway slaves became increasingly difficult. Yet, this essay is about more than just the fracturing of settler sovereignty over slavery. Rather it also illuminates how settlers responded to these challenges by using force, diplomacy, and the print media. The settlers’ most potent response was in portraying Belizean slavery as ‘benign,’ creating a surprisingly robust narrative that would endure for generations. The essay illuminates how emancipation and imperialism remained inextricably linked in borderland areas such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean.

Until the 1980s, Catholic elements in Haitian culture tended to be interpreted exclusively in connection to the forced conversion of the enslaved population under French rule. This changed following John Thornton's groundbreaking research into the development of Christianity in early modern Africa—Kongo in particular—and the awareness that a significant number of enslaved Africans already identified as Christian before their arrival in Saint-Domingue. This article's goal is to go beyond Thornton's research by showing that we can acquire a better understanding of Catholic elements in Haitian culture if we start our analysis in late medieval Iberia. To illustrate this, the article focuses on one of Haiti's most enigmatic cultural traditions, known as Chariopié, Lwalwadi, or, most commonly, Rara. Although this performance has received abundant scholarly interest, questions relating to the origin of its Catholic elements have remained largely unanswered. This is regrettable considering that Rara parades follow the liturgical calendar of Lent and intensify in frequency during Holy Week. Moreover, a key element of Rara consists of the destruction of an effigy of Judas Iscariot, in accordance with the Biblical account of the Easter story. Using a comparative analysis, this article presents a number of remarkable parallels between Rara and late medieval Iberian Lent traditions. To explain these parallels, it claims that enslaved Africans who were familiar with Iberian practices prior to their arrival in the Caribbean established, by their own initiative, a network of mutual aid and burial societies modeled on Afro-Iberian Catholic brotherhoods.

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

During the 1980s, more than 20,000 Salvadorans fleeing the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War entered the neighboring country of Nicaragua. Their flight was part of a larger multidirectional migration out of El Salvador in which Salvadorans sought refuge across Central and North America. In response to this unprecedented influx of Salvadoran refugee men, women, and children, the Nicaraguan government—newly under the control of the revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN)—declared that all refugees would be permitted “the opportunity to survive and produce.” This article argues that the timing of the refugees’ arrival proved mutually beneficial for both the Salvadorans and the FSLN by illustrating how Sandinista officials sought to further agrarian reform projects via refugee integration into agricultural cooperatives. As such, Nicaraguan refugee policy functioned as an integral part of Sandinista statecraft. Through an analysis of refugee-produced sources, government and UNHCR documents, and news reports, this article sheds new light on the entwined histories of Salvadoran refugees and the Sandinista state in the transnational context of the late Cold War period in Central America.

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1616 El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno stands as the author's staggering attempt to obtain by privilege that which he could not secure through justice: status as a native lord and title to lands. Indeed, the last 20 years of the native chronicler's life as we know it, roughly from 1595 to 1615, are marked by the usual milestones of an ascending clerical career in the service of provincial priests, inspectors, and administrators from the south central Andean region stretching between Jauja and Huamanga.1