‘Under the colombian flag’: nation-building on San Andrés and Providence islands, 1886-1930
Under the Colombian Flag examines the Colombian state‘s efforts to incorporate the Afro-Caribbean English-speaking Protestant islanders of San Andrés and Providence into the Spanish-speaking Catholic nation. The project analyzes how those cultural struggles and political negotiations shaped the Colombian nation-building process. I illustrate how Colombian political elites largely spoke of islanders‘ ethnic differences in terms of cultural attributes such as language, religion, and customs. In their minds, these characteristics were malleable. The Colombian nation-builders‘ project thus ignored North American and European pseudo-scientific understandings of race in order to incorporate ethnically and racially diverse populations into their homogenizing agenda, which promoted the Spanish language, Hispanic culture, Roman Catholicism, gendered notions of morality, and racial views of health and modernity. San Andrés and Providence islanders had a different understanding of racial and national identities. They tended to formulate their Colombian identity in terms of loyalty, reciprocity, and rights. My work contributes to the growing body of historical scholarship on race and nation-building in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as scholarship investigating the experiences of black communities in the Atlantic world.
Fuente:
Biblioteca Virtual Banco de la República
Formatos de contenido:
Tesis