Justin Wolfe

I am a historian of post-colonial social and cultural history, particularly focused on the construction of identity within the context of everyday politics. At the same time, my work seeks to cross back and forth over the boundaries between social scientific and cultural analysis, to explore the interconnections between structure and imagining.

In my 2007 book, The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua (University of Nebraska Press), I analyzed how popular communities—both indigenous and non-indigenous—understood, negotiated and transformed the meaning of national identity through struggles over land, labor and ethnicity. The book’s exploration of quotidian social life and politics reveals how diverse economies, ethnicities, and geographies engendered multiple experiences of nation. These invigorated a new Nicaragua citizenry through a fragmentation of local community authority and autonomy, which laid the ground from which August Sandino and Anastasio Somoza would spring.

In 2010, I published Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place (Duke University Press), co-edited with Lowell Gudmundson. Based on an international conference held at Tulane University, the collection explore the history of the earliest Africans to arrive in the Americas, who came to Central America with Spanish colonists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since then, our book shows, people of African descent have constituted substantial parts of the nonindigenous populations in the region. Yet in the development of national identities and historical consciousness, Central American nations have often countenanced widespread practices of social, political, and regional exclusion of blacks. The postcolonial development of mestizo or mixed-race ideologies of national identity have systematically downplayed African ancestry and social and political involvement in favor of Spanish and Indian heritage and contributions. In addition, a powerful sense of place and belonging has led many peoples of African descent in Central America to identify themselves as something other than African American, reinforcing the tendency of local and foreign scholars to see Central America as peripheral to the African diaspora in the Americas. The essays in this collection begin to recover the forgotten and downplayed histories of blacks in Central America, demonstrating the centrality of African Americans to the region‘€™s history from the earliest colonial times to the present. They reveal how modern nationalist attempts to define mixed-race majorities as “Indo-Hispanic,” or as anything but African American, clash with the historical record of the first region of the Americas in which African Americans not only gained the right to vote but repeatedly held high office, including the presidency, following independence from Spain in 1821.

My current project, tentatively titled On Equal Grounds: Race and Empire in the Age of Manifest Destiny, is microhistory of the port of Greytown/San Juan del Norte—the eastern terminus of the Gold Rush-era transit route across Nicaragua. For centuries, explorers, politicians, scientists, and merchants dreamed of an interoceanic canal across Nicaragua. In 1848, this dream seemed on the verge of realization, when British forces claimed sovereignty over the port town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua, the transit route’s Atlantic starting point, rechristening it Greytown in honor of Jamaica’s then-governor. With the discovery of gold in California in 1849, the canal seemed even more urgent. Thousands of people make the trek through the isthmus; between 1850 and 1855, more than 80,000 people flooded across Nicaragua. As steamships began to arrive, Greytown evolved from a quiet village of a few dozen huts to a bustling town of hotels, stores, billiard halls, bars, storehouses, and the like. In 1852, as Americans poured in and Greytown began to challenge the Panamanian transit route, the British converted Greytown into a free port, with a constitution that provided universal manhood suffrage. The men of African descent—from the U.S., the Caribbean, and Nicaragua—who formed the town’s electoral majority, embraced this experiment in political freedom and opportunity. For pro-slavery travelers and observers, Greytown produced fevered visions of emancipation’s prospects in the U.S. By 1854, the collision of these forces led the United States to bombard and torch the entire port. Against the scholarship’s tendency to frame this as an episode in the “Southern dream of Caribbean empire” or an expression of white “othering,” this project uses a microhistorical approach that places the residents of Greytown at the center of debates on slavery, empire and social equality.