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Heraclio Bonilla (ed.), Indios, negros y mestizos en la independencia (Bogotá : Planeta and Universidad Nacional de Colombia , 2010), pp. 336, pb.
Reviews
This is a peculiar book that nevertheless contains nuggets of useful information and raises some interesting issues that those studying the independence period could profit from considering. Its peculiarity begins with its cover, a rather inappropriate and irrelevant picture of three naked young women, taken from J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The title mentions three racial groups, but mestizos are discussed only in passing in the chapters, probably because they are less easy to identify in the historical record than the other two. The title also indicates a focus on the independence period, but some authors take their story back to the conquest and some push it forward well into the nineteenth century. The book is divided into sections on Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru; the sections are not geographically specific, however, as the other countries of South America get an occasional mention, and one chapter includes a long discussion of runaways in Brazil. A number of contributors begin by regretting the lack of published material on these subaltern groups in the independence struggles, but their discussions and the bibliographies supplied for each chapter indicate that we know quite a bit. Indeed, more studies have appeared since the publication of this book, notably the works of Roger Pita Pico and Marcela Echeverri on Colombia and Alex Borucki on Uruguay. Nevertheless, there is still much to...