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This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in
Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by
race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing
patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the
wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role
of Afro-descendants and the indigenous peoples in the region’s independence from Spain and
Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly
liberal ideas and the role of slavery and emancipation, and of the Haitian revolution, in
configuring ideas about race as well as racial hierarchies in the region, the so-called Indian
question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and
non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption
and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the
critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of ‘indigenista’ and
mestizaje ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the
development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of
‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialized social policies. More
generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’
throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.