Session Abstract

This is the first of a series of panels exploring migration and diaspora in Latin America, with a focus on questions of race, ethnicity and politics. All papers are sensitive to transnational connections, examining both the influence of the country of heritage and the place where people chose to lead their lives.

This particular panel will consider how studies of diasporic relationships and identities might complicate the narratives of Latin American history that are often told within the confines of a nation-state. Most basically, these three studies use a diasporic lens to ask how constructions of race and ethnicity develop not just in a national or continental setting, but also in negotiation with other parts of a diaspora. The papers go further, however, to propose that diasporic identities and trends have a significant impact on various other identities—including those associated with class or politics—and even imaginations of the nation. 

The papers in this panel span the 20^th century and consider three different diasporic groups (African, Jewish, and Portuguese) who made a home in three different Latin American nations (Panama, Argentina, and Brazil, respectively). They all take up the question of how relationships with other parts of the diaspora were essential to how they defined themselves and their political and labor activism. Jonathan Warner points to the importance of transnational ideas of blackness and Garvyism in inspiring and shaping the West Indian worker’s strike of 1920. Jerry Dávila, meanwhile, considers the politics and policies surrounding the migration of Portuguese colonists from Angola to Brazil immediately after independence. He asks how these migrants came to understand Brazil as the ideal haven in the midst of the collapse of Portuguese colonialism. Beatrice Gurwitz turns to the Jewish community in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, and focuses on its relationship with another corner of the Jewish diaspora: Jews in the United States. Pointing to several points of interaction, she argues that interactions with representatives and representations of American Jewishness created opportunities for Argentine Jews to define (often in contrast) their Jewishness, Zionism and what it meant to be a member of the Argentine nation.