Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico. By Ileana Rodríguez-Silva. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. vii, 320. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00 cloth (original) (raw)

Lohse argues that these diverse origins, alongside the infrequent number of slave arrivals direct from Africa, the low-density geographical concentration of slavery, and the close contacts of Africans with European, Amerindians, and their mixed progeny led Africans and their descendants in this region to create collective identities based on overlapping sources: African, indigenous, European, and combinations thereof. By the mid-seventeenth century most of the slave population in Costa Rica was nativeborn, as was true in slightly different periods of colonial Oaxaca and Guatemala, and inland regions of New Granada and the Río de la Plata. Further comparisons will reveal whether these patterns were replicated across the Spanish Americas.