The Many Lives of a Journal

This short essay tracks the configurations and editorial orientations that have
marked the journal over the last decades. It suggests that the various changes in
its name, the subjects covered, its formats and policies, and the distribution of re-
search articles and reviews, has reflected different framings of Latin America and
the Caribbean as “study areas” since the mid-1970s. These shifts have also followed
transformations in anthropology itself as a discipline and body of knowledge in-
side and outside US academic and professional contexts. These moves encompass
generations of editors, authors, and readers, who, in diverse ways, have participated
in a broad and diverse community of specialists. Rather than the trajectory taken
by one journal, we can think of JLACA’s history as the sum of various ideas and
understandings on what might connect specialized authors and readers interested
in Latin America and the Caribbean.
One of the great achievements of an academic journal dedicated to producing
knowledge in a discipline like anthropology, focused on a specific geopolitical area
or region, is to gather together texts capable of understanding, describing, and an-
alyzing local sociocultural transformations with theoretical competence, method-
ological acuity, and empirical depth. At the same time, the closer and more local
these analyses are grounded, the more detached they stand from the generalizing
canons that have marked “area studies.” Ethnographies, for their part, can offer al-
ternative and critical views, frequently counterhegemonic to the academic frame-
works surrounding the “field.” This apparent oxymoron, which approximates what
we can call local and nonlocal perspectives, is not just a virtue. It can be consid-
ered a prerequisite for expanding the universe of readers, authors, and articles.
When we look at the many paths and the new beginnings of JLACA under differ-
ent names since 1976, we can surmise that the journal incorporated different ways
of connecting authors, readers, and anthropological knowledge over these years.
JLACA today, in some ways, is the overlapping of various attempts to reshape what
has been seen to comprise since the mid-1970s the anthropology of either “Latin
America” or “Latin America and the Caribbean” as specialized fields within the
American Anthropological Association.

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 452–456. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. © 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12608

452 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

 The volume that incarnated the first appearance of JLACA was the first of a
series—the Contributions of the Latin American Anthropology Group (hereafter
CLAAG)—that sought to promote the publication of studies circulating in the
meetings of the American Anthropological Association. The first issue of CLAAG
(1976) brought together contributions from established scholars and research in
progress conducted in Haiti, Suriname, Trinidad, and the Venezuelan and Colom-
bian Caribbean. Making diversity a starting point seems to have been one of
CLAAG’s core commitments—or, we could say, to cite one of the concepts at stake
during this period, “plurality” played an important role as a principle. It meant,
for instance, keeping different things side by side. At that moment, diversity was
produced from “outside” to “inside.”
In the first issue of CLAAG, the editor Norman E. Whitten Jr. acknowledged
that the rise of Black Movements in the 1960s, coupled with the lack of funding to
research “Afro-America” in United States high education institutions in the follow-
ing decades, had affected the literature produced on the subject in scholarly publi-
cations in distinct ways. This recognition fueled a sense of urgency to explore a new
direction. However, this project involved binding the future to the continuity of a
“tradition”—the Afro-American studies around which a diverse group of scholars
gravitated. Not by chance, CLAAG reprinted a text by the Mexican anthropologist
Gonzalo Aguire Beltrán that had been first presented in 1945 at the 29th Inter-
national Congress of Americanists, a symbolic meeting for the establishment of
an Afro-American Studies Institute composed of Latin American, Caribbean, and
North American scholars (Beltrán 1976). Thus, the first issue of CLAAG emerged
as an unconventional platform combining the contemporary debate on the Afro-
American studies pursued in the anthropological institutions and academic jour-
nals of the United States with ethnographic writings on immigration, nationalism,
poverty, and Maroon populations by authors from different backgrounds. Surpris-
ingly, the texts as a whole offered a variety of perspectives on the location of Afro-
America in different “places” and “pasts,” as well as “presents,” within Caribbean
societies. The Caribbean did not appear as an index or name articulating a special
framework, arranging a set of issues, or mobilizing theoretical and political inter-
ventions. But otherwise, it was “there,” both without and within. These dissimilar
contributions figured as contextualized evidence of an Afro-American world. By
making the theme the starting point of a publication dedicated to Latin Ameri-
can and Caribbean Anthropology, the publication turned the margin if not into
a “center” then into a departure point—despite the title and notwithstanding the
clear Latin Americanist vocation.1
After nearly ten years, when it reappeared as the Latin American Anthropology
Review (LAAR) in Spring 1989, the journal asserted its mission to strengthen Latin
American anthropology by adopting a specific approach. The Caribbean seems to
have lost any centrality to the incoming editors. We can mention the wide range of

Reflections, Questions, Visions 453

 topics covered in the book reviews published about the region. However, the first
issue also outlined a profile, a clear editorial stance concerning the research texts
and articles. This perspective is visible in the first issue of LAAR, in which Terence
Turner described the emergence of Indigenous mobilization in Brazil, the forms
of insurgency against development policies, and the ongoing dialogues between
Indigenous leaders and academics—as in the case of the announced trip of the
Kayapó chief, Payakan, to the United States for a series of lectures at the University
of Chicago (Turner 1989, 2). The issues highlighted by Turner are explored in the
other articles written by emerging ethnologists and published in the following is-
sue organized by Jonathan Hill, under the title “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples
and Nation-States.” The 1989 volume followed the US ethnological tradition and,
at the same time, inaugurated a trend that would mark all the editions of the jour-
nal in the following decade. On one hand, the strong participation of ethnologists
and the ethnology produced in US institutions in studies of the Amerindian peo-
ples of South American. On the other hand, the increasing number of studies and
ethnographies on Indigenous resistance and the emergence of political movements
against state intervention in traditional territories. This extends to ethnographies
on Zapatista, Mayan, Andean, Ecuadorian, Colombian, and Bolivian Indigenous
movements and a new political protagonism. The case of Mamo Kuncha Navin-
guna, an Iku representing the Autoridades Traditionales de Seinimin in the Sierra
Nevada de Santa Marta, who became an author, is emblematic. His letter to the
Colombian Senator Lorenzo Muelas was reproduced in LAAR alongside other re-
search articles on Colombia. Mamo Kuncha Navinguna’s text opened volume 1 (2)
and was published as “a pronounced example of an indigenous community’s rejec-
tion of the terms in which autonomy” (Rappaport and Dover 1996, 8) was being
discussed by the State authorities, the editors write. However, it is pertinent to ask
about its effect in a scholarly publication in which Mamo Kuncha Navinguna’s voice
is not just heard through other authors’ texts—namely, those of the United States or
Colombian anthropologists found in the rest of the publication—but though edited
(as pointed out Rappaport and Dover) stands as a direct intervention in a special
section dedicated to the aftermaths of the new 1991 Colombian Constitution.
In September 1995, renamed the Journal of Latin American Anthropology
(JLAA), the publication assumed a new profile, broadening the space for re-
search articles. The inaugural issue opened with the first article in Spanish, au-
thored by the Argentinian anthropologist Néstor García Canclini, entitled “Una
modernización que atrasa: las contradicciones socioculturales en América Latina”
(Canclini 1995). By this juncture, the profile, title, and publication format had
changed considerably in line with other orientations and transformations within
the discipline. Many things had changed in the anthropologies produced about
Latin America and the Caribbean since 1976, and had affected not only US institu-
tions. These changes included distinct views on a particular area/region, different

454 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

disciplinary practices, multiple methodologies, and diverse writing styles. More-
over, these transformations occurred both inside and outside academia. It seems
clear that there were very few similarities between the task of producing anthropo-
logical knowledge among the specialists of the field in 1976 and the way in which
the articles published in JLAA redrew both fields twenty years later.
If we shift our gaze back to this time, we see an array of possibilities for defin-
ing and engaging with now radically transformed “fields.” The journal aggregates
gender, ethnicity, gay studies, human rights, postcolonialism, and other agendas
emerging in the new millennium. Volume 8 (2) brought contributions on “Latino
Racial Formations in the United States,” reorienting the geopolitics of the area
covered by the publication. From 2007 (vol. 12) onward, JLACA reincorporated
Caribbean anthropology within its scope and published new issues on Caribbean
immigrants in the United States and Canada. However, the first and only dossier
exclusively dedicated to the Caribbean region only appears ten years later. Enti-
tled “States, Subjects, and Representations in the Postcolonial Caribbean” (Forde
2018), this issue included articles on Cuba, Trinidad, and Tobago.
Finally, we should ask whether quantity and representativity are the correct
indicators to assess the importance of certain fields and topics in a journal that
has made its history and editorial policy in response to the discipline’s transfor-
mations. At the same time, the journal’s receptiveness to the diversity of languages
and subjects, offering new opportunities and venues for other writings, increases
the complexity of the challenges. The expansion and incorporation of themes, as
well as the submission formats, are evidence that the outlines of the areas, regions,
and fields—and the ways of producing knowledge about constructs such as “the
Caribbean and Latin American region,” entanglements of diverse viewpoints con-
cerning spatialities and societies—are in continual transformation. They are part
of the trajectory of a journal that has incarnated many lives. Along the way, the
Caribbean and Latin America have comprised different assemblages, diverse dis-
courses on difference, sovereignty, and the creation of political horizons. Among
other things. Like an artifact being molded, reworked, scaled-down, and enlarged,
JLACA can tell not just one but many stories. [journal history, editorial politics,
Area Studies; historia de periódico, políticas editoriales, estudios de área; istwa
jounal, liy politik, etid rejyonal]

Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha

Federal Universit y of R io de Janeiro

Note

1 Except for Aguirre Beltrán’s text, all the other contributions published in the first volume of

CLAAG were presented at the AAA Meeting in San Francisco held in 1975. Among these five texts,

Reflections, Questions, Visions 455

 four rely on ethnographic and historical data from the Caribbean region. See, for instance, Laguerre
(1976); Hutz and Pierce (1976); Olien (1976); Stewart (1976); Wilbert (1976).

References

Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. 1976. “Ethnohistory in the Study of the Black Population in Mexico.” Contributions of the
Latin American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 3–6.
Forde, Maarit, ed. 2018. “Dossier: States, Subjects, and Representations in the Postcolonial Caribbean.” Special issue,
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 23 (3): 401–612.
García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. “Una Modernización que atrasa: Las Contradicciones Socioculturales En América
Latina.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1 (1): 2–19.
Laguerre, Michel S. 1976. “Belair, Port-Au-Prince: From Slave and Maroon Settlement to Contemporary Black
Ghetto.” Contributions of the Latin American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 26–38.
Hutz, Evelyn M., and B. Edward Pierce. 1976. “Historical Factors Contributing to the Perception of Ethnicity Among
the Nengre of Surinam.” Contributions of the Latin American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 39–57.
Olien, Michael D. 1976. “United States Colonization Programs for Blacks in Latin America during the 19th Century.”
Contributions of the Latin American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 7–16.
Rappaport, Joanne, and Robert V. H Dover. 1996. “Introduction.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1 (2): 2–17.
Stewart, John. 1976. “Mission and Leadership Among the ‘Merikin’ Baptists of Trinidad.” Contributions of the Latin
American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 17–25.
Turner, Terrence. 1989. “Amazonian Indians Lead Fight to Save Their Forest World.” Latin American Anthropology
Review 1 (1): 2–4.
Wilbert, Johannes. 1976. “Kinsmen of Flesh and of Blood: A Comment on Possible Socioeconomic Africanisms in
Goajiro Indian Culture.” Contributions of the Latin American Anthropology Group 1 (1): 58–66.

456 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology