The 'port people' of Bilwi: Ideologies of race, lexicons of identity and the politics of peoplehood in the Mosquito Coast

This dissertation has two objectives: (1) to describe the development, transformation and function of the extant systems of socio-racial identification within the Mosquito Coast region of Central America over time and (2) to critically evaluate the approach to race and culture that is embodied in the relevant historical and social science literature. In that sense, the subject of the dissertation is simultaneously "us" (social scientists and historians) and "them" (the diverse historical and modern actors of the Mosquito Coast). It is my explicit intention not to epistemologically separate the status of the conclusions that I make about each of these subjects. In other words, I believe that in analyzing the reasons for which these historical and ethnographic misinterpretations have been made, we learn something significant about "ourselves."; In this dissertation I argue that the great majority of scholarship about the Mosquito Coast region of Nicaragua mistakenly operates on the assumption that the region is composed of identifiable "ethnic groups" each with its own distinct "culture." I illustrate the ways in which the Mosquito Coast represents a single, albeit highly diverse, society with a regionally-specific social structure that has been shaped historically by unique political and economic forces. Following a chronological framework that begins with the pre-Columbian period and ends in the aftermath of the Contra war, each chapter provides an alternative reading of the use and function of socio-racial categories in the Mosquito Coast and particularly in Bilwi/Puerto Cabezas. I argue that the scholarship of the region relies on an all-too-pervasive analytic framework that invests socio-racial categories with a degree of fixity and cultural content that in my opinion obscures the pan-regional culture that I describe.; The ultimate goal, then, of the thesis is to provide a more accurate and theoretically informed understanding of the use of socio-racial racial categories in the region. This understanding, in turn, provides insight into the historical and modern conflicts that have arisen and which have been attributed to the "racial" heterogeneity of the region.