This well-researched, passionate study focuses on the negative attitudes of literate white elites, particularly in Colombia’s interior, toward the black population in the Caribbean zone and on the struggle of coastal blacks for social recognition and citizenship (including the long-delayed right to vote. McGraw examines the whites’ contempt for the Caribbean blacks’ population via their frustration with, and anger about, the lack of discipline of the bogas—black males who painfully propelled their boats up the Magdalena River with poles. He suggests that white elites in Colombia’s interior welcomed the introduction of steamboats on the river because it lessened the necessity of relying on the bogas. Steamboats could go upriver in eight or nine days compared to the more than a month that the poled boats took.
Also examined are the cases of two Caribbean blacks who became educated: Candelario Obeso became a writer; his literary status among the white...