A decade ago the distinguished historian of Brazil Barbara Weinstein challenged Latin Americanists to “combine the ‘Indo’ and the ‘Afro’” in studies of the region’s postcolonial history. Yuko Miki’s Frontiers of Citizenship, though not initially conceived in response to that challenge, represents an endorsement of Weinstein’s program, as well as a major accomplishment for its author. Readers of Ethnohistory will find much to admire in its charting of the complex intersections of indigenous and diasporic peoples over the course of nineteenth-century Brazilian history, from early experiments in nation building through the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in its last New World redoubt, in 1888.
The impact of these intersecting histories, Miki argues, echoed through the length of the continent-sized country into the twentieth century and on to our time, but their site—the site of the particular histories she documents—was much more limited. It consisted of what she calls...
