Over the last decade, a wide range of global forces have combined to promote the territorial titling of collective lands to indigenous and black communities in the lowland tropics of Latin America. This marks an unprecedented turn in land titling and reform in the hemisphere. In this paper, I describe the territorial turn in collective land titling in the Pacific region of Colombia. In particular, I describe the World Bankfunded Natural Resource Management Program's effort to demarcate and title some 5 million hectares of national lands to black community councils in Pacific Colombia since 1996. In so doing, I examine how environmental, human rights, and multilateral lending interests have come together over the last few decades to strengthen ethnic rights to collective lands throughout the Latin American lowlands. Although it is too early to make definitive assessments, I argue that the machinations of the World Bankfunded project interacted in very complex and significant ways with how black social movements instituted a novel ethnic-territorial relationship. The project has widespread implications for black and indigenous territorial aspirations throughout the lowland tropics and for better understanding how identity and territory constitute one another.

This paper draws from my participation in mapping miskitu community land claims in the spring of 1997 to discuss the relationship between the mapping process and an identity politics of place in northeastern Nicaragua (the moskitia). in community fora that formed the critical element of the mapping process, miskitu community intellectuals passionately narrated miskitu history with recourse to moskitia geography and the places to be mapped. these public narratives resonated with and mobilized community audiences because they combined authoritative Miskitu identity signifiers, such as the Miskitu flag and biblical lessons, with commonplace toponyms and cultural landscapes. in narrating the relationship of miskitu identity to moskitia places, community intellectuals simultaneously critiqued the conventional wisdom of Nicaraguan historiography and transformed the initial aim of the mapping project by shaping the meaning of “community lands” for community members. in this way, the mapping project merged a cultural politics of place with those of identity.

In north-eastern Nicaragua, territorial titling of communal lands confl ates particular notions of ethnicity with proprietary conceptions of space to generate new forms of confl ict within and between indigenous and black communities, and with mestizo migrants. Notions of rights between competing groups, or within confl icting normative frameworks, become increasingly polemic during demarcation. While analysis of three land titling case studies demonstrates that results are socially contingent and place based, trends include: (a) power disparities; (b) tension between 'traditional' and 'modern' patterns of land tenure and resource rights; and (c) contradictions fed by international conservation agendas and neoliberal economic reforms. Combining critical actor-based analysis with practical policy critique our work illuminates how contestations over the bounding of communal territories contribute to social injustice.

Identity differentiation between the Sambo and Tawira Miskitu in eastern Nicaragua and northeastern Honduras is examined with respect to African integration, settlement geography, differential relations with British settlers and Spanish officials, neighboring Indians, and market economies for the period 1620 to 1790. Research draws from sixteen months of fieldwork in the Mosquitia from 1994-7 and documentary research among British, Spanish, Moravian church, Nicaraguan, and U.S. archival sources. Findings suggest that a salient yet paradoxically overlooked dynamic of Miskitu ethnohistory was the geographically circumscribed animosity between the Sambo and Tawira Miskitu.

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