Taking the Irish local and European elections in 2009 as a point of entry, this chapter follows two Nigerian women as they navigate the vagaries of Irish local politics in Dundalk and Drogheda. This chapter explores political participation by ‘new immigrant candidates’ as they engaged with a public caught in the teeth of an extraordinary economic and political crisis. It is also an ethnographic examination of the sensibilities connected to forms of migrant and minority political mobilization.

In September 2009 the radio station LMFM hosted a live debate on racial tensions in the taxi industry in Drogheda. Allegations were made about African-born drivers operating unlicensed taxis and failing to use photo IDs – according to one commentator, ‘They all look much the same to the general public’. This chapter takes this incident as a starting point from which to explore the ways in which the taxi industry has become a key a site of racialization and labour integration in Ireland. The chapter discusses migrant drivers’ hopes for upward social mobility but also attends to their everyday experiences of racism and discrimination in an industry characterized by government at a distance, liberalization, and extraordinary work pressures. The chapter also pays particular attention to the role of rumours within the local cultural landscape.

This chapter covers the recent history of plantation archaeology in the Caribbean as it intersects with the discourse of race, ethnicity, and capitalism. Analysis of the artifacts and landscapes in relation to the Caribbean plantation complex allows for renewed questions about the development of race and capital in places where the written record is insufficient. Particularly as it pertains to studies of race, ethnicity, and capital, plantation archaeology in the Caribbean has coalesced around three major themes: (1) African cultural retentions; (2) trade, consumption, and access; and (3) landscapes and social relations.

The chapter discusses the respective locations and “values” of Indigeneity and Blackness vis-à-vis whiteness and ethnoracial mixings in ideological constructions of national identity in two different Latin American historical periods: “monocultural mestizaje” and multiculturalism. After delving into the ideological foundations of monocultural mestizaje and “racial democracy,” the chapter considers the advent of what has been called “the Latin American multicultural turn,” which began emerging unevenly in the region in the late 1980s. The “turn” brought about new official narrations of the nation, in a move away from the “monocultural mestizaje” ideology of national identity that reifies the mestizo as the prototypical national identity, to instead nominally recognize and “embrace” national ethnoracial diversity in a wave of new constitutions and constitutional reforms. The chapter concludes that both racial hierarchy and the mestizaje ideology of national identity remain alive and well, as the colonial racial order has adapted to contemporary circumstances, including the ideological shift from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism.