Jose F. Buscaglia

One of the main scholarly contributions of Buscaglia is his work on the origins and development of the ideology of racialism and the power imbalance it has fostered since the 16th century. In his book Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean, he argues that race, as a construct, was systematically developed for the purpose of managing labor resources upon the basis of ethnicity and skin pigmentation.[6] According to him, the system drew its inspiration from Judeo-Christian notions of tribal exclusivity growing into a global network of colonial exploitation that is still widely operative while currently disguised under the orthodoxies of identity politics and nationalist populisms.[7]

Buscaglia’s research on the Caribbean, as one of the major epicenters of the Modern experience, identifies a counterhegemonic discourse to racialist ideology. In 2003 he coined the neologism of mulataje to describe a culture and way of thinking that, since the 16th Century, has continuously attempted to undo the myth of race and its mechanisms of labor control and social policing.[8] According to Paget Henry, in Undoing Empire Buscaglia has "made a very distinct contribution to the relation between early Euro-American thought and Caribbean thought. The dimension of the former is often overlooked.".[9]

Another major focus in Buscaglia’s work is the nature of early Latin American Creole thought and ideology. He has edited, translated, and written critical essays on the historical narratives of 17th-century Spanish intellectual and Mexico City native Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. This scholarship, which is based on field research that included an underwater archaeological expedition on the Yucatan coast, focuses primarily on the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez), a pamphlet published in Mexico in 1690, which tells the story of the first American to circumnavigate the globe. Buscaglia finds in Ramirez's testimony and in Sigüenza's complicity as interlocutor and validator, the first enunciation of a rebellious, piratical, and freedom-loving American spirit.[10]

Since his earliest works, Buscaglia has questioned the use of the term American to refer in exclusivity to the people of the United States. Being that all the inhabitants of the continent stretching from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, including the peoples of the Caribbean, have an equal claim to Americanness, he proposes the use of the term Usonian to describe the peoples, institutions, and imperial tradition of the United States of America[11][12]

• Undoing Empire, Race, and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (2003) ISBN 9780816635740
• Histories of the Mexican Archipelago (2009) ISBN 9789592602748
• Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (2011) ISBN 9788400093655
• Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez/Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: Edited and translated by José F. Buscaglia-Salgado (2019) ISBN 9780813593074

• Buscaglia Salgado, J. F. (2011). El Caribe al final de la Era Usoniana: Hacia un nuevo modelo de confederación. Aguaita, Colombia, 23 (December 2011): 38–58.
• Buscaglia Salgado, J. (2014). El poder, la ideología y el terror en el Mar de las Antillas. Historia de las Antillas, vol. 5. José Antonio Piqueras and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, eds. Madrid: Doce Calles: 475–517. ISBN 9788497441667
• Buscaglia, J. F. (2015). Race and the Constitutive Inequality of the Modern/Colonial Condition. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 109–124. ISBN 9781137554291
• Naranjo Orovio, C., & Buscaglia, J. F. (2015). Race as a weapon: defending the colonial plantation order in the name of civilization, 1791–1850. Culture & History Digital Journal, 4.2.