Belize is a cultural unusually in Central America, with a society oriented more to Britain, the English-speaking Caribbean countries, and North America, than to neighboring Spanish-speaking republics. During the 1980s, efforts to forge a common national identity among a small, multi ethnic population challenged the colonial orientations of Belizean society. Regional conflicts, migration, and intensified relationships with the United States also posed challenges.

The deepening of social, economic, and political ties to the United States during the 1980s prompted critics in Belize and abroad to complain that the nation merely exchanged one colonial master for another. In addition, emigration of Belizeans to the United States and of Central Americans to Belize further challenged Belizean society, which was already deeply separated by differences of ethnicity, race, and class.

Belize might appear to be the first postcolonial "plural society," a mosaic of discrete cultural groups with their own value systems and institutional forms, joined together only by the forces of the marketplace and coercive authority. Indeed, a number of scholars have described Belize as split between two cultural complexes--one English-speaking, and Creole, and the other Spanish-speaking , and Mestizo. Belizean social and cultural variety was, much more complex than this bipolar model suggests. Language and religion cut across ethnic and racial categories. Moreover, race was a complex and elusive concept.

Ethnic boundaries in Belize were also notoriously fuzzy. Intermarriage between members of different groups has historically been widespread. Identification of people of mixed ancestry varied considerably; one recent survey of secondary-school students found eight different substitutions of Creole identity alone. This variability was not limited to Creoles. Some urban, Europeanlooking Spanish-speakers identified themselves as Maya; many Mestizos no longer spoke Spanish in the home or had become evangelical Protestants.

Not all individuals of multiple ancestries felt comfortable identifying with a particular ethnic group; in the words of one Belizean youth, many Belizeans were "all mix up." A small, but remarkable number of people eschewed potentially divisive ethnic categories and referred to themselves simply as "Belizeans." Ethnicity competed with other identities, such as those based on status, occupation, and political affiliation, for primacy in social interaction. Belizean society was as separated by class differences as it was by race, language, religion and ethnicity.