Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000 9780674545847

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Afro-­Latin America the nathan i. huggins lectures

Afro-­Latin America black lives, 1600–2000

George Reid Andrews

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Andrews, George Reid.   Afro-­Latin America : Black lives, 1600-­2000 / George Reid Andrews.   pages cm   ISBN 978-­0 -­674-­73759-­4 (hardcover) 1. Blacks—​Latin America.  2. Blacks—​Race identity—​Latin America.  3. Racism—​Latin America.  4. Racially mixed people—​ Latin America.  5. Latin America—​Race relations.  I. Title.   F1419.N4A64 2016   305.80098—​ dc23  2015025417

For my beloved children, Lena Gabriela Andrews, Jesse Reid Andrews, and Eve Werner Andrews

Contents

1 On Seeing and Not Seeing  1

2 On Counting and Not Counting  18

3 Afro-­Latin American Voices  45

4 Transnational Voices  67

5 On Acting and Not Acting  88

Notes  95 Acknowledgments  117 Index  119

Afro-­Latin America

1 On Seeing and Not Seeing

In 2010 the distinguished literary theorist and public intellectual

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., traveled to Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru. His goal was to answer the question, “What does it mean to be ‘black’ in these countries” and, more generally, in Latin America as a whole? Gates saw much on his travels that inspired and impressed him: Brazilian Carnival, the Sans Souci palace and the Citadel fortress in Haiti, a quinceañera celebration in Peru, Brazilian university students hotly debating affirmative action. But he saw much that disturbed him as well.1 Over and over Gates encountered what he described as the silencing, denial, and invisibility of the region’s black and African heritage. Scholars that he met in Mexico and Peru characterized black history in their countries as “a history of invisibility,” “a legacy of invisibility . . . ​The economic, social, political, cultural life of blacks in our society has not been recognized.” The citizens of the Dominican Republic, a local anthropologist informed him, “are in complete denial of who they are,” that is, in denial of the African components of Dominican history, society, and culture. Gates concurred that “a great amount of schizophrenia, denial and racial tension lie just beneath the surface” of Dominican life.2 Conditions seemed somewhat better in Brazil and Cuba, two societies that acknowledge and even celebrate their African heritage. But even in those countries, “well-­meaning policies” of race mixture and official doctrines of racial democracy—​the idea that Latin America is a region characterized by high levels of racial 1

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equality and harmony—​ “had led to blackness being forced to become invisible, or to brown-­pride movements that buried black roots.” In Cuba Gates “saw segregation all around me” and state-­ imposed silence on the topics of racism and racial discrimination. Public debates on those topics are much more open and lively in Brazil but have not succeeded in overturning the “huge lie” (to quote one of his informants, the late Afro-­Brazilian activist Abdias do Nascimento) of racial democracy. “Racial democracy was a mask,” Nascimento told him, “a public face that Brazil put on for the world.” In everyday life, “Brazil was still hostile to blacks, still trying to ‘whiten away’ vestiges of African culture.” Gates encountered an especially poignant example of “whitening” and black invisibility in a hair salon in Belo Horizonte, where the Afro-­Brazilian owner informed him that national media are so dominated by white standards of female beauty that black women “can’t see themselves at all.” And indeed, as Gates scanned a newsstand in Rio de Janeiro for a black face in the magazines displayed before him, he was hard-­ pressed to find one. In a country that is majority Afro-­Brazilian, he saw “rows upon rows of white faces, white models, a white Brazil. I could have been in Switzerland.”3 Gates is far from alone in making such observations. The theme of black people’s invisibility in Latin America is deeply inscribed both in the scholarship on the region and in the discourse of black intellectuals and activists. As early as the 1870s and 1880s, and as recently as 2014, Afro-­A rgentine newspapers in Buenos Aires protested that “the history of our country has many blank pages” and that black contributions to national life had been “invisibilized.” Afro-­Uruguayan activist Romero Jorge Rodríguez has written eloquently about the “silence and invisibilization by the State and society of the historical situation of our country’s black community.” In Cuba, historian Alejandro de la Fuente confirms Gates’s description of the revolutionary government’s “official silence on race” and the irony that “the same government that did the most to eliminate racism also did the most to silence discussion about its persistence.” In Colombia, Aline Helg notes “the silence that Colombian elites have kept since the early nineteenth century over the substantial contribution of people of African descent to the



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formation of the nation”; anthropologists Nina de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha concur that Afro-­Colombians have “been edited out of the national vision of present-­day reality.” Similar comments can be found for almost every Latin American nation.4 Many of the same sources, however, that charge Afro-­ Latin Americans’ longstanding invisibility in their national societies go on to note important recent changes in that situation. Friedemann and Arocha report, for example, after a century or more of invisiColombians” in the bility, “the gradual making visible of Afro-­ 5 1980s and 1990s. The edited volume in which their essay appeared, No Longer Invisible: Afro-­Latin Americans Today, tells a similar story for other nations in the region: as the result of black civil rights movements that formed during those decades, issues of racial inequality and discrimination were finally put on the public agenda in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries, provoking intense discussion and, in some countries, new policy initiatives. Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela all included formal recognition of their black and indigenous minorities in newly drafted national constitutions, and they adopted policies aimed at redressing centuries-­old inequities and inequalities. In a further blow against invisibility, most of the countries in the region gathered racial data in the national censuses of 2010–2011, some for the first time ever in their national history. Two of the countries that Gates visited, Mexico and Peru, opted to gather data on indigenous peoples but not Afro-­ descendants. In both countries Gates found activists pressing hard for the inclusion of a black racial category in the census. After his book went to press, their campaigns bore fruit in the form of commitments by the governments of both countries to include a black racial category in the national household survey and, in Peru, in the census of 2017.6 In short, as one of Gates’s Afro-­Peruvian informants told him, the racial situation in the region has “changed significantly . . . ​ Before we were totally invisible. . . . ​Now, we are visible.”7 This of course represents a tremendous advance. Groups and individuals that have no public presence, that cannot be seen, are treated quite differently from those that are socially visible. Invisibility encourages discrimination and mistreatment, while actively hindering

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possible remedies for that mistreatment. How can a society address a problem that, to all appearances, does not exist? But were, in fact, black people in Latin America “invisible” in the past? In literal, material terms, of course not. As Winthrop Wright observed for the case of Venezuela, Afro-­descendants’ “disappearance” from national history “constituted a paper one only, for the blacks’ visual presence remains obvious, especially along the Caribbean coast.” Aline Helg makes a similar point for Colombia, where “blacks’ invis­­ ibility sharply contradicts the fact that today Colombia has the third largest population of African origin in the Western Hemisphere.” Afro-­descendants were similarly visible in countries like Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama, where they constituted between one-­t hird and one-­half of the national population in 1900.8 What most historians and activists mean when they talk about black invisibility is not that black people could not be seen but rather that, as Friedemann and Arocha suggested, they had been “edited out” of official and semiofficial narratives of national history. Most countries were willing to acknowledge the fact of African slavery, a colonial and nineteenth-­century institution that left abundant and undeniable evidence of its existence. Once slavery came to an end in the mid-­to late 1800s, however, the “official story” in most of the region was that Afro-­descendants had been peacefully and successfully integrated into national society, ceasing to exist as a separate, identifiable, and, therefore, “visible” social group. One of the principal demands of present-­day Afro-­Latin American activists has been that historians revise the official story to acknowledge Afro-­descendants’ multiple roles in building their respective nations. Partly in response to those demands, partly in response to increasing scholarly interest in questions of race and ethnicity, over the last three decades researchers have produced a growing body of scholarship on the Afro-­Latin American past and present. One of the key findings of that scholarship is that while Afro-­Latin Amer­ icans are “no longer invisible” in the present, they were never totally invisible in the past. And indeed, how could they have been? As pillars of the colonial economies, as soldiers and officers in the independence and civil wars of the 1800s, as creators of the region’s popular culture, as members and leaders of the mass-­based political



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movements of the 1900s, Africans and their descendants have been central participants in the creation of Latin American societies.9 Especially in light of that participation, how was it possible that for most of the twentieth century people of African ancestry were excluded from accounts of the region’s history? On what terms did black visibility in daily life coexist with black invisibility in imaginings of the nation? How did the relationship between visibility and invisibility, and between voice and silence, evolve over time? And what kinds of sources have historians used to combat that silence and invisibility and to channel the voices of the past?

Afro-­Latin America: A Brief History “Afro-­Latin America” is a term that was coined in the 1970s, inspired by the surge in black political mobilization at that time.10 It referred to those countries or subregions with significant populations of African ancestry. “Afro-­ Latin Americans” referred to people of African ancestry, who were identified as such by a variety of local terms: negros (blacks), pardos (browns; people of mixed race), zambos (people of mixed African and indigenous ancestry), and other terms that we will encounter over the course of this book. Beginning in the 1970s, “Afro-­[nationality]” was increasingly used to refer to people of African ancestry (e.g., Afro-­Colombians, Afro-­Venezuelans); since 2000, “Afro-­descendant” has been embraced as an identifier that can be used in all nations across the African diaspora.11 All those terms trace back to the progenitors of Afro-­ Latin America, the enslaved Africans who arrived in the region between 1500 and 1870. Of the 10.7 million Africans who came to the New World in those years, almost two-­thirds, 6.8 million, came to the countries of Spanish America and Brazil. Almost five million Africans came to Brazil alone, compared to fewer than four hundred thousand brought to the United States.12 Enslaved Africans and their descendants did all manner of work: plantation labor growing sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, and other crops; gold-­ mining in Brazil, Colombia, and Central America; ranch labor in Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil, and Venezuela; and throughout the colonies, urban labor ranging from the skilled trades through domestic service and street commerce through

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unskilled manual labor. Because of their value as both laborers and as merchandise, any transaction involving a slave—​buying or selling a slave, using a slave as collateral for a loan, grants of freedom, wills in which slaves were listed as property—​was recorded at the local notary’s office, becoming part of the public record. Many of those registries survive to this day, providing rich information on slave family structure, occupations, strategies for acquiring freedom (often hinted at or revealed in manumission documents), and other aspects of slave life.13 Partly on the basis of precedents in Roman law, and partly in order to facilitate the smooth functioning of the slave labor on which the colonial economies were based, Spanish and Portuguese law mandated a series of rights and protections to which all enslaved people were entitled: the right to receive Catholic sacraments, including baptism and marriage; the right to adequate food, clothing, and shelter; the right not to suffer excessive punishment; rights to form families, seek new owners, and buy freedom. For most slaves, these protections went largely unobserved and unenforced; but throughout Latin America, those slaves who were able to learn of these legal provisions could be (and were) quite persistent in approaching local authorities to demand their enforcement.14 Every time slaves appealed to royal authority, their cases became part of the historical record, inscribed and registered in state archives and requiring an official response. As those petitions and appeals intensified in the second half of the 1700s, some localities appointed Defensores de esclavos, public defenders charged with receiving slaves’ complaints and acting on them. While the documents filed by those defenders reflect the legal procedures and language of the day, it is possible to hear the voices of the slaves even through the filter of that language. Indeed, reports historian Lyman Johnson, slave petitions “are filled with the white heat of emotion—​ allegations of betrayal, lies, and physical abuse.” Those petitions often resulted in court hearings, “a public venue where [slaves’] grievances could be performed and the most embarrassing elements of the master’s life could be made public.”15 While some slaves sought redress of grievances in the courts, others resorted to armed rebellion. This was especially the case



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during the last decades of the 1700s and first half of the 1800s, when more Africans arrived in Latin America than ever before.16 Most of those slaves were young men, many with military experience in Africa. Those young men (and some women) took up arms in Haiti in the 1790s and then in a wave of slave uprisings in Brazil and Cuba in the early 1800s. Public fears of and preparation for such events kept slaves and slavery very much in the public eye. And the official investigations of those rebellions almost always included interrogations of the surviving participants that offer invaluable information on their lives and histories.17 Another collective activity that concerned slave owners and officials were the public events at which Africans gathered to sing, dance, and play music together. Here, in fact, is a perfect example of the coexistence of slave visibility and invisibility. As part of their campaign to Christianize the indigenous peoples of the New World, Spanish and Portuguese missionaries spent much time and effort to learn and catalog Amerindian languages and cultures. They took few such pains, however, with their African charges, simply baptizing them en masse in rites conducted in Latin. Thus while the missionaries left us with detailed ethnographies of the region’s Amerindian peoples, its African peoples remained a largely undifferentiated mass, identified, if at all, by their African port of embarkation.18 Because of the exotic quality of the African street dances, Europeans and Latin Americans alike flocked to come and watch them. But even as they recorded what they saw, observers admitted that they had little or no idea of what those rites conveyed. While some officials defended them as a way to make the experience of slavery more tolerable, others feared that the dances disturbed public order and might provide opportunities for slaves to plot rebellion. The unfamiliarity of African cultural practices, and the fact that they were conducted using African languages, made them largely unintelligible to Latin American and European observers, simultaneously visible and invisible.19 Similarly concealed in plain sight were the activities of the African mutual aid societies that flourished in Spanish American port cities during the first half of the 1800s. Like the slave rebellions of those

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years, the African societies—​k nown as cabildos in Cuba and Colombia, or as salas de nación in Argentina and Uruguay—​were the product of the increased importation of enslaved Africans, who arrived in sufficient numbers to form separate social and cultural organizations based on their African ethnic origins. Those organizations represented slave and free black interests to local authorities and also maintained African religious rituals in the New World, often mixed with elements of Catholicism. One of their principal functions was to provide funeral services that would usher members’ souls into the afterlife in a fitting and dignified manner. For all members of colonial society, making a “good death” was essential to ensuring the wellbeing of one’s soul. Since slaves faced special obstacles in achieving that goal, the African associations occupied a crucially important role in slave and free black community life.20 Most Africans brought to the New World lived out their lives in slavery. Each year, however, small numbers of slaves—​perhaps as many as 1 percent of the slave population—​succeeded in winning grants of freedom from their owners. Most of those grants involved cash payments, in which slaves (or third parties) paid their owners some part or all of their market value. The records of such transactions were carefully preserved and today provide evidence both of how slaves mobilized the resources to obtain their freedom and of owners’ motives for agreeing to such a transaction.21 Once freed, former slaves (libertos) entered a new regulatory realm, that of the caste laws. It is often asserted that the Latin American nations never experienced state-­imposed racial laws comparable to those in the segregationist United States or South Africa. That is true for the period after independence but not for the colonial period, when Latin American societies were ruled by the first comprehensive system of racial laws in the early modern world. In their initial iteration, in the early 1600s, the caste laws divided colonial society into three racial groups—​A fricans, Europeans, and New World “Indians”—​each with clearly differentiated obligations and privileges. Indigenous peoples enjoyed legal freedom (i.e., they could not be legally enslaved), but this freedom was limited by their status as special wards of the Spanish state. Partly in order to protect them from exploitation by European settlers, partly to make them



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more subject to government oversight and control, indigenous people were required to live in repúblicas de indios, settlements set apart (literally, segregated) from European towns and villages. In return for those protections, they were required to support the Crown with tribute taxes and forced labor. Africans brought to the colonies came as slaves, and African ancestry quickly became synonymous with enslavement and degraded legal and social status, even for black people who had attained freedom or were born free. Only Europeans and their American-­born offspring enjoyed the full rights and privileges of free-­born subjects of the king.22 This was the caste regime in theory, as dictated by law. The caste regime in practice, as lived in daily life, evolved quite differently. Indigenous people strove constantly to evade royal taxes and labor drafts. Many did so by leaving the repúblicas de indios and moving to towns, cities, or Spanish-­owned haciendas, where they lived in close contact with Spaniards and their descendants. The result was a rapidly growing racially mixed mestizo population. Similarly, while most Africans lived and died as slaves, those who were able to buy or negotiate their way out of slavery and into freedom formed populations of free Africans and their descendants that in most of the region grew more rapidly than the slave population. By 1800, free blacks and mulattos outnumbered slaves in every Latin American colony except Brazil and Cuba.23 Thus not all Africans were slaves and, conversely, not all slaves were Africans. Over time, growing numbers of them were native-­ born Afro-­Latin Americans; and as a result of sexual contacts among Africans, Europeans, and indigenous people, many of those slave and free Afro-­Latin Americans were people not just of African ancestry but of European and/or indigenous ancestry as well. Under these conditions, the caste laws evolved to include a fourth racial category, that of the free castas. Including mestizos, mulattos (also known as pardos), zambos (people of mixed indigenous and African ancestry), and free blacks, the castes brought together all those who could not be assigned to the white, indigenous, or slave categories. As race mixture continued, however, it became ever more difficult to assign individuals to specific caste groupings. Indigenous people who moved to towns or cities and lived in racially mixed neighborhoods could claim

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to be mestizos (which exempted them from tribute payments), as could mulattos (who, under caste law, were also liable to tribute payments). Mestizos, in turn, could claim to be white or, if seeking positions of influence in indigenous communities, indigenous, and so on, in a process that repeatedly blurred the boundaries prescribed by the caste laws.24 Here we confront yet another source of black invisibility. One way free blacks and mulattos sought to evade the restrictions of the caste laws was to claim white, mestizo, or indigenous racial status. This could be done in several ways: by bribing parish priests to change racial designations on birth, marriage, or death records; by requesting a legal “pardon” of one’s racial status by the monarch; or simply by making public claims of nonblackness and having the social clout to make those claims stick. These tactics were successful often enough to provoke a Mexican official to complain in 1770 about “the liberty with which the plebs have been allowed to choose the [racial] class they prefer . . . ​A Mulatto, for instance, whose color helps him somewhat to hide in another caste says, according to his whims, that he is Indian to enjoy the privileges as such and pay less tribute . . . ​or, more frequently, that he is Spaniard, or Castizo or Mestizo, and then he does not pay any [tribute] at all.”25 As upwardly mobile blacks and mulattos challenged their Afro-­ descendant racial status and, in some cases, succeeded in escaping it, they took the first steps toward achieving, and creating, the “invisibility” against which Afro-­Latin American activists railed two centuries later. A second and even more consequential step toward invisibility was the abolition of the caste laws following national independence in the early 1800s. In almost every Spanish American country, independence armies enrolled large numbers of slave and free black troops.26 Slaves who volunteered or were conscripted into those armies received their freedom; free blacks, many of whom had served in Spain’s colonial militias, had no such incentive to join. In pursuit of free black military and political support, independence movements in Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, and other countries all moved to abolish colonial racial restrictions and to decree full civic equality for all citizens, regardless of race. Brazil took the same step in its constitution of 1824.



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Independence also meant the passage in the 1810s and 1820s of laws granting gradual emancipation, under which the children of slave mothers were born legally free but with the obligation to serve their mother’s master through their teenage years. Upon reaching adulthood they received full freedom.27 The final, definitive abolition of slavery came for most of the Spanish American countries in the 1850s and 1860s, in 1886 in Cuba and 1888 in Brazil. The combination of the ending of caste restrictions and the abolition of slavery marked a tremendous political advance for the region’s black populations, who were now able to take part in party politics, pursue livelihoods of their own choosing, and form families free of slave-­ owner interference. But the abolition of the colonial-­period racial categories also meant the beginning of the historical invisibility decried by Henry Louis Gates and others. In Venezuela, reports Winthrop Wright, “blacks simply disappeared from the official records . . . ​I n government documents, court records, and national histories, blacks receive no attention, as such, and remain hidden from sight.” Much the same occurred in Brazil, argues historian Hebe Mattos, where by the middle of the 1800s racial and color labels had disappeared from official records and parish registries. The only countries in Latin America to continue to employ such labels were Cuba and Puerto Rico, where Spanish rule, the caste laws, and race-­based recordkeeping all persisted until 1898. But with independence from Spain and the institution of a system of civil birth, death, and marriage registries, “race labels started disappearing from official statistics.”28 Throughout Latin America, the black and mulatto population had gone officially missing. And yet, to return to Wright’s previously cited observation, blacks’ disappearance had taken place only on paper. In real life, as middle-­and upper-­class ladies and gentlemen stepped out of their townhouses and mansions each morning in nineteenth-­century Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Cartagena, Caracas, and other cities, “Africa began at their doorstep: in the rapidly growing slums and tenement complexes of their cities; in the barracks of increasingly industrialized sugar mills; and in the very bodies of an extensively racially mixed national citizenry.”29 And as doctrines of scientific racism crystallized in Europe and the United

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States in the mid-­1800s and made their way to Latin America, those racially mixed citizenries worried local elites more and more. Scientific racism forecast a bleak future indeed for societies with majority nonwhite populations. Venezuelan intellectual and politician Arturo Uslar Pietri vividly expressed those fears in 1937, lamenting that neither blacks, nor Indians, nor the products of race mixture involving either, could form the basis of a modern, twentieth-­century society. Indigenous people lacked the strength and discipline required for systematic, sustained labor. The Africans brought to Venezuela to replace them proved no better, and “the resulting mix [of races] has not surpassed its original components. What we might call the present-­day Venezuelan race is as incapable of a modern and dynamic concept of work and of wealth as were its ancestors. This means that if we do not greatly modify the ethnic composition of our population it will be almost impossible to change the course of our history and make this country into a modern nation-­state.”30 Obeying the dictates of scientific racism, almost every Latin Amer­­ ican country sought to “greatly modify the ethnic composition of our population” by attracting European immigration. Only a few succeeded. Between 1880 and 1930 Argentina and Brazil both had net European immigration of slightly over three million people, and Uruguay some six hundred forty thousand. Cuba recorded almost eight hundred thousand arrivals from Spain between 1900 and 1930, but many (and perhaps most) of those immigrants were sugar workers who came each year for the harvest and then returned to Europe; it is unclear how many chose to stay in Cuba.31 No other Latin American country received Europeans in numbers sufficient to alter the racial composition of its population. Racial transformation and whitening, if it were to take place, would have to occur through some other means. That means proved to be the same process of race mixture that had been taking place in the region since the beginning of the caste laws, but now reimagined by a new generation of intellectuals and policymakers as a source of strength and advantage rather than weakness and vulnerability. The scientific racists had viewed race mixture as leading inexorably to social and biological degeneration.



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But in a brilliantly creative reversal of scientific racism’s premises, during the first decades of the 1900s Latin American intellectuals recast race mixture as the historical “mission of the Ibero-­A merican race,” in the words of Mexican writer José Vasconcelos. In his widely read and highly influential book, La raza cósmica (1925), Vasconcelos argued that it was Latin America’s destiny to produce the “cosmic race,” “the definitive race, the synthesis race, the integral race, made up of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, more capable of true brotherhood and of a truly universal vision.” The creation of that “fifth race” (combining and superseding the European, African, Asian, and Amerindian races) would be the region’s crowning achievement and confer on it world leadership as “the mother race of the new civilization.”32 Closely linked to the rehabilitation of race mixture was the set of ideas that in Brazil and elsewhere came to be known as “racial democracy,” a term that will come up fairly frequently in this book. Advocates of racial democracy argued that, as a result of the independence wars and the abolition at that time of the caste laws, Latin America had succeeded in creating what was unthinkable in the United States and other racially divided societies: nations characterized by complete civic and legal equality and, even more than paper equality, by genuine feelings of affection and “fraternity” among members of different racial groups.33 Especially after the Second World War, in a world seeking to recover from the barbarism of Nazi racism, racial democracy offered a deeply appealing model of how to construct egalitarian and harmonious multiracial societies. And like the reevaluation of race mixture, it transformed the region’s multiracial character from a liability to a source of pride and potential global leadership. Racial democracy in turn formed part of an even larger experiment in social and political inclusion under way in mid-­century Latin America. Vasconcelos had conceived the idea of the cosmic race in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, as his country struggled to build a new and more inclusive political order. As other Latin American nations experienced the economic turmoil of the 1930s, the dictatorships and oligarchical republics of the early 1900s fell from power, replaced by new governing coalitions incorporating

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movements and representatives from the region’s middle and working classes. As in Mexico, these new regimes and movements—​ trabalhismo (“laborism”) in Brazil, Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba, left Liberalism in Colombia, Acción Democrática in Venezuela, Peronism in Argentina—​constantly invoked the need to include “the people” in national governance and to adopt policies that would serve their needs. Expenditures on public health, education, housing, and other social goods increased sharply during the 1940s and 1950s. Populist regimes also sought to promote national industrialization, which expanded job opportunities for blue-­and white-­collar workers.34 Racial democracy and populism both sought to include in national political and economic life two overlapping groups that previously had been largely excluded: nonwhites and workers. This should have provided optimal conditions for Afro-­Latin American social and economic advancement, and in some ways it did. In the years following the Second World War, the number of Afro-­descendants graduating from high school and college and then finding blue-­ collar and white-­collar employment increased appreciably (though as we shall see in Chapter 2, the decision of most Latin American governments not to gather racial data in the national censuses of those years makes it impossible to provide exact numbers). As Afro-­Latin Americans pursued those opportunities, however, they found themselves encountering barriers of prejudice and discrimination that, in a racial democracy, simply should not have existed. Widely publicized—​and therefore highly visible—​incidents of discrimination in hotels or other venues led to the passage of federal antidiscrimination laws in Venezuela (1945), Brazil (1951), Panama (1956), and Costa Rica (1960, 1968); similar incidents in Cuba and Uruguay provoked soul-­searching national discussions but no legislative action.35 In the face of these obstacles to black advancement, Afro-­ descendants joined a variety of political and social movements, some racially defined and “black” in character but most not. The former included the Club Negro de Colombia; the Club Atenas and other black social clubs in Cuba; the Partido Autóctono Negro (PAN) and the Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguay (ACSU) in Uruguay; the



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Frente Negra Brasileira, União Nacional dos Homens de Cor, Associação do Negro Brasileiro, and other organizations in Brazil; and in the last three countries, an active black press.36 Most politically active Afro-­Latin Americans, however, chose to take part in national politics not through racially defined movements but through multiracial centrist and leftist parties: the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro in Brazil; Acción Democrática in Venezuela; the left wing of the Liberal party in Colombia; the Colorado party in Uruguay; the Communist party in Cuba. While most of these parties did not adopt explicitly racial platforms or programs, their openness and receptivity to black participation were well known and frequently commented on. Even in Argentina, which prided itself on of-­ t he-­ century transformation into an overwhelmingly its turn-­ majority-­white nation, Afro-­A rgentine men, women, and children appeared regularly in publications, posters, and flyers promot­­ing Juan Perón’s labor-­based political movement, as did visiting members of the African diaspora such as the American entertainer Josephine Baker or the Cuban boxer Kid Gavilán. Partly in response to those images, partly in response to longstanding associations between working-­ class status and blackness, Perón’s opponents denounced his followers as negros and his movement’s rallies and demonstrations as candombes, harking back to the nineteenth-­ century street dances of the African mutual aid societies.37 Whether in racially defined black movements or in class-­based populist movements, Afro-­descendants were both visible and audible in the roiling politics of mid-­century Latin America. Racial democracy and populist democracy had combined to make their participation possible, but neither body of thought or political practice was able to resolve the barriers of discrimination and inequality that people of African ancestry continued to confront. In the face of those failures, a new generation of black activists mobilized in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s demanding that Latin American societies make good on the promises of racial democracy.38

What This Book Is About Those activists can rightly claim to have put issues of race, discrimination, and inequality on national political agendas, forcing their

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explicit public discussion and thus ending, or at least reducing, black “invisibility.” Yet as I hope the preceding pages have suggested, those issues have been constantly present in the life of the region for the past five hundred years. Elite efforts to “edit” race and blackness out of official narratives of these nations would not have been necessary had blackness not been an integral part of national society, politics, and culture. Nevertheless, those efforts did have the effect of obscuring and, during much of the twentieth century, silencing the history of black participation in national life. In recent years historians have sought to reverse that silence by delving deeply into a wide variety of sources: the notarial registries discussed above, parish registries, church archives, court archives, military archives, police records, newspapers, magazines, novels, short stories, poetry, song lyrics, oral history interviews, physical artifacts, and so on. Those categories of sources all offer different (and multiple) perspectives on black history in the region. In an effort to suggest the diversity of those perspectives, each of the next three chapters examines an additional set of historical sources, asking what those sources can tell us, and fail to tell us, about conditions of black life in the region. Chapter 2 considers one of the principal tools that social scientists and policy makers use to gather information on, and analyze the needs of, their national societies: the census. Census data are an indispensable source for studying societies and populations in the aggregate, at the macro level. Yet those data present a series of methodological, political, and even ethical problems, beginning with the question of whether societies should be gathering racial information at all. Latin American nations have answered that question in different ways at different times, sometimes opting to count race and sometimes not. Chapter 2 surveys the history of those decisions, and their consequences for black visibility and invisibility. Chapter 3 moves from the macro-­level perspective of the census to the micro-­level perspective of the individual. It does so by looking at book-­length memoirs or manuscripts written or dictated by four Afro-­Latin Americans. Such texts are even rarer in Latin America than in the United States, and correspondingly precious as sources. As with censuses, the methodological challenges of analyzing those



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works, of placing them in the context of the time and place where they were written, and of truly hearing what their authors were trying to say, are daunting. Yet such texts give us insight into black historical experiences and individual subjectivities that no other source can provide. One of the recent trends in scholarly writing on Afro-­ Latin America, and on the African diaspora more generally, has been to stress the importance of transnational and even transcontinental connections in shaping conditions of black life.39 Beginning with the slave trade and continuing with the mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans and their descendants experienced very high levels of geographic mobility. As black sailors, entertainers, laborers, businesspeople, and writers traveled around the Atlantic world, inevitably they compared what they saw in other countries with their host societies. Of no group was this more true than of the African-­A mericans who traveled from the United States to Latin America during the 1800s and 1900s, many of whom wrote about what they saw there. Focusing primarily on Brazil, Chapter 4 examines what African-­A merican visitors had to say about racial conditions in that country and how their views evolved over the course of the 1900s. Having presented these various visions of black life in the region, the book concludes with current debates in Afro-­Latin America over how to achieve genuine racial democracy, and the significance those debates hold for the larger world.

2 On Counting and Not Counting

In the weeks following New Year’s Day, 1852, the provinces of

northeastern Brazil rose in revolt. The rebels’ demands were simple: that the national government abandon its plan to institute civil registries for births and deaths and that it cancel Brazil’s first national census, scheduled to be held in June and July of that year. The purpose of the registries and the census, the rebels were convinced, was to prepare lists of free black men, women, and children who would then be enslaved. Officials dismissed such fears as “mischievous rumors . . . ​insanely believed by ignorant people.” But the rebels saw a direct connection between the recent end of the African slave trade to Brazil in 1850 and the conscription of themselves and their families to replace the enslaved Africans who were no longer coming. Storming through the backlands of Pernambuco, Alagoas, Paraíba, and Sergipe, bands of rebels attacked churches, jails, and plantations, taking local officials hostage and demanding the revocation of the government’s decrees. After a month of spreading civil unrest, the government announced the cancelation of the registries and the census. It would be twenty years before Brazil would attempt another national population count.1 Over a century later, in the 1970s and 1980s, groups of Afro-­ Brazilian activists again turned their attention to the national census, but now using very different tactics and making very different demands. From 1872 to 1960, Brazil had been one of the few nations in Latin America to gather racial data in multiple national censuses. The resulting information on racial disparities in 18



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education, health, vocational achievement, and other social indicators provided much of the evidence for the first critiques of Brazilian racial inequality in the 1950s. Perhaps in response to those critiques, racial data were not included in the published reports of the 1960 census and were not gathered at all in the census of 1970. (That census, unlike earlier ones, did not ask respondents about their color or race.) Now unable to document the extent of racial inequality in Brazilian activists joined with academic Brazil, in 1978 Afro-­ researchers to demand the restoration of a race question to the census of 1980. Agreeing with the activists and researchers on the need for such data, the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) added a race question to the census of 1980 and all subsequent censuses. Eleven years later, in 1991, black organizations mounted a national campaign, financed by the Ford Foundation, to persuade Afro-­Brazilians to identify as black or brown in the census of that year and to “not let your color pass as white.” Possibly as a result of that campaign, the percentage of Brazilians identifying as brown or black increased from 45 in 1980 to 48 in 1991.2 These episodes suggest that over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Afro-­Brazilian attitudes toward the census had shifted dramatically. While Afro-­ Brazilians in 1852 viewed the census as a potential means of enslavement, their counterparts in the late 1900s now saw it as an essential political resource, as a lobbying tool and as a means of collective affirmation and public visibility. That present-­day view of the census seems to be widely shared across Latin America, to judge by similar campaigns by black and indigenous groups in other countries to incorporate racial data into their national censuses.3 Like the black and indigenous activists, historians and social scientists also embrace the census as an invaluable source of information on large-­scale social phenomena. That information does not come, however, without its costs. “The aim of statistics,” observes French statistician and historian Alain Desrosières, “is to reduce the abundance of situations and to provide a summarized description of them that can be remembered and used as a basis for action.” Political scientist James Scott concurs: in portraying social phenomena, censuses and other statistical measurements “reduce an

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infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregations.”4 The reduction of complex social phenomena to sets of simplified categories presents obvious risks and challenges. One is the methodological challenge of measuring accurately. Another is the epistemological challenge of deciding which phenomena to measure, and therefore to “see,” and which phenomena to ignore. From 1850 to 1920 the United States census tracked the growth over time of a racially mixed “mulatto” racial group. From 1930 on, that group no longer appeared in the census. Had it ceased to exist? Of course not. Rather, census officials increasingly doubted the accuracy of the numbers that they were gathering and so decided to eliminate that social category from the census. Meanwhile, Hispanics, today one of the largest categories in the U.S. census, first appeared in the national count in 1970. Had they not existed as a people prior to that time? Again, of course not. But not until 1970 did political pressure from Hispanic groups succeed in incorporating a new question, and category, into the census.5 Change and variation over time has been the rule as well with Latin American censuses, both across the region as a whole and within individual nations. Only in recent years, however, have Afro-­ Latin Americans themselves played any role in deciding what national censuses should measure and how they should measure it. For most of the region’s history, the format and content of censuses were determined by small groups of state administrators and, in the 1900s, professional demographers. Not until the second half of the 1900s were the citizens of Latin American nations even allowed to select their own racial or ethnic identities, which in the past had been assigned to them by census takers.6 Censuses may be the paradigmatic case of the silencing of the subaltern, of Afro-­Latin Americans being barred from speaking in their own voices. Given those limitations, is it even appropriate for us to use censuses as a source for studying the Afro-­Latin American past and present? I would say yes, and for two reasons. First, back to the primary purpose of statistics: to give us a comprehensive view of a large, complex social phenomenon. It is hard to think of a social phenomenon larger or more complex than the New World African



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diaspora. Where are its tens of millions of people located? How long have they been there? Doing what kinds of work and living in what kinds of economic and social conditions? And how do these conditions compare to those experienced by other racial groups? Second, virtually all present-­day students of the census agree that “the census does much more than simply reflect social reality; rather, it plays a key role in the construction of that reality.”7 To take the U.S. examples referred to above, the elimination of the mulatto category from the census of 1930 was both a signal of the hardening of black/white racial boundaries in American society and an additional force driving that hardening. The addition of a Latino or Hispanic category to the 1970 census was both a sign of growing Hispanic presence in the United States and an incentive for people to officially adopt that identity. Tracking changes over time in the racial categories of Latin American censuses gives us a privileged view of the social construction of race and the formation of racial identities in the region. In the censuses we see the crystallization of elite dreams and visions for their societies, and the confrontation of those dreams and visions with the social reality of racial dynamics on the ground, in everyday life. The history of those confrontations, and of the resulting negotiations and bargains that were struck, is of critical importance for understanding Afro-­Latin America as we know it today. It is also a history that those activists, intellectuals, citizens, and state officials negotiating the formats of current and future censuses need to know.

Counting Race: A Brief History North and South Americans’ longstanding interest in race is not widely shared across the globe. Sociologist Ann Morning found that, of 138 countries that conducted national censuses between 1995 and 2004, only 13, fewer than 10 percent, chose to include a question on race in their population counts. (Two more included a question on color.) And those countries were comprised “almost entirely [of] the former slaveholding societies of the Western Hemisphere and their territories.”8 The centuries-­long experience of African slavery inscribed the concept of race, and of social orders structured by rigorously

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enforced racial hierarchies, deep into the societies of the New World. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonies those hierarchies took the form of the caste system that we encountered in Chapter 1. The caste laws sought to create a social hierarchy of three clearly defined racial groups: Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples. But in the face of widespread race mixture, and of persistent efforts by indigenous, black, and racially mixed people to evade the restrictions and controls of those laws, the boundaries dividing racial groups from each other became ever more porous and difficult to enforce. Rather than a well-­defined structure of racial groups subject to clearly differentiated degrees of coercion and freedom, colonial society was a dynamic, constantly shifting sea of racial and legal markers that black, white, indigenous, and racially mixed Latin Americans sought to navigate as best they could.9 It was those markers that provided the racial categories for the first large-­scale population counts in Latin America. In order to ensure the regular payment of Indian tribute taxes and labor drafts, local officials were responsible for occasional surveys of the Indians under their jurisdiction. Comprehensive counts of the indigenous population were carried out in Peru in the late 1600s and mid-­1700s. Spanish officials in Mexico attempted a census of the viceroyalty in the 1730s but achieved only partial coverage.10 In response to intensifying military pressure from England in the 1700s, Spain initiated a series of policies aimed at increasing tax revenues and expanding the size of the colonial militias. As part of that effort, in 1776 the monarchy ordered a census of the entire empire, detailing the gender, civil state, social status, and “caste” of its inhabitants. Colonial officials responded with a series of population counts taken between 1777 and 1810. Reflecting local conditions, those counts varied somewhat in their treatment of race. The absence of Indian populations in Cuba and Puerto Rico led officials in those islands to pay more attention to racial distinctions among the slave and free black populations, noting the numbers of blacks and mulattos in each.11 In parts of the empire with large indigenous populations, officials paid less attention to the mulatto racial category, in some cases dispensing with it entirely. In Peru, census takers counted mulattos either as mestizos, free blacks, or slaves.12 Officials in the



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viceroyalty of New Granada (today Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador) created a category of “free people of all colors” that included mestizos, mulattos, zambos (people of mixed indigenous and African ancestry), and free blacks. In most of the viceroyalty, this category proved to be the largest in the census, accounting for 60 percent of the population in Panama and almost half of the population in Venezuela (49 percent) and Colombia (47 percent).13 Officials in Central America followed a similar approach, grouping racially mixed nonwhites into a “ladino” category that continued to be widely used in the region in the 1800s and 1900s. Only in Nicaragua did officials distinguish among mestizos, mulattoes, and zambos.14 A general population count ordered in Brazil at the same time (1776) did not include information on race but subsequent counts conducted in the early 1800s did. Most of the colony’s captaincies (provincial-­level administrative units) provided data on slaves and free nonwhites but did not distinguish between blacks and mulattos or between Africans and native-­born Afro-­Brazilians. Even in the absence of those distinctions, these late-­colonial counts make clear that, as of 1800, Brazil housed the largest Latin American population of Africans and their descendants, with at least 1.3 million enslaved and free blacks and mulattos. In Spanish America, the largest black and mulatto populations were located in Mexico (635,000), Venezuela (552,000), Cuba (326,000), and Colombia (306,000). Blacks and mulattos represented a majority of the population in Brazil, Panama, Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, and large minorities (30–50 percent) in Colombia, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Honduras (see Map 1).15 Numbers that large meant that the independence wars of the 1810s and 1820s (and, in Cuba, the 1860s, 1870s, and 1890s) could not possibly be won without political and military support from the slave and free black populations. In order to win that support, independence leaders specifically called for the abolition of the caste laws; once independence had been achieved, principles of full civic equality and the ending of caste distinctions were written into new national constitutions. In theory this should have removed racial categories from national censuses, but following the widespread destruction and turmoil of the independence wars, very few

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Cuba 326

Mexico 635 Honduras 40

Santo Domingo 66 Puerto Rico 90

Nicaragua 38 Costa Rica 9

Panama 41

Colombia 306

Venezuela 552

Ecuador 33

Peru 81

Brazil 1,305

Bolivia

Paraguay 11

Chile 31

Argentina 69

Uruguay 7

Percent black and mulatto 0-4 5-14 15-29 30-49 50-100 No Data/Not Mapped

map 1.  Afro-­Latin America, 1800. Numbers under country names indicate the size of the black and mulatto population, in 000s. (Map by Lena Andrews.)



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governments possessed the resources or capacity to undertake comprehensive population counts. For most countries in the region, national censuses did not begin until the second half of the 1800s. Latin American nations took those counts under the shadow of the scientific racism that was absolutely hegemonic in the Western world at that time and that forecast a bleak future indeed for those nations minority nonwhite. whose populations were majority or large-­ Seeking to confound those forecasts, every nation in the region tried to whiten its racial composition by attracting European immigrants. Two of the countries that were most successful in doing so, Argentina and Uruguay, did not include race in their national censuses but did gather such data in municipal censuses of their capital cities, where European immigrants were most heavily concentrated. Not surprisingly, the results roundly vindicated the two countries’ whitening efforts: Buenos Aires’s 1887 population was 98 percent white, and Montevideo’s (1884) 99 percent. National commentators seized on those data to proclaim the two countries as the white republics of South America, “where very soon the population will be completely unified, forming a new and beautiful race that is the product of all the European nations made fruitful on American soil.”16 Brazil succeeded in attracting some four million immigrants between 1880 and 1930. However, those immigrants tended to flow to the southern states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul, largely bypassing the central and northern sections of the country. And many of them ultimately did not remain in Brazil, either returning to their countries of origin or moving on to Argentina, Uruguay, or North America.17 The country’s racial composition thus remained a source of great concern, and the first two national censuses, in 1872 and 1890, both gathered data on race. They offered the welcome news that the combined black and brown population fell from a majority (58 percent) of the national population in 1872 to a minority (47 percent) in 1890.18 In a lengthy essay published as part of the Brazilian census of 1920, sociologist Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna cited those figures as evidence of the “Aryanizing work” under way in Brazil. That work, of which Vianna (himself a person of mixed race) was a passionate supporter, was being pushed forward by three factors, he

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reported: the arrival of European immigrants to the country; the misery and poverty afflicting the black and indigenous populations, which reduced their reproductive capacity; and, finally, the greater “eugenism” of the white race, which, in the “vast field of race fusion” taking place in Brazil, enabled its genetic qualities to prevail over those of African and indigenous peoples. As a result of these three tendencies, “the coefficient of the white race is constantly increasing in our population,” accompanied by “a reduction in the coefficient of inferior blood.”19 Vianna was guardedly neutral on the phenomenon of racially mixed mestiços allegedly re-­classifying themselves in the census as white. Along with high death rates among the black and brown populations, reclassification of this sort was one of the principal reasons, he suggested, for the relative decline in those two groups and the accompanying increase in the white population.20 The director of the census office, José Luiz de Bulhões Carvalho, echoed Vianna in noting the mestiço population’s reluctance to declare the “original color of the race to which they belong.” In the face of such resistance, Carvalho and his fellow census officials concluded that they were unable to ensure the accuracy of racial data and therefore removed the race question from the census of 1920.21 Of national censuses conducted in Latin America between 1850 and 1900, about half gathered data on race, and half did not.22 When countries did gather such data, they tended to do so using the same categories as one hundred years before, in the late colonial population counts. Thus while Honduras’s and Guatemala’s first national censuses, in the 1880s, divided the population into ladinos and indígenas, Nicaragua’s 1883 census employed the six categories of the 1777 count: indigenous, mestizo, mulatto, negro, zambo, and white. These different classificatory schemes yielded radically different counts for the Afro-­descendant population: 0 percent of the national total in Guatemala and Honduras (where blacks and mulattos were rendered statistically invisible by being folded into the ladino category) versus 43 percent in Nicaragua.23 Similarly, when Colombia gathered racial data in the censuses of 1912 and 1918, it did so employing a racially mixed “mestizo” category that was essentially a continuation of the “free people of all



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colors” category employed in the population count of 1778. Including mestizos, mulattos, zambos, and all other racially mixed people, the mestizo category was the largest in the census, accounting for half of the national population (49 percent in 1912, 54 percent in 1918). An additional 9–10 percent of the population was counted as negro.24 The Colombian censuses’ incorporation of race anticipated a wave of racial counts in the circum-­Caribbean. Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras continued to count by race, joined now by Panama (1911, 1920), Costa Rica (1927), and El Salvador (1930). The Dominican Republic’s first national census, in 1920, included a question on race, as did Mexico’s (1920), though the latter asked only about indigenous peoples. Cuba (1919, 1931) continued to gather racial data, as it would throughout the 1900s. The 1910s and 1920s represented the high-­water marks both of scientific racism and of race counts in the region. Scholarly critiques in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s of the scientific validity of race, followed by the complete discrediting of the concept by its association with Nazi racial policies, led to a turning away from race counts in the post-­ war period. In Mexico, Central America, and the Andean countries, censuses did continue to gather data on national indigenous populations, but now conceptualized as groups defined by culture rather than biology. Afro-­Latin Americans, by contrast, were seen as largely integrated into national life and much less culturally distinct. As a result, they disappeared from the post-­war censuses of all but a handful of countries: Brazil (1950, 1960), Costa Rica (1951), Cuba (1953), and the Dominican Republic (1950, 1960).25 Explicitly rejecting the scientific racism of the early 1900s, in the post-­war years Latin American nations reimagined themselves as egalitarian and harmonious racial democracies with, therefore, no need to collect census data on race. If Afro-­Latin Americans were already integrated into national societies on terms of full equality, what could be the logic, other than racism, of counting them as a separate racial group? The black movements that formed in the 1970s and 1980s strenuously opposed such arguments, insisting that racial data were absolutely necessary to determine whether Latin American nations had achieved genuine equality, or whether racial differentials persisted in access to health, education, jobs, housing, and other social goods.

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Brazil’s experience in this regard served as a model for black movements in other countries. As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, racial data from the censuses of 1940 and 1950 had provided evidence for the first systematic analyses of racial inequality in that country. The government’s decision not to publish those data for 1960, and then to withdraw the race question entirely from the census of 1970, made it impossible to determine levels of inequality, or even the size of the black and brown population, during those decades. As the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) prepared for the census of 1980, a coalition of academic Brazilian activists successfully lobbied the researchers and Afro-­ agency to restore race to national population counts. Data from the censuses of 1980, 1991, and 2000, and from annual national household surveys, provided the raw material for detailed analyses of statistical disparities among the black, brown, and white populations. Those analyses in turn provided much of the motive force for the eventual adoption in the early 2000s of national affirmative action policies in education and employment.26 Inspired in part by these developments in Brazil, activists in Colombia and Uruguay pushed successfully for the addition of a race question to the national census (Colombia, 1993, 2005) or the national household survey (Uruguay, 1996, 2006). The real breakthroughs, however, came in the early 2000s and primarily as a result of pressure on national governments from international agencies and NGOs. Mobilizations by black and indigenous organizations across Latin America to protest the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America had forcefully called international attention to the deeply rooted racial inequities afflicting the region. At the same time, development agencies such as the World Bank and the Inter-­ A merican Development Bank (IDB) were increasingly recognizing that extreme levels of social inequality were not just a lamentable by-­product of modern capitalist development but also an important obstacle to such development.27 Social and economic inequality can be measured in various ways: by social class, by economic sector, by region, by gender—​and by race. In part as a result of the Brazilian research on racial inequality, international agencies had recognized the need to include data on



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race in their evaluation of proposals for specific development projects. Yet as of 2000, only a handful of countries were gathering such data. Seeking to address that situation, the World Bank and the IDB convened international meetings in 2000 and 2002, bringing together black and indigenous activists, academic researchers, and national census officials to discuss how to incorporate racial data into their population counts. The result was a round of Latin American censuses in and around 2010 that, in many cases for the first time in a century or more, gathered national data on Afro-­ descendant populations.28

Measuring Blackness As they prepared to count their citizens by race, Latin American census agencies faced the challenge of how to word the relevant question(s).29 This was not a trivial matter: in canvassing the region’s indigenous populations, census officials had learned that final totals could vary greatly depending on the question being asked. In Peru, censuses taken during the second half of the 1900s asked respondents about indigenous languages spoken either by themselves or by their mother. This question produced a steadily declining proportion of indigenous people in the national population, from 39 percent in 1961 to 18 percent in 2006. In the latter year, however, the national household survey also asked whether respondents identified with any of the country’s main indigenous groups (Quechua, Aymara, or Amazonian peoples). Over a quarter of respondents, 28 percent, indicated that they did. A second survey, in 2009, showed 35–37 percent of respondents self-­identifying with indigenous groups.30 In Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia, twentieth-­century censuses defined indigenous peoples not by language but by where they lived, counting only those individuals living in state-­designated indigenous reserves. Citing the provisions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 169 for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, approved in 1989, indigenous movements in those countries pressed for population counts that would include indigenous people living outside the official reserves. All three countries agreed to that change in their 1990 censuses and also to the principle of self-­identification (as opposed to census takers deciding

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individuals’ ethno-­racial status). In all three countries, the result was an immediate doubling of the indigenous population between 1980 and the early 1990s, followed by another doubling (or more) in the early 2000s, at which point indigenous people represented 12 percent of the national population of Panama (2010), up from 5 percent in 1980; 3 percent of the population of Colombia (2005), up from 1 percent in 1985; and 3 percent of the population of Venezuela (2011), up from 1 percent in 1981.31 Colombia had a similar experience in counting people of African ancestry. In response to lobbying by Afro-­Colombian activists, the Colombian census agency, DANE, agreed to add a question on blackness to the 1993 census, the first such question since 1918. To the activists’ enormous chagrin, the 1993 count found only 2 percent of the national population identifying as Afro-­Colombian. This dramatic undercount—​government reports prepared in 1970 and in 2002 estimated blacks and mulattos to constitute 20–30 percent of the national population—​was initially ascribed to Afro-­Colombians’ reluctance to identify as such. Upon closer examination, however, the more likely explanation for the undercount was found to be the census question itself, which had asked respondents, “Do you belong to an ethnic group, indigenous group, or black community?” By “black community,” census officials were referring to majority or exclusively black settlements in the islands of San Andrés and Providencia, the Pacific coast department of the Chocó, and elsewhere. Afro-­Colombians living outside those settlements, in racially mixed towns and neighborhoods—​which is to say, the great majority of Afro-­Colombians—​who heard or read the question, concluded that it did not apply to them, and replied no, rendering (quite unintentionally) the Afro-­Colombian population statistically invisible.32 Determined to prevent a recurrence of this undercount, census officials designed a population count for 2005 that focused specifically on the country’s “ethnic groups”: Afro-­Colombians, indigenous people, and Rom (Gypsies). All individuals not identified with those groups, which is to say the country’s white and mestizo majority, were consigned to a single, undifferentiated “none of the above” category. Seeking to cover all the bases, the race question asked whether, “in accord with your culture, people, or physical characteristics, are you or do you consider yourself to be indigenous,



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Rom,” or one of three “black” categories: San Andrés / Providencia islanders, residents of the San Basilio palenque community, or “black / mulatto / Afro-­Colombian / Afro-­descendant.” DANE also provided financial support for a national publicity campaign, similar to the 1991 campaign in Brazil, aimed at raising public awareness of the race question and persuading Afro-­Colombians to identify as such. Ultimately, 4.3 million Colombians, 10.5 percent of the total population, identified in the census as black. This was a figure well below the expectations of black activists, who criticized the government’s failure to include the racial category of moreno, widely used among Afro-­Colombians living along the Caribbean coast. Still, the 2005 totals were much higher than those recorded in 1993. They also corresponded to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) survey of Colombia in 2010, in which self-­identified blacks and mulattos accounted for 10.4 percent of all respondents.33 Changes in Ecuador’s census questions produced less dramatic but still significant increases in the size of that country’s black population. In 2001 the Ecuadorian census asked citizens, “How do you consider yourself?” and offered the options of indigenous, black, mulatto, mestizo, or white. In 2010 census officials rewrote the question to ask, “How do you identify according to your culture and customs?” They also added an additional option, that of “Afro-­ Ecuadorian / Afro-­descendant,” which proved to be by far the most popular black-­related category, accounting for over half (59 percent) of black-­related responses. As a result of that additional category, the total black and mulatto population increased from 5 percent of the national total in 2001 to 7 percent in 2010.34 In Venezuela, by contrast, the appeal of the “Afro-­descendant” category proved more limited. In the two centuries since independence, Venezuela had never once tabulated the racial composition of its population. In 2008, citing the international conferences convened by the IDB, World Bank, and the UN, and national lobbying by the Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezolanas, the Venezuelan census agency agreed to add a race question to the census of 2011. That question, developed through discussions with black organizations, academics, and census officials from other countries, asked Venezuelans whether, “according to your physical characteristics, family ancestry, culture and traditions, you consider yourself to be”

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black (negro), Afro-­descendant, moreno, white, or “other” (none of the above). While over 95 percent of Venezuelans marked themselves as either white or moreno, 3 percent identified as negro and less than 1 percent (0.7) as Afro-­descendants.35 Those relatively few Afro-­descendants proved to be a highly select group. While those opting for the negro category were clearly disadvantaged, in educational and economic terms, in relation to the white population, and morenos occupied an intermediate position between negros and whites, “Afro-­descendants” showed levels of economic and educational achievement very close to those of the white racial group. Afro-­descendant rates of literacy and college enrollment were within one percentage point of white rates; and the poverty rate was slightly lower among Afro-­descendants than among whites (Table 1). The limitations of the version of the 2011 census that is currently available to researchers make it difficult to analyze “Afro-­descendants” (or any other racial group) in any detail. We may hypothesize that “Afro-­descendants” are disproportionately urban; clearly they are more highly educated than the black and brown population as a whole. Those two factors may have made them more receptive to appeals from the country’s black activists urging them to identify as (in the words of the census) “a descendant of Africans who survived the slave trade and slavery and who form part of the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, and/or any person who acknowledges African descent based on the perception, valuing, and pondering of historical, generational, territorial, cultural, and/or phenotypic components.”36 That definition, expressing the diasporic orientation of the black movement in Venezuela and other countries, stands in stark contrast to the census’s definition of negros: “any person with strongly pigmented skin, very frizzy hair, flat nose and thick lips. She/he may have cultural practices of African origin, even if she/he does not identify them as such.” While “Afro-­descendants” were defined in terms of their collective historical experience and the political and cultural choices they have made, negros were defined by physical, corporal factors that are innate and inherited and over which they have no control.37 Those same factors were used to describe morenos, who were the largest group in the census and the overwhelming majority (93



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Table 1 Selected socioeconomic indicators by race, in percentages, Venezuela, 2011.

Afro-­ Negros Morenos Descendants Whites

Percentage of total   2.9 51.6   0.7  population Poverty rate 37.5 30.9 21.9 Literacy 89.9 94.7 95.8 Enrollment in post-secondary 12.7 20.8 28.9  education

43.6 22.6 96.5 30.1

Data source: http://www.redatam.ine.gob.ve/Censo2011/index.html.

percent) of the nonwhite population. According to the census, morenos are people “whose phenotypic characteristics are less marked or pronounced than those of people defined as negros. It is a term that in some contexts can be used to soften the discriminatory implications associated with being a black person.” Throughout Latin America, moreno plays an ambiguous role in racial identification, occupying a fluid middle ground between blackness and whiteness. Historically it was a term closely associated with blackness and, in the colonial period, served as a polite euphemism for negro—​a usage that continues in Venezuela to the present, as suggested by the census agency’s reference to its “soften[ing] the discriminatory implications associated with being a black person.” Over time, it has taken on an associated meaning of being dark-­skinned but not so dark as to be considered negro. A 2004 survey of Venezuela’s racial composition by the Laboratorio de Ciencias Sociales, a private research institute, grouped morenos and mulatos together as a single racial category, accounting for over one-­third (36 percent) of the national population.38 Like negros and morenos, whites were defined in the census in physical terms, as “any person whose skin color is light and therefore associated with populations of European origin.” Yet the agency admitted to some uncertainty on this category. “Although [whiteness] literally implies external aspects such as light skin, the form and color of hair and eyes, among others, ‘white’ has been used in different ways in different historical periods and places. Like other widely used terms for human ethnic groups, its precise definition is somewhat confused.” Recent research by Edward Telles and René

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Flores on definitions of whiteness in Latin America does find some local variation in those definitions but “remarkable consistency” across countries in their everyday application. “For the region as a whole and for all the large countries [including Venezuela], whiteness seems to have a fairly common meaning and practice, at least in terms of skin tone, and would thus seem to function as a recognizable transnational category.” In Venezuela, almost half the population, 44 percent, identified itself as belonging to that category.39 Like Colombia and Ecuador, Costa Rica also modified its census questions between 2000 and 2011. The 2000 census asked respondents whether they “belonged” to the indigenous, black / Afro-­ Costa Rican, or Chinese culture. The 2011 census dropped that cultural formulation and instead asked respondents whether they considered themselves to be negro / afrodescendiente, mulatto, Chinese, white / mestizo, other, or none of the above. This change in question quadrupled the percentage of the population identifying as Afro-­Costa Rican, from 2 percent in 2000 to 8 percent (1 percent black, 7 percent mulatto) in 2011.40 In almost every country of the region, activists and census officials confronted the question of exactly what constituted blackness. Should the census be counting only people who saw themselves as black and mulatto (self-­identification)? Or should it be counting those whom the broader society considered to be black and mulatto (external identification, perhaps by the census taker)? As sociologist Edward Telles observes, racial “self-­ identification is especially useful for understanding phenomena such as identity, willingness to join ethnic social movements, and other social phenomena that tend to involve ethno-­racial self-­understanding . . . ​[ but] is less adequate for understanding social phenomena like discrimination, where others do the classifying.” If we wish to examine the specifically racial dimensions of inequality, discrimination and prejudice, we need information on all those individuals that the society views as nonwhite, even those who may not choose to identify as such. “Race and ethnicity are not simply a matter of identity or consciousness. They also involve the gaze of the other.”41 Meanwhile, what about people who show no visible signs of African ancestry but who nevertheless acknowledge, or actively assert, some degree of African heritage? Black movements in



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Argentina and Uruguay urged their governments to include such individuals in national population counts, at least partly in order to increase the size of the African-­descent population. In response to those movements’ demands, the Argentine census of 2010 asked respondents, in a single question, whether they considered themselves to be Afro-­ descendants or had any Afro-­ descendant or origin” ancestors, going back as far as their great-­ “African-­ grandparents. Even with such a capacious question, only 0.4 percent of the national population responded affirmatively.42 After initially experimenting (in the national household survey of 1996) with racial identification, Uruguay also opted for ancestry, without specifying how far back in their family history respondents should go. While the 1996 survey asked respondents what race they felt they belonged to (“¿a qué raza Vd. cree pertenecer?”), the household survey of 2006, and then the census of 2011, changed the question to, “Do you think you have ________ ancestry?” and allowed respondents to check more than one category. As census officials acknowledged, the 1996 and 2006/2011 questions were not equivalent and therefore did not measure the same thing. “In 2006 [and 2011] the operative term in the question was ancestry. This concept refers to the genetic inheritance of individuals but not necessarily to their physical appearance.” That change increased the Afro-­ Uruguayan population (or perhaps better put, that population claiming some degree of African ancestry) from 6 percent in 1996 to 9 percent in 2006 and 8 percent in 2011.43 Meanwhile, the two Latin American nations that had consistently gathered statistical data on blackness throughout the 1900s, Brazil and Cuba, continued to do so in the 2000s, using their longstanding system of color categories. Cuba’s censuses of 2002 and 2012 asked respondents to categorize themselves according to “skin color” (color de la piel), and the Brazilian census asked individuals for their “color or race.” Afro-­Cubans constituted 36 percent of the national total in 2012, up from 35 percent in 2002.44 Brazil’s census of 2010 showed Afro-­Brazilians as a slight majority of the national population, at 51 percent. This was a considerable increase from 2000, when black and brown Brazilians had accounted for 45 percent of the national total. Part of that increase is doubtless traceable to Afro-­Brazilians’ growing willingness to acknowledge, or even embrace, African ancestry and

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nonwhite racial status. Another part, however, is owing to demographic factors, particularly birth rates that remain higher among Afro-­Brazilian women than among white women. Fertility rates fell sharply in Brazil for both racial groups over the last thirty years, for white women falling well below the replacement level of 2.1 children per women (the number at which a population will remain stable, neither growing nor shrinking). Births to black and brown women slightly exceed the replacement level, leading to more rapid growth among the black and brown population than among the white.45

Measuring Inequality That comparison of racial differentials in fertility rates is just one example of the kind of analysis that the 2010 round of national censuses has made possible. Researchers working on earlier censuses in Brazil and Cuba had already demonstrated the potential utility of those sources. Using the published report of the 1981 Cuban census, historian Alejandro de la Fuente documented the remarkable impacts of socialist policies in almost eliminating racial differentials in education, health, and employment. De la Fuente and other scholars have hypothesized that the economic downturn and “special period” austerity policies of the 1990s reversed much of that progress and widened racial disparities in the island. Until recently, the Cuban government’s failure to provide detailed public reports from the censuses of 2002 or 2012 made it impossible to undertake census-­based research on the racial consequences of the “special period.” But the release in 2014 of a 10 percent sample from the Cuban census of 2002 will now enable researchers to examine the impacts of that decade on the racial distribution of wealth and opportunity on the island.46 Brazil’s gathering and publication of racial data over the course of the 1900s, and especially since 1980, makes it possible to examine the racial impacts of social policies in that country as well. For most of the 1900s, Brazil had some of the highest indicators of social and racial inequality not just in Latin America but in the entire world. Beginning in the mid-­1990s, however, Brazil departed dramatically from that history by undertaking a sweeping set of social and economic initiatives aimed at uprooting centuries-­ old patterns of inequality. Between 1990 and 2010 the country’s poverty rate fell by



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half and some 30 million Brazilians made their way out of the poor and working classes into the rapidly expanding lower-­middle class.47 The censuses of 2000 and 2010, and the household surveys of the 1990s and early 2000s, make clear that Afro-­Brazilians were full participants in those initiatives and benefited accordingly. As poverty rates fell throughout Brazilian society, they declined even more rapidly for Afro-­Brazilians than for whites. So too did rates of infant mortality, with corresponding impacts on life expectancy, which rose more rapidly for Afro-­Brazilians than for whites. Meanwhile, black and brown earnings grew more rapidly than white earnings, both for individuals and for households. In 1990 median Afro-­ Brazilian household income was 41 percent of white household income; by 2010 that figure had risen to 56 percent.48 Despite those increases, white families in 2010 were still earning on average almost twice as much as black and brown families. The same was true of poverty rates, which had fallen sharply but were still, in 2009, twice as high among Afro-­Brazilians (34 percent) as among whites (17 percent). Indeed, sharp racial disparities between the Afro-­ Brazilian and white populations persisted on almost every social indicator for which census or survey data are available. This does not come as a complete surprise after some sixty years of scholarly studies showing the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in Brazil. Rather, what is news is that, with the 2010 round of censuses in Spanish American countries, we now have unprecedented opportunities to investigate conditions of racial inequality in other countries of the region, to see how Brazil compares to those countries, and to see how they compare to each other. Because of variations in the formats of different national censuses and in the racial categories that they chose to use, those comparisons are not always easy to draw. Nevertheless, a quick look at racial differentials in poverty and education in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela gives some sense both of the racial dimensions of those societies and of the utility of census data in illuminating those dimensions.49 Perhaps the most immediately striking aspect of those data is that, with the exception of Uruguay, indigenous people confront even higher levels of inequality and disadvantage than do the black and brown populations. Whether measured in terms of poverty (Table 2),

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Table 2  Poverty rates by race in selected countries, in percentages, 2003–2011. Indigenous Measured by household  earnings Uruguay (2006) Ecuador (2006) Brazil (2009) Colombia (2003) Measured by unmet   basic needs Uruguay (2011) Colombia (2003) Costa Rica (2011) Venezuela (2011)

Blacks and mulattos (B&M)

Whites (W) B&M – W

31.8 55.8 —​ —​

50.1 52.1 33.8 61.0

24.4 25.7 31.2a 20.9 16.7 17.1 54.1a   6.9

—​ —​ 54.2 69.7

51.3 34.5 34.1 31.1

32.1 19.2 22.7a 11.8 25.5a   8.6   22.6 8.5

Data sources: Uruguay (2006): Marisa Bucheli and Wanda Cabela, Perfil demográfico y socioeconómico de la población uruguaya según se ascendencia racial (Montevideo: Instituto Nacional de Estadística, n.d.), table 22; Ecuador: Guillermo Cruces et al., Situación socioeconómica da la población afroecuatoriana en el marco de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (Panama City: PNUD, 2010), table AI.5a; Brazil: special tabulation provided to author by Laboratório de Análises Económicas, Históricas, Sociais e Estatísticas das Relações Raciais (LAESER); Colombia: César Rodríguez Garavito et al., Raza y ­derechos humanos en Colombia: Informe sobre discriminación racial y derechos de la población afrocolombiana (Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2009), figure 6; Uruguay (2011): Wanda Cabella et al., La población afro-­ uruguaya en el censo 2011 (Montevideo: PNUD, 2013), table 13; Costa Rica: http://www.inec.go.cr /cgibin/RpWebEngine.exe/PortalAction?BASE=2011; Venezuela: http://www.redatam.ine.gob.ve /Censo2011/index.html. a. Whites and mestizos.

access to sanitation infrastructure (Table 3), or literacy (Table 4), indigenous people lag behind the Afro-­descendant population, in most countries by wide margins. This is in large part a reflection of indigenous people’s greater tendency to live in rural areas, where access to government services and economic and educational opportunity is more difficult than in urban areas. In some countries it also reflects even higher levels of gender inequality among the indigenous population than among the black or white populations, and very low levels of educational achievement among indigenous women.50 The second major finding is that Brazil is not alone in its racial disparities. Data on poverty show that Ecuador and Uruguay both have racial differentials even larger than those existing in Brazil. Ecuador’s 2006 national household survey found 52 percent of Afro-­ Ecuadorians falling below the poverty line, versus 31 percent of the



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Table 3 Access to sanitation infrastructure by race in selected countries, in percentages, ca. 2010. Indigenous Piped water Colombia Ecuador Brazil Venezuela Costa Rica Uruguay Public sewage system Colombia Ecuador Brazil Venezuela Uruguay Costa Rica

Blacks and mulattos (B&M)

Whites (W)

W – B&M

39.3 70.3 84.9a 14.6 49.1 70.5 81.4 10.9 65.3 90.1 96.8  6.7 54.4 83.6 88.8  5.2 67.3 92.3 93.8a  1.5 95.0 95.1 93.8 (1.3) 19.5 54.3 73.9a 19.6 24.5 45.2 65.1 19.9 35.7 58.7 75.1 16.4 13.5 66.9 77.0 10.1 51.2 47.6 57.4 9.8 10.4 21.3 19.8a (1.5)

Data sources: Brazil: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), International, Minnesota Population Center, available at https://international.ipums.org/international-­action/samples; all other countries: national census websites, available at http://celade.cepal.org/redbin/RpWebEngine .exe/Portal?&MODE=BASE&ITEM=CPVAMLAT. a. Whites and mestizos.

mestizo and white populations. In Uruguay in the same year, 50 percent of the black and brown population fell below the poverty line, as compared to 24 percent of the white population (Table 2).51 Those poverty rates, like the Brazilian rate, were calculated on the basis of household earnings. An alternative measure of poverty is when a household has one or more of its basic needs (adequate housing, sanitation, education) unmet. On this measure, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela registered lower black/white racial differentials than did Brazil, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Even in the former countries, however, black and brown poverty rates were 9–12 percentage points higher than white rates; in Brazil, Ecuador, and Uruguay, the differential was 17–26 points. Racial disparities were visible on several additional indicators of individual and social well-­being: access to piped water and a public sewage system (Table 3) and the ability to read and write (Table 4). Here again, indigenous indicators lagged behind those for blacks

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Table 4  Literacy rates by race in selected countries, in percentages, ca. 2010. Indigenous

Blacks and mulattos (B&M)

Brazil 73.7 Colombia 70.8 Ecuador 79.6 Venezuela 70.8 Uruguay 98.6 Costa Rica 88.9

Whites (W) W – B&M

85.7 88.3 92.4 94.4 97.3 96.9

92.8 7.1 92.4a 4.1 96.3 3.9 96.5 2.1 98.6 1.3 97.6a 0.7

Data sources: Brazil: IBGE, Censo demográfico 2010: Características da população e dos domicílios. Resultados do universo (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2011), table 1.3.3; all other countries: national census websites. a. Whites and mestizos.

and whites, and again by wide margins. Meanwhile, as measured by black/white racial disparities, the countries clustered in two groups, with Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil showing higher levels of racial inequality in the provision of those public goods, and Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Venezuela showing relatively lower levels of inequality. How do we explain the differences between those two groups of nations? Might they reflect higher levels of racial tolerance and lower levels of prejudice and discrimination in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and Venezuela? Perhaps; yet ethnographic and statistical research has demonstrated the significant presence of racial prejudice and discriminatory behavior in Uruguay and Venezuela. (Comparable research on Costa Rica remains to be done.) It does not appear that, at least in the area of racial attitudes and behavior, those countries offer significant advantages over their more racially unequal counterparts.52 Might differences in levels of racial inequality be explained by higher levels of general socioeconomic equality (what we might think of as “class equality”) in some countries than in others? This hypothesis is suggested by the experience of socialist Cuba, where the reduction of overall inequalities in income, education, housing, and health produced dramatic reductions in racial inequality as well. And in fact this hypothesis does find some support in a comparison of the countries’ Gini indices of overall income inequality. Of all the countries in Latin America, Uruguay and Venezuela have the lowest such indices (38.0 and 40.5, respectively), reflecting relatively high



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41

levels of class equality (indeed, higher levels of class equality than in the United States). At the other end of the spectrum, Brazil has the second-­highest Gini index in the region (56.7), with Colombia not far behind (53.6).53 Yet the correlation between class and racial inequality is not perfect. Among countries showing higher racial inequality, Ecuador has a relatively low Gini index (43.4). Costa Rica, with relatively low levels of racial inequality, falls in the middle of Latin America’s Gini distribution (50.3). And Uruguay, with the lowest Gini index in Latin America and relatively small racial differentials in access to sanitation, had the highest racial differentials in rates of poverty and on our final indicator, access to high school and post–high school education. Figures 1 and 2 tabulate the highest level of education that respondents ages 15 and over reported having attended. This signifies having studied for one or more years at the level either of high school or of university (or post-­secondary technical school). The censuses indicate that by 2010 Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela had all achieved relative racial parity in high-­ school enrollment; indeed, in Costa Rica the percentage of Afro-­ descendants who had attended high school was slightly larger than the number of whites and mestizos who had done so. Only in Uruguay had whites attended high school at rates significantly higher (6 percentage points) than blacks. Racial differentials were much higher at the university level and strikingly consistent across countries. With the exception of Colombia, Afro-­descendants attended post-­secondary education at rates 9–13 percentage points lower than their white compatriots. White Brazilians were two and one-­half times more likely than Afro-­Brazilians to have attended college; white Uruguayans were twice as likely as Afro-­Uruguayans; and white Venezuelans 50 percent more likely than Afro-­Venezuelans. These figures make abundantly clear why black movements in Latin America have placed such emphasis on the importance of affirmative action policies in higher education, as we will see in Chapter 5. We could go much further in the analysis of these data, and I trust that at least some of my readers will be moved to do so. The censuses are all accessible on the websites of their national census

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50

40

30

20

10

0 Brazil

Colombia

Costa Rica

blacks and mulattos

Uruguay

Venezuela

whites

figure 1.  Percentage of population age fifteen and over that had attended high school, by race, selected countries, ca. 2010. Note: For Colombia and 40 Costa Rica, “whites” = whites and mestizos combined. Data sources: Brazil, IPUMS; all other countries, national census websites.

30 agencies

or on the website of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.54 Those databases make it possible to break racial groups down into subgroups by gender, age, region, or other variables; or, alternatively, to investigate the racial 20 aspects of those same variables (gender, age, etc.). This opens up tremendous opportunities for future research and analysis of race in the region, opportunities that will develop further as future cen10 suses are taken and become available to the public. Meanwhile, we can use the figures from the 2010 censuses (or, in the case of those countries that did not count race in 2010, the 2010 0 LAPOP survey) to construct a broad overview of the region’s black Brazil Uruguay Costa Rica America’s population (Map 2).Colombia As of that year, Latin Afro-­Venezuela descendant population was an estimated one hundred thirty-­ o ne million people, blacks and mulattos whites representing 24 percent of the regional total. Most Afro-­ Latin Americans (ninety-­seven million) lived in Brazil, with another fifteen million in Venezuela and eight million in the Dominican

0 Brazil

Colombia

Costa Rica

blacks and mulattos

Uruguay

Venezuela

whites

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40

30

20

10

0 Brazil

Colombia

Costa Rica

blacks and mulattos

Uruguay

Venezuela

whites

figure 2.  Percentage of population age fifteen and over that had attended post-­secondary education, by race, selected countries, ca. 2010. Note: For Colombia and Costa Rica, “whites” = whites and mestizos combined. Data sources: Brazil, IPUMS; all other countries, national census websites.

Republic. Those three countries were all majority Afro-­descendant; Cuba’s population was over one-­third Afro-­descendant. All other countries were 12 percent Afro-­descendant or less.55 We have come a long way from those first population counts of the late 1700s and perhaps an even longer way from the censuses of the last fifty years, most of which provided no information at all on the meanings and dynamics of race in the region. We now have abundant access to such data, with the promise of more to come; Afro-­Latin Americans are no longer statistically invisible. But being visible in statistical terms is not the same thing as being visible in the flesh, in daily life at home and in the street. Even when broken down into subgroups for closer levels of analysis, population counts have a dry, abstract quality that leaves us hungering for actual human experience. For that we must move to the micro level of the town, community, or neighborhood; or perhaps to the most micro level unit of all: individuals and their stories.

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Cuba 4,007 Dominican Republic 8,406

Mexico 2,584 Honduras 473 El Salvador 7

Puerto Rico 462

Nicaragua 154

Costa Rica 334 Panama 313

Venezuela 14,531 Colombia 4,312

Ecuador 1,042

Brazil 96,795

Peru 1,270 Bolivia 23 Paraguay 173

Chile 133

Argentina 149

Uruguay 255

Percent black and mulatto 0-4 5-14 15-29 30-49 50-100 No Data/Not Mapped

map 2.  Afro-­Latin America, 2010. Numbers under country names indicate the size of the black and mulatto population, in 000s. (Map by Lena Andrews.)

3 Afro-­Latin American Voices

One of the most exciting developments in recent scholarship on

Afro-­Latin America has been the discovery of growing numbers of historical documents written by, or on behalf of, African and Afro-­ Latin American groups and individuals. Those documents are of various kinds and genres: petitions and court cases by slaves seeking protection from abusive masters, or the right to marry, or even freedom; the statutes and administrative records of black religious brotherhoods, civic organizations, and social clubs; the vast universe of articles, social notes, correspondence, advertisements, and other features published in the black newspapers of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and Uruguay; collections of oral history interviews; and many others.1 Especially significant has been the publication in recent years of a handful of book-­length autobiographical texts written or dictated by Afro-­Latin Americans.2 Because of much lower levels of literacy in Latin America than in the United States, such sources are even rarer in the former region than in the latter. Nor do they yield their secrets easily. As Doris Sommer reminds us, in “minority writing” even more than in mainstream texts, “withholding information or supplying false leads are standard moves.” Authors never tell all; and additional layers of uncertainty can be introduced by mediators (scribes, editors, translators) whose interventions create further degrees of separation between author and reader.3 Still, very few authors are driven primarily by a desire to conceal. Most seek to communicate, and certainly that is the case with the 45

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four authors we meet in this chapter. They lived in widely divergent times and places—​seventeenth-­century Peru, nineteenth-­century Uruguay, and nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Cuba—​and had very different stories to tell. But as they tell those stories, some common themes emerge. Far from being excluded from the major events and developments of their times, all four writers “lived the big changes” of their historical epochs.4 The notion that they might have been historically marginal or insignificant seems never to have occurred to them. All saw their life stories as directly connected to the great historical dramas of their day, and indeed as helping to shape those dramas. Cuban independence-­war veteran Ricardo Batrell explicitly titled his narrative to indicate that he was writing “for history,” to ensure that his story would become part of the historical record and refute those “imposters who falsify the history of the Liberation Army.” Uruguayan author Jacinto Ventura de Molina apologized to his readers for violating “historians’ rules” for how to write but insisted on his right to contribute to the discipline that “describes what time conceals.”5 All four authors took part in those historical events by participating in their societies’ most important political and cultural institutions: the colonial-­ period Catholic church, the independence movements and armies of the 1800s, and the mass-­based social and political movements of the 1900s. All four recognized their subordinate status in those institutions and described that status in some detail. All four insisted, however, on their full membership in those entities, a membership that entitled them to present scathing critiques when those organizations and movements failed to live up to their stated principles and ideals. These authors’ sense of their own place in history, and of their roles in contemporary events, makes their writings tremendously valuable for historians and other readers seeking “subaltern” accounts of those lives and times. In order for us to make full sense of those accounts, however, we must read them within their historical contexts and connect them to their historical moments. What were the specific events or conditions on which these authors were commenting? And how were their perceptions influenced by their life experiences as males and females, as slaves and free blacks, and



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as members of different nationalities living in widely varied historical moments? All four texts provide abundant evidence on these points, showing us not just how their authors lived the “big changes” but how they lived their personal dramas as well. Each author leaves little doubt, in fact, of the central challenges that they faced and of the existential axes around which their lives revolved.

The Handmaiden of God For Úrsula de Jesús, born in Lima, Peru, in 1604 to an enslaved mother, the existential center of her life was the same as for millions of other Latin American women (and not a few men): her personal relationship with her savior, Jesus Christ. Her “spiritual diary,” which she dictated during the 1640s and 1650s to the nuns in the Convent of Santa Clara (in English, Saint Clare), reported her frequent conversations with Jesus and the visions that he revealed to her. Úrsula had entered the convent in 1617, at the age of twelve, as the personal slave of her mistress, who had taken vows as a nun. When she requested authorization in 1645 to leave the convent to find a new owner—​a right guaranteed her by the laws governing slavery—​ another nun agreed to buy her freedom. Úrsula then remained in the convent as a consecrated free servant, a donada, until her death in 1666.6 Úrsula thus lived her entire adult life in one of the core institutions of colonial Spanish American life, and one that remains important in the life of the region to this day. Economically, politically, symbolically, and spiritually, Catholic religious orders were key building blocks of Spanish colonialism and were perhaps even more important in the lives of women than of men. In a society that placed severe limits on women’s freedom of action, convents offered opportunities for self-­governance, for education, for intellectual and literary life, for entrepreneurship, and in some cases for love and romance.7 While offering those opportunities, convents also faithfully enforced the class and racial distinctions of the colonial social order. Sisters of the black veil entered the convent with a full dowry, a cash payment that entitled them to their own private rooms and to full voting rights. Lay sisters of the white veil paid a half-­dowry, did not

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hold voting rights or own their own rooms, and sat at services in the lower choir, while sisters of the black veil sat in the upper choir. Servants of various conditions—​free and slave, white, indigenous, mestiza, and black—​waited on the nuns, cooking their food, washing their laundry, cleaning their rooms, and doing any other work required to keep the convent functioning.8 In addition to considerations of class, wealth, and race, one other currency helped determine status in the convent. That was the currency of religiosity and spirituality, and here Úrsula de Jesús proved to have truly unusual gifts. In a setting in which all the nuns strived for direct contact with Jesus, the Virgin, and the saints, Úrsula stood out by virtue of the frequency and intensity of those contacts. After winning her freedom, she was instructed by her confessor to start keeping a diary of her visions and celestial visitations. Confessors often ordered female mystics to keep such diaries, which were monitored for evidence of heresy or, alternatively, of eligibility for possible canonization. The diaries also formed the basis for the hagiographies (lives of the saints) that were staples of religious literature during the early modern period. In Úrsula’s case, her confessor did write a biography of her shortly after her death. But neither the biography nor Úrsula’s diary was published until their discovery in Lima’s ecclesiastical archives by historian Nancy van Deusen.9 As a slave and then as a free servant, Úrsula’s work regimen consisted of días trabajosísimos (days filled with labor) spent cooking and cleaning. Beyond her duties to the convent at large, she was often asked to do additional work for individual nuns, who came “asking me to run errands, others, to cook this or that for them . . . ​These things take away the little time I have” and prevented her from devoting herself to Jesus with the passion and intensity that she desired.10 Vexed and impatient, Úrsula was occasionally tempted to say no to the demands made on her. But in her conversations with Jesus, he reminded her that, “in the thirty-­t hree years I spent in this world, I endured a tremendous amount of work and oppression. When I left this world they placed me on a piece of wood, as though I were a common slave and thief.” The parallels between Jesus’s life and her own “alleviated the distress and tiredness I felt, and I returned feeling happy . . . ​Some days I just want a chance to catch my breath.”11



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Not all of Úrsula’s conversations with Jesus were so comforting. As with other Catholic mystics, the visions he revealed to her were often deeply disturbing, devastating, and tormenting. Úrsula witnessed over and over again the agonies of souls being tortured in hell and in purgatory. She found those spectacles so overwhelming that she sometimes wondered whether they were inspired by God or by the devil.12 Jesus assured her that the visions were God’s will and an expression of his absolute love for her. Further evidence of that love was Úrsula’s role as an intermediary between God and the souls in purgatory. This ability to intercede for souls in torment made her a person of tremendous importance in colonial society. “Worry about one’s final destination was always present. Catholics at that time were aware that for most people direct access to the Heavenly paradise was almost impossible, and that a previous sojourn in purgatory, similar to hell except that one’s stay there was not permanent, was practically inevitable.”13 The goal was to make one’s stay in purgatory, a place where souls were purged of their sins through hellfire and other forms of torment, as brief as possible. This was achieved, first, by living an exemplary life on earth, and then, after death, by the celebration of masses, prayers, and other forms of devotion on behalf of the dead person’s soul. Last wills and testaments routinely specified that part of the deceased’s estate be devoted to paying for those masses; and one of the principal functions of the lay Catholic brotherhoods and sisterhoods was the singing of masses for their deceased members.14 Úrsula’s ability to intercede with Jesus on behalf of the dead made her the unwilling recipient of regular visitations by souls in torment. She found those visits absolutely harrowing; one friar whom she had known in life came to her ten days in a row, “covered in flames from head to foot” and begging her in agony to plead his case to Jesus. Receiving another apparition, “I was so terribly frightened that I began shaking like someone poisoned by mercury.” Yet another time she awakened to an apparition, screaming so loudly that she feared she would knock the convent walls down.15 Because of the visions, “everything torments me . . . ​Everything in the world tortures me.”16 Why, then, continue to receive them? In part, it seems, because Úrsula had no control over them. Jesus and the spirits came to her unbidden and of their own volition. Nor did

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she wish to refuse them. To receive the visions, to contemplate Jesus’s suffering, to help the souls in purgatory, was to serve God and to do his will on earth. Indeed, the greater Úrsula’s fear and suffering, the greater her service to God. There may have been more to Úrsula’s motivation, however, than Christian self-­ sacrifice. By becoming an intimate of Jesus, the medium through which the souls of the dead appealed to him and through which his plans and desires were communicated to the sisters of Saint Clare, Úrsula became a figure of significant power and authority in the affairs of the convent. In so doing, she followed a path traced by many African and Afro-­Latin American women who used their spiritual gifts to acquire influence and standing in their local communities and occasionally in the larger society. The accepted position of women in many African religious traditions as intermediaries between the material world and the world of the spirits opened the possibility of their continuing to play such roles in the New World. Women were full participants in the founding and dissemination of the African-­based religions of Candomblé (in Brazil) and Santería (in Cuba). Their spiritual powers also made African and Afro-­ descendant women the frequent targets of Inquisition investigations of magic and witchcraft.17 African spiritual gifts also expressed themselves through Catholicism. Throughout Latin America, Africans and their descendants formed racially segregated lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods to worship specific saints and support their local churches. And just as African priestesses forged relationships with African deities and spirits, so did Úrsula converse directly with Jesus, as undoubtedly many other Afro-­Latin American women did. On the night before a sharply contested election for abbess, Jesus informed Úrsula in advance who was going to win. At another point, disgusted by the nuns’ lackadaisical celebration of communion, Jesus dictated to Úrsula a set of instructions on communion practices. “The abbess had the paper read out, saying that it came from God, who was very angry.” The scribe writing this section of the diary went on to report that “since this occurred, the nuns take communion more frequently and seem to do so with greater care. They are making general confessions and continue to do so, thanks be to God.”18



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Jesus’s criticisms of the nuns were in turn part of a larger critique, expressed and articulated through Úrsula, of the hypocrisy and cant of colonial society. In his conversations with Úrsula, Jesus returned repeatedly to his disappointment with those of his followers who, while claiming to be devout Christians, continued to sin without restraint or remorse. Such sins were even more deplorable when committed by the clergy. “They offend Him even more in religious houses, where they should only love and serve Him.” This was why hell and purgatory were so full of priests and nuns, many of whom were spending decades expiating their sins.19 And not just priests and nuns. “Many kings and monarchs, emper­ ­ors and powerful leaders were in hell,” Úrsula reported. Other high authorities, still alive, were destined for hell. People fear the viceroy, Jesus noted, “as though he were important, because he can kill them. But do you not realize who the viceroy really is? Throw a little bit of dirt in water and then see whether they can pick up any bits. This is exactly what the viceroy is. Forgetfulness so great, a sin without restraint.”20 Speaking through Úrsula, Jesus pointedly contrasted the sins of the powerful with the saintly qualities of the meek and humble. In order to best serve him, Jesus advised, she should “be very humble, spurn the egotistical ones, avoid becoming puffed up, and persist in prayer.” “The more you lower your head, the higher you can ascend.” Saint Francis Xavier, who also occasionally appeared to Úrsula, ­seconded Jesus’s instructions. At one point he acknowledged that the nuns were socially superior to the convent’s servants “because the nuns are white and of the Spanish nation. [B]ut with respect to the soul, all is one: Whoever does more, is worth more.”21 In direct contrast to the nuns’ many spiritual failings, Jesus “told me how much in particular the insignificant and humble ones of this house please God,” citing two servants by name: Florencia Bravo, “a wretched mulata,” and Antonia de Cristo, “a blind, black woman.” Úrsula reported that Saint Francis and Saint Clare had both interceded with Jesus on behalf of one of the convent’s former servants, now languishing in purgatory. During a moment of personal crisis, when she may have been contemplating suicide, Úrsula was saved by the intervention of the same two saints; at another point, Saint

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Francis appeared to her accompanied by “an army of Jesuits,” all bleeding from the wounds of their martyrdoms. Francis informed her that “when you die, I, and all of those you see today, will come for you” to escort her into heaven.22 By the final pages of her diary, Úrsula was ready to step out from behind Jesus, as it were, to express his radical message of social leveling in her own words. As she did so, she cast that message in explicitly racial terms, echoing Saint Francis’s earlier observation: “Although He raised us as different nations, the will of blacks and whites is the same. In memory, understanding, and will, they are all one. Had He not created them all in His image and likeness and redeemed them with His blood?”23 Amidst all the scenes of fire, torture, and suffering, Úrsula did leave us with a few images that suggest the beauty and serenity of Christian faith. One was her brief portrait of María Bran, an enslaved African who Úrsula had known in life and whom she saw one day in purgatory. I saw her in a priest’s vestment, the whitest of whites, beautifully embellished and gathered with a short cord with elegant tassels. She also wore a crown of flowers on her head. The celestial beings arranged for me to see her from the back, although I could still see her face and she was quite lovely, and her face a resplendent black. . . . ​A lthough she had been there [in purgatory] a long time, her punishment had been mild. She was very thankful to God, who with His divine providence had taken her from her land and brought her down such difficult and rugged roads in order to become a Christian and be saved.24 Christianity had opened opportunities both to María Bran and to Úrsula de Jesús: eternal salvation, spiritual equality in the community of believers, and direct access to God. It had not offered economic or social equality, but by channeling and inhabiting the voices of Jesus and the saints, Úrsula appropriated the most powerful authorities in colonial society and made them hers. The fact that she believed wholeheartedly in the reality of those authorities made her act of appropriation all the more compelling and effective. She had no sense, I suspect, of exercising any control over them or of putting



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words into their mouths. To the contrary, she felt completely at the mercy of these powerful forces and a mere pawn in their cataclysmic confrontations. But when those forces spoke, it was in Úrsula’s voice and in Úrsula’s words. This afforded her extraordinary opportunities to assert influence in the convent and to convey a political message that lies always present in Christian theology, waiting to be used: the message of social justice and human equality.

Two Soldiers That same message of justice and equality can be heard in the writings of our second author, the Afro-­Uruguayan shoemaker, soldier, and would-­be lawyer Jacinto Ventura de Molina (1766–1841). Writing in 1827, Molina acknowledged and then promptly undercut the notion of white racial superiority. “White men fly like the birds and swim like the fishes. They write naturally; blacks do not, even though, thanks be to God, we are men like they are, redeemed by the most Precious Blood of my Lord Jesus Christ. And if the whites desire that we be saved, we equally desire that they be saved themselves.”25 Molina’s reference to the rigors of writing was hardly accidental; despite being “the most prolific known Afro-­Latin American writer prior to the end of the 1800s,” his writings did not circulate widely during his lifetime and then disappeared completely after his death, when they were bound into three volumes of manuscripts that passed into the hands of private collectors. In 1991 the papers were purchased by the Biblioteca Nacional in Montevideo, where I first read them in 2002. Historians William Acree and Alex Borucki published an edited and abridged edition of the papers in 2008, finally making Molina’s work available to a broader public.26 Unlike Úrsula de Jesús who dictated her story to others, in Molina’s handwritten manuscripts we hear the author’s unmediated voice. The orthography is consistent throughout, as is the voice, which is utterly distinctive. While Úrsula constantly invoked her meekness, humility, and powerlessness in the face of God’s will, Molina tirelessly reiterated his achievements and “merits” and insisted that those merits be officially recognized and rewarded. “Merits” was an important and frequently used word in colonial society, referring to any characteristic that qualified one for favors or rewards from the king. Merits could include noble birth, honorable

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behavior, or specific acts of service to the monarch and the empire. Colonial subjects wrote frequently to the king and his officials concerning those merits; and Molina wrote more frequently, and at greater length, than most.27 Thus while Úrsula’s text falls into the genre of the spiritual autobiography, Molina’s papers conform to a different genre, that of the petition to royal (and, after Uruguayan independence in 1828, republican) authorities. Beginning in 1817, immediately following the invasion and occupation of Uruguay by Portuguese forces from Brazil, Molina petitioned first the occupying authorities and then, following Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822, the new Brazilian monarch, Pedro I. After Uruguay won its own independence, he directed his appeals to the authorities of the newly declared republic; and in 1833 he even sent a petition to Pope Gregory XVI, with instructions to the Pope to forward copies of his response (never received) to the emperors of Spain and Brazil.28 What merits could Molina claim? As the son of enslaved African parents—​his father Ventura de Molina was from Dahomey, and his mother Juana del Sacramento from Angola—​he was obviously not of noble birth. But in lieu of aristocratic ancestry, Molina constructed an alternative: his close, semiadoptive relationship with Spanish General Josef de Molina, owner and liberator of the boy’s parents. As a result of General Molina’s generosity, Jacinto was born free, both his parents having been granted their freedom several years earlier. And after Jacinto’s birth, General Molina treated the boy as though he were the general’s own son, giving him a thorough education in Latin, grammar, philosophy, theology, and mathematics. “Until I was sixteen years old, not a day passed in which I did not receive a lesson from Brigadier Josef de Molina.” When Molina’s father died in 1782, the general told the teenager that from then on he would be Molina’s father, and that whatever Molina might need, he should simply ask for it and it would be done. Three months later the general died, supposedly on Jacinto’s sixteenth birthday. In three separate letters Molina recalled the general’s (alleged) dying words, that the young man should “take care how you live, because anything that happens to you will be attributed to the good or bad upbringing that I have given you.”29



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Through his repeated invocations of General Molina, Jacinto sought to tie himself closely to a powerful white patron, even after the latter’s death. He also quietly distanced himself from his father Ventura, whom he acknowledged as a skilled craftsman and a faithful servant of the general but also as “vice-­ridden, a gambler, and money-­hungry.” At the moment of Ventura’s death, Molina claimed, his father counseled the boy to always stay with the general, “who is more your father than I am.”30 While distancing himself from his father, Jacinto affirmed his ties to his mother Juana. On occasions when his father “was severe with my mother, who was very young, pretty, and decent, and severe with me as well,” the two of them would take shelter with General Molina. Jacinto remembered his mother as beautiful, and beautifully dressed, in lace shawls, velvet gowns, and gold and silver jewelry. “How did a black woman acquire such luxuries? Through a life of ceaseless labor.” She made and sold bread, cakes, and other baked goods and “did laundry constantly . . . ​carrying me on her back, tied to her waist in her shawl.” “What mother ever brought up her child with more care and attention than mine did? . . . ​A nd who would ever say that such memories of a black woman are possible? [And yet] I’ll tell you, [they are] identical for all the African women.”31 Another source of Molina’s merits was the wide-­ranging education that he received at the hands of General Molina and other tutors hired by the general. In all of his writings Jacinto took great pains to demonstrate his impressive erudition. His petitions flow on for a hundred pages or more, with lengthy biblical exegeses, discussions of Christian and Jewish theology, of Greek and Roman literature and mythology, of classical and medieval history, and, especially in his letters to Brazilian Emperor Pedro I, of European dynastic power struggles of the 1700s and early 1800s. It was precisely those great-­power struggles that enabled Molina to accumulate his most significant merits: his military service to Spain, Portugal, and Brazil in the wars of the late 1700s and early 1800s. Throughout the Atlantic world, and especially in the Río de la Plata, these were years of constant warfare and struggle, initially among competing European empires and then, first in the United States, then in Haiti, and then in Spanish America, between those

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empires and would-­be nations seeking their independence. Because of the large size of the slave and free black populations in most of Latin America, African and Afro-­Latin American soldiers and officers played central roles in those struggles (as they would later in the 1800s in the Cuban independence wars).32 Molina claimed that his military service began at the age of five, when he and other boys carried powder and ammunition to Spanish artillerymen at the siege of Rio Grande in southern Brazil. Five years later he served as an orderly at the siege of the Portuguese enclave at Colonia, in present-­day Uruguay.33 Following the deaths of his father and of General Molina in 1782, the young Molina moved to Buenos Aires, where he worked as a shoemaker and joined the Spanish militia. Returning to Montevideo in 1799 with his wife, María Rufina Campana, he continued in the militia through the early years of the independence wars, swearing allegiance to Spain. This nearly cost him his life in 1815 when rebel forces led by José Gervasio Artigas took the city and demanded that he and his fellow militiamen switch sides. Refusing to do so, Molina was threatened with death and placed in the stocks. Eventually he was released, and when Portuguese forces took the city in 1817, later driving Artigas into exile, Molina joined the Portuguese militia, rising to the rank of sergeant major.34 In his letters to the emperors of Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, Molina returned constantly to the theme of his loyal military service over a nearly forty-­year period. It was that service, he felt, that entitled him to petition the monarchs to request, among other things, an appointment as the legal representative of Montevideo’s black population, and the creation of a convent and high school for that same population, to be named in honor of his late wife (she died in 1819) and to be headed by Molina himself.35 There is no evidence that any of those rulers ever responded to his pleas; but following Uruguay’s independence from Brazil in 1828, Molina started to claim, in his letters to the new republican authorities, that Brazilian Emperor Pedro I had granted him the title of Bachelor of Laws (Licenciado en Reales Derechos), with corresponding authority to represent clients in the courts and in administrative disputes with government agencies. Molina did represent clients in several such



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cases in the 1820s and early 1830s; and in 1832, in response to “the great scarcity of lawyers that the Republic unfortunately confronts,” and “the extreme utility to the citizens of color of such an eloquent and philanthropic defender of their rights,” the Ministry of the Interior confirmed his legal degree.36 So empowered, in 1833 and 1834 Molina took up the defense of one of the city’s salas de nación, African ethnic associations set up to provide religious, cultural, and mutual aid benefits to their members. As we saw in Chapter 1, these organizations were ubiquitous in the port cities of Afro-­Latin America. In one of his briefs, Molina listed thirteen such organizations active in Montevideo; police records from 1850 show twenty organizations.37 In a series of petitions on behalf of the Congos de Gunga nation, Molina sought to counter images of the African organizations as expressions of cultural backwardness and barbarism. He portrayed them not as representing the African past but rather as a product of modern, republican “civil society, [which] was, and is . . . ​t he necessary starting point for the happiness and prosperity of the human race.” The nations were formed in classic liberal fashion, “by a contract through which many men come together and agree to work toward the common good.” To allay fears that they celebrated arcane African rites in secret, Molina assured the authorities that the salas conducted their activities in “public, their doors open, in well-­k nown and established houses, with well-­k nown presidents . . . ​ Far from causing any alarm, they help maintain order, obedience, and subordination by promoting morality, Religion, and Piety, which are the most solid bases of thrones and states.”38 Besides the nations’ associations with (alleged) African barbarism, colonial and independence-­period authorities worried about their possible involvement in slave conspiracies and rebellions. Such fears had led in 1833 to the closure by the police of the Congos de Gunga organization, which was suspected of involvement in a plot discovered that year. Appealing to the General Assembly (parliament), Molina admitted that conspirators had indeed approached members of the organization to recruit them for an uprising but that the Congos had refused to take part. Part of their reason for doing so was the obvious risk to themselves and their families if the

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rebellion failed. But their main reason, Molina argued, was the Congos’ absolute loyalty to the Uruguayan state and constitution. “We are not so ignorant as to be unaware of the benefits conferred by the Constitution [of 1830], of the humane laws and liberal principles proclaimed on our behalf by the new institutions” of the republic. Just the previous year (1832), members of the Congos and other African nations had defended the government against an uprising by the opposition Blanco party. Invoking “the memorable events” of the independence wars and the civil violence that had marred the early years of the new republic, Molina reminded the Assembly that “the free black regiments have taken part in all of them, with splendor and as the strongest supports of their governments.” On the basis of that record, surely the Congos deserved to have their headquarters restored.39 In his petitions on behalf of the Congos de Gunga, Molina deftly invoked the principles of Uruguay’s new republican order: civic equality, the rule of law, and liberal social and political institutions. Having fought to create and then to defend those institutions, free black soldiers and their families were especially entitled to their rights and benefits, including, in the case of the African nations, the right of free association. The outcome of Molina’s case is unknown, but his arguments found an uncanny echo some eighty years later in the memoir by Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, a veteran of the last war for Cuban independence (1895–1898). Illiterate at the time he enlisted in the independence army, Batrell taught himself to read and write as a young adult after the war. Though less prolific than Molina, he was the author of at least one book (and possibly the beginnings of a second), several political manifestos, and an active correspondence with the Afro-­ Cuban politician and journalist Juan Gualberto 40 Gómez. Batrell’s book is a vivid account of the events of the independence war, told from the perspective of a common enlisted man. The author leaves us in no doubt about the violence and savagery of the war, and of the Cuban forces’ constant shortages of arms, ammunition, food, and medical supplies. He conveys as well the war’s moments of beauty and even grandeur. “It hasn’t faded from my memory the way that the [Cuban] cavalry attacked with such spirit,



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looking like a long rippling ribbon extending across the open plain. . . . ​We looked like the swell of the sea when it wants to destroy some obstacle in its path.”41 Batrell’s book is also a coming-­of-­age story. Fifteen years old when he enlisted, Batrell was still a teenager when the war ended. During those years he saw friends and comrades die, faced death himself on numerous occasions, and suffered profound disillusionment when he was betrayed (in some unspecified way) by his commanding officer, Colonel Raimundo Ortega.42 Batrell’s relationship with Ortega was comparable in some ways to that of Jacinto Ventura de Molina with Spanish General Josef de Molina. Batrell loved Ortega “as much [as], if not more, than my father” and claimed at one point to have saved the colonel’s life by warning him away from an ambush.43 But “something serious, very grave, happened between us on our way back to the camp . . . ​My heart was filled with sorrow because of that argument,” the nature of which Batrell refused to disclose to his fellow soldiers or to his readers. Literary critic Mark Sanders, who edited and translated Batrell’s memoir, suggests that Ortega may have made a sexual overture toward the young soldier; certainly the text provides support for that hypothesis.44 Even more disturbing to Batrell was Cuban society’s failure to acknowledge the decisive role of black soldiers and officers in the struggle for independence. Batrell recalled that in the province of Matanzas, where he served, almost all the rebel troops were black or mulatto; in his regiment in particular, “from the lowest soldier to the commander, we were all of the colored race . . . ​Each time, on the battlefield or in an ambush, that a soldier of the Liberation Army in the province of Matanzas died, it was some poor black. In the hour of sacrifice, we gave our lives.”45 And yet, Batrell complained, his comrades’ heroic contributions to the war effort were not always appreciated by their superiors and in some instances were even held against them. Early in the war, “the fact that [Batrell’s regiment] fought more battles monthly than all the rest of the units combined . . . ​[and] the fact that our commanding officer was a man of color, commanding an all-­colored regiment, had a bad effect” and led to proposals that their unit be merged with another regiment commanded by Colonel Acevedo, a

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white officer. But Acevedo “couldn’t stomach the continuous battles that we engaged in” and declined to assume command.46 Batrell did acknowledge outstanding courage and heroism from some white commanders. But too many white officers, he charged, sat out the war in rear-­g uard camps far from the action, while black soldiers and officers were putting their lives on the line. “When the war intensified in 1897, a great number of the commanders who surrendered were white, some already colonels. Of the constantly mistreated [blacks], not a single officer surrendered.” Time after time, Batrell charged, black officers who had distinguished themselves on the battlefield either failed to receive the promotions they deserved or were actively hounded out of the service.47 And “once the war was over, or its end was in sight, it became necessary to start obscuring the heroism and brilliance of those whom, because of their dark skins, it was not possible to present as commanders to the ‘privileged families’ who came to visit us.”48 “What a hard lesson,” Batrell bitterly reflected, “given by a country that prides itself on its conscience and that aspires to live in the intoxicating environment of eternal Liberty.” That aspiration was real, Batrell believed, and had manifested itself during the war in numerous instances of genuine cross-­racial camaraderie.49 When Spanish troops evacuated Matanzas and the independence army entered the provincial capital on New Year’s Day, 1899, they were deliriously received by “what was truly the Cuban people, with no worries or races. Everything was joy and brotherhood.”50 In the years following the war, however, the egalitarian promise of independence had not been realized. Batrell and other black veterans became convinced that they were being denied the recognition to which they were entitled for their role in winning Cuban independence, as well as the material benefits of that recognition, in the form of government jobs. Historians of that period agree with Batrell that, in the distribution of the fruits of victory, the Cuban government clearly favored white officers and veterans over blacks, and in some cases even recent Spanish immigrants over Afro-­ Cubans born in the island. Private employers showed similar racial preferences, significantly narrowing the range of opportunities open to Cubans of color.51



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Having breathed “the purified air of democracy” during his years in the rebel army, “I will never be able to stand idly by and tolerate injustices that threaten the ideal of civilized humanity.” Batrell joined the left wing of the Liberal party, served in the Constitutionalist revolt of 1906 and wrote two political manifestos (in 1907 and 1912) protesting “today’s situation, in which whites treat blacks with a cruelty that rivals the odious days of slavery” and demanding, among other points, that a minimum of 35 percent of all state jobs (except for judgeships) be reserved for Afro-­Cubans. He was arrested and imprisoned for several months in 1910 and again in 1912, both times as part of the islandwide repression of the Partido Independiente de Color. Like many of those caught up in that repression, he was not a member of the party though he was doubtless in sympathy with its goals.52 Batrell’s book echoes a number of themes found in Jacinto Ventura de Molina’s writings. Both men cited military service as the principal source of their own merits, as well as those of other black soldiers on whose behalf they wrote. Both sought to tie themselves closely to powerful father figures and patrons: in Molina’s case to General Josef de Molina (and at a greater distance, the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian monarchs); in Batrell’s case to Colonel Ortega and then, after their mysterious argument, to Colonel Fernando Diago, to whom Para la historia was dedicated.53 Finally, Molina and Batrell both embraced the liberal ideals of their newly independent republics and invoked those ideals as additional justification for the full participation of Afro-­descendants in national life. But Batrell embraced those ideals more fervently than Molina, and felt more keenly the jarring discrepancy between official proclamations of equality and the continuing reality of racial discrimination. This was doubtless owing in part to differences of personality between the two men, but it may also reflect the differences between the respective struggles for independence in Cuba and Uruguay. While black soldiers and officers were important in both countries, they were even more so in Cuba where Afro-­Cubans formed the bulk of the rebel forces in all three independence wars (1868–1878, 1879–1880, 1895–1898). This in turn made questions of race, and the issue of racial equality, even more central in the Cuban

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independence movement than in Uruguay’s. As enunciated by José Martí, Juan Gualberto Gómez, and others, antiracism became one of the main planks of the Cuban independence program; and during the 1880s and 1890s, between the second and third independence wars, a small but persistent Afro-­ Cuban civil rights movement pressed the Spanish government for an end to colonial racial laws.54 Ricardo Batrell thus came of age in a society that was intensively debating questions of race and that, in the act of becoming independent, had committed itself to the goal of moving, in the words of José Martí, from “the century of [the] struggle of races” to “the century of the affirmation of rights.”55 Batrell and his comrades had experienced those debates at first hand and had shed their blood in the name of those ideals. They were not about to let their fellow Cubans abandon those principles or allow them to become a dead letter for lack of enforcement. Batrell was well aware of how difficult it would be to transform the last slave society in Spanish America into a genuine racial democracy. But he remained hopeful that “there are always pure hearts, and the love of democracy will never die in the hearts of grateful Cubans.”56

A Life in the Twentieth Century How far Cuba has come in achieving the goal of racial democracy is one of the main questions posed by our fourth and final text, a memoir by María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno (1902–1997). Like Úrsula de Jesús, whose visions were transcribed by nuns, Reyita (as she called herself) dictated her memories to her daughter, the historian Daisy Rubiera Castillo, who edited them into a vivid and highly engaging narrative told in a warmly colloquial voice. While Reyita concluded that as of the mid-­1990s Cuba still had “a long way to go” to achieve full racial equality, over the course of the 1900s her own family made remarkable progress toward that goal.57 Born in 1902, Reyita had a front-­row seat on some of the most dramatic events in twentieth-­century Cuban history. As a girl, she knew Fulgencio Batista, who was her next-­door neighbor in the small town of Banes. She remembered him as “a happy, cheerful boy” who later, as president, “invented some Indian ancestors for himself; he didn’t want to acknowledge his black ones.” At the age of



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ten, she witnessed the repression of the Partido Independiente de Color in 1912, in which her Uncle Juan was killed and her Aunt Mangá sentenced to six months in prison. Both had been party members and had introduced Reyita to Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonnet, two of the party’s founders, both killed by government forces. As a teenager she joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, inspired by its promise of the diaspora’s return to Africa.58 In the 1940s, while living in Santiago with her husband and children, Reyita joined the Communist party and became an active member, hosting meetings in her house and selling the party newspaper, Hoy. “What I liked most was that they fought for . . . ​equality between blacks and whites and between men and women. . . . ​That was wonderful, struggling for equality, brotherhood, and the rights of women. It was like a huge hopefulness was reborn inside me!” When her family moved away from Santiago, she lost contact with the party but remained in strong sympathy with its goals of social and economic justice. In the 1950s, two of her sons, Monín and Nené, joined the 26th of July Movement to fight against the Batista dictatorship. Following the movement’s triumph in 1959, she joined the Federation of Cuban Women and her local Committee in Defense of the Revolution. In 1960 her son Monín was killed in an incident of suspected sabotage, the explosion of the cargo ship La Coubre in Havana harbor. A year or two later she was given a house in the new 30th of November housing development, in recognition of her status as the mother of a martyr of the revolution.59 Like Úrsula de Jesús, Reyita possessed spiritual powers. As a child, she had visions in which she foresaw future events; as an adult, she worked occasionally as a medium, transmitting messages and advice from the spirits to her clients. Even after she closed the business, she remained in close contact with the spirits, who visited her every day. They needed to be fed with water, which “is very important to spirits, because it’s their nourishment. I have religiously followed the tradition of emptying a glass of water at the entrance to my house at midday . . . ​That’s the time when they open the door of space, so they can go down and visit their families, and they need refreshment before coming in.”60

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The highest spirit in Reyita’s pantheon was the Virgin Mary, and the specifically Cuban manifestation of the Virgin, the Virgen del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint. As a teenager, she prayed to the Virgin for “a good, hard-­working, white husband . . . ​I n those days, marry­ ­ing white was vital.” And the Virgin answered her prayers, “grant[ing] me a handsome, young, hard-­working, good-­looking man.”61 Reyita prayed for a white husband and she got one. And here we come to the heart of her story. If the most important thing in Úrsula de Jesús’s life was her relationship with Jesus, and the most import­ ­ant thing in Molina’s and Batrell’s lives was the long-­deferred recognition of their “merits,” the most important thing in Reyita’s life was her family. And her family writ very large, going back two generations to her African grandparents, going forward several generations to her numerous grandchildren and great-­grandchildren, and extending outwards to include the many friends and protégés pulled into the force field of Reyita’s magnetism. As for many of us, her family was her greatest pride and joy, and the source of her deepest pain. That pain began at birth, when, of her mother’s four daughters, she was the only one, she says, who was visibly black.62 “I was the victim of terrible discrimination on my mother’s part. And if you add what was then the case in Cuba, you can understand why I never wanted a black husband. . . . ​I didn’t want to have children as black as me, so that no one would look down on them, no one would harass and humiliate them. . . . ​I didn’t want my children to suffer what I’d had to suffer. That’s why I wanted to adelantar la raza [advance the race], that’s why I married a white man.”63 After a very difficult and painful childhood with her mother and other surrogate parents, Reyita achieved her dream in 1923 by marrying Antonio Rubiera, a telegraph operator for the Wells Fargo Company. This was “very significant for me. I glimpsed security, the home I’d never had, without anyone discriminating against me or being ashamed of the color of my skin or my lips or my nose; at last, I was heading for bliss.” But when she went to meet Rubiera’s parents, they refused to receive her, opening a rift in the family that never healed. Rubiera swore never to see his parents again, and Reyita says that he never did, not even attending their funerals when they died.64



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The marriage lasted over fifty years, until Rubiera’s death in 1975, and produced eight children. But it was not an easy one. The family suffered extended periods of poverty, leading Reyita to open a small diner, work as a medium, take in sewing, and do other work to support the family. Even during times when their economic situation was better, Rubiera was very reluctant to spend money on the family, even on the children’s education. Reyita, by contrast, “wanted my children . . . ​to study or learn a good trade.” She was also determined to move the family out of the slum neighborhoods where they lived. “I never stopped explaining to him that this was imperative, that it was important to have a better atmosphere for our children. By dint of so much insistence—​or because I wore him down,” in 1950 the family moved to a middle-­class neighborhood, “almost all white. I arrived there having decided to give my life an overhaul and, therefore, yours [the children’s] as well. Barracones [their previous neighborhood] stayed behind with its prostitutes, its pimps, the yankee sailors, hustlers, delinquents, and everything all that meant.”65 The family did make a fresh start in their new house on Cristina Street; but while living in that house, Reyita made a shattering discovery. Preparing the papers to apply for survivor benefits from her father’s pension as an independence-­war veteran (like Batrell), she discovered that she and Rubiera were not legally married. The marriage ceremony had indeed taken place, complete with party and cake, but Rubiera had apparently arranged with the notary not to issue a license or record the marriage in the town’s civil registry. For legal purposes, Reyita was single and her children were all born out of wedlock. She was not the person that for thirty years she had thought she was, nor were her children. “I thought about all of you [her children], about the home I had so struggled to provide. I kept that pain deep in my heart. But from that moment on, I was never the same María de los Reyes.”66 Reyita stayed with Rubiera until his death in 1975. But in emotional terms, the marriage was over. Instead, Reyita now focused on her (by the 1990s) eight children, thirty-­nine grandchildren, sixty-­ four great-­ grandchildren, and seven great-­ great-­ grandchildren. “My family’s beautiful! It looks like a rainbow: whites, blacks, mulaticos, jabaítos. Long hair, short hair, curly and straight. Engineers,

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lawyers, teachers, technicians, workers; all organized and, most importantly, free of racial prejudices.”67 A rainbow family “free of racial prejudices,” perhaps reflecting a country free of racial prejudices? Or perhaps not: before the Revolution, “racial discrimination in Cuba was very intense and a complicated issue . . . ​Now, you don’t have to worry about the color of your skin. Although, really, I do know of quite a few people who still have serious racial problems. I’ve heard of black girls who ­haven’t got jobs in an office, in favor of white girls; positions not given to a black person with any old excuse in order to ensure a white person gets it. There are lots who still have that mentality; . . . ​ In this sense, there’s still a long way to go!”68 Reyita’s description of the racial situation in Cuba is consistent with research demonstrating that the revolution substantially reduced racial disparities in health, education, and vocational achievement while leaving in place racist attitudes and some discriminatory practices.69 Reyita recognized both sides of the revolution’s achievements: on the one hand, how its comprehensive social programs had benefited workers and the poor, two groups in which Afro-­Cubans were heavily represented; and on the other, its failure to completely root out the prejudice and discrimination that were antithetical to the revolutionary program of social and racial equality. In Reyita’s account of her life one hears clear echoes of Ricardo Batrell’s disappointment with the failed promises of Cuban independence, of Jacinto Ventura de Molina’s more gingerly but pointed references to the liberal principles of Uruguayan republicanism, and of Úrsula de Jesús’s belief in the spiritual equality of all Catholics. Socialism, nationalism, liberalism, Catholicism: four different paths to racial equality, a goal that each of our authors believed to be attain­­ able. Nor were they the only ones who shared that belief. The idea that Latin American societies were on the road toward achieving racial equality, or might already have arrived at that longed-­for destination, circulated widely among African-­A mericans in the nineteenth-­ and twentieth-­century United States, a number of whom traveled to the region to see this miracle for themselves. As they talked and wrote about what they saw there, those visitors from the North generated yet another set of visions of Afro-­Latin America.

4 Transnational Voices

In the summer of 1906 James Weldon Johnson wrote to Booker T. Washington from Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, where he had recently been appointed as U.S. consul. Washington had personally lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt to name Johnson to the position; the young man wrote to thank Washington for his help and to talk about his trip to Venezuela, which had been long and arduous but more interesting than my trip to Europe last summer; the curi­ ­ous field for the study of questions of race and color made it so. Our first stop was at San Juan [Puerto Rico]; I strolled about that quaint old town for two days, and there caught the first glimpse of the great and intricate color scheme of humanity that is being worked out in this part of the world. I found that in spite of the American occupation and domination, prejudice, based solely on race and color, had made very little headway. Among the people, from the pure whites—​who are, by the way, very scarce—​to those showing the slightest mixture, I could discover no distinct lines of division . . . ​I called on the mayor and the president of the City Council, and was treated very cordially by them; they are both men of color.1 The ship made a second stop in Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, where “I found colored men—​ sure enough colored men—​in every kind of work and business, laborers, storekeepers, tailors, watchmakers, in short they seem to be taking a hand in 67

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everything going on.” Once arrived in Caracas, Johnson attended the opening night of the opera season. The theater is a rather nice one, and the opera was well sung by an Italian company, but I was, of course, more interested in the people. . . . ​The ladies and gentlemen were in evening dress just as they would be at the opera in New York; and I judged that many of the ladies’ gowns came from Paris. And the ladies! Some of them were women of remarkable beauty, they ran the whole range of colors from seal brown to lily white; and on the whole one could say as Abraham did of Sarah, “They were fair to look upon.” But that was not all; when I saw in the President’s suite, and mingling among the crowd, colored colonels, and generals, and major-­generals, clad in crimson and gold, with gold handled swords clinking at their sides and silver spurs clinking at their heels, using another biblical quotation, I felt like exclaiming with the prophet, “Lord, mine eyes have seen thy salvation, let now thy servant depart in peace.” But in all seriousness, I must say that the sight gave me a sort of thrill I never felt before. You know in Europe we are not shut out, but everything we see is white, and we can’t feel, somehow, that we are a part of the procession; but I felt that night that I, too, was in it.2 Johnson closed his letter by telling Washington that “there is floating around through my mind in a hazy way an article, or a pamphlet, or something of that sort on the ‘Black freedmen of North and South America.’   ” Had Johnson gone on to write that article, he would have been one of the pioneers in the comparative study of race in the Americas. Over the course of the twentieth century, race and slavery were the most intensively studied topics in the field of comparative history.3 North Americans sickened and repelled by their country’s longstanding racial nightmare found in Latin America the same “curious field for the study of questions of race and color” that Johnson did. By “curious,” Johnson meant “different,” and more specifically, different from the United States. Over the course of the 1900s, those differences proved of enormous interest to diverse American audiences: to scholars and intellectuals



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seeking to understand “race” as a social and cultural phenomenon; to activists and policymakers seeking possible policy responses to deeply engrained racial inequality; and, perhaps most urgently and immediately, to African-­A mericans seeking more humane models of how to construct multiracial societies. That quest led African-­ A merican intellectuals, activists, and common citizens to pay close attention to developments in Latin America and the Caribbean. Much recent work has suggested that A merican observations of and reflections on the racial African-­ dimensions of other American countries were an integral part of thinking about race in their own country and of forging African-­ American identities.4 Without doubt that is true, as is the converse: that as Afro-­Latin Americans observed racial developments in the United States, they were simultaneously thinking either implicitly or explicitly about how their own countries compared to the United States and drawing conclusions accordingly.5 How African-­A merican visions of Latin America shaped African-­ American lives and African-­A merican identities is a compelling and important historical question. But what about the reverse of that question: How did the conditions of African-­A merican life influence what African-­A mericans saw when they looked at Afro-­Latin America, obscuring some aspects of Afro-­Latin American life while highlighting others? And how did changing social and political conditions, both in the United States and in Latin America, lead to changes in African-­A merican perceptions of the region over time?

Looking South: Haiti and Cuba The book that James Weldon Johnson wrote in Puerto Cabello (and during a second consular posting in Nicaragua) was not the comparative study he described in his letter to Washington. Rather, it was a novel, one of the classics of African-­A merican literature: Autobiography of an Ex-­Colored Man. The book is set entirely in the United States but references Afro-­Latin America at several key moments. Early on, the nameless protagonist is inspired by the reading at his grade-­school graduation of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s widely reprinted 1862 lecture, “Toussaint L’Ouverture.”6 The story of Toussaint, the liberator of Haiti, galvanizes the boy: that night “I could talk of nothing else with my mother except my

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ambition to be a great man, a great colored man, to reflect credit on the race and fame for myself.” Later, as a young man, the narrator spends several years living in the Cuban community of Jacksonville, Florida, learning Spanish and working as a reader (in Spanish) in a cigar factory.7 In a situation unusual for the Deep South, there is no color bar in the factory; and while talking with his black and white coworkers and reading their newspapers, the protagonist learns of the Cuban independence war of 1895–1898, fought by a multiracial rebel army led by “the two Gómezes, both the white one and the black one,” and by Afro-­Cuban commander Antonio Maceo.8 Johnson’s novel reflected nineteenth-­century African-­A mericans’ fascination with Haiti and with Cuba. When John Brown Russwurm became the first black college graduate in the United States, in 1826, his valedictory address at Bowdoin College was on “The Conditions and Prospects of Hayti.” During the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, African-­ American sermons and newspapers regularly compared Toussaint Louverture to other great liberators: Moses leading his people out of slavery, or the slave revolutionary Spartacus, or even George Washington. In 1854, William Wells Brown compared Toussaint to George Washington, to the former’s advantage. “Each was the leader of an oppressed and outraged people, each had a powerful enemy to contend with, and each succeeded in founding a government in the New World.” But while “Toussaint’s government made liberty its watchword, incorporated it in its constitution, abolished the slave-­t rade, and made freedom universal amongst the people . . . ​ Washington’s government incorporated slavery and the slave-­t rade, and enacted laws by which chains were fastened upon the limbs of millions of people. Toussaint liberated his countrymen; Washington enslaved a portion of his, and aided in giving strength and vitality to an institution that will one day rend asunder the UNION that he helped to forge.”9 With the coming of the Civil War, “in public orations and printed texts, African-­A mericans and their white allies insisted that the Civil War was a second Haitian Revolution, a bloody conflict in which tens of thousands of armed bondsmen, ‘American Toussaints,’ would redeem the republic by securing the abolition of slavery and proving the equality of the black race.” Toussaint was “a secret



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household word” among Southern slaves, a Union chaplain in South Carolina reported in 1862. The following year, an encampment of eight to ten thousand fugitive slaves under Union protection in New Bern, North Carolina, took the name of New Hayti.10 African-­A mericans invoked Haiti not just as an inspiring example of black freedom struggles but as proof of black fitness for self-­ government. “Our American press and American people,” Frederick Douglass’s journal The North Star reported in 1850, “are particularly anxious to make Haiti appear before the world as feeble, indolent and falling to decay.” “In the midst of the lies daily propagated by the Southern tools of the slaveocracy,” that paper and others took as their mission “to furnish our readers with reliable intelligence from the black republic.” In 1861, preparing to make his first trip to the island, Douglass expressed his intention “to see, as we doubtless shall see, in the free, orderly, and independent Republic of Haiti, a refutation of the slanders and disparagements of our race. We want to experience the feeling of being under a Government which has been administered by a race denounced as mentally and morally incapable of self-­government.”11 If Haiti was one focus of African-­A merican attention during the 1800s, Cuba was the other, and for much the same reasons.12 While Cuban slave rebellions fell short of the resounding success of the Haitian Revolution, they nevertheless won the admiration and sympathy of African-­A merican observers. One of the first novels written by an African-­ A merican, Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America, told the story of Henry Blake, a runaway slave who, after trying to spark a slave insurrection in the South, makes his way to Cuba with the same goal. While in Havana he receives advice and counsel from an actual historical figure, the Afro-­ Cuban poet Plácido (the pen name of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés), who was executed in 1844 as part of the repression of the La Escalera conspiracy. Delany named one of his sons after Plácido (and two others after Toussaint Louverture and Faustin Soulouque).13 As rebel armies fought for Cuban independence in the second half of the century, African-­A mericans saw in Antonio Maceo and other black commanders Cuban equivalents of Toussaint Louverture and his lieutenants. Just as Toussaint had been a favored name for

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African-­A merican children in the first half of the 1800s, Maceo now became equally popular in the second half and into the 1900s. During the first independence war, in 1868–1878, Fredrick Douglass called on African-­A merican youth to “surrender their citizenship and to join their fortunes with those of their suffering brethren in Cuba.”14 Following the U.S. intervention in Cuba in 1898, the African-­ American press followed events in Cuba even more closely and printed dozens of letters from black soldiers and officers serving in the island. Private Simon Brown of the 23rd Regiment Kansas Volunteer Infantry pronounced himself “ready to die upon the battlefield defending our country, ‘Grand America,’ and the poor Cubans as well, because I am convinced that these people are of our Negro race, although they cannot speak the English language, but they have the complexion of our race.” Some correspondents reported finding evidence of prejudice in the island, though adding that “unlike the American article, [Cuban racism] is not so bitter.” Others, such as Private John Lewis of the Tenth Cavalry, were struck by the absence of U.S.-­style segregation. “You find the colored man in all kinds of business and trade; all colors working together in the greatest harmony. . . . ​There have been Americans who came to this island and tried to . . . ​draw the color line, but the Cubans would not submit to such treatment and cleaned up the place; and if they will only take lessons from the Cubans, America will then be the land of the brave and free and not until then.”15

Seeking Racial Democracy The sense that Cuba had much to teach the United States in the area of race extended to other Latin American countries as well, and especially to the largest such country, Brazil. As early as 1858, Frederick Douglass had made much the same point as Private Lewis, suggesting that “Brazil—​a country that we, in our pride, stigmatize as semi-­barbarian—​does not treat its people of color, free or slave, in the unjust, barbarous and scandalous way we treat them . . . ​ Democratic and Protestant America would do well to learn a lesson of justice and freedom from Catholic and despotic Brazil.”16 Brazilian slaves would have been startled to hear that they lived under conditions of greater justice and freedom than their U.S. counterparts; but free people of color in Brazil did enjoy higher levels



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of civic and social equality than free African-­A mericans, while at the same time forming a far larger proportion of the Brazilian population.17 In common with other Latin American nations, Brazil had struck down colonial racial laws at the time of independence (1822) and had declared full civic equality for all male citizens. While most Brazilians remained poor and uneducated, some did free Afro-­ manage to join the country’s small middle class, working as artisans, shop owners, teachers, journalists, or in other professions.18 The striking down of official barriers, combined with visible examples of Afro-­Brazilian upward mobility, eventually gave rise to the concept of Brazil as a “racial democracy”: a society in which whites, blacks, and people of mixed race lived together under conditions of relative harmony and equality and in which race mixture was not only tolerated but actively encouraged. Often credited to sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s writings in the 1930s, in fact the concept of Brazil as a racial democracy developed gradually during the first half of the 1900s, with multiple contributors having a hand in its creation. While Freyre proclaimed the virtues of racial miscegenation, “ethnic democracy,” and “social democracy,” writers in the Afro-­ Brazilian press developed the idea of “racial fraternity,” of Brazil as a society in which people of mixed European, African, and indigenous descent were bound inextricably together in a national union.19 Even before the concept took definitive form in the 1940s, Brazilian racial democracy had caught the attention of African-­ Americans. In 1914, the Chicago Defender reported on its front page that “Brazil Welcomes Afro-­A mericans.” A series of breathless subtitles followed: “Young Chicago Man Visits Principal Cities in Brazil and Is Amazed at the Progress, Wealth and Lofty Positions Attained by Afro-­A mericans—​Races Continues [sic] to Intermarry and Live in Peace and Harmony, for the Common Good of the Country. ABSOLUTELY NO COLOR LINE IN BRAZIL.”20 In 1916, the paper returned to the theme of Brazil as “the elysian field of the Black people. If any doubt exist in the mind of the American white man that the Black people are incapable of self-­government he need only to see and study the Black people of this wonderful republic to be convinced.” Both houses of the Brazilian Congress were majority-­black, the paper reported, and Afro-­Brazilian former president Nilo Peçanha (1909–1910) was regarded as “the ablest”

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Brazilian president and the “elder statesman whose counsel and advice is always sought and adopted on all great government questions . . . ​Whites and blacks are equals in every respect, and no thought of one’s color ever enters the mind of anyone, no matter what the occasion . . . ​If there exist anywhere on earth an ideal spot for the black man it can without doubt safely be said to be the Republic of Brazil.”21 Similarly enthusiastic articles appeared in other black papers, and by 1921 the Brazilian-­A merican Colonization Syndicate was organizing a proposed migration by several hundred African-­A merican families to agricultural colonies in the western state of Mato Grosso. “Brazilians are very enthusiastic over the prospects of having a goodly number of American Negro colonists come into the country at this time as settlers,” reported the Norfolk Journal and Guide. “If appearances go for anything it truly looks good for the new colonists.”22 Those appearances turned out to be deceiving. The proposed African-­A merican colonization program had in fact provoked a tremendous uproar in Brazil and led to the introduction of a bill into Congress specifically barring black immigration into the country. Though the bill did not pass, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry instructed its consulates to issue no visas to African-­ American immigrants or tourists, effectively killing off the colonization project and almost thwarting the visit to Brazil of Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender.23 Abbott went to Brazil in 1923 to “ferret out . . . ​t he possible industrial, commercial and social opportunities for that enlightened and growing group of North American Negroes, who so recently are beginning to look to the South American continent as, after all, the most likely haven for a solution of their individual problems.” Once arrived, he found abundant evidence of “absolute social harmony. Negroes and whites intermarry without provoking the slightest social criticism. Further, the tendency seems to encourage intermarriage between widely different stocks, such as white and African—​t he ideal being a perfect political state thoroughly homogeneous in blood . . . ​ Negro people are evident on every hand, enjoying with inconceivable ease the entire facilities of a present-­day democracy.”24



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Abbott did acknowledge several troubling episodes that marred this racial idyll. First, he and his wife were denied visas by the Brazilian consul in Chicago. “His was a flat refusal, and that solely on the ground of [our] being Negroes.” Only after one of Illinois’s senators lodged repeated protests with the Brazilian embassy in Washington were the visas finally granted. Then upon arriving in Brazil, Abbott and his wife were refused rooms at the hotels in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo where they had reservations. All of this, Abbott noted, was in direct violation of the Brazilian constitution, yet it happened. “Why is such the case?”25 The answer was simple, responded Afro-­ Brazilian journalists who reported on the Abbotts’ visit: far from being a racial democracy, Brazil was a society in which racial discrimination and exclusion were daily occurrences. The couple’s treatment in the Rio and São Paulo hotels was far more representative of Brazilian racial realities than were the handfuls of Afro-­Brazilian professionals that Abbott excitedly reported meeting in each city. “The doors of society only open reluctantly” to those men, commented the São Paulo newspaper Kosmos, “forced open by their indomitable intellectual abilities. Is this the equality characteristic of true Brazilian democracy? . . . ​Illusion, pure illusion.”26 Despite the Abbotts’ mixed experience in Brazil, the Chicago Defender’s coverage of that country remained relentlessly positive through the 1920s and into the 1930s, as did that of the rest of the black press.27 Some papers even insisted that any barriers preventing African-­A merican visitors from traveling to Brazil were imposed not by that country but by the U.S. government, which did not want black Americans seeing a racial paradise firsthand and getting the wrong ideas.28 By the 1940s, however, African-­ A mericans were starting to take a second and closer look at Brazil. In 1940 the Baltimore Afro-­American sent correspondent Ollie Stewart to see whether reports that the country had no color line or color prejudice were true.29 On his first day in Rio de Janeiro, he immediately found that they were not. The Abbotts had been denied admission at two hotels; Stewart was turned away from eleven before he finally found a room. When he visited the University of Brazil (today the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), he saw “fewer colored than I would see

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on an average day at Harvard or New York University. Columbia and Chicago University [sic] have three times as many colored as the University of Brazil.” He did find large numbers of Afro-­Brazilians in the armed forces, including in the officer ranks, “and for this tolerance I want to give full credit to Brazil.” But even officers were paid very little, he reported, and the enlisted men even less. “If everything is on an equal basis, why were there no colored in the department of propaganda, agriculture, fine arts, commerce . . . ​?”30 Stewart wavered on the question of whether African-­A mericans should consider emigration to Brazil and other Latin American nations. At several points he suggested that “the American colored man can’t solve his problem by running off to Cuba, Santo Domingo or Brazil . . . ​My verdict is I’d rather be colored in the United States. At least I know what I’m up against.” At other points, however, he urged his readers to pursue business opportunities abroad and to “make a start by visiting Brazil. . . . ​Pioneers always catch hell. A colored man trying to get a toehold in business in Brazil or Santo Domingo or Haiti today would have to take plenty. But American whites take it. Germans take it. Englishmen take it.” African-­ Americans, he concluded, should join the competition.31 Also arriving in Brazil in 1940 was E. Franklin Frazier, later to go on to a distinguished career as first African-­A merican president of the American Sociological Association and head of the Division of Applied Social Sciences at UNESCO.32 Frazier spent four months in the northern state of Bahia conducting research on black family structure.33 In trying to evaluate racial conditions, Frazier found himself stymied by the fact that “there is, in Brazil, little discussion of the racial or color situation. It appears that there is an unexpressed understanding among all elements in the population not to discuss the racial situation, at least as a contemporary phenomenon.” As a result of that silence, and also because of the profound differences between how Brazilians and Americans think and act about race, “it is exceedingly difficult to discuss and make intelligible to Americans race relations, involving whites and Negroes, in Brazil.” Legal segregation did not exist in Brazil, blacks were absolutely free to participate in national life, and race mixture was so extensive that it was producing a population that “will not be white, but will be a fusion of white, black and red.” “Negro blood is not regarded as a



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taint nor does it identify one racially.” On these grounds, “it would appear that race and color prejudice did not exist in Brazil.”34 Frazier concluded, however, that those appearances were misleading. “When the situation is studied closely, it is found that there are distinctions based upon color and that certain social distances are maintained by a subtle system of etiquette.” This was especially the case in the upper and middle classes and “in the new type of social life which is developing in clubs and hotels,” which did not admit people of color. Those strictures were clearly in effect in Bahia and even more so in the southern states, where “color prejudice is much more marked than in the north.” Frazier attributed this regional difference to the presence of Italian and German immigrants in the southern states and resulting job competition between blacks and whites. Even so, “racial discrimination is not as strong even in southern Brazil as in the United States.” And while the upper and middle classes did enforce color lines, at the level of the working class “color distinctions and prejudices against the blacks are seemingly absent . . . ​It is among the laboring masses that race mixture is continuing on a large scale in Brazil” and will eventually transform the country into a single mixed-­race nation.35 The distinction that Frazier drew between race relations at the levels of the upper and middle classes and at the level of the working class was repeated in 1948 by journalist George Schuyler, though in much harsher terms. Titling his article in the Pittsburgh Courier “Brazilian Color Bias Growing More Rampant,” Schuyler opened with an account of the African-­A merican scholar Irene Diggs being refused a room at a hotel in Rio de Janeiro the year before and his own rejection at the same hotel.36 In two detailed and well documented articles, Schuyler reported on color bars in the Brazilian military and foreign service academies, in private schools, and in the city’s better hotels, restaurants, theaters, and social clubs. He reported on racial disparities in education and in hiring and employment. He reported on the housing situation and on the favelas, slum neighborhoods where “all colors and races are represented . . . ​but colored people predominate.”37 In the caption of a photograph of several black children, Schuyler predicted that “this group of typical Brazilian Negro children . . . ​ will find the future increasingly hard to master, with prejudice against

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Negroes constantly increasing in their country.” Schuyler did, however, point to two possible sources of hope. One was that Afro-­ Brazilians were mobilizing in defense of their rights, through the Frente Negra Brasileira, the União Nacional dos Homens de Cor, and the Teatro Experimental do Negro. E. Franklin Frazier had written about these organizations as well and had brought back to the United States a “Message to American Negroes” from the União Nacional dos Homens de Cor. Ultimately, however, he had concluded that the União and other black groups “lack the drive and motivation of similar [African-­A merican] organizations in the United States.”38 Schuyler disagreed, seeing in Afro-­ Brazilian mobilization an important counterweight to Brazilian racism. He drew this conclusion on the basis of his conversations with “the brilliant Abdias do Nascimento,” probably the foremost Afro-­Brazilian activist of the 1900s.39 At the time that Schuyler met him, Nascimento was the director of the Teatro Experimental do Negro and of Quilombo magazine and had begun organizing the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. Schuyler returned to Brazil the following year (1949) to attend the planning meetings for the congress; he gave a short speech urging Afro-­Brazilians to abandon their preoccupation (as he saw it) with color gradations and to unite as negros.40 Also working to counterbalance Brazilian racism, Schuyler felt, was the same racial mixing and convivência (harmonious living together) that Frazier had witnessed among the “laboring masses.” Schuyler found this “(to a U.S.A. citizen) a revelation. He sees interracial camaraderie on every hand. Here are black and white walking arm in arm . . . ​Here is a free association between all colors that is astonishing and reassuring. It shows that the masses of Brazilians do not share the social snobbery of the top whites. On beaches, in bars, in movies and on the street chromatic democracy seems to prevail.”41 Schuyler’s description of “chromatic democracy” embodied by “black and white walking arm in arm” is strikingly reminiscent of the “racial democracy” coined by French sociologist Roger Bastide in 1944. Writing in a São Paulo newspaper about his recent visit to the home of Gilberto Freyre in the suburbs of Recife, Bastide recalled how



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I returned to the city by streetcar. It was full of workers coming home from the factory, their tired bodies mixed with those of day-­t rippers returning from Dois Irmãos Park: a population of mestiços, whites and blacks fraternally gathered together, jammed together, piled onto one other in an enormous and friendly confusion of arms and legs. Close to me, a black man exhausted by the day’s labors let his heavy head, sleepy and covered in sweat, droop onto the shoulder of an office worker, a white man who carefully adjusted his shoulders to cradle the head, like that of a child, as if to caress it. And this was the beautiful image of social and racial democracy that Recife offered me on my way back from the outskirts of the city at dusk.42 In this passage Bastide combined the “racial fraternity” of the Afro-­ Brazilian press and Gilberto Freyre’s “social and ethnic democracy” to produce “racial democracy,” the term that would become Brazil’s semiofficial self-­image during the second half of the 1900s. It seems doubtful that Schuyler (who did not speak or read Portuguese) had read Bastide’s article; rather, when confronted by corporeal evidence of racial interaction, he interpreted what he saw in much the same way as Bastide. He stopped well short, however, of endorsing Brazil’s model of race relations. Rather, Schuyler observed, “Brazil is a mass of contradictions, just like the U.S.A., so that anything anybody says about inter-­racial relations, good or bad, is apt to be true.” And he chose to conclude his account with an extended quotation from Abdias do Nascimento denouncing “this veiled racial discrimination, mystified among the propositions of a constitution which defines all men equal before the law.”43 Robert Abbott, Ollie Stewart, E. Franklin Frazier, and George Schuyler all coincided in identifying hotels as one venue of Brazilian life in which discrimination was barely veiled, if at all. In 1949, six months after Schuyler had been refused admission to the Hotel Glória, Abdias do Nascimento and several colleagues were barred from attending a convention of journalists in the same hotel.44 A year later, African-­ A merican dancer Katherine Dunham was rejected from the Hotel Esplanada while on tour in São Paulo. Dunham’s angry protests provoked debate and discussion throughout Brazil,

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widespread condemnation of the hotel’s action, and passage the following year (1951) of the nation’s first antidiscrimination law, the Afonso Arinos law. “Decent Brazilians were outraged,” reported the Atlanta Daily World. In passing the law, Brazil “has recognized racial and color prejudice as a national evil and has moved to eradicate it on a national level. It has set an example of inter-­racial justice which all Americans might well follow.”45

Denouncing Racial Democracy The Afonso Arinos law, and the continuing translation and dissemination during the 1950s and ’60s of Gilberto Freyre’s works into English, led some African-­A merican observers to continue to see Brazil as “not only outdoing the U.S. in the field of race relations, but . . . ​setting a pattern for the entire world.” In the areas of science and technology, “Brazil is said to have learned a lot from America. But it may also be said that America could learn a lot from Brazil in the field of race relations.”46 Yet the 1950s also marked the beginning of a sea change in Brazil­ ians’ and foreigners’ perceptions of race and racism in that country. That change started with the bitter critiques of racial discrimination and inequality produced by Abdias do Nascimento and his colleagues at Quilombo and the First Congress of Brazilian Blacks, picked up steam with the findings of the UNESCO-­sponsored research of the early 1950s, and then continued through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s with a wave of studies by Brazilian researchers documenting pervasive racial inequality in Brazilian society.47 Meanwhile, in the United States the civil rights and Black Power movements were challenging and profoundly altering American ideas and policies concerning race. As a result of those movements in each country, while during the first half of the century African-­A merican visitors to Brazil had tended to see its racial situation as superior to that in the United States, during the second half of the century the terms of the comparison shifted. Visiting Brazil in 1965, Ebony correspondent and foreign affairs editor Era Bell Thompson detected and largely shared that grow­ ­ing sense of skepticism. She reported that the UNESCO research had “revealed a mild but growing form of discrimination in Brazil, a fact confirmed by some of the country’s leading sociologists and



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admitted in a few of its newspapers and periodicals.” Crisscrossing the country during a two-­month stay, she interviewed many of the country’s leading intellectuals on the subject, including Gilberto Freyre, Abdias do Nascimento, Raymundo Souza Dantas (Brazil’s first black ambassador), Senator Afonso Arinos de Melo (author of the 1951 antidiscrimination law), and many others.48 “Does amalgamation work in Brazil?” Thompson asked. By “amalgamation” she meant race mixture, the complexities of which she delved into with numerous interviews and photographs showing varying combinations of such mixture among whites, blacks, indigenous people, and people of mixed race. That last group, she noted, was becoming demographically dominant in Brazil, while the other three were “becoming extinct as the number of pardos increases.” In that sense, “amalgamation in Brazil is not only working, but working overtime.”49 “Amalgamation” did not mean, however, an end to racism or discrimination. Thompson opened one of her articles by describing her own encounter with discrimination in a restaurant in Santos. Her Brazilian hosts and the offending waiter all insisted to her that nothing untoward had taken place and that discrimination was unthinkable in Brazil. Thompson wasn’t having it. “Compared to the United States, Brazilians say, they do not have a race problem. They do, however, have racial prejudice and a system of discrimination based on skin color. . . . ​The darker a man is[,] the greater his problems.” And as growth and development continued in the future, “economic competition between the dark citizens and the light will surely cause friction. Inklings of this are already being heard in industrial São Paulo and the Europeanized South.”50 Those “inklings” then erupted in the 1970s in the form of a “new black movement” (so called to distinguish it from earlier movements in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s). African-­A merican observers detected strong resemblances between this mobilization and the U.S. civil rights movement. Reporting on the creation of the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) in 1978, journalist Hoyt Fuller found that the MNU’s demands “have a striking similarity to lists drawn up by Black activists in the United States two decades ago. [They] include police brutality; exclusion from public places; denial of jobs; degradation of

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Black culture; inadequate educational opportunities; the absence of Blacks from policy making positions; discrimination in the armed services; slum housing; high infant mortality; poor health services; and, important for Brazil, the exploitation of Black and mulatto women.” Afro-­Brazilians “no longer will quietly accept systematic discrimination and an automatic role at the bottom of the nation’s social, political and economic structures.”51 Fuller and others were not wrong to see parallels between the Brazilian and U.S. civil rights movements. The Brazilian movement was inspired in part by the achievements of civil rights activists in the United States and hoped to replicate some of their successes.52 Arising, however, from a different national history and national experience with race, inevitably the Afro-­Brazilian movements took different directions and adopted different strategies from those followed in the United States. For visiting African-­A mericans, those divergences could be disconcerting and disappointing. Political scientist Michael Hanchard spent several extended periods in Brazil in the 1980s interviewing Afro-­ Brazilian activists in Rio and São Paulo. He judged their collective efforts to represent “significant advances from previous generations of Afro-­Brazilian activism” but to still fall short of what would be required to overturn deeply embedded structures of racial subordination in Brazil.53 Part of that failure he laid at the door of the activists themselves. Instead of focusing on the practical politics of coalition-­building and creating a mass base, the black movement had pursued a “culturalist” agenda based on “the fetishization of cultural artifacts and expressions” derived from the African and Afro-­Brazilian past. The idea was that, by highlighting the central role of Africans and their descendants in creating the Brazilian nation, black movements would attract adherents (both black and white) to their cause and win support for government programs to fully integrate Afro-­Brazilians into national life. In pursuing that goal, however, “the practical dimensions of this expression, that of community outreach, grass-­ roots politics, were largely ignored. More important, there were no Afro-­Brazilian versions of boycotting, sit-­ins, civil disobedience, and armed struggle.” The result was “a fragmented and episodic subaltern politics” that failed to achieve its political goals.54 Hanchard acknowledged that not all of the blame for that failure



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should be ascribed to the black movement, which faced imposing obstacles not of its own making. One was the poverty both of the black organizations themselves and of the constituencies they sought to mobilize. Another was the hegemonic ideology of racial democracy, “which proclaim[s] the existence of racial egalitarianism in Brazil . . . ​ while producing racially discriminatory belief systems and practices at the same time.” In so doing, racial democracy provided a powerful ideological cover for racism and inequality, greatly impeding Afro-­Brazilians’ ability to identify the sources of their own oppression. This in turn made it less likely that they would join the struggling movements of the 1980s and 1990s.55 Hanchard expressed a vision of late–twentieth-­ century Brazil that was widely shared among African-­A merican visitors to the country. Earlier in the century, African-­A mericans had for the most part applauded the concept and practice of racial democracy. By the 1980s and ’90s, not only were they less likely to accept the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy, but many now saw the concept as one of the principal obstacles to the country’s ever achieving genuine racial equality. In the United States, the argument went, racial oppression was open, obvious, and perfectly visible. This made it easier to identify and, once identified, to struggle against. In Brazil, by contrast, racial oppression was concealed and covered over by a national discourse that proclaimed racial harmony and equality for all. As a result, Afro-­Brazilians were less likely to recognize racial inequality and discrimination as such and were correspondingly unmotivated to struggle against it. In the memorable formulation of anthropologist Angela Gilliam, “in the United States there is a machine gun aimed at my head. In Brazil, the same machine gun is aimed at my back, where I can’t see it.”56 In order to discover how racism could exist and even flourish in a country that claimed to be a racial democracy, sociologist France Winddance Twine settled into a small city in Rio de Janeiro state and spent the better part of a year there trying to talk with people about race and racism. It proved to be an uphill battle. As E. Franklin Frazier had found in Bahia fifty years earlier, “there are few subjects, if any, in Vasalia that are more difficult to discuss in private or public than racism . . . ​W hen I attempted to raise this issue, I was immediately silenced by residents who accused me of being a racist for simply

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calling attention to what I perceived to be racial disparities in employment, education, housing, and political representation.” In conversation after conversation, her informants, both white and black, resisted talking about race, either changing the subject or instead explaining inequality in Brazil in terms of social class. Twine recognized that a refusal to discuss racism, or even to acknowledge its existence, played a crucial social role for Afro-­Brazilians, enabling them to “sustain a sense of hope and dignity as they cope with pervasive racial inequalities.” But the consequences of silence were absolutely devastating, she concluded, rendering Afro-­Brazilians unable to challenge the country’s system of de facto white supremacy.57 Journalist Eugene Robinson came to very similar conclusions. Sent to Argentina in the early 1990s as South America correspondent for the Washington Post, Robinson traveled frequently to Brazil, where he initially had the same positive reactions as those of earlier African-­ American travelers to the country. In words echoing those of James Weldon Johnson almost a century before, he exulted that “Brazil, for the first time, offered me hope. Even a middle-­of-­the-­road, lapsed Methodist like me wanted to shout Hallelujah! . . . ​Brazil was my love, my inspiration, my revelation.” “The thing that so excited me about the future I saw in Brazil was the absence of solid walls. The categories I’d grown up with that were so much a part of my being—​ the categories black and white—​just tended to melt away in Brazil. . . . ​ I felt liberated from them, liberated to the point of exhilaration.”58 As he spent more time in the country, however, Robinson was increasingly troubled by the extreme inequality that pervades that society and by the role of racial-­democracy ideology in preserving that inequality. “I came to understand that structuring a society so that black people didn’t ‘have to be’ black didn’t seem to do much good for black people at all. That, in fact, it seemed to do them harm, to hold them down—​worse, to deny even the awareness that they were being held down, to deny them the language to talk about it and the anger to do something about it.”59 When Robinson traveled to Salvador, the unofficial capital of Afro-­ Brazil, he was initially impressed by the re-­ A fricanization movement in that city, which sought to bring Afro-­Brazilian music, dance, art, capoeira, religion, and other cultural expressions back to



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their African roots. “It all reminded me of the moment [in the U.S.], around 1967 or so, when black became beautiful.” But that moment in the United States, he went on to reflect, had been “about more than culture. It was, among other things, about wrestling away political power, and black people in Salvador had none; despite being a clear majority, they were not electing their candidates or even pushing their issues to the fore. It was about organizing to press for change, and black people in Salvador weren’t really doing that in any substantive way. It was about confronting white society with demands, about getting in the nation’s face and insisting on being seen and heard, and people in Salvador weren’t doing that either.”60 “There always comes a day in a love affair when infatuation wears off and you open your eyes and you see the object of your affections more clearly, more critically.” For Robinson, that day came during the Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro. As he watched the Bahianas who form an obligatory part of every samba school, he saw old, poverty-­stricken women being driven to perform for the largely white audience. “I saw the lines that crossed their brows; I saw the uneven, gapped teeth; I saw the cloudiness of their eyes. They whirled as if they would float away, but I saw the heaviness of their legs and the toughness of their feet, burdened feet. I saw their bodies, imperfect bodies that told their own histories, some too thin, many too fat, all with the sags and bulges that come from a combination of frequent childbearing and constant hard labor. Looking past the joy and glory of the moment, I saw hard lives. . . . ​ Amid all the beauty and excitement and joy of that evening, I saw something that was backward and ugly and wrong.”61

Reversing Course Over the course of the 1900s, African-­A merican visions of Brazil traced a 180-­degree arc. Early in the century African-­A merican visitors and newspapers had viewed the country in extravagantly positive terms and seen it as a possible haven for black Americans fleeing racial violence and oppression. By the end of the century, African-­ American observers had turned sharply negative in their evaluation of Brazil’s racial situation, now seeing it as “something that was backward and ugly and wrong.”

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Those negative judgments reflected in part African-­A merican observers’ opportunity to spend more time in the country, and to get to know it better, than had been the case in the early decades of the century. While none of the early-­t wentieth-­century visitors had been able to speak Portuguese, Hanchard, Twine, Gilliam, and other researchers were fluent in the language. This enabled them to burrow more deeply into local realities and to draw more informed, empirically based conclusions. But this shift in views was owing to more than just better-­ informed reporting. Observers in the early 1900s were comparing Brazil to the United States at one of the nadirs of the latter’s racial history, a time of widespread racial violence and oppression. By the end of the century, racial conditions had changed dramatically in the United States, much less so in Brazil. Civil rights movements in the United States had brought state-­mandated racial segregation to an end in the Southern states and pressed the country to enact civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. Partly as a result of those achievements, racial disparities in health, education, vocational achievement, earnings, and other areas all fell significantly in the United States between 1950 and 1990. In Brazil during those years, those same indicators remained more or less constant or in some areas—​most notably, employment patterns and measures of salary discrimination—​actually increased.62 As a result of those changes, comparisons of the racial situation in the two countries, whether implicit or explicit, now tended to favor the United States. But as in any research project, those comparative conclusions owed as much to the questions with which researchers began their inquiries as to the objective conditions that they found on the ground. Michael Hanchard began his fieldwork by asking, “Why has there been no sustained Afro-­Brazilian social movement in Brazil comparable to the civil rights movement in the United States?” France Winddance Twine’s goal was to explain “this paradox of pervasive racial inequality and the continued failure of antiracist organizations and antiracist policies to generate grassroots support among nonelites.”63 There should have been a social movement; there should have been grassroots support for antiracism. There wasn’t; why not? How and why did Afro-­Brazilians fail?



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Reading those questions, one is reminded of a 2001 think piece by Miguel Centeno and Fernando López-­A lves, two Latin American sociologists based in the United States. In that essay, Centeno and López-­A lves called for a more systematically theoretical approach to the study of Latin America, based on theory derived from the historical experiences of the region. Research on Latin America tends not to be theoretically driven, they argued; and when it is, those theories tend to be based on the histories, societies, and cultures of Europe or North America. When we look at Latin America through European or North American lenses, we tend to frame our questions in terms of what went wrong. Why did Latin America (supposedly) fail to make a successful transition from feudalism to capitalism, as (supposedly) happened in Europe? Why did industrialization and urbanization in Latin America not create modern, hegemonic middle classes, as (supposedly) happened in Europe and the United States? Or self-­ sustaining, dynamic national economies? What went wrong?64 “Imagining a standard outcome” against which all other cases are measured, argued Centeno and López-­A lves, “reduces comparative analysis to medical diagnosis. Our job is not to find what is ‘wrong’ with a patient but to understand how the body works.”65 Afro-­ Brazilian activist Luiza Bairros made precisely this point in her critical rejoinder to Hanchard’s book, suggesting that his research question should have been, not why Brazil didn’t follow the path of the United States, but rather, “on the basis of Brazil’s racial formation, what kind of black movement was created?”66 Instead of trying to figure out why Afro-­Brazilians don’t want to talk about racism, might we learn more by asking them what they do want to talk about?67 Instead of calling on black activists in Brazil to stage boycotts and sit-­ins, what if we asked them why they thought those strategies were not such a good idea? Why did they think culture is so important? How does the body of Afro-­Latin American soci­ ­ety work? Asking those questions puts us in a better position, I believe, to understand the dramatic changes that have taken place in Brazil and other countries of Afro-­Latin America during the last twenty years, changes that will surely require us to revise the comparisons of the late 1900s and our visions of Afro-­Latin America.

5 On Acting and Not Acting

A nother recent African-­A merican visitor to Brazil is the

individual whom we met at the very beginning of this book, literary critic and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Visiting the country in 2010, Gates shared his compatriots’ uneasiness about the concept of racial democracy and its effects on Afro-­ Brazilians. “Their country told them that racial democracy had made, or would make, everything all right and that there was no need to fight for equal rights. But today’s Brazil is a very long way from being a racial paradise, and any sensible black Brazilian—​and white Brazilian—​ knows that.”1 Survey data from Brazil confirm Gates’s sense that most Brazilians, regardless of race, are well aware of the extent of racial inequality in their country.2 That awareness is owing in large part to the ceaseless efforts of Brazil’s black movement, from the late 1970s to the present, to educate the nation on the realities of race in Brazil. Using the statistical data generated by the national census and household surveys, the testimonies of individual Afro-­Brazilians who have experienced discrimination and prejudice, and the growing body of scholarly research on the history of slavery and racial inequality in the country, the movement’s activists hammered home the message of Brazil as a profoundly unequal and unjust society in almost every sense, including racially unequal.3 It was that message, perhaps more than any other factor, that has produced what Gates did see as a potential source of hope in Brazil: the country’s “experiment with affirmative action in higher 88



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education,” which could “begin to accomplish in the twenty-­first century the sort of equality of opportunity that has proved to be so elusive in Brazil.” Attending a student debate at the State University of Rio de Janeiro on the use of racial quotas in university admissions, and reflecting on his own experiences in the 1960s as a beneficiary of affirmative action, Gates concluded that it “is not a perfect remedy for a history of discrimination, by any means; but it is the best system we have in the United States to address a past that can’t be altered.”4 Black activists in Brazil had started discussing the concept and practice of racial affirmative action during the 1980s. Their ideas received a sympathetic hearing from the administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002), a former sociology professor who, as a young researcher, had written extensively on racial inequality. Cardoso included proposals for affirmative action in his National Human Rights Program in 1996; and Brazil’s statement to the UN-­sponsored World Conference Against Racism, held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, acknowledged the country’s “historic responsibility for slavery and the economic, social, and political marginalization of the Africans’ descendants” and committed Brazil to a variety of public policies aimed at combating racial discrimination and inequality, including “the adoption of quotas or other affirmative measures to promote the access of blacks to public universities.”5 This last proposal was particularly significant. Unlike the United States, where the most prestigious institutions of higher learning tend to be private, in Brazil the most sought-­after schools are the federal and state universities, which offer high-­quality education free of charge to those students who score highest on national entrance examinations. Throughout the 1900s, those students were almost exclusively members of the white upper and middle classes (remember Ollie Stewart’s comments in the previous chapter on the absence of black students at the University of Brazil). Beginning in 2001, the State University of Rio de Janeiro took the unprecedented initiative of reserving 40 percent (reduced in 2003 to 20 percent) of the places in its entering class for black and brown applicants. By 2007 over thirty state and federal universities had enacted similar programs of racial set-­asides in admissions. Meanwhile, in 2004

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President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva created the University for All (ProUni) program, which provided federal scholarships that low-­ income graduates of public high schools could use to attend private universities. In each state, the number of ProUni scholarships awarded to Afro-­descendant and indigenous students had to be equal to the percentage of Afro-­descendants and indigenous people in the state population.6 The adoption of these programs was immensely controversial in Brazil, provoking widespread public debate and a wave of lawsuits to stop their implementation.7 Of those suits, the most consequential were three separate cases—​against the federal universities of Brasília and Rio Grande do Sul, and the ProUni program—​brought by the right-­w ing Democratas Party. Each case questioned the legality of racial set-­ asides, arguing that they violated the equal-­ protection clauses of the constitution of 1988. In decisions handed down in April and May of 2012, the Brazilian Supreme Court rejected all three suits, finding that, in the face of longstanding patterns of racial inequality in the country, racial quotas were a necessary means to achieve the constitution’s goals of “eradicating poverty and marginalization and reducing social and regional inequalities.”8 In the wake of those decisions, Brazil’s Congress approved in August 2012 a Law of Social Quotas that requires the country’s federal universities to reserve one-­half of their entering places for graduates of public high schools. Within that 50 percent quota, black, brown, and indigenous students must be included in numbers equal to their representation in the local population; at the same time, 50 percent of the quota students—​25 percent of all entering students—​ are required to have per capita family incomes that do not exceed 150 percent of the federally mandated minimum wage. The program is being phased in gradually during 2013–2017 and its results will be evaluated by a parliamentary commission in 2022.9 With this new legislation and the 2012 Supreme Court decisions, Brazil has embarked on a public policy experiment that combines race-­and class-­based affirmative action in tremendously creative ways.10 And Brazil is not alone in such experiments. Despite being much smaller and less institutionalized than its Brazilian counterpart, during the 1990s and early 2000s Uruguay’s black movement



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was able to provoke national debates on racial inequality very similar to those taking place in its northern neighbor. In its statement to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Uruguay committed itself to affirmative action policies “to compensate for social inequality in every possible sphere.” Following the election of President Tabaré Vázquez in 2005, special offices were created in the Ministry of Social Development to develop policies in support of Afro-­Uruguayan women and children. And in 2013 the Uruguayan General Assembly unanimously approved a law setting aside 8 percent of positions in all national agencies—​such as courts, legislature, and ministries—​for Afro-­Uruguayan jobseekers.11 Ecuador’s 2008 constitution obligated the state to implement affirmative action measures that would “promote real equality” and “guarantee the participation of discriminated sectors.” A presidential decree the following year mandated racial affirmative action policies in the areas of public and private employment. When that decree went largely unenforced, some 300 Afro-­Ecuadorian activists and community leaders marched from the Pacific coast to the national capital of Quito in 2012 to demand its full implementation. But as of 2014, “there is still no consolidated project of affirmative action per se.”12 Like Ecuador, Colombia’s 1991 constitution pledged the state “to promote conditions that will make equality real and effective” by adopting “measures in favor of discriminated and marginalized groups.” In 1996 the government created a national scholarship program for black students, the Fondo de Créditos Educativos. In 2004 planners in the National Council for Economic and Social Policy (CONPES) prepared an advisory report for the president and Congress on “Affirmative Action Policies for the Black or Afro-­ Colombian Population.” Included among its recommendations were the incorporation of racial data in the 2005 census and other government data-­gathering systems; increased social spending in areas of concentrated black population, such as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; expansion of the Fondo de Créditos Educativos program; and other provisions. In 2007 President Alvaro Uribe convened a working group of government officials and Afro-­Colombian activists, headed by Vice President Francisco Santos Calderón, to draw

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up a national action plan to combat racial inequality. The group presented its report in 2009, calling for, among other policies, affirmative action programs in education and employment. In 2012 the Ministry of the Interior incorporated the group’s recommendations into a comprehensive omnibus bill, the Law for the Participation and Representation of Black and Afro-­Colombian Communities, that it submitted to the Senate for approval.13 The bill did not fare well, being tabled in committee and never voted on. Its numerous proposals for affirmative-­action policies in education, employment, housing, politics, collective land-­ownership, and community governance may simply have been too much for Congress to take on. But especially in light of the descriptions of Afro-­ Colombian invisibility with which this book began, it is striking to note the bill’s preamble, which described the proposed law as reflecting a “qualitative change” in the Colombian state’s understanding of national society, “especially in the recognition of the role that Afro-­Colombians have played throughout our history.” Describing Afro-­ Colombians as the “foundation” of Colombian national identity, the bill highlighted their contributions to popular culture through “practices and customs constructed over several centuries of struggle and resistance,” and their political role in the “consolidation and transformation of the [national] State.” And yet, the preamble went on to add, those roles were not as widely known and celebrated as they should be, whence the bill’s proposals for mandatory instruction, at all educational levels, in Afro-­Colombian history and culture, and a special fund, to be administered by Colciencias, the Colombian equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States, to support scholarly research on “the Afro-­Colombian ethnic group.” Such teaching and research were essential, the Ministry argued, to ensure that “the names, the achievements, the blood and the sweat of the men and women who gave their lives to achieve the democracy that we enjoy today” would be remembered and communicated to future generations.14 Much has changed over the last one hundred years. From a position of supposed “invisibility” in their national societies, Afro-­Latin Americans have moved to center stage and are now acknowledged as crucial participants in their nations’ past, present, and future. And



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having envisioned themselves for much of the twentieth century as racial democracies, Latin American nations are now taking action to make those visions real. Their efforts in that direction will be enormously consequential both for their own societies and, I believe, for the world at large. At the midpoint of the 1900s, racial democracy offered a hopeful alternative to the racism of Nazism, U.S. and South African segregation, and European colonialism. To those seeking models of how to structure multiracial societies in better and more humane ways, racial democracy sounded almost too good to be true; which, as it turned out, was indeed the case. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, by the end of the 1900s, census data and closer scrutiny of racial realities in the region had revealed racial democracy’s tenuous connection with social, economic, and political reality. But as we also saw in Chapter 3, reports of racial democracy’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Úrsula de Jesús, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, Ricardo Batrell, and María de los Reyes Castillo knew better than anyone that their societies were not racially egalitarian. But they also believed fervently in racial equality as an ideal and as an achievable social goal. Their faith is shared today by black and indigenous movements throughout the region, which have promoted broad-­ranging and serious debates on how to achieve that equality. Those debates are not about whether to achieve racial equality; the longstanding acceptance of racial democracy as a treasured national ideal makes that point moot. Once it has been demonstrated that racial equality does not yet exist, the only remaining question is how best to arrive at that goal. At a time when the United States has largely abandoned the concept of affirmative action as a policy tool to combat racial inequality, Latin America as a region is moving in the opposite direction, and in so doing, has launched itself on a bold social and political experiment.15 Whatever the outcome, I suspect that that experiment is only the beginning of Latin Americans’ efforts to achieve genuine racial equality. Just as North Americans (and others) traveled to Latin America in the 1900s to see racial democracy in action, I predict that in this current century they will be looking to the region again for examples of how nations acknowledge their pasts and take action in the present to become the societies that they truly wish to be.

Notes

1

On Seeing and Not Seeing 1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 3. See also the PBS programs that Gates filmed during those trips, available at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-­in-­latin-­america/. 2. Gates, Black in Latin America, 63, 110, 131, 144. 3. Ibid., 38, 48, 50, 203, 214, 217–220. 4. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-­Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 198; “Invisibilización y barbarie,” El Afroargentino: La voz de nuestra comunidad, Oct. 2014, 4–5; Romero Jorge Rodríguez, Racismo y derechos humanos en Uruguay (Montevideo: Organi­ zaciones Mundo Afro, 2003), 57; Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-­Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4, 19, 338; Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 1; Nina S. de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha, “Colombia,” in No Longer Invisible: Afro-­Latin Americans Today, ed. Minority Rights Group (London: Minority Rights Publications, 1995), 47. On Venezuela, see Winthrop Wright, Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4; on Mexico, see Ben Vinson III and Bobby Vaughan, Afroméxico: El pulso de la población negra en México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), 15–16, and María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 272; on Central America, see Rina Cáceres Gómez, ed., Del olvido a la memoria: Africanos y afromestizos en la historia colonial de Centroamérica (San José: San José, C. R.: Oficina Regional de la UNESCO para Centroámerica y Panamá, 2008). 5. Friedemann and Arocha, “Colombia,” 47; Minority Rights Group, No Longer Invisible.

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6. On recent developments in the region, see Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 151–164; Robert J. Cottrol, The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 238– 291; Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 250–300. Mexico’s census agency, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, is still debating whether to include a black racial category in the census of 2020. “Negro? Prieto? Moreno? A Question of Identity for Black Mexicans,” New York Times (Oct. 25, 2014). 7. Gates, Black in Latin America, 115–116. 8. Wright, Café con leche, 4; Helg, Liberty and Inequality, 2. For population figures, see Chapter 2. 9. For overviews and syntheses of that scholarship, see George Reid Andrews, Afro-­ Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Peter Wade, “Afro-­Latin Studies: Reflections on the Field,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, 1 (2006): 105–124; Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2009); George Reid Andrews, “Afro-­Latin America: Five Questions,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 4, 2 (2009): 191–210. 10. Anani Dzidzienyo, “Activity and Inactivity in the Politics of Afro-­Latin M ichel Fontaine, America,” SECOLAS Annals 9 (1978): 48–61; Pierre-­ “Research in the Political Economy of Afro-­Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 15, 2 (1980): 11–41. 11. Thomas M. Stephens, Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). On “Afro-­ descendants,” see the Decenio Internacional de los Afrodescendientes, declared by the UN General Assembly for the period 2015–2024. Available at http://www.un.org/es/events/africandescentdecade/index.shtml. 12. In addition to the United States and Latin America, 2.1 million Africans came to the British Caribbean, 1.1 million to the French Caribbean (mainly Haiti), and 0.4 million to the Dutch and Danish Caribbean. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” American Historical Review 120, 2 (2015): 440. Of the four most important slave ports in the New World (i.e., those that received the largest numbers of enslaved Africans), three (Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife) were located in Brazil. David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 204. 13. On notarial registries, see Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). On the use of such registries to recover slave voices, see José Ramón Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650–1700) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005). 14. Alejandro de la Fuente, ed., Su “único derecho”: Los esclavos y la ley, special issue of Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004); Lyman L. Johnson, “   ‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect’: Slaves and Their Masters in the Courts of



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Late Colonial Buenos Aires,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, 4 (2007): 631–657; Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, 4 (2007): 652–692; Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 122–156; Frank Trey Proctor III, “An ‘Imponderable Servitude’: Slave versus Master Litigation for Cruelty (Maltratamiento or Sevicia) in Late Eighteenth-­ Century Peru,” Journal of Social History 48, 3 (2015): 662–684. 15. Johnson, “   ‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience’,” 634, 657. For a rich collection of such cases, see Gloria García Rodríguez, Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-­Century Cuba: A Documentary History, trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 16. The number of Africans arriving in Spanish America and Brazil rose from 1.1 million between 1700 and 1760 to 2.0 million between 1760 and 1820. Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat, “Atlantic History,” 440. 17. Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Manuel Barcia, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A história do levante dos Malês em 1835, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). 18. For one of the few Spanish clerics who did gather ethnographic data on his African charges, see Alonso Sandoval, Treatise on Slavery, ed. and trans. Nicole Von Germeten (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008). 19. On public street dances in the early 1800s, see John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 91–113. 20. On the African mutual aid societies, see David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-­Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 25–61; Oscar Chamosa, “   ‘To Honor the Ashes of Their Forebears’: The Rise and Crisis of African Nations in the Post-­ Independence State of Buenos Aires, 1820–1860,” The Americas 59, 3 (2003): 347–378; Nina S. de Friedemann, “Cabildos negros: Refugios de africanía en Colombia,” Caribbean Studies 23, 1/2 (1990): 83–97; Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion, 96–120. 21. On manumission, see Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 195–206. 22. On the caste regime, see Martínez, Genealogical Fictions; O’Toole, Bound Lives. 23. Andrews, Afro-­Latin America, 41. 24. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 49–67; Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 171–226.

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25. Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 69. On black strategies of upward mobility, see Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 26. Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). 27. Cuba’s gradual emancipation law was decreed by Spain in 1870; Brazil’s was passed by Parliament in 1871. 28. Wright, Café con leche, 4; Hebe Mattos, Das cores do silêncio, 3rd ed. (Campi­ ­ as: Editora da UNICAMP, 2013), 101–107; de la Fuente, Nation for All, 32. n 29. Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-­ Cuban Modernity and Tradition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 224. 30. Quoted in Jesús Chucho García, Afrovenezuela: Una visión desde adentro (Caracas: Editorial Apicum, 1992), 64. 31. Nicolás Sánchez-­A lbornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 155, 167. 32. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race / La raza cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 20, 38, 60, 78. On similar ideas in other countries, see Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 33. Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Alejandro de la Fuente, “Myths of Racial Democracy: Cuba, 1900– 1912,” Latin American Research Review 34, 3 (1999): 34–73; Paulina Laura Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-­ Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 34. Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of A merican Latin America in the 20th Century (Washington, D.C.: Inter-­ Development Bank, 1998), 97–158. 35. Andrews, Afro-­Latin America, 173–182. 36. Pietro Pisano, Liderazgo político “negro” en Colombia, 1943–1964 (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012), 65–109; de la Fuente, Nation for All, 161–171; George Reid Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-­ Uruguay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 96–111; Alberto, Terms of Inclusion, 110–223. 37. Ezequiel Adamovsky, “Race and Class through the Visual Culture of Peronism,” in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina: Shades of the Nation, eds. Paulina Laura Alberto and Eduardo Elena (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 38. Amilcar Araujo Pereira, O mundo negro: Relações raciais e a constituição do movimento negro contemporâneo no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas Editora, 2013); Kwame Dixon and John Burdick, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Afro-­Latin America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 135–304; Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Black Social Movements in Latin America: From Monocultural Mestizaje to Multiculturalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).



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39. That trend began with Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). For more recent contributions, see Micol Siegel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-­ Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Tiffany D. Joseph, Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

2

On Counting and Not Counting 1. Sidney Chalhoub, A força da escravidão: Ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012), 13–27; quotation on 18. See also Nelson Senra, História das estatísticas brasileiras, vol. 1, Estatísticas desejadas (1822-­c. 1889) (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], 2006), 150–171; Mara Loveman, “Blinded Like a State: The Revolt against Civil Registration in Nineteenth-­Century Brazil,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 1 (2007): 5–39. 2. Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 146–162. In the absence of such a campaign in 2000, the percentage of Brazilians identifying as black or brown fell that year to 45, the same level as in 1980. George Reid Andrews, “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States, 1990–2010,” Journal of Social History 47, 4 (2014): figure 1. 3. On those campaigns, see Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 250–300; Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández and Sabine Kradolfer, eds., Everlasting Countdowns: Race, Ethnicity and National Censuses in Latin American States (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). 4. Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13; James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 77. 5. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 35–69; Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 51–59, 101–104. 6. This was the case in the United States as well, where racial self-­ identification began with the census of 1960. Melissa Nobles, “Racial Categorization and Censuses,” in David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 49. 7. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, “Censuses, Identify Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,” in Kertzer and Arel, Census and Identity, 2.

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8. Ann Morning, “Ethnic Classification in Global Perspective: A Cross-­ National Survey of the 2000 Census Round,” Population Research and Policy Review 27, 2 (2008): 245–248. 9. R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara, eds., Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Joanne Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 10. Adrian J. Pearce, “The Peruvian Population Census of 1725–1740,” Latin American Research Review 36, 3 (2001): 69–104; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), 220–223. 11. Ramón de la Sagra, Historia económico-­política y estadística de la isla de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta de las Viudas de Arazoza y Soler, 1831), 1–14; Katherine J. Curtis and Francisco Scarano, “Puerto Rico’s Population Padrones, 1779– 1802,” Latin American Research Review, 46, 2 (2011): 200–213. 12. David Cahill, “Colour by Numbers: Racial and Ethnic Categories in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532–1824,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, 2 (1994): 339; John R. Fisher, Bourbon Peru, 1750–1824 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 55. 13. Hermes Tovar Pinzón et al., Convocatoria al poder del número: Censos y estadísticas de la Nueva Granada, 1750–1830 (Bogotá: Archivo General de la Nación, 1994), 68–72; John V. Lombardi, People and Places in Colonial Venezuela (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 132. 14. Officials in Costa Rica did not use the term ladino but did combine mestizos and mulattos in a single category. Summary reports from Central American population counts are on deposit at the Archivo General de Centro América and were generously provided to me by Rina Cáceres. 15. For those numbers and how they were calculated, see George Reid Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Andrews, Afro-­ Press, 2004), 41, 203–207. In addition to sources cited there, see, on Nicaragua, Justin Wolfe, The Everyday Nation-­State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-­ Century Nicaragua (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 7, 156; on Honduras, Darío Euraque, “La diáspora africana en Honduras: Entre la esclavitud colonial y la modernidad del protagonismo Garífuna,” in Rina Cáceres, ed., Del olvido a la memoria: Africanos y afromestizos en la historia colonial de Centroamérica (San José: Oficina Regional de la UNESCO, 2008), 42–43. 16. The quotation is from the Argentine national census of 1895. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-­ Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 66, 106. On Uruguay, see George Reid Andrews, Blacks in the White Nation: A History of Afro-­Uruguay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010), 2–8. 17. Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1888 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 60–84. 18. Andrews, “Racial Inequality,” 233.



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19. “Evolução da raça,” in Diretoria Geral de Estatística, Recenseamento do Brasil, realizado em 1 de setembro de 1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. da Estatística, 1922), 312–344; quotations on 313, 324, 326. 341. 20. Ibid., 343. 21. Senra, História das estatísticas, vol. 2, 472–473; Mara Loveman, “The Race to Progress: Census Taking and Nation Making in Brazil (1870–1920),” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, 3 (2009): 460–463. The race question had also been removed from the census of 1900, with no explanation. 22. Loveman, National Colors, 113. 23. Antonio R. Vallejo, Censo general de la República de Honduras levantado el 15 de junio de 1887 (Tegucigalpa: Tipografía del Gobierno, 1888); Wolfe, Everyday Nation- ­State, 154–157. For estimates of Honduras’s black and mulatto population (6.7 percent in 1910), see Euraque, “La diáspora africana,” 41. 24. T. Lynn Smith, “The Racial Composition of the Population of Colombia,” Journal of Inter-­American Studies 8, 2 (1966): 214–218. 25. Loveman, National Colors, 207–249. 26. Mala Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 39, 1 (2004): 60–89; Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 148–170. 27. For evidence of that recognition, see Inter-­ A merican Development Bank, Facing Up to Inequality in Latin America (Washington: Inter-­A merican Development Bank, 1998); David Ferranti et al., Inequality in Latin America: Breaking with History? (Washington: The World Bank, 2004); Gustavo Márquez et al., eds., Outsiders? The Changing Pattern of Exclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington: Inter-­A merican Development Bank, 2007). 28. Corinne Lennox and Carlos Minott, “Inclusion of Afro-­Descendents in Ethnic Data Collection: Towards Visibility,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 18, 2 (2011): 257–275. 29. Racial and ethnic questions for the 2000 and 2010 rounds of censuses are listed in Loveman, National Colors, 256–263. 30. David Sulmont and Néstor Valdivia, “From Pre-­Modern ‘Indians’ to Contemporary ‘Indigenous People’: Race and Ethnicity in Peruvian Censuses, 1827–2007,” in Angosto Ferrández and Kradolfer, Everlasting Countdowns, 201–204. 31. Mónica Martínez Mauri, “The Social and Political Construction of Racial and Ethnic Categories in National Censuses of Panama, 1911–2010”; Gloria Patricia Lopera Mesa, “Who Counts Indigenous People, How Are They Counted, and What for? Census Policies and the Construction of Indigeneity in Colombia”; and Luis Fernando Angosto Ferrández, “National Censuses and Indigeneity in Venezuela,” all in Angosto Ferrández and Kradolfer, Everlasting Countdowns. 32. Tianna Paschel, “    ‘The Beautiful Faces of My Black People’: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Colombia’s 2005 Census,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, 10 (2013): 1551, 1556, n. 8.

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33. Paschel, “   ‘The Beautiful Faces’,” 1557; Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadísticas (DANE), Colombia, una nación multicultural: Su diversidad étnica (Bogotá: DANE, 2007). LAPOP figures available at http://lapop .ccp.ucr.ac.cr/Lapop_English.html. 34. Ecuador, Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda, 2010. Available at http://redatam.inec.gob.ec/cgibin/RpWebEngine.exe/PortalAction?BASE =CPV2010. 35. Venezuela, Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), XIV Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda: Resultados total nacional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela (Caracas: INE, 2014), 29. 36. Ibid., 66. 37. Ibid., 66. The agency’s definition of negros appears to be taken almost verbatim from Ligia Montañez, El racismo oculto en una sociedad no racista (Caracas: Editorial Tropykos, 1993), 142. 38. Adriana Bolívar et al., “Discurso y racismo en Venezuela: Un país ‘café con leche’,” in Teun A. Van Dijk, ed., Racismo y discurso en América Latina (Barcelona: Editorial Gedisa, 2007), 387–388. On the meanings of moreno in other countries, see Tanya Maria Golash-­Boza, Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 97–101; Christina A. Sue, Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 36–45, 55–57; Edward Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 82–85. 39. INE, XIV Censo Nacional, 29, 66; Edward Telles and René Flores, “Not Just Color: Whiteness, Nation, and Status in Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 93, 3 (2013): 433–434, 447. 40. Luis Ángel López Ruiz and David Delgado Montaldo, Situación socioeconómica de la población afrodescendiente de Costa Rica según datos del X Censo Nacional de Población y VI de Vivienda 2011 (Panama City: PNUD, 2013), 11–16. 41. Edward E. Telles and PERLA, Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race and Color in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 10. 42. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC), Censo nacional de población, hogares y viviendas 2010, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires, INDEC, 2012), 295–305. 43. Marisa Bucheli and Wanda Cabella, Perfil demográfico y socioeconómico de la población uruguaya según su ascendencia racial (Montevideo: INE, 2007), 10–11. See also Wanda Cabella et al., La población afrouruguaya en el Censo 2011 (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2013). 44. Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información (ONEI), Resumen adelantado: Resultados definitivos de indicadores seleccionados en Cuba, provincias y muni­ cipios (Havana: ONEI, n.d.), 17–18, 68–74. 45. Marcelo Paixão et al., eds., Relatório anual das desigualdades raciais no Brasil, 2009–2010 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Garamond, 2010), 81–83. As of 2011, the total fertility rate (number of children born to a woman over her lifetime) was 1.6 for white women, 2.2 for black and brown women. IBGE, Síntese de indicadores sociais, 2012 (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 2012), table 1.5. 46. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, 1 (1995): 131–168. On the “special period,” see Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in



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Twentieth-­Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 317–334. The sample of the 2002 Cuban census, and census samples from other countries as well, is available at the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) website of the Minnesota Population Center, https://international .ipums.org/international-­action/samples. 47. On those policies and their impacts, see Albert Fishlow, Starting Over: Brazil since 1985 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2011); Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada (IPEA), Perspectivas da política social no Brasil (Brasília: IPEA, 2010); Marcelo Côrtes Neri, A nova classe média: O lado brilhante dos pobres (Rio de Janeiro: FGV / IBRE, 2010). 48. Andrews, “Racial Inequality.” 49. Public-­access electronic files of all the censuses except for Brazil’s are available at the UN-­ECLAC website, http://celade.cepal.org/redbin/RpWebEngine .exe/Portal?&MODE=BASE&ITEM=CPVAMLAT. A 5-­ percent sample of Brazil’s 2010 census is available both at the IBGE website, http://loja.ibge.gov.br /censo-­demografico-­2010-­microdados-­da-­amostra.html, and at the IPUMS website, https://international.ipums.org/international-­action/samples. 50. Susan Kellogg, Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 124, 141–142, 156–157, 165. 51. Guillermo Cruces et al., Situación socioeconómica da la población afroecuatoriana en el marco de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (Panama City: PNUD, 2010), table AI.5a; Bucheli and Cabella, Perfil sociodemográfico, table 21. 52. Lucía Scuro Somma, ed., Población afrodescendiente y desigualdades étnico-­ raciales en Uruguay (Montevideo: PNUD, 2008); Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation; Winthrop Wright, Café con leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Bolívar et al., “Discurso y racismo.” 53. United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UN-­ECLAC), Social Panorama of Latin America, 2013 (Santiago: UN-­ECLAC, 2014), table I.A.3. 54. http://celade.cepal.org/redbin/RpWebEngine.exe/Portal?&MODE =BASE&ITEM=CPVAMLAT. 55. All figures from the 2010 round of national censuses except for Chile, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Peru, which did not gather data on their Afro-­descendant populations. For those countries I tabulated the percentage of respondents in the 2010 LAPOP surveys who identified as black or brown in each country and applied that percentage to the 2010 census totals to generate an estimated Afro-­descendant population. LAPOP data available at http://lapop.ccp.ucr.ac.cr/Lapop_ English.html. For comparable numbers for the region based on a similar statistical procedure, see Telles et al., Pigmentocracies, 26–27.

3

Afro-­Latin American Voices 1. On slave petitions and court cases, see María Eugenia Chaves, La estrategia de libertad de una esclava del siglo XVIII: Las identidades de amo y esclavo

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en un puerto colonial (Quito: Ediciones Abya-­ Yala, 1999); Gloria García Rodríguez, Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth-­Century Cuba: A Documentary History, trans. Nancy L. Westrate (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On black cultural and social organizations, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, People of Faith: Slavery and African Catholics in Eighteenth-­Century Rio de Janeiro, trans. Jerry Dennis Metz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-­Mexicans (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006); Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Puzzling Out Slave Origins in Rio de Janeiro Port Unionism: The 1906 Strike and the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiche e Café,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86, 2 (2006): 205–45. On black newspapers, see Paulina L. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-­Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Lea Geler, Andares negros, caminos blancos: Afroporteños, Estado, y Nación (Rosario: Prohistoria Ediciones, 2010); George Reid Andrews, “Afro-­ World: African-­ Diaspora Thought and Practice in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1830–2000,” The Americas 67, 1 (2010): 83–107. For collections of interviews, Haroldo Costa, Fala, crioulo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1982, 2009); Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afro-­Cuban Voices: On Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Teresa Porzecanski and Beatriz Santos, eds., Historias de exclusión: Afrodescendientes en el Uruguay (Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 2006). 2. In addition to the texts discussed in this chapter, see Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiography of a Slave, ed. Ivan Schulman, trans. Evelyn Picon Garfield (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996); Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Runaway Slave, trans. Nick Hill (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994); Maria Carolina de Jesus, Child of the Dark, trans. David St. Clair (New York: E.  P. Dutton, 1962); José Correia Leite, E disse o velho militante José Correia Leite, ed. Cuti (São Paulo: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1992); María Elena Moyano, The Autobiography of María Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activist, ed. Diana Miloslavich Tupac, trans. Patricia S. Taylor Edmisten (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Benedita da Silva, Benedita da Silva: An Afro-­Brazilian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love, ed. Medea Benjamin and Maisa Mendonça (Berkeley: Food First Books, 1997); and others. 3. Doris Sommer, Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4. On the complexities of reading and analyzing autobiographical texts, especially those by “minority” authors, see also Rosalind C. Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Paul John Eakin, ed., The Ethics of Life Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Sylvia Molloy, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially 36–54. 4. On “living the big changes,” defined as “ordinary people’s experience of large structural changes,” see Charles Tilly, “Retrieving European Lives,” in



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Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 11–52; quotation from 15. More recently, see Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragments / Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39, 3 (2006): 615–630. 5. Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo (Havana: Seoane y Alvarez, 1912); Ricardo Batrell, A Black Soldier’s Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence, ed. and trans. Mark Sanders (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 202; William Acree and Alex Borucki, eds., Jacinto Ventura de Molina y los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata (Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 2008), 65, 91. See also María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno’s concern that historians of the Afro-­Cuban experience “don’t go deep enough” and that “in the end, the[ir] books don’t really reflect reality that well.” María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno, ed. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, trans. Anne McLean, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 31; Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, sencillamente (Testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenaria) (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1997), 27. 6. Nancy E. van Deusen, ed. and trans., The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-­ Century Afro-­ Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 1–5. 7. Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 8. Van Deusen, Souls of Purgatory, 22–32; Burns, Colonial Habits, 101–131; Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 116–76. 9. On spiritual diaries and autobiographies, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Kristine Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). 10. Van Deusen, Souls of Purgatory, 98, 135, 177. 11. Ibid., 98, 177. 12. This fear was not uncommon among female mystics, including the most famous such figure, Saint Teresa of Ávila. Jodi Bilinkoff, The Ávila of Santa Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-­Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 118. 13. Miguel Angel Rosal, Africanos y afrodescendientes en el Río de la Plata. Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2009), 172. 14. João José Reis, Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-­ Century Brazil, trans. H. Sabrina Gledhill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 187–215; Soares, People of Faith, 168–172; von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers. 15. Van Deusen, Souls of Purgatory, 79, 83, 167, 170. 16. Ibid., 84, 111, 172. 17. Using police records, Harding estimates that 39 percent of the leaders of Candomblé congregations in nineteenth-­ century Salvador were female.

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Rachel Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 74; see also J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Brazilian Candomblé (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 188– 213. On black women as the targets of Inquisition investigations, see Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala, 1650–1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 29; Nicole von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 103–143; Joan Bristol, Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-­Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 149–189. 18. Van Deusen, Souls of Purgatory, 118, 124, 125, 185, 186. 19. Ibid., 79, 81, 84, 87, 167. 20. Ibid., 80, 123, 167, 185; emphasis added. 21. Ibid., 96, 121, 133. 22. Ibid., 88, 93–94, 117, 148–149, 173, 175. 23. Ibid., 151. 24. Ibid., 80, 168. 25. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 137. See also Molina’s thoughts on how “the human genus is naturally and essentially one general society” divided into “the different nations on the face of the Earth.” All nations have the same needs and obligations, he asserted, and “each nation . . . ​ is like a province of the great kingdom of Nature.” Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 130. 26. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina; quotation from William Acree, “Jacinto Ventura de Molina: A Black Letrado in a White World of Letters, 1766–1841,” Latin American Research Review 44, 2 (2009): 38. Also on Molina, see Alex Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in Montevideo, 1770–1850 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 183-­214; Alejandro Gortázar, El licenciado negro: Jacinto Ventura de Molina (Montevideo: Trilce, 2007); Alejandro Gortázar, ed., Jacinto Ventura de Molina: Antología de manuscritos (Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 2008). 27. On probanzas de mérito, as such documents were called, see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 123–128. 28. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 161. 29. Ibid., 56, 68, 75, 117. 30. Ibid., 60, 66. 31. Ibid., 60, 83–84. 32. Wim Kloosters, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 33. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 77–78. 34. Borucki, “From Shipmates to Soldiers,” 186–188.



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35. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 146–164. 36. Ibid., 82, 204. 37. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 113–114; Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 162. On salas de nación in Montevideo, see Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers, 147–182. 38. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 129, 139. 39. Ibid., 139. 40. On Batrell, see Mark Sanders, “Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban Racial Narrative: An Introduction to A Black Soldier’s Story,” and “Looking for Ricardo Batrell in Havana: An Appendix Essay,” in Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, ix-­l xvi, 207–222; Fernando Martínez Heredia, “Ricardo Batrell empuña la pluma,” in Fernando Martínez Heredia et al., eds., Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912 (Havana: Ediciones UNION, 2001), 292–313; Rosabal Blancamar León, “Ricardo Batrell, un expediente inconcluso,” in Martínez Heredia, Espacios, silencios, 314–322. On Juan Gualberto Gómez, see Leopoldo Horrego Estuch, Juan Gualberto Gómez, un gran inconforme, 2nd ed. (Havana: Editorial de las Ciencias Sociales, 2004). 41. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 17; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 16. For the most part I will be quoting from Mark Sanders’s translation of Batrell’s text. Occasionally, however, I will use my own translations of Batrell. In such instances the note will cite the Spanish text first, followed by the equivalent reference in the English-­language edition. Conversely, when the English-­ language edition is cited first, I am quoting from the Sanders translation. 42. On Ortega (also known as Sanguily), see Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 150, 159. 43. Molina referred frequently to the fact that his father, Ventura, had saved General Molina’s life in battle. Acree and Borucki, Jacinto Ventura de Molina, 56–57. 44. Sanders, “Introduction,” l-­li; for the incident itself, see Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 124–127; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 106–109. 45. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 141; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 122. Ferrer estimates that the Liberation Army was “at least” 60 percent Afro-­ Cuban. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 3. See also Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-­Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 56–59. 46. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 12–13; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 12. 47. See the cases of Cajizote, Severino, Martín Duen, and others. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 38–40, 84–85, 140–142, 200–202. Quotation from 197. 48. Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 122; Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 141. 49. See the famous incident, often cited by historians, of the black aide-­de-­ camp Ciríaco carrying his wounded white commander, Colonel Dantín, and then, when Ciríaco was mortally wounded, Dantín reversing the roles by carrying his aide. “That truly was democracy, with all of its beautiful attributes. Here was the human reciprocity that all people, nations, and civilized men fight to achieve.” Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 29; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 26. 50. Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 166; Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 193. 51. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 91–139; Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-­ Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 99–137.

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52. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 29; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 26; Sanders, “Introduction,” xlvi-­x lvii; Martínez Heredia, “Ricardo Batrell,” 304, n. 23; Helg, Our Rightful Share, 143–144. On the Partido Independendiente de Color, see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 193–226; de la Fuente, A Nation for All, 66–91; Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 216–252. 53. Diago was one of those white officers who displayed “exceptional valor . . . ​Cuba would be happy if many of its white sons were like Colonel Diago.” Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 60; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 50. 54. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 23–55; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 128–37. 55. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 195. 56. Batrell, Black Soldier’s Story, 29; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia, 25. 57. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 31; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 27. 58. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 26–29, 48–54. On Afro-­Cuban membership in the UNIA, see Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-­ Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 61–106. 59. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 83–84, 119–121, 137–140. 60. Ibid., 109; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 98. 61. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 59; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 59. 62. Reyita’s mother Isabel was a woman of mixed race, with an African mother and a white Cuban father. Reyita describes her siblings Pepe and María as “almost white, [with] fine, not very curly hair.” Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 33; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 30. 63. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 21–22; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 17. 64. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 61; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 60. In the Cuban edition of the book, Reyita’s daughter Daisy reports on her efforts, eventually successful, to reestablish contact with members of the Rubiera family. Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 165–171. 65. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 85–86; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 87–88. 66. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 169–170; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 161–162. 67. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 158; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 151. 68. Castillo Bueno, Reyita, 30–31; Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, 26–27. 69. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 259–340; Alejandro de la Fuente, ed., special issue of América Negra 15 (1998); Mark Q. Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post-­ Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

4

Transnational Voices 1. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 9, 1906–8 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 27. 2. Ibid., 28–29. 3. George M. Fredrickson, “Comparative History,” The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 465; George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social



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Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 47. For recent comparative studies, see Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); G. Reginald McDaniel, Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Vinícius Rodrigues Vieira and Jacquelyn Johnson, eds., Pictures and Mirrors: Race and Ethnicity in Brazil and the United States (São Paulo: FEA / USP, 2009); Robert J. Cottrol, The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 4. Lisa Brock and Digna Castañeda Fuertes, eds., Between Race and Empire: African-­Americans and Cubans before the Cuban Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-­Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 5. Evaristo de Moraes, Brancos e negros nos Estados Unidos e Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Miccolis, 1922); Ginetta E.  B. Candelario, Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Seigel, Uneven Encounters; Paulina L. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-­Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); George Reid Andrews, “Afro-­World: African-­Diaspora Thought and Practice in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1830–2000,” The Americas 67, 1 (2010): 83–107; Tiffany D. Joseph, Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 6. On Phillips’s speech and its impact, see Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 2. 7. Readers were paid to read newspapers, books, and other texts aloud to rooms of cigar workers as a source of information and entertainment. Araceli Tinajero, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, trans. Judith E. Grasberg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 8. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-­Coloured Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1912), 46, 67, 71; Harilaos Stecopoulos, “Up from Empire: James Weldon Johnson, Latin America, and the Jim Crow South,” eds. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, Imagining Our Americas: Toward a Transnational Frame (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 34–62. The “two Gómezes” were Máximo Gómez, the Dominican-­born commander of the rebel army, and Afro-­Cuban journalist and politican Juan Gualberto Gómez. 9. Clavin, Toussaint, 44–45; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 84–101. 10. Clavin, Toussaint, 5, 135–40. 11. “Haiti and Faustin First,” The North Star, April 26, 1850, p. 2; “Haiti,” The North Star, Oct. 27, 1848, p. 2; Frederick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 440.

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12. “Except for Haiti, no New World society received as much attention from black North Americans in the nineteenth century as did Cuba.” David J. Hellwig, “The African-­A merican Press and United States Involvement in Cuba, 1902–1912,” in Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, 71. 13. Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 191–215. 14. Lisa Brock and Bijan Bayne, “Not Just Black: African-­ A mericans, Cubans, and Baseball,” in Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, 176; Lisa Brock, “Introduction,” in Brock and Castañeda Fuertes, Between Race and Empire, 8. 15. Willard B. Gatewood, “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 232, 235. 16. Célia M. Azevedo, Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Garland, 1995), 91. 17. Free blacks and mulattoes were 43 percent of Brazil’s total population in 1872, as compared to 2 percent of the total U.S. population in 1860. Bergad, Comparative Histories, 123. 18. On conditions for slaves in Brazil, see Herbert Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). On free blacks, Keila Grinberg, O fiador dos brasileiros: Cidadania, escravidão e direito civil no tempo de Antonio Pereira Rebouças (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002); Klein and Luna, Slavery in Brazil, 259–292. 19. George Reid Andrews, “Brazilian Racial Democracy: An American Counterpoint,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, 3 (1996): 483–508; Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, “Racial Democracy,” in Imagining Brazil, eds. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 119–40; Alberto, Terms of Inclusion, 23–109. 20. “Brazil Welcomes Afro-­A mericans,” The Chicago Defender, March 14, 1914, p. 1. 21. “Brazil Wants Educated Black Men,” The Chicago Defender, Jan. 22, 1916, p. 1. For similarly positive views of Brazil in other African-­A merican newspapers, see David J. Hellwig, ed., African-­American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 35–54. 22. “First Colony to Sail for Brazil in June,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, Jan. 29, 1921, p. 1; see also “Brazil Is a Very Interesting Country,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, Jan. 15, 1921, p. 1. 23. Tiago de Melo Gomes, “Problemas no paraíso: A democracia racial brasileira frente à imigração afro-­americana (1921),” Estudos Afro-­A siáticos 25, 2 (2003): 307–331; Teresa Meade and Gregory Pirio, “In Search of the Afro-­ American ‘Eldorado’: Attempts by North-­A merican Blacks to Enter Brazil in the 1920s,” Luso-­Brazilian Review 25, 1 (1988): 85–110.



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24. Hellwig, African-­American Reflections, 65–66, 68. On Abbot’s trip to Brazil, see Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955), 228–240; David Hellwig, “A New Frontier in a Racial Paradise: Robert S. Abbott’s Brazilian Dream,” Luso-­ Brazilian Review 25, 1 (1988): 59–68; Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 192–195. 25. Hellwig, African-­American Reflections, 58. 26. George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 137; see also Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 194. On racial conditions in the early 1900s, see Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Petrônio Domingues, Da nitidez a invisibilidade: Legados da pós-­ emancipação no Brasil (Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2012); Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds., Quase-­cidadão: Histórias e antropologias da pós-­emancipação no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 2007). 27. “Brazil Offers Great Opportunity to Cotton Growers of America,” Chicago Defender, Dec. 29, 1923, p.  3; “Brazil Pays High Honor to Dark Citizens,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1926, p.  1; “Hoover Learns Lesson on Color Question in Brazil,” Chicago Defender, Dec. 29, 1928, p. 1; “Brazil Settles Color Question by Divisions of Society,” Chicago Defender, Aug. 24, 1929, p. A1; “Brazil Reviews 45 Years of Real Freedom,” Chicago Defender, May 20, 1933, p.  2; Clara Beasley Reynolds, “The Black Man in Brazil,” New York Amsterdam News, April 4, 1928, p.  13; “A Sidelight on Mr. Hoover’s Trip,” Pittsburgh Courier, Jan. 15, 1929, p. B8. 28. William Pickens, “Passports for Brazil,” New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 14, 1923, p. 1; “Republican U.S. Keeps Us from Visiting Brazil,” Baltimore Afro-­American, Sept. 29, 1928, p. 5; “Believes Washington Is Behind Move to Bar Negroes in Brazil,” New York Amsterdam News, Jan 8., 1944, p. A7. 29. Stewart’s five articles are reproduced in Hellwig, African-­American Reflections, 91–108. 30. Ibid., 92, 99, 108. 31. Ibid., 95, 106, 109. 32. Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). On Frazier’s research in Brazil, see David Hellwig, “E. Franklin Frazier’s Brazil,” Western Journal of Black Studies 15, 2 (1991), 87–94; Anadelia Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 119–132. 33. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Negro Family in Bahia, Brazil,” American Sociological Review 7, 4 (1942): 465–478. 34. E. Franklin Frazier, “A Comparison of Negro-­W hite Relations in Brazil and in the United States,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, series 2, vol. 6, no. 7 (1944): 265; E. Franklin Frazier, “Some Aspects of Race Relations in Brazil,” Phylon 3 (1942): 291–295 passim. 35. Frazier, “Some Aspects,” 292–294 passim. 36. Ellen Irene Diggs was an anthropologist who worked as research and editorial assistant to W.  E.  B. Dubois, received her PhD in 1944 from the University of Havana, and then devoted her career to the study of African-­ descent people in Latin America. A. Lynn Bolles, “Ellen Irene Diggs: Coming

112

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of Age in Atlanta, Havana, and Baltimore,” African-­ American Pioneers in Anthropology, eds. Ira E. Harrison and Faye V. Harrison (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 154–167. 37. George S. Schuyler, “Brazilian Color Bias Growing More Rampant,” Pittsburgh Courier, Sept. 4, 1948, pp. 1, 7. 38. Frazier, “Some Aspects,” 294; “Message to American Negroes,” Phylon 3 (1942): 284–286. See also “Color Distinction Noted in Brazil: Lack of Drive among Negro Organizations, Sociologist Says,” Atlanta Daily World, March 13, 1942, p. 3. On Afro-­Brazilian organizations during this period, see Elisa Larkin Nascimento, The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 120–148. 39. On Nascimento, see Sandra Almada, Abdias Nascimento (São Paulo: Selo Negro, 2009). Curiously, there is no mention of Nascimento in Schuyler’s later account of his time in Brazil. George Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle: Arlington House Publishers, 1966), 303–309. On his trip through the rest of Latin America, see 289–303. 40. George S. Schuyler, “Women Pep Meet in Brazil,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 28, 1949, pp. 1, 4; “Schuyler Advises Brazil’s Negroes to Forget Color,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 28, 1949, p. 4. On the Congress, see Abdias do Nascimento, ed., O negro revoltado (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1982). 41. Schuyler, “Brazilian Color Bias,” 7. 42. Quoted in Guimarães, “Racial Democracy,” 126. 43. Schuyler, “Brazilian Color Bias,” 7. More than sixty years later, Nascimento made essentially the same points in his conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates, Black in Latin America, 47–50. 44. “Actors Barred from Swank Brazil Hotel,” Atlanta Daily World, March 15, 1949, p. 2. 45. “Hotel in Brazil Snubs Katherine Dunham,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 29, 1950, p. 32; “Brazil Enacts Law Against Race Bias,” Atlanta Daily World (July 8, 1951), p. 1; “Brazil Sets an Example,” Atlanta Daily World, Sept. 24, 1952, p. 4. 46. “Brazil Sets Pattern in Race Relations ‘South of Border’,” Atlanta Daily World, Nov. 18, 1959, p.  2. On Gilberto Freyre, see George Schuyler, “The Week’s Books: Brazilian Background,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 2, 1956, p. B3; Charles Walker, “Re: A Brazilian Friend,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 13, 1955, p. 15. 47. On Quilombo and the Congress, see Quilombo: Vida, problemas e aspirações do negro (São Paulo: FAPESP / Editora 34, 2003); Nascimento, O negro revoltado. On the UNESCO research project, see Marcos Chor Maio, “O Projeto UNESCO e a agenda das ciências sociais no Brasil dos anos 40 a 50,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 14, 41 (1999): 141–158. 48. Era Bell Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work in Brazil?” Ebony, July 1965, pp. 27–41; Era Bell Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work in Brazil?” Ebony, Aug. 1965, pp. 33–42. 49. Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work?” July 1965, p. 29; Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work?” August 1965, p. 42. 50. Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work?” July 1965, p. 29; Thompson, “Does Amalgamation Work?” Aug. 1965, p. 42.



NO T E S T O PAG E S 82 – 87

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51. Hoyt W. Fuller, “Blacks Challenge Policy of ‘Non-­Racialism’ in Brazil,” Atlanta Daily World, Sept. 29, 1978, p.  1; article reprinted as “Freedom Movement Launched in Brazil,” Baltimore Afro-­American, Oct. 7, 1978, p. 5. See also “Brazil’s Blacks Experience New Cultural Consciousness,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, Sept. 16, 1981, p. 11. 52. Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araújo Pereira, Histórias do movimento negro no Brasil: Depoimentos ao CPDOC (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas, 2007), 69–89. 53. Michael George Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 138. 54. Ibid., 138–139, 159. 55. Ibid., 74; see also 43–74. 56. “Nos Estados Unidos, tenho uma ametralhadora apontada para a minha cabeça. No Brasil, tenho a mesma ametralhadora nas costas, mal posso vê-­la.” Norma Couri, “O negro no Brasil a nos EUA, segundo uma antropóloga antiintegracionista,” Jornal do Brasil, Feb. 15, 1980; see also Angela Gilliam, “Black and White in Latin America,” Présence Africaine 92 (1974): 161–173. 57. France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 12–13, 139. 58. Eugene Robinson, Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 71, 73, 110–111. 59. Ibid., 158–159. 60. Ibid., 192–193. 61. Ibid., 131, 157, 159. 62. George Reid Andrews, “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison,” Journal of Social History 26, 2 (1992): 229–264. 63. Hanchard, Orpheus, 5; Twine, Racism, 4. 64. Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-­A lves, “Introduction,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, eds. Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-­A lves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3–23. For a similar argument, see Juan Pablo Luna, María Victoria Murillo, and Andrew Schrank, “Latin American Political Economy: Making Sense of a New Reality,” Latin American Politics and Society 56, 1 (2014): 3-­10. 65. Centeno and López-­A lves, “Introduction,” 10. 66. “Que tipo de movimento negro foi gerado a partir da formação racial brasileira?” Luiza Bairros, “Orfeu e poder: Uma perspectiva afro-­americana sobre a política racial no Brasil,” Afro-­A sia 17 (1996): 176. From 2011 to 2014 Bairros served in the administration of President Dilma Rousseff as cabinet minister and head of the Special Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality. 67. Though other researchers have found that Afro-­Brazilians are in fact quite willing to talk about racism, if allowed to do so at their own pace and on their own terms. See for example Haroldo Costa, Fala, crioulo (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1982, 2009); Robin Sherriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999);

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Graziella Moraes da Silva and Elisa P. Reis, “Perception of Racial Discrimination among Black Professionals in Rio de Janeiro,” Latin American Research Review 46, 2 (2011): 55–78.

5

On Acting and Not Acting 1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 58. 2. For such data, see Cleusa Turra and Gustavo Venturi, eds., Racismo cordial: A mais completa análise sobre preconceito de cor no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1995); Stanley R. Bailey, Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 88–116; Edward Telles and PERLA, Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 207–214. 3. On Brazil’s black movement, see Amilcar Araujo Pereira, O mundo negro: Relações raciais e a constituição do movimento negro contemporâneo no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas / FAPERJ, 2013); Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Perira, eds., Histórias do movimento negro no Brasil: Depoimentos ao CPDOC (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas / CPDOC-­FGV, 2007); Paulina L. Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-­Century Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 4. Gates, Black in Latin America, 57, 58. 5. Relatorio do Comitê Nacional—​II Conferência Mundial das Nações Unidas contra o racismo, discriminação racial, xenophobia y intolerância correlata (2001). Available at http://www.dhnet.org.br/direitos/sos/discrim/relatorio.htm; see also Mala Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 39, 1 (2004), 60–89. 6. Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica e Aplicada (IPEA), Políticas Sociais—​ Acompanhamento e Análise 13 (Brasília: IPEA, 2007): 297–304. 7. In the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, more than 300 such suits were filed. Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 154. 8. Brazil, Supremo Tribunal Federal, “Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental 186,” April 26, 2012. Available at http://www.stf.jus.br /arquivo/cms/noticianoticiastf/anexo/adpf186rl.pdf. 9. The text of the law is available at http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03 /_Ato2011–2014/2012/Lei/L12711.htm. 10. Michelle Peria and Stanley R. Bailey, “Remaking Racial Inclusion: Combining Race and Class in Brazil’s New Affirmative Action,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 9, 2 (2014): 156–176. 11. The law established similar racial set-­asides for national and departmental scholarships and called for the inclusion of Afro-­Uruguayan history and culture in public education and teacher-­t raining. Uruguay, Poder Legislativo, “Ley No. 19.122. Afrodescendientes: Normas para favorecer su participación en



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las áreas educativa y laboral.” Available at http://www.parlamento.gub.uy/leyes /AccesoTextoLey.asp?Ley=19122&Anchor=. Brazil passed a similar law in 2014, reserving 20 percent of positions in all federal agencies for Afro-­ Brazilians. See http://www.planalto.gov.br/CCIVIL_03/_Ato2011–2014/2014 /Lei/L12990.htm. 12. Catherine Walsh, “Affirmative Action(ing)s and Postneoliberal Move­ ment in South America and Ecuador,” Cultural Dynamics 27, 1 (2015): 29; on the march, see Observatorio sobre Discriminación Racial y Exclusión Étnica, Boletín Informativo 2 (April-­June 2012). 13. Colombia, Senado, “Proyecto de Ley Estatutaria 125 de 2012.” Available at http://www.imprenta.gov.co/gacetap/gaceta.mostrar_documento?p_tipo=18&p _numero=125&p_consec=34216. On the 2004 and 2009 reports, see Colombia, Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social (CONPES), Política para prom­­ over la igualdad de oportunidades para la población negra, afrocolombiana, palenquera y raizal, Documento CONPES 3660 (Bogotá: CONPES, 2010). Available at http://w w w.convergenciacnoa.org/images/Documentospdf/legislacion /CONPES%203660.pdf. 14. Colombia, Senado, “Proyecto de Ley Estatutaria 125.” 15. On the “demise of affirmative action” in the United States, see Terry Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 217–273; Dennis Deslippe, Protesting Affirma­ tive Action: The Struggle over Equality after the Civil Rights Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 209–220.

Acknowledgments

This book is based on the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures delivered at Harvard University October 2–4, 2012. It was an exhilarating three days, and I am sincerely grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and to Evelyn Higginbotham for the invitation to come to Cambridge and present those talks. Thanks also to Abby Wolf, executive director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and to Matthew Weinberg, events coordinator at the Hutchins Center, who oversaw the logistical arrangements, and to the many students, faculty, and community members who responded so generously with thoughtful comments and questions. As always with book projects, I relied on valued colleagues to answer questions and give advice. Those included William Acree, Alex Borucki, Rina Cáceres, Alejandro de la Fuente, Betina González, Marcelo Paixão, Mark Sanders, Edward Telles, Nancy van Deusen and, at the University of Pittsburgh, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck, and Bruce Venarde. Joyce Seltzer’s superb editorial advice helped shape the book; Brian Distelberg and John Shannon meticulously supervised its production. The manuscript was completed with support from a Faculty Fellowship provided by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for International Studies. My wife, Roye Werner, accompanied me to the lectures and then through the process of writing. Probably every book I write should be dedicated to her, but for the last several years our now-­adult children, Lena, Jesse, and Eve, have been asking me to dedicate one to them. I am only too happy to oblige. Thank you, dear children, for all our years together as a family and for leading us, each in your own way, up the mountain. 117

Index

Abbott, Robert, 74–75, 79 Abolition. See Slavery: abolition of Acción Democrática, 14, 15 Acree, William, 53 Affirmative action, 1, 28, 41, 86, 88–93 Afonso Arinos law, 80, 81 African-Americans, 15, 66; negative views of, toward Brazil, 75–86, 88; positive views of, toward Brazil, 72–75, 78–79; views of, toward Cuba, 70–72; views of, toward Haiti, 69–71 Africans, 5–9, 49–50, 55, 57–58 Afro-descendants: defined, 5; in censuses, 31–32, 34 Afro-Latin America: compared to United States, 68; defined, 5; ­population of, 23, 42–43 Afro-Latin Americans, defined, 5 American Sociological Association, 76 Amerindians. See Indigenous peoples Argentina, 2, 14, 15, 84; African mutual aid societies in, 8; black organizations in, 34–35; censuses of, 23, 25, 35; immigration to, 12, 25 Arinos de Melo, Afonso, 81 Arocha, Jaime, 3, 4 Artigas, José Gervasio, 56 Asociación Cultural y Social ­Uruguay, 14 Associação do Negro Brasileiro, 15 Atlanta Daily World, 80

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 69–70 Bairros, Luiza, 87 Baker, Josephine, 15 Baltimore Afro-American, 75 Bastide, Roger, 78–79 Batista, Fulgencio, 13, 62, 63 Batrell Oviedo, Ricardo, 46, 58–62, 64, 66, 93 Biblioteca Nacional (Uruguay), 53 Blacks. See African-Americans; Africans; Afro-descendants; AfroLatin Americans; Free blacks; ­Mestiços; Morenos; Mulattos; Negros; Pardos; Zambos Blake, or the Huts of America, 71 Blanco party, 58 Bolivia, 3 Borucki, Alex, 53 Bowdoin College, 70 Bran, María, 52 Bravo, Florencia, 51 Brazil, 4, 9, 13; abolition of slavery in, 11; affirmative action in, 1, 28, 88–90; black organizations in, 15, 18–19, 28, 78, 81–83, 85, 86–88; censuses of, 18–19, 23, 25–26, 27, 28, 35–42; free blacks in, 72–73; immigration to, 12, 25–26, 74, 76, 77; independence of, 54, 73; negative views of, by African-­ Americans, 75–86, 88; positive views of by, African-­A mericans,

119

120 I N DE X Brazil (continued) 72–75, 78–79; race mixture in, 26, 74–77, 81; racial democracy in, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 88; racial discrimination in, 2, 14, 75–77, 79–81, 83–84, 89; racial inequality in, 18–19, 28, 36–41, 77, 80, 82–86, 88–90; slave rebellions in, 7; slave trade to, 5 Brazilian-American Colonization Syndicate, 74 Brown, Simon, 72 Brown, William Wells, 70 Bulhões Carvalho, José Luiz de, 26 Campana, María Rufina, 56 Candomblé, 50 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 89 Carnival, 1, 85 Caste laws, 8–11, 13, 22, 62; abolition of, 10, 23, 73 Castillo Buenos, María de los Reyes, 62–66, 93 Censuses, 16, 19–21; in the colonial period, 22–23; in the 1800s, 18, 25; in the 1900s, 14, 18–19, 25–30; in the 2000s, 3, 28–43, 91 Centeno, Miguel, 87 Chicago Defender, 73–75 Citadel, 1 Civil rights movements: in Argentina, 34–35; in Brazil, 15, 18–19, 28, 78, 81–83, 85, 86–88; in Colombia, 30–31; in Cuba, 62; in Latin America, 3, 15, 27, 93; in the United States, 80, 81–82, 86; in Uruguay, 34–35, 90–91; in ­Venezuela, 31–32 Club Atenas, 14 Club Negro de Colombia, 14 Colciencias, 92 Colombia, 2–3, 4, 14, 15; affirmative action in, 91–92; African mutual aid societies in, 8; black organizations in, 30–31; censuses of, 23, 26–27, 28–31, 37–41, 91; racial inequality in, 37–41, 91–92 Colorado party, 15 Committee in Defense of the Revolution, 63 Communist party (Cuba), 15, 63 Congos de Gunga, 57–58

Congress (Brazil), 73, 74, 90 Congress (Colombia), 91–92 Congress (Uruguay). See General Assembly Convent of Santa Clara, 47, 50 Costa Rica: censuses of, 27, 34, 37–41; racial discrimination in, 14; racial inequality in, 37–41 Cristo, Antonia de, 51 Cuba, 1–2, 4, 9, 13; abolition of slavery in, 11; African-American views of, 70–72; African mutual aid societies in, 8; censuses of, 22, 23, 27, 35, 36, 43; immigration to, 12; independence wars in, 23, 58–62, 70, 71–72; racial discrimination in, 14, 59–61, 64, 66; racial inequality in, 36, 40, 62–66; slave rebellions in, 7 Curaçao, 67 DANE, 30–31 De la Fuente, Alejandro, 2, 36 Delany, Martin, 71 Democracy, racial. See Racial democracy Democratas Party, 90 Desrosières, Alain, 19 Diago, Fernando, 61 Diggs, Irene, 77 Discrimination. See Racial discrim­ ination Dominican Republic, 1, 4; censuses of, 27, 42–43. See also Santo Domingo Douglass, Frederick, 71, 72 Dunham, Katherine, 79–80 Ebony, 80 Ecuador, 3; affirmative action in, 91; censuses of, 23, 31, 37–41; racial inequality in, 37–41 El Salvador, 27 Emancipation. See Slavery: abolition of Estenoz, Evaristo, 63 Federal University of Brasília, 90 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 75 Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, 90 Federation of Cuban Women, 63

I N DE X 121

First Congress of Brazilian Blacks, 78, 80 Flores, René, 33–34 Fondo de Créditos Educativos, 91 Ford Foundation, 19 Frazier, E. Franklin, 76–77, 78, 79, 83 Free blacks, 9–10; in Brazil, 72–73; in censuses, 22–23; in independence wars, 23, 56, 58, 59–62 Freedom, grants of. See Manu­ mission Frente Negra Brasileira, 14, 78 Freyre, Gilberto, 73, 78–79, 80, 81 Friedemann, Nina de, 3, 4 Fuller, Hoyt, 81–82

Inter-American Development Bank, 28–29, 31 International Labour Organization, 29 Invisibility: of blacks in Latin Amer­ ­ica, 1–5, 11, 92–93; statistical, 11, 26, 43 Ivonnet, Pedro, 63

Garvey, Marcus, 63 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 1–3, 11, 88–89 General Assembly (Uruguay), 57–58, 91 Gilliam, Angela, 83, 86 Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 58, 62 Gregory XVI, Pope, 54 Guatemala, 26, 27 Haiti, 1, 7, 55, 76; African-American views of, 69–71 Hanchard, Michael, 82–83, 86–87 Helg, Aline, 2, 4 Honduras, 23, 26, 27 Hotel Esplanada, 79 Hotel Glória, 79 Household surveys. See Censuses Hoy, 63

Laboratorio de Ciencias Sociales, 33 Ladinos, 23, 26 Latin American Public Opinion Project, 31, 42 Law for the Participation and Representation of Black and Afro-­ Colombian Communities, 92 Law of Social Quotas, 90 Laws: affirmative action, 90–92; antidiscrimination, 14, 80, 81; caste, 8–11, 13, 22, 23, 62, 73; ­governing slavery, 6, 47 Lewis, John, 72 Liberal party (Colombia), 14, 15 Liberal party (Cuba), 61 Liberation Army (Cuba), 46, 59 Libertos (former slaves), 8 López-Alves, Fernando, 87 Louverture, Toussaint, 69–70, 71

Immigration: by African-Americans, 74, 76; by Europeans, 12, 25–26, 77 Independence, 10–11; of Brazil, 54, 73; of Uruguay, 54; wars of, 10, 23, 55–56 Indians. See Indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples, 7, 90; in censuses, 22–23, 26–27, 29–30, 37–40; laws governing, 8–9; organizations of, 28–29, 93 Inequality, 28–29, 40–41. See also Racial inequality Inquisition, 50 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, 19, 28

Maceo, Antonio, 70, 71–72 Manumission, 8 Martí, José, 62 Mattos, Hebe, 11 Mestiços, 26 Mestizos, 9–10; in censuses, 22–23, 26–27, 30, 39 Mexico, 1, 3, 13; censuses of, 22, 23, 27 Ministry of the Interior (Colombia), 92 Ministry of Social Development (Uruguay), 91 Miscegenation. See Race mixture Molina, Jacinto Ventura de, 46, 53–58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 93 Molina, Josef de, 54–56, 59, 61

Jesús, Úrsula de, 47–53, 62, 63, 64, 66, 93 Jesus Christ, 47–52, 53, 64 Johnson, James Weldon, 67–70, 84 Johnson, Lyman, 6 Kid Gavilán, 15 Kosmos, 75

122 I N DE X Molina, Ventura de, 54–56 Morenos, 31, 32–33 Moses, 70 Movimento Negro Unificado, 81–82 Mulattos, 9–10; in censuses, 22, 26–27, 34; in the United States, 20, 21. See also Free blacks Nascimento, Abdias do, 2, 78, 79, 80, 81 National Council for Economic and Social Policy (Colombia), 91–92 National Science Foundation (United States), 92 Negros, 5; in censuses, 27, 32–33 New Granada (viceroyalty), 23 Nicaragua, 23, 26, 27, 69 No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin ­Americans Today, 3 Norfolk Journal and Guide, 74 North Star, The, 71 Ortega, Raimundo, 59, 61 Panama, 4; censuses of, 23, 27, 29–30; racial discrimination in, 14 Para la historia, 46, 61 Pardos, 5, 9, 81 Partido Autóctono Negro, 14 Partido Independiente de Color, 61, 63 Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, 15 Peçanha, Nilo, 73–74 Pedro I (Brazil), 54, 55, 56 Perón, Juan Domingo, 15 Peronism, 14, 15 Peru, 1, 3, 47; censuses of, 3, 22, 29 Phillips, Wendell, 69 Pittsburgh Courier, 77 Plácido. See Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción Populism, 13, 15 ProUni. See University for All Puerto Rico, 11, 67; censuses of, 22 Quilombo, 78, 80 Race mixture, 9–10, 12–13; in Brazil, 26, 74–77, 81 Racial democracy, 1–2, 13–14, 15, 27, 93; in Brazil, 73, 78–79, 83–84, 88

Racial discrimination, 14, 15; in Brazil, 75–77, 79–81, 83–84, 89; in Cuba, 59–61, 64, 66. See also Caste laws Racial inequality, 3, 8–9, 28–29, 36–42. See also “Racial inequality” under specific countries Racial terminology: in Afro-Latin America, 5; in censuses, 22–23, 26, 30–36 Racism: scientific, 11–12, 25, 27; Nazi, 13, 27, 93 Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezolanas, 31 Robinson, Eugene, 84–85 Rodríguez, Romero Jorge, 2 Roosevelt, Theodore, 67 Rubiera, Antonio, 64–65 Rubiera Castillo, Daisy, 66 Rubiera Castillo, Monín, 67 Rubiera Castillo, Nené, 67 Russwurm, John Brown, 70 Sacramento, Juana del, 54, 55 Sanders, Mark, 59 Sans Souci, 1 Santería, 50 Santo Domingo, 23, 76 Santos Calderón, Francisco, 91 Schuyler, George, 77–80 Scott, James, 19 Second World War, 13, 14 Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula da, 89 Slavery, 4, 21, 68, 88, 89; abolition of, 11; laws governing, 6, 47. See also Slaves Slaves, 5–10, 45, 72; in censuses, 33–34; in indepen­­dence wars, 10, 23, 56 Slave trade, 5, 18 Sommer, Doris, 45 Soulouque, Faustin, 71 South Africa, 8, 89, 93 Souza Dantas, Raymundo, 81 Spartacus, 70 State University of Rio de Janeiro, 89 Stewart, Ollie, 75–76, 79, 89 Supreme Court (Brazil), 90 Teatro Experimental do Negro, 78 Telles, Edward, 33, 34

I N DE X 123

Terminology, racial. See Racial terminology Thompson, Era Bell, 80–81 26th of July Movement, 63 Twine, France Winddance, 83–84, 86 União Nacional dos Homens de Cor, 14, 78 United Nations, 31; Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 42; Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 76, 80; World Conference against Racism, 89, 91 United States, 11–12, 15, 55, 66, 92; affirmative action in, 86, 89, 93; censuses in, 20–21; civil rights movements in, 80, 81–82, 86; Civil War in, 70–71; compared to Brazil, 72, 79, 80, 81–87; compared to Latin America, 68; ­segregation in, 8, 13, 86, 93; slave trade to, 5. See also AfricanAmericans Universal Negro Improvement ­A ssociation, 63 University for All, 90 University of Brazil, 75–76, 89 Uribe, Álvaro, 91 Uruguay, 2; affirmative action in, 91; African mutual aid societies in, 8, 57; black organizations in, 34–35, 90–91; censuses of 25, 28, 35, 37–41; immigration to, 12, 25; independence of, 54, 56; racial

discrimination in, 14; racial inequality in, 37–41 Uslar Pietri, Arturo, 11 Valdés, Gabriel de la Concepción, 71 Van Deusen, Nancy, 48 Vasconcelos, José, 13 Vázquez, Tabaré, 91 Venezuela, 3, 4, 15, 67–68; black organizations in, 31–32; censuses of, 23, 29–30, 31–34, 37–42; racial discrimination in, 14; racial inequality in, 32–33, 37–41 Vianna, Francisco José de Oliveira, 25–26 Virgen del Cobre. See Virgin Mary Virgin Mary, 48, 64 Visibility. See Invisibility Washington, Booker T., 67–68 Washington, George, 70 Washington Post, 84 Whites: in censuses, 25–26, 30–34, 36–41; in Cuban independence wars, 60 Women: African, 55; Afro-Brazilian, 2, 36, 82, 85; Afro-Uruguayan, 91; indigenous, 38; and religion, 47–52; rights of, 63 World Bank, 28–29, 31 Wright, Winthrop, 4, 11 Xavier, Saint Francis, 51–52 Zambos, 5, 9; in censuses, 23, 26–27