Afro-Latin America, Research on

Afro-Latin America encompasses a broad geographical, cultural, and linguistic area of Latin America—from Brazil in South America to the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola, which is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, and Mexico in Central America. There is no agreement among scholars or other observers about which countries may be correctly designated as Afro-Latin American. A generally accepted yardstick emphasizes the presence of people of African descent from the time of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the present. How many Afro-Latin Americans there are today is a difficult question to answer. Throughout Latin America, definitions of race, color, and origin are extremely varied. In Brazil, for example, the four official racial categories are black, brown (or pardo), yellow, and white. Yet census takers in 1980 counted some 140 terms used by respondents to describe their racial background. If we use African origins as the determining factor, the size of the Afro–Latin American population dramatically increases to include all members of the black and brown categories: thus, of the 43 percent of Colombians who are of African descent, 14 percent are pure black; of the 75 percent of Brazilians of African descent, 33 percent are black; and in the Dominican Republic the count is even more complicated.

Early research into Afro-Latin America focused on the survival of African culture, religion, and tradition, both during and after the time of slavery, primarily in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Venezuela. In contrast to the rest of Latin America, these more visibly “African” societies received large numbers of slaves from Africa and experienced more profoundly, in their culture, art, and religious lives, the impact of the African presence. Of interest to researchers has been the push to attract European immigrants who would act as a kind of civilizing force meant to expunge what was seen as the taint of African and Indian roots from a newly independent Latin America. For the offending groups, all visible reminders of their origins were accorded neither honor nor prestige.

Since the late 1970s, scholars, artists, and writers have brought fresh perspectives to the often complex realities of Afro-Latin American studies. Their reconsiderations of specific events—like the attempts of nineteenth-century Afro-Latin Americans to win their freedom and analyses of present-day civil liberties organizations—increasingly acknowledge Afro-Latin America as part of a larger hemispheric reality that includes both the United States and Latin America.

Researchers looked at the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain, which occurred from 1895 to 1898, and saw that thousands of Afro-Cubans fought with nationalist forces in the hope of gaining full citizenship. After the war, political mobilization included the formation of the Independent Party of Color in 1908, the subsequent banning of political parties based on color, the outbreak of a racial war in 1912, and strong repressive measures unleashed against the Afro-Cuban community. Researchers have analyzed how these events point to miserably dashed hopes and the marginalization of Afro-Cubans, which would have far-reaching consequences.

Brazil, by virtue of its large population of blacks—exceeded only by Nigeria—has been a principal focus of study in this area. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Afro-Brazilians established sociocultural and political entities and published newspapers and magazines whose columns discussed the special problems of the community and its place within the larger Brazilian society. The press focused on the lack of employment opportunities, racial discrimination in public places, police harassment, and suggestions for general enhancement of the community and its members. Events in the larger black world—in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean—were followed intently. One newspaper was even named after former emperor Menelik of Ethiopia. In 1944 the founding of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (the Black Experimental Theater) offered Afro-Brazilians a means of cultural expression that would present their view of what it meant to be Afro-Brazilian in contemporary Brazil. The emergence of the short-lived Frente Negra Brasileira (the Black Brazilian Front), which was registered as a political party during this period, is perhaps the clearest signal that Afro-Brazilians as an organized group would raise an alternative voice in the political life of Brazil.

The Republic of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, uneasy neighbors on their shared island, provide one of the more complex issues in Afro-Latin American studies. Following the successful slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century and the establishment of the Haitian republic at the beginning of the nineteenth, Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic, which has the distinction of being the only Latin American country that gained its independence not from Spain but from a black republic. Haiti, in the minds of Dominicans, came to symbolize blackness and African cultural and religious values, the antithesis of the value system of the European-minded elite.

Regional migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from English- and French-speaking Caribbean countries account for the increased presence of people of African descent in Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and even Brazil, and have important sociocultural, economic, and political consequences for Afro-Latin American research.

Peru, viewed principally as a country of Indians, mestizos, and whites, is also home to a community of blacks whose origins may be traced to the relatively small number of African slaves who had been absorbed into the general population by the 1830s. Despite its near invisibility, the Afro-Peruvian community has spawned an institute for Afro-Peruvian research, civil rights organizations, and a host of cultural groups. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, a self-identified Afro-Peruvian poet and cultural activist, wrote of the struggles of black South Africans to end racial oppression.

Recent research has shown the presence in nineteenth-century Argentina of a black community whose visibility within Buenos Aires province and the rest of the nation ended after 1900. Findings from Colombia and Ecuador point to the importance of regional concentrations in the study of Afro–Latin America. In Colombia, the Pacific coast (the Chocó region, where blacks are dominant) and the Atlantic coast (in Barranquilla and Cartagena, which have significant black communities) have Afro-Latin American populations with different relations to the structures of power and prestige in the dominant society. Urban areas have been shown to offer Afro–Latin American residents a space for organizing religious, cultural, and political activities. This phenomenon can be seen in Brazil in nineteenth-century Salvador, Bahia, among African slaves, Brazil-born descendants of slaves, and free Afro-Brazilians; in Buenos Aires (Argentina); and in Lima (Peru). In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and São Paulo, there are to this day centers of activity for Afro-Brazilians.

From the earliest research to the inquiries of present-day scholars, the African-derived religions of Latin America—Candomblé, Macumba, and Santería—have been a major focus of Afro–Latin American studies. The blending of aspects of Catholicism and traditional African religions that began during slavery—most notably the identification of Catholic saints with African deities—shows the creative survival of a people and the endurance of institutions once deemed barbarous by the dominant society. Indeed, one can no longer assume that the practitioners of Candomblé, for example, are predominantly people of African descent: Afro-Brazilian religious traditions have crossed the border into purportedly Eurocentric Argentina. Afro-Latin Americans today may be adherents of Catholicism, Protestantism, or religions of Asian derivation, and the number of those who adhere to the traditions of their ancestors is not easily determined. That they do exist reminds us that the study and appreciation of Latin American culture continues to have an important Afro component.

That Afro-Latin Americans, as individuals and in groups, articulate views that reflect a deeper connection to the global black world often challenges the widely accepted image of a Latin America that has managed to escape racial antagonism, racially segregated public spaces, and racially based inequalities among its citizens. By articulating a connection with the global black diaspora, Afro-Latin Americans are implying that the situation in Latin America might not be so unique, and that racism and racial inequalities exist in Latin America as they do elsewhere. The underrepresentation of Afro-Latin Americans in education, politics, business, and the centers of prestige and power is but a vivid reminder of a persistent inequity and moves the object of inquiry well beyond a focus on the celebrated few who have achieved success.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the specter of the Haitian revolution and blacks rising en masse to end slavery and racial domination fueled the anxieties of Latin American societies. Today, Afro–Latin American activists, in spite of language barriers, struggle to keep abreast of developments in Africa and the United States. In the process they raise keen suspicion among the dominant sectors, which see such interest as both a betrayal of national identity and a possible move toward the violent patterns of North American race relations. Afro-Latin Americans, in their own defense, sometimes adopt a superpatriotic identity.

Required proclamations of national loyalties have posed no obstacle to some Afro-Latin Americans. The Black Brazilian Front found inspiration and example in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of the late 1910s and 1920s, and other activists looked to the movements to liberate Africa from European colonialism and the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa.

The United States has, since the mid-1960s, seen steady growth in the number of Latin American immigrants, which translates into complex research questions. For example, to what extent does common nationality take precedence over the traditional black-white racial division in the U.S.? In other words, on which side of the hyphen does the Afro-Latin American's primary identity lie? Is the recent push for adding a mixed-race category to the U.S. census a reflection of the Latin Americanization of race relations in the U.S.? And, in turn, does the experience of Latin Americans, of all races, in the U.S. pave the way for the greatly feared North Americanization of race relations, with race defined in bipolar black or white terms in Latin America itself?

The pioneering research of Roger Bastide (from France), Fernando Ortiz (Cuba), Gilberto Freyre (Brazil), J. Melville Herskovits (United States), and Manoel Querino (Brazil), and the writings of Adalberto Ortíz (Ecuador), Manuel Zapata Olivella (Colombia), and Ramon Diaz Sánchez (Venezuela), laid the groundwork for subsequent research on Afro-Latin America. The titles of recent works are a fine reflection of the state of current research: No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today (1995); Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (1995); Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (1993); Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993); Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (1988); The Making of the African Diaspora in the Americas (1987); The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800 to 1900 (1980); Black Writers in Latin America (1979); and The African Experience in Spanish America, 1512 to the Present Day (1976).

The increasing visibility of Afro-Latin Americans who consciously assert an awareness of their African heritage argues for further research into their achievements and continuing struggles. The aim would be to bring Afro-Latin America closer to general discussions of the multiple dimensions of Africa in the Americas.

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Afro-Latin America, Research on

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