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PART I
History
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1
BEYOND REPRESENTATION
Rethinking Rights, Alliances and Migrations: Three Historical Themes in Afro-Latin American Political Engagement
Darién J. Davis
On December 11, 1994, Romero Jorge RodrĂguez, director of Mundo Afro, a small Uruguayan Black rights organization, welcomed Black activists, intellectuals, community organizers and politicians to a conference in Montevideo to introduce his organization to the region and to foster new national and transnational modes of thinking, intervening politically and working together for the betterment of Afro-America. RodrĂquezâs emotional words also represented a call for sustained political engagement and activism as an antidote to social and economic marginalization that had rendered Afro-Latin Americans invisible and vastly underrepresented in all branches of national and local government. Since the creation of modern Latin American republics in the 19th century, Europeans forged political systems that had, as Juan de Dios Mosquera, an Afro-Colombian community organizer at the event affirmed, privileged Whites and limited the social, economic, cultural and political rights of African descendants in multiple ways (Mundo Afro: 1994).
RodrĂquezâs call was not new. For centuries, Afro-Latin American communities have resisted oppression and engaged politically in a variety of ways depending on the historical options. Many sought justice or redress through available legal channels that the judicial system provided. For over four centuries, others created Palenques or Quilombos, self-emancipated self-governing Maroon communities, often recognized by Spanish and Portuguese authorities. The enslaved and the free also organized and coordinated rebellions or sabotage, whereas others engaged in guerilla warfare. At the same times, individuals like Juan Garrido in colonial Mexico received personal wealth, and contemporary actors such as Loria Raquel Dixon became the first Black representative elected to the Nicaraguan General Assembly.
The Montevideo conference helped begin a new era of visibility and engagement in a democratic era throughout Spanish-America and Brazil. Despite the gradual change in visibility of individuals of African descent in national political arenas, RodrĂguesâs call remains urgent today as Afro-descendant communities continue to face deep social, economic and cultural marginalization on various fronts. Moreover, focusing exclusively on individual achievement falls into a problematic pattern of celebrating exceptionalism over structural change and community status. In the modern era, race, class and national prejudices all continue to conspire to limit the rights of Afro-descendants in multiple ways. While regional political dynamics diverge temporally and geographically, people of African descent throughout the region have faced significant social, economic and cultural challenges since the 16th century. Migration and migration policy have been an important role in these dynamics.
The politics of Afro-descendants viewed in the context of four major waves of migratory dislocations, even though there are many other forms of dislocations. Examples of forced migrations such as the Garifuna, or Black Caribs, who eventually settled across the Central American isthmus after the British expelled them from the island of St. Vincent in 1796. They eventually migrated across the Central American isthmus, creating communities in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in Central America in the 1790s. But the first occurred when European colonizers and elite Africans ripped Africans from their homes to serve as workers for the European colonial project. The second major wave occurred after abolition at the end of the 19th century when Atlantic multinationals lured Afro-descendants from their nations to work on new infrastructure and industrial projects. The third wave came during the Cold War, as Afro-descendants fled civil war, violence and instability along with many other groups; and finally, from the 1990s to the present, new migrants have begun to reshape the demographics and politics of the region. Despite these challenges, contemporary Afro-descendants have continued to organize and insist on political engagement within their societies, often under great duress and violence in three interrelated ways: (1) fighting for full rights and visibility; (2) forging alliances with other Afro-Latin Americans and with allies across racial and cultural boundaries (or sections to paraphrase the language of intersectionality); and (3) breaking down barriers between âmigrantsâ that the establishment casts as outsiders and âNativesâ. While this work highlights these dynamics in the postâCold War era of rapid globalization, their roots are in the colonial and modern eras.
To understand the tensions between positive visibility and marginalization, it is important to understand how we define âAfro-Latin Americaâ, which, like most identity constructions constitutes, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson, an âimagined communityâ. Until recently, âAfro-Latin Americaâ was a term American academics utilized to highlight a set of shared experiences, responses and attitudes of people of African descent within Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking âLatin Americaâ, although former Spanish colonies such as Jamaica and Trinidad complicate this definition. For decades, many observers of Latin America (including this author) have highlighted the color distinctions among Latin Americans (Negro/a or Preto/a, Prieto/a, Jabado/a, Mulato/a, etc.). Many scholars have highlighted the fact that many individuals who identify as White or Mestizo have African ancestry and have been culturally schooled by pervading Afro-Latin American customs and traditions (Davis, White Face, xvâxxv). The debates over racial identity and terminology, although often important, can easily lead to exoticizing marginalized communities and obscuring more pressing issues related to fundamental human rights and struggles for dignity for Afro-descendants, the term preferred by activists, regardless of their skin tone or racial categorization (Davis, Afrobrasileros Hoje, 17â21).
Afro-Latin America constitutes a diverse geocultural area in which peoples and states continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery in multiple ways. We cannot escape the fact that the elite in this region bought and sold human beings for their own purposes less than two decades before the beginning of the 20th century. Any overview of the history of Afro-Latin American politics must necessarily examine the ways in which Afro-Latin Americans, however, defined, grapple with that legacy of slavery and its consequences in diverse political settings to secure economic, social and cultural rights in the modern (post-1800) and contemporary era (post-1960s). Although many examples suggest that Latin American societies developed a flexible social system that allows for individual advancement through merit and/or connections (Hanchard), the structural and class-based foundations of colonial Latin American political history (1492â1800) have allowed political and religious elites to wage a relentless assault on Black bodies, Black culture and Black advancement on many levels.
Afro-Latin Politics in the Colonial and Modern Eras: Obstacles to Securing Rights and Intersectional Alliances
The tools and methods employed by Afro-Latin Americans to be recognized as human beings, to secure social, economic and cultural rights and to forge community across linguistic and ethnic borders during the colonial era under royal authority until the end of 18th century differed from the dynamics of the modern period after 1800 when Creole or Mazombo families became the new elite. With the exception of Haiti, the national politics in the former viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, Peru, Rio de La Plata and Brazil necessarily shifted to focus on developing national Republicanesque projects that continued to marginalize Afro-descendants well into the 20th century. The legal dismantling of slavery in Brazil in 1888 finally banished African slavery from the Americas and represented an important watershed in the evolution of region-wide recognition of Afro-descendants as citizens, although few governments developed specific programs to benefit them. Yet, Afro-Latin Americans, who were near majorities in many regions in the Caribbean and Portuguese America, for example, responded differently from one another at the turn of the 20th century depending on whether they were involved in the urban-based abolitionist movement or living in the self-emancipated Palenques or Quilombos. In countries where Afro-descendants were demographic minorities such as in Mexico and Uruguay, for example, emancipated Blacks also responded differently to abolition in 1829 and 1830, respectively.
In the 20th century, Afro-Latin Americans continued to struggle in many sectors of society. In places such as Argentina and Mexico, their numbers dwindled precipitously. Was it a horrible genocide or a natural integration into the Mestizo gene pool? Evidence points to the former, as political elites crafted policies to restrict the advancement of the majority of people of African descent and cast them as outsiders or migrants without claims to American-ness or citizenship. In places such as Bahia, in the northeast Brazil, Central America and Peru, Afro-descendants fared better depending on the economic sector, the relative importance of the Indigenous population, the vibrancy of democratic principles and the strength of civil society. While issues of rights and visibility continue to challenge communities of African descent, new forms and processes warranted new ways of thinking, organizing and engaging politically. Today contemporary Afro-Latin Americans continue to battle the persistent and complex colonial political ideology of exploitation that disenfranchised Blackness in general and Afro-Latin American articulations of agency and political engagement in particular.
Colonial Dynamics
The European colonial project limited the movement, rights, education, visibility and assembly of Black people. It also restricted communication among family members, preventing the development of communities and forging a new and fractured sense of ethnic identity based on suffering. During the age of discovery, Iberians valued the bravado and risk-taking of Afro-descendants and rewarded men like Juan Valiente, who fought along the conquistadors in Chile and Juan Garrido in Mexico City with property (Icaza, entry No. 169; Bancroft, 423n).
After the initial period of exploration, Europeans turned to enslaved Africans and their descendants to supplement or replace Indigenous labor during the establishment of colonies. Between 1501 and 1900, the forced migration of Africans constituted a central part of the European colonial enterprise. Europeans relied on forced African migrants for a host of skilled and unskilled labor for the proper functioning of their colonial projects, while restricting certain professions to Creoles and Peninsulares. During this period, approximately 1,292,900 enslaved Africans disembarked in the Spanish-Americas and 4,864,370 arrived in Portuguese-America. Forced migration and captivity reduced Africans and their descendants to the status of furniture. At the same time, elites rewarded loyalty with job promotions or manumission (The Transatlantic Slave Database).
The legal designation of this inhuman status did not prevent European men from choosing Black men and women as their sexual partners, whether forced or consensual. African-descendant women and men struggled to preserve their dignity and to protect their offspring in myriad ways despite the suffering caused by sexual abuse. Not surprisingly, colonial laws such as the Code Noir and Las Siete Partidas and the American Slave Codes prohibited all interracial marriages from being officially recognized. Authorities were particularly interested in monitored Black-Indian unions while cohabitation between White men and women of color was widespread. Women such as Francisca da Silva de Oliveira from Brazil, Nanette Dubriel from New Orleans and Augstina MachĂ© in Puerto Rico often improved their status in society if the elite White male partner recognized her and their children. Moreover, as late as the eighteenth centuries, the Spanish law of Gracias al Sacar allowed economically privileged Mulatos and Pardos to purchase certificates of Whiteness and practice professions restricted to Whites (MartĂnez Alier, 12).
Afro-descendantsâ political activity in the colonial environment depended on status or their relationship to males of higher social status. Free Afro-descendants organized politically on various fronts, including becoming involved in the abolitionist movement. Vicente Guerrero, for example, joined the abolitionist movement in Mexico and later became one of the few Afro-descendants to attain the position of president in the region. Because public political opportunities were not available to the majority of the enslaved, they often influenced the colonial and national societies through sabotage, resistance or maroonage. Like most politics, resistance was not always a zero-sum game. Some self-emancipated Maroon communities resisted for the duration of the life of the settlement (such as the famous Palmares [1605â1694] in the northeast of Brazil or the Quilombo of QuariterĂȘ in the 18th century in the current state of Mato Grosso, Brazil), whereas others signed treaties with local Whites to preserve the gains that they had made (San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia is a clear example). African descendants adapted to their local geographies and dynamics. Slavery in Mexico, Argentina and Chile differed substantially from the plantation economies of the Caribbean and Brazil.
The cultural production of African descendants served as an important avenue for spiritual sustenance, empowerment and political expression. Throughout Latin America, Africans continued to honor their ancestors and practice their religious values despite prohibitions and pressures to convert. CandomblĂ© and SanterĂa, for example, largely maintain the dominant Yoruba base in the Americas. According to Joseph Halloway, several uprisings in colonial Bahia had a strong Yoruba influence. For example, Islam also inspired Africans to resistance in the 19th century as the MalĂȘ Revolt of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil, clearly indicates (Reis, 118). Europeans converted many Afro-descendants sometimes nominally and sometimes en Masse. The Lima-born Afro-descendant Juan Martin de Porres VelĂĄsquez reportedly used his Catholic faith and connections with the Dominican order for multiple purposes, including self-preservation. Historians have very little documentation on St. Martin, although we know he was a free person of color living in humble circumstances. While St. Martinâs beatification by the Church in 1835 may be another example of the exceptionalism thesis, Javier Mariatequi suggests that he may have joined the Dominican brotherhood to escape the limitations of his racial condition and that his religion allowed him to work around the city assisting the infirmed and the poor (MariĂĄtegui, 42â47).
Economic uncertainty in the newly formed independent republics combined with the Creole and Luso-Brazilian controlled state structures that valued and promoted order and patriotism as necessary values of all citizens also served as deterrents to intra- and inter-sectional alliances. Few Black rights movements emerged in the 19th century, although Afro-Latin Americans understood early on in the colonial period the importance of non-Black allies in many professions to securing rights and achieving long-term goals. Black Latin American men also understood the importance of Black women to their cause and often worked closely with Indigenous groups in the colonial period along with White allies to help escape the harshness of slavery or in the defense of their Quilombos or Palenques. In the abolitionist era, Afro-Latin Americans often worked with White abolitionists, many of them lawyers and religious leaders, to push for the dismantling of slavery. These cross ethnic and gender alliances surely constitute examples of intersectional cooperation in historical eras radically different from our own. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price convincingly argue that enslaved Africans began breaking down ethnic and linguistic divides on the ships that they brought them to the New World (Mintz and Price, 7â23). Evidence also indicates that Quilombos and Palenques resisted the Iberian attempt to create hierarchies among Afro-descendants based on their migrant status (whether they were African- or American-born), or their perceived utility or docility.
Modern Dynamics
In the wars of independence and national liberation of the 19th century, Africans and their descendants played key roles in the political struggle for independence. Their contributions were most visible in the first Black revolution on the island of Hispaniola, which not only abol...
