Black in Latin America

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814732991
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries
12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest—over ten and a half million—were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences.

Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view.

In Brazil, he delves behind the façade of Carnaval to discover how this ‘rainbow nation’ is waking up to its legacy as the world’s largest slave economy.

In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959.

In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves’s hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire became a double-edged sword.

In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people—far greater than the number brought to the United States—brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru.

Professor Gates’ journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their African antecedents. “Black in Latin America” is the third instalment of Gates’s documentary trilogy on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.

1
Brazil
“May Exú Give Me the Power of Speech”

On the whole emancipation [in Brazil] was peaceful, and whites, Negroes, and Indians are to-day amalgamating into a new race.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, 1915

In South America we have long pretended to see a possible solution in the gradual amalgamation of whites, Indians and Blacks. But this amalgamation does not envisage any decrease of power and prestige among whites as compared with Indians, Negroes, and mixed bloods; but rather an inclusion within the so called white group of a considerable infiltration of dark blood, while at the same time maintaining the social bar, economic exploitation and political disfranchisement of dark blood as such. … And despite facts, no Brazilian nor Venezuelan dare boast of his black fathers. Thus, racial amalgamation in Latin-America does not always or even usually carry with it social uplift and planned effort to raise the mulatto and mestizoes to freedom in a democratic polity.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, 1942

FOR A VERY long time, whenever I heard the word race, only images of black people in the United States came to mind. As silly as it might sound now, to me, then, race was a code word for black people, and for their relations with white people in this country. I think that this is probably some sort of African American exceptionalism for people my age, people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement of the late fifties and sixties. Even today, in our era of multiculturalism, I still find it necessary sometimes to remember that race is not just a black thing, that race (by which most of us mean ethnicity) signifies a lot of different kinds of people, representing a full range of ethnicities, in a lot of different places, and that African Americans in this country don’t have a patent on the term or the social conditions that have resulted either from slavery or the vexed history of racial relations that followed slavery in the United States.

I should say that African Americans don’t have a patent especially on slavery, as I much later came to realize, throughout the New World. When I was growing up, I simply assumed that the slave experience in the New World was dominated by our ancestors who came to the United States between 1619 and the Civil War. And I think that many Americans still assume this. But it turns out that the slave ancestors of the African American people were only a tiny fraction—less than 5 percent—of all the Africans imported to the Western Hemisphere to serve as slaves. Over eleven million Africans survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the New World; and of these, incredibly, only about 450,000 Africans came to the United States. The “real” African American experience, based on numbers alone, then, unfolded in places south of our long southern border, south of Key West, south of Texas, south of California, in the Caribbean islands and throughout Latin America. And no place in our hemisphere received more Africans than Brazil did.

I think that probably the first time that I ever thought about race, integration, segregation, or miscegenation outside of the context of the United States, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement was the night that I saw the film Black Orpheus. I had thought about Africa quite a lot, and the black people who lived in Africa, from the time I was in the fifth grade, in 1960, the great year of African independence, the year that seventeen African nations were born. But thinking about black people and Africa is not the same as thinking about race. No, that came, for the first time, when I was a sophomore at Yale, assigned to watch Black Orpheus in the class called “From Africa to the Black Americas,” the art history class taught by the great scholar Robert Farris Thompson.

Black Orpheus, directed by Marcel Camus and shot in Brazil, was released in 1959, to rave reviews. In fact, it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1960. Based on a play written by Vinicius de Moraes entitled Orfeu da Conceição, the film adapts the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Set mostly in the Morro da Babilônia favela in the Leme neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, the film is stunning, even fifty years later, for the fact that it seamlessly transforms a classical Greek tale in black or brown face, as it were, without preaching about race or class and without protest or propaganda. It just assumes its propositions, as it were. The key Greek characters are here, including Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, as well as Orpheus and Eurydice, of course, played by an athletic Breno Mello and the irresistibly beautiful Marpessa Dawn, the goddess of black Brazilian cinema, who turned out to have been born in Pittsburgh of Filipino and African American descent.

Three things grabbed me when I saw the film. First, as I have mentioned, was the seamless translation of the Greek myth to a Brazilian context, with the race of the characters taken for granted and not trumpeted or strained in any way. Second was the use of Umbanda and Candomblé, which some people have called Brazil’s national African religions. When Orpheus descends (down a spiral staircase at, cleverly, the Office of Missing Persons) into Hades to find and retrieve Eurydice, “Hades” turns out to be an Umbanda ritual, complete with female worshipers dressed in white and the pivotal Yoruba god Ogun. Eurydice’s spirit speaks to Orpheus, in fact, through one of these female worshipers, now possessed by her spirit. Most striking sociologically, perhaps, is the fact that virtually everyone in the film is black or brown; very few “white” people appear in the film, and none appears in a significant role, similar, as I later discovered, to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Watching the film, my friends and I thought that Brazil was that most remarkable of places: a democracy in brown. Brazil, judging from the film, was a mulatto. For us, Black Orpheus seemed to be a sort of cinematic analogue to Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Brazil as a unique racial democracy. And all that made me want to visit there, but not as much, to be honest, as the vain hope that I’d spot one of the daughters of the beautiful Marpessa Dawn.

I thought about all of this, in flight, high above the Amazon, I supposed, on my way to Brazil for the first time, heading to Carnaval in February 2010. Between 1561 and 1860, Brazil (as we have seen) was the final destination of almost five million African slaves—some of them, perhaps, my distant cousins. But that wasn’t where my mind was taking me. Try as I might, I couldn’t help dwelling on the Brazil of my imagination: the pageantry and ecstasy of Carnaval; its syncretic mixtures of indigenous, African, and European cultural elements; the dancing to music and song born in Africa; the Yoruba, Fon, and Angolan–based religions blended into Candomblé and Umbanda; the many regional expressions of Afro-Brazilian religions such as Xangô, Batuque, Tambor de Mina. All of these forms of culture were signal aspects of an irresistibly vibrant national culture synthesized from so many strands contributed by its multiethnic people—a sea of beautiful brown faces with brilliant white smiles, at least as shaped in my mind by Carnaval scenes from Black Orpheus.

So much of Brazil’s syncretic culture manifests itself at Carnaval. And the most “African” of the various manifestations of Carnaval traditions in the country occurs each year in Bahia. As I boarded the packed connecting flight from São Paulo to Salvador—full of Brazilian tourists from other parts of the country, tourists from other countries, and even a few other African Americans, some of whom I learned were regulars—I began to wonder what exactly I would find when my plane touched down. Because about 43 percent of all slaves brought to the Americas ended up in Brazil, today over 97 million Brazilians in a total population of 190 million people have a significant amount of African genetic ancestry, self-identifying as either Brown (parda) or Black (preta) in the federal census (among five categories, including White (branca), Yellow (amarela), and Indígenous, Brown, and Black). This makes Brazil in effect the second-largest black country in the world, after Nigeria, if we use definitions of blackness employed in the United States. (Brazil, one might say, is genetically brown, though there are some areas of the country, such as Porto Alegre, that are overwhelmingly white.) And a third of Brazil’s slaves—about a million and a half people—landed in Brazil through the port here, in Bahia.

Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, we now know that about 70 percent of them came from Angola, and much of black Brazilian religion is based on two sources: the Yoruba orishas from western Nigeria and Benin and also what the historians Linda Heywood and John Thornton call “Angolan Catholicism,” whose roots were in Angola and which the slaves brought with them to Brazil. (Angolan Catholicism was born out of King Afonso’s skillful and deliberate blending of Christianity and Central African religions promoted by “Xinguillas” (as the Portuguese called them), a process that was well advanced by 1516, even before there was any significant African presence in Brazil. And Angolan Catholicism was every bit as much an African religion as was the Yoruba religion of the orishas. When many slaves from other parts of Africa arrived in Brazil, they were converted to Catholicism not as practiced in Portugal but as practiced in Angola, and indeed many were in fact catechized by Angolans informally, if not formally.) And this syncretic combination manifests itself in the religion called Candomblé, one of the most compelling cultural products of Pan-African culture in the New World. Candomblé is at the heart of black Brazilian culture. And if Brazil’s black culture has a capital, it is Bahia, without a doubt.

Brazil, I knew, was also a place of contradictions. It was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, just after Cuba abolished slavery in 1886. But it was also the first to claim it was free of anti-black racism, as Gilberto Freyre’s doctrine of “racial democracy” became associated with Brazil’s official identity. When I studied Brazil in college, at the end of the sixties, it was still generally thought to be a model society of a postracial world—a far cry from the rigidly segregated United States that the Civil Rights Movement was attempting to dismantle—although its racial-democracy ideology had come under fire (Du Bois critiqued it in 1942) and its military dictatorship had forbidden debate about race and racism in the country. And, indeed, Brazil remains one of the most racially mixed countries on earth—a hybrid nation descended from Africans, Europeans, and its original indigenous inhabitants. In the United States, people with African ancestry are all categorized as black; in Brazil, racial categories are on steroids, including at least 134 categories of “blackness.” Brazilians, or so I’d been told, believe that color is in the eye of the beholder. But who are the Afro-Brazilians? And what do they think of their history—of their own relation to Africa and to blackness? I wanted to know their story.

Bahia had especially fired my imagination, since so much of the literature about African retentions in the New World refers to rites and cultural practices developed there. Five hundred years ago, the Portuguese established a sugar cane empire in this region, in the present-day states of Bahia and Pernambuco—one of the largest plantation economies on earth. Initially, the Indians were used as field workers, but their numbers proved inadequate. The Portuguese needed slave labor to meet the demand, and so Africans were poured into the region. The first Africans came from the Portuguese Atlantic islands as specialized workers employed in the sugar-making process proper. As the demand for sugar increased, the number of slaves imported to Brazil exploded. Angola was the central source of these slaves.

By 1600, Brazil produced half the world’s sugar, and that sugar was produced through the labor of African slaves. I was extremely keen to see this place that so many Africans had first looked on when they disembarked from the slave ships, no doubt terrified and miserably disoriented, awaiting their fates in the New World, some even convinced that they were about to be eaten by white cannibals! But nothing I had dreamed or imagined, nothing I had read or even researched, prepared me for what I experienced in Bahia. I stepped out of my car on a busy street and looked around, and I thought, “My God, I am back in Africa!” Seriously. Everywhere I looked, I saw Brazilians with Africa inscribed on their faces and just as deeply on their culture. Across the street, I spotted a woman’s headdress I had seen just a few years before in Nigeria. Because of the long history of cultural trade between Bahia and West Africa, going back to the nineteenth century, West African cloths and other cultural objects were part of the trade, along with slaves.

Few of us realize that the traffic of the Yoruba between Brazil and Nigeria has been a two-way street at least since the early nineteenth century, when some freed slaves returned to the mother land in growing numbers after the defeat of the 1835 Muslim rebellion there, creating cross-pollination in Yoruba religious practices, among other things. Today, I learned, there is a great attempt of some culturally conscious black Brazilians to be “authentic,” and items such as cloth are still imported, though Brazilian-manufactured cloths make up the majority percentage of those used by Candomblé devotees and middle-class blacks, since imported cloth is very expensive. Bahia celebrates its African roots, its African heritage, and never more so than during Carnaval. The people here are more “African,” genetically, than in any other concentrated part of Brazil. The smells in the air, the gait of men in the streets, the way women move, their ways of worshiping and their religious beliefs, the dishes they eat—all remind me so much of things I had seen and smelled and heard in Nigeria and Angola, but transplanted across an ocean, similar and familiar but distinct: Africa, yes, but with a New World difference, Africa with decided twists.

Mesmerized, avidly on the lookout for those daughters of Marpessa Dawn, I walked the streets for hours before heading off to my first meeting, with João Reis, professor of history at the University of Bahia. I wanted to understand what had happened here, and so I wanted to start with Professor Reis, who has spent his entire professional life studying the history of slavery in Brazil. Straight off, he told me that ten times more Africans had come to Brazil as slaves than had gone to the United States. The reasons, he said, were both economic and geographic. Brazil was closer to Africa than was any other major destination in the New World (far closer than were the Caribbean or the English colonies in North America); in fact, though it is counterintuitive, it was quicker and easier to sail to Europe from certain African ports through Brazil, as it were. Moreover, the land surrounding the magnificent Bay of All Saints, where Salvador, Bahia’s capital, was founded in 1549, was a fertile growing ground for one of the era’s most desirable and extraordinarily profitable products: sugar. As a result, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the words sugar and Brazil were synonyms. And virtually all of it was produced with slave labor. Sugar is a leitmotif of this book; as the center of sugar production shifted, so did the size of the slave trade and the slave population, over a two-hundred-year period from Brazil to Haiti to Cuba. While both Mexico and Peru had sugar mills, and these were worked by slaves, most Afro-Mexicans and Afro-Peruvians labored in urban areas, many worked in the textile industry, and still others produced foodstuffs in towns. In Colombia, or “New Granada” (outside the scope of this book), they worked primarily in mines and not in sugar.

“Salvador, Bahia, was one of the most important Atlantic cities in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and through the eighteenth century,” Reis explained to me, with the patience of a great lecturer used to teaching hopelessly unprepared US undergraduates. “In the nineteenth century, it was full of foreigners from Europe, from the United States, from the Caribbean, and from Africa. It was a multicultural society, a cosmopolitan society, maybe even more cosmopolitan than the way we live here today.” Reis explained that Brazil was a prime destination for adventurers, and accordingly, many Europeans who came to Bahia were single men. In the British colonies of North America, entire families often emigrated to set up new lives. But in Bahia’s early history, Portuguese bachelors were the norm; and they found sexual conquest where they could—brutally, or coercively, and sometimes willingly—first among native women and then among African slaves. The racial blending that later came to define Brazil began.

I asked Professor Reis how these slaves were treated, especially in comparison to the treatment of slaves in the United States. Were they treated better, more humanely, than were their counterparts in the United States? That they were, of course, is part of Freyre’s explanation of the origins of Brazil’s “racial democracy” and is now part of its national mythology. The national story Brazil likes to tell today about its slave past is highly unusual. According to this story, the country made a more or less seamless transition from slavery to tolerance, from a terribly informal yet terribly effective racism (Brazil had no laws prohibiting blacks from occupying any post in society or politics) to racial democracy, because of the intimacy—specifically, sexual intimacy—between master and slave. How could did this come about? And could any country make such a shift? Was slavery in Brazil somehow fundamentally different than it was in the United States? The answers I got were complex.

Reis told me that the people of Bahia often freed their slaves or allowed them to buy their own freedom. Indeed, citizens of Bahia granted manumission—emancipation—to more slaves than did any other region in the Americas. You’d think that made it a lucky destination, if a slave could ever be considered lucky. But it belied a deeper, more disturbing reality. There were many more slaves in Bahia at a certain point in the slave trade than there were almost anywhere else—and for most of those who had been born in Africa, life in their new country was short and unbearably harsh. (As slavery matured in southern Brazil thanks to mining and, later, coffee, Minas, Rio, and São Paulo came to have larger slave populations. The city of Rio, for example, became in the mid-nineteenth century the largest slave city in the hemisphere ever, with close to one hundred thousand slaves.) Bahia’s steady supply of human labor caused many slaves to suffer especially bad treatment, just because they were so easily replaceab...