Becoming Black Political Subjects

Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil

Tianna Paschel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400881079
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the most important cases in the region: Colombia and Brazil.Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Tianna Paschel shows how, over a short period, black movements and their claims went from being marginalized to become institutionalized into the law, state bureaucracies, and mainstream politics. The strategic actions of a small group of black activists—working in the context of domestic unrest and the international community's growing interest in ethno-racial issues—successfully brought about change. Paschel also examines the consequences of these reforms, including the institutionalization of certain ideas of blackness, the reconfiguration of black movement organizations, and the unmaking of black rights in the face of reactionary movements. Becoming Black Political Subjects offers important insights into the changing landscape of race and Latin American politics and provokes readers to adopt a more transnational and flexible understanding of social movements.

CHAPTER ONE

POLITICAL FIELD ALIGNMENTS

In 1991, black farmers and miners left the rural areas of Colombia’s Pacific Coast, making their way to the capital city of Bogotá. They took with them marimbas, drums, and songs about rural life and culture with the intention of serenading the delegates to the National Constituent Assembly. Their serenatas served one purpose: to convince those elected to draft Colombia’s new constitution that the state should grant black communities specific rights. Ultimately, they succeeded, and the country’s 1991 constitution recognized that black people, like indigenous peoples, were a distinct “ethnic group” whose right to collective territory was to be legally protected. The constitution also mandated the adoption of the Law of Black Communities (1993), which recognized the rights of rural black communities to ethnic education, alternative development, natural resources, political participation, and local autonomy. This legislation profoundly disrupted the way that the Colombian state had imagined the nation for nearly a century, as racially mixed and culturally homogeneous.

Colombia’s neighbor, Brazil, had reformed its constitution along similar lines just three years before when it recognized the land rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of runaway slaves. However, Brazil’s more transformative ethno-racial reforms came about a decade later with a wave of policies designed to “promote racial equality.” This happened in August 2001, when black Brazilian activists flew to Durban, South Africa, as part of one of the largest delegations to the United Nation’s Third World Conference against Racism.¹ In contrast to Afro-Colombians who carried with them symbols of cultural difference, Brazil’s black activists traveled equipped with official statistics on racial inequality and discrimination in their country. They had one main objective: to pressure the Brazilian state to grant the country’s black population reparations in the form of affirmative action policies.² The strategy worked. In December 2001, then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso gave an historic speech in which he stated, “The Brazilian state recognizes the painful consequences that slavery has caused in Brazil and it will continue with the task of repairing such damage through policies that promote equal opportunity.”³ He added that the best way to address this issue was through both “universal and affirmative action policies for Afro-descendants.” Subsequently, government agencies and nearly a hundred of Brazil’s most prestigious universities implemented unparalleled race-based affirmative action policies with the goal of proactively addressing racial inequality and discrimination.

These political changes in Colombia and Brazil disrupted prevalent state discourses, which had denied the existence of racism and downplayed these countries’ cultural heterogeneity for decades. Nationalist narratives in these cases had been based on the notion of mestizaje—the idea that biological mixture and cultural hybridity between European, indigenous, and African peoples—had given way to a racially egalitarian and homogeneous society. The official state discourse was that these countries had overcome their sordid histories of slavery and colonization to create racial paradises of sorts. As such, the state, and society more generally, often dismissed those who thought otherwise. Black activists were often accused of importing racism from elsewhere, and in rare cases, the state repressed such ideas outright.⁴ However, this began to change radically in the late 1980s, as states throughout Latin America recognized black and indigenous rights as well as adopted policies aimed at bringing about ethno-racial equality. These reforms shook the very foundation upon which nationalism was built in these countries.

In this book, l examine these political transformations in Colombia and Brazil. More specifically, I analyze the process through which blackness became legitimated as a category of political contestation in the eyes of the state and other powerful political actors. In order to do so, I examined archives and conducted ethnographic fieldwork over nearly eight years in the style of what scholars across disciplines have called “political ethnography” (Auyero 2006; Baiocchi and Connor 2008; Schatz 2013). While this approach to ethnography relies on participant observation, it is more fundamentally about being immersed in political communities in ways that lead to a more textured analysis of political processes.⁵ Embedding myself in the very political processes I was studying helped to generate a productive analysis that moved beyond simple “categories of state, civil society, and social movements,” as Baiocchi and Conner (2008, 139) have noted. In the methodological appendix, I explain my methods in greater detail and also explore how being an African American woman affiliated with elite U.S. universities shaped my experience in the field.

I first ask: Why did the Colombian and Brazilian states go from citizenship regimes based in ideas of the universal and formally unmarked citizen to the recognition of black rights? I argue that in both cases they did so in the face of pressure from black social movement organizations. However, while these movements were essential to the making of black political subjects, they were small and under-resourced networks of activists. They also had very few political allies and were unpopular with, and largely unknown to, the masses. In fact, social movement scholars might debate the extent to which they were movements at all. Even if we assume they were in fact movements, we are still left with many questions about why activists were able to reshape state policy and discourse in such drastic ways. Their success runs counter to the ideas that have been cultivated for decades that massive, disruptive movements as well as those with strong political allies and favorable public opinion are more likely to bring about the changes they desire.⁶

Yet the story I weave together here is still fundamentally about how black social movements in Colombia and Brazil did succeed—against all odds—in bringing about specific legislation for black populations as well as substantive changes in popular discourse. In addition to analyzing the strategies they used to do so, I also examine how their embeddedness in a complex field of local and global politics often blurred the very definition of what a social movements is. In this vein, I argue that the only way to understand the making of black political subjects in Colombia and Brazil is to take as a point of departure the idea that these movements, like many movements around the world, operate within the material and discursive boundaries of multiple fields of contestation.

The two fields in which black movements were embedded in these cases were the field of domestic politics, and something I call the global ethno-racial field. These fields (a term I borrow from Bourdieu) were composed of local and global discourses of race, nation, and rights as well as a plethora of political actors, including state officials, academic “experts,” environmentalists, international human rights advocates, development workers, capitalists, and other social movement actors. I show how black movements in Colombia and Brazil successfully pressured their respective states to adopt ethno-racial reforms because they acted strategically in the context of this consolidated global ethno-racial field oriented around multiculturalism, indigenous rights, and anti-racism, which converged with profound changes in the domestic political fields of these countries. I contend that by mobilizing around these political field alignments, black movements in Colombia and Brazil overcame significant ideological and material odds to ultimately transform citizenship regimes previously based on homogeneity and formal colorblindness.

The second question I seek to answer is: Why have black rights taken such distinct forms in different countries in Latin America? Nearly every country in the region has adopted some type of ethno-racial policies over the last three decades. However, unlike previous scholarship I do not see these reforms all as making up a singular “multicultural turn.”⁷ Instead, I argue that it is more useful to view these changes as constituting two distinct moments of interplay between domestic and global politics. The first of these, I suggest, began to unfold in the late 1980s with the shift to what Van Cott (2000) called “multicultural constitutionalism.” In this period, Latin American states reformed their constitutions in ways that recognized the “pluri-ethnic” and “multicultural” character of the political community while at the same time they extended specific rights to indigenous peoples and in some cases to black populations. In countries that did include blacks in this multicultural alignment, the black political subject that emerged was defined by a discourse of cultural difference and autonomy that was very much entangled with concerns about the struggle and well-being of indigenous peoples.

About a decade later, Latin American states initiated a new wave of ethno-racial reforms aimed at combating racial discrimination and bringing about racial equality. This included establishing national holidays celebrating black history and culture, creating state institutions aimed at combating racial discrimination, including new kinds of ethno-racial questions on national censuses, and the passing of anti-discrimination legislation. Unlike the multicultural policies of the 1980s–1990s, blacks—rather than indigenous peoples—were the presumed subjects of these new reforms. I examine how both of these rounds of reforms played out in two of the most important cases in the region, Colombia and Brazil.

Last, I explore the broader social and political consequences of these shifts. By the time I embarked upon fieldwork in 2006, I did not find the kind of silencing of racial critique that previous scholars found to be so prevalent in this region. Instead, both the Colombian and Brazilian states talked openly about racism and ethno-racial policies.⁸ Moreover, rather than be seen as divisive, black identity was considered a legitimate political category. Yet while these governments had dramatically shifted their discourse around ethno-racial issues, many questions remained unresolved. Who would be the beneficiaries of these policies? How would blackness be defined in these contexts where ethno-racial categories were notoriously so blurry? Did people have to be rural and culturally distinct, reside in “black regions,” or trace their ancestry back to runaway slaves to qualify for multicultural rights? Would having a black ancestor be enough to qualify one for affirmative action at a university?

Further, given that both Colombia and Brazil are notorious for their gaps between laws on the books and actual state practices, did these reforms actually matter on the ground? I show how the institutionalization of ethno-racial rights and policies not only reconfigured the state, it also reshaped the terms—both the conditions and language—of the black movement itself. In the wake of what were inevitably partial victories, what developed were entangled relationships between black movement actors and the state, as well as contentious debates within these movements over questions of authenticity, representation, and political autonomy. All of these political dynamics shaped how deep these reforms actually went.

FROM RACE MIXTURE TO BLACK RIGHTS

Throughout most of the twentieth century, elites, ordinary citizens, and visitors shared a view of Latin America as a region of racial harmony. Such an idea made some sense when you situated these cases in a global context. In a world of Jim Crow, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, Latin America—with its high levels of mixing, its lack of racially exclusionary laws, and its low levels of ethno-racial conflict—seemed exceptional. These characteristics were especially pronounced when contrasted with the racist regimes of the United States up until the 1960s or South Africa until the 1990s (Freyre 1933; Pierson 1942; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Fry and Maggie 2004; Magnoli 2009).⁹ To some observers, even slavery took a more benevolent form in places like Brazil than it did in the United States (Tannenbaum 1947; Harris 1956; Hoetink 1967).

Latin American state officials echoed this sentiment, often presenting their countries on the world stage as models of racial egalitarianism. As one Brazilian diplomat suggested before the United Nations in 1978, “even though there is a multiplicity of races that live within our borders, racial problems simply do not exist in Brazil.”¹⁰ State officials in both countries argued that the prevalence of race mixture, and a tradition of colorblind legalism, and universal citizenship had made racial conflict disappear. A Colombian diplomat captured this idea well in a 1984 report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD): “The legal and social organization of Colombia has always guaranteed racial equality and the absence of discrimination [against] any element of the population.”¹¹ This statement channeled a deeply entrenched nationalism based on mestizaje. Also implied in these narratives was that countries like Colombia and Brazil had overcome the stain of slavery and colonization, something their neighbors to the north had not.

During the colonial period, European colonists, enslaved Africans, and indigenous peoples did, in fact, intermix more in Latin America than they did in English colonies. While this might suggest that these differences were cultural in nature, scholars have argued that they were more likely the result of vastly different demographic and political dynamics in these different regions (Degler 1971; Telles 2004). Whereas English settlers came to the United States fleeing religious persecution with their families in tow, Portuguese and Spanish colonists were men largely migrating alone and often with the idea that they would make a fortune in the New World and return home. There is no doubt that, in some cases, African and indigenous women entered into some consensual concubine relationships with European men in colonial Latin America (Stolcke 1989). However, many of the encounters that produced these mixed-race nations also entailed violence and coercion, something that narratives of mestizaje often obscure (Stolcke 1989; Caldwell 2007).

Nevertheless, the most significant distinction between Latin America and the United States was not the amount of race mixture per se, but where this mixture figured into the law and into the nationalist project. The United States increasingly outlawed miscegenation over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Latin American countries not only allowed mixture, they often celebrated it. Under mestizaje nationalism, the mestizo (“mixed person”) became the quintessential national subject, and indigenous and black populations often stood at the center of the symbolic nation. Moreover, rather than formalize racial exclusion via state institutions, elites in Latin American states extended formal citizenship to sub...