Styling Blackness in Chile

Music and Dance in the African Diaspora

Juan Eduardo Wolf

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041173
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Ethnomusikologie

Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence.

Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers—a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indígena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.

PART I

STYLING BLACKNESS AS AFRO-DESCENDANT

1

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF BLACKNESS AND THE EMERGENCE OF AFRO-DESCENDANTS IN CHILE

Music has been very important symbolically. I would say that it is a part of our culture, of cultural expressions, that has empowered us. Because, in the North, people like music very much, and we have noticed that they, when we go out in our comparsas, when we present our festivities, they follow us—with a lot of joy, with a lot of respect, which is something very honorable in the community, and we have noticed that foreigners knock themselves out taking pictures, but thinking that we are a group on tour in the city. When we tell them that we are Chilean Afro-descendants, they exclaim—Oh, I did not know! And they begin a series of interviews and, in truth, music has been our great achievement and helped plant us in the minds and awareness of people.

(Marta Salgado, president of Oro Negro, interview with author, September 5, 2009)

AT THE TIME I INTERVIEWED MARTA SALGADO, THE tumbe carnaval had been in the public spotlight for six years, and her praise of this music (and dance, for she has often danced as the standard bearer of the group) was based on her own experiences of its growing positive reception. To fully appreciate the effect tumbe performances have achieved and to understand the rationales behind styling Blackness as Afro-descendant, one needs to have an idea of the historical trajectory of Blackness within Chile. In this chapter, I weave some of the history of Africans and their descendants in Chile with the evolution of concepts of Blackness in the country to frame the emergence of the tumbe carnaval. This information will also be useful later as I describe music-dance genres associated with Blackness other than tumbe.

The trajectory of Blackness as a concept in Chile began as Africans arrived with the colonizing Spaniards to the Americas and were given a designation within the developing system of castas—categories that combined ideas of class, ethnicity, and race—which included the category Black. When Chile became a republic and slavery was abolished, the government generally stopped recording this information in the name of fairness, but intellectuals writing during the nineteenth century continued to stigmatize Blackness and downplay its role in Chilean society. During the twentieth century, popular culture played a particularly important role in shaping the country’s racial attitudes, so developments in music-dance contributed to the “erasure” of Blackness in Chile throughout this period. These attitudes became more flexible with the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, a time frame that coincided with the adoption of the Multicultural Alignment and new lines of thought regarding Blackness throughout Latin America. This meeting of moments set the stage for what seemed like the sudden appearance of Chilean Afro-descendant groups and the tumbe carnaval, the music-dance that is most identified with the movement.

Castas and a Brief History of Afro-descendant Slavery in Chile and Arica

The history of ideas about race in Chile follows many of the trends that were present in the rest of Latin America. In general, an individual’s status in Latin American colonial society was legally established through association with their casta, a category that depended on a number of factors. Not solely racial, castas combined ideas of lineage and phenotype with geography and culture. The three main, or “pure,” categories in colonial Spanish America were español, indio, and negro (Spanish, Indian, and Black), with español at the top of the hierarchy. From the Spanish perspective, the geographically named casta of español was presumed Catholic, while indio (from Indies, also geographically named) was conceived as a pagan in need of conversion and spiritual guidance. In return for their salvation, they would give their labor. The phenotypically named negro, however, was assumed infidel and generally appropriate for enslavement.¹

From these primary categories, more castas emerged based on the concept of “mixture.” The secondary categories were mestizo (the mix between Spanish and Indian), mulato (the mix between Spanish and Black), and zambo (the mix between Black and Indian). Additional tertiary categories varied locally depending on further combinations of these six categories (Mörner 1967, 58–59). The casta of indio tended to be afforded more legal protections than the casta of negro, but other factors also came into play by considering an individual’s social status. For example, Black slaves with a trade could sometimes earn additional money and eventually purchase their freedom. Together with slaves who were voluntarily given their freedom by their owners as well as Black children whose parents were already free, these individuals made up a class of free Black people who were present in Latin American societies from quite early on. These free Black people could be referred to as moreno or pardo to distinguish them from negro (Forbes 1993, 121). Beyond one’s status as slave or free, one’s place of birth also had an influence on one’s casta. Environment was supposed to have an impact on one’s character, so that European-born Spaniards, referred to as peninsulares, were given higher status than those of Spanish descent born in the Americas, most often named criollos. Interestingly, the term criollo appears to have originated to contrast a Black person who had been born within Spanish society (also called ladinos) with the bozal, who was born on the African continent (Lockhart 1994, 198). These terms were often combined to refine the broader casta categories, for example, negro bozal.

The abundance of casta categories—due to local variations and socially mitigating factors—has led some to debate how important the concept of race was in colonial Latin America (Wade 2010, 29; Burns 2011). However, some colonial-period writings directly connect the castas with physical appearance and temperament, a sign of racialized thinking. In 1789, Jesuit priest and historian Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre listed the castas he recognized in Chile, together with descriptions of their behavior. For example, he characterized mulatos as being “of regular stature, of weak constitution and beautiful qualities of spirit, if you overlook the arrogance that is their inclination.” Similarly, for zambos, he stated, “The color of these is copper, their frame large, robust, brawny, their hair not long but not so curly. The qualities of spirit are ordinarily bad, disloyal, extremely cantankerous, cruel, traitorous, and so, people whose company you ought to avoid.”² Gómez’s descriptions suggest that phenotypical characteristics played a role in the system. They were particularly limiting for those individuals who were phenotypically and temperamentally associated with the castas of indio and negro (Wade 1993, 9). Gómez discussed criollos separately from the castas, noting their similarity in appearance to Spaniards and, given the right upbringing, their tendency to be logical, honest, and concerned about their reputation. Such descriptions of Chilean society provide the basis for the metaphors I use to describe the styling of Blackness in part 2 of this book.

With this understanding of casta terminology, one can more deeply engage with the limited historiography about Africans and the nature of slavery in Chile. This literature began to expand, albeit mostly focused on Chile’s capital, Santiago, after the recent appearance of Afro-descendant activist groups.³ From this new scholarship, it is worth elucidating a few points. First, while the overall number of slaves in Chile was relatively low, the same could be said of the overall population of Europeans and their descendants. Thus, the relative percentage of Afro-descendants, recognized within the categories of negro and mulato, could be locally significant. For example, using baptismal records in Santiago, Jean-Paul Zuñiga (2009) has calculated that during the period of 1633–44, there were approximately 430 slave owners for the approximately 1,685 slaves in a city with roughly 300 families. Since most of the owners had four or fewer slaves, Zuñiga asserts that slavery was a reality in most households. Both he and Frederick Bowser (1974) argue that slavery in the viceroyalty of Peru was understood as a socioeconomic asset to the household, so that even people with meager resources were willing to invest in the purchase of a slave.⁴ Furthermore, the work of both Zuñiga and Celia Cussen (2009) shows that slaves in colonial Santiago were involved in a variety of tasks and professions, from shoemaker to carpenter. During its early period, Santiago was a mixture of urbanity and rurality, so the tasks of a “domestic” slave could also involve tending fields or working small mining extractions. Those slaves with the most lucrative professions—who often became well-connected with the more influential people in colonial society—were more likely to be able to purchase their freedom, although few slaves could achieve this status. Even after a slave was freed, Cussen argues, slavery continued to cast a long shadow. Former slaves thought about how to free enslaved companions and family members, and they still faced the stigma of race, since they were persistently marked in documents with phrases such as pardo libre (free Black) (Cussen 2009, 134).

The stigma associated with Blackness might explain why it is so difficult to trace the history of African descendants after their manumission. To begin with, Zuñiga believes that Africans in Chile had a difficult time identifying with one another precisely because they were spread out in the assimilating environments of individual households rather than held in large groups. In other countries, the membership of certain institutions, such as specific religious brotherhoods, was predominantly African. In Chile, the membership of brotherhoods was much more diverse. William F. Sater argues that, in Chile, “miscegenation . . . annihilated the black” (1974, 37), an argument that he supports by citing several case studies in which documents showed a decline in the Black population, while the mixed population designated as mulatos and zambos increased. Like Sater, many people have focused on the concept of racial mixture to explain the so-called absence of Blackness in Chile, thereby downplaying the role racism played in the process. Chilean society, however, consistently valued Spanish over Black heritage, giving little motivation for people to recognize their Blackness. George Reid Andrews (1980) discovered that, for Argentina, these arguments based on miscegenation can be called into question on closer scrutiny, and I believe that a similar situation is possible for Chile, if the appropriate records can be located.

Map 1.1. Major cities within the three general cultural regions of mainland Chile. Cartography by University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab, Department of Geography.

Of course, this description of the history of people of African descent in Chile principally refers to colonial Chile, a region focused on Santiago that geographically ranged from north of the Bio-Bio River to the city of Copiapó. Populations varied within this region. According to a census in 1777–78, Santiago’s population was approximately 18 percent negro and mulato. Coquimbo’s negro and mulato population was higher (at greater than 20 percent), and the southern valley, including Colchagua and Maule, was approximately 8 percent (Cussen 2006, 53). The region in and around Arica, however, has a slightly different history: Arica only came under Chilean control in 1880, after Chilean troops took the city as part of the War of the Pacific (1879–83). After a dispute of almost fifty years, Arica was finally ceded fully to Chile via treaty in 1929. Thus, Arica’s history with slavery is intimately tied with that of Peru, and by extension, Bolivia.

The Spanish founding of the port of Arica in 1546 came just a year after the Spaniards discovered silver in the mines of Potosí, in the highlands of what would later become Bolivia (Vásquez Trigo 2002, 20). Arica initially served as the principal port for the mines, giving it a particularly important status within Spanish colonial America in the seventeenth century. According to a 1614 census, some 1,300 Black people were part of the 1,784 residents in Spanish colonial society, a number that already included African descendants of the fourth generation (Briones Valentín 2004).⁵ Arica’s status as a port, combined with the high Black percentage of the urban population during this early period, led to some interesting situations. Militias of free Blacks were enlisted to protect the port from pirates, and legend has it that Arica even elected two free Black mayors, who were removed from their posts due to racism (Salgado Henríquez 2014, 69–70). The Black population continued to be significant until the second half of the nineteenth century. The urban slave situation along colonial Peru’s coast was like that of colonial Santiago in that many slaves were artisans and the “domestic” slave often performed tasks in the garden. As with Santiago, the Indigenous presence in Arica’s surrounding regions was still important and performed much of the agricultural labor.

Beyond Castas: Chile’s Independence and Republican Ideas of Racial Mixture

During the colonial period, the concept of racial mixture could be threatening to those groups at the top of the social hierarchy, as it provided the possibility—albeit very limited—for individuals to contest and reposition themselves within that structure. With the arrival of independence in the nineteenth century, however, some members of the new governments wanted to show they had thrown off ideas about the division between races. Racial attitudes toward Blackness, however, continued to surface in the writings of intellectuals and historians, and also appeared in political cartoons addressing the question of Arica’s sovereignty in the wake of the War of the Pacific. In this section, I explore the racial attitudes of the period through the writings of Diego Barros Arana and Nicolas Palacios as well as the propaganda images that appeared in Chilean magazines as the fate of Arica was being negotiated.

In 1818, Chile’s first supreme director Bernardo O’Higgins stated that castas should not be an issue in the new republic, and the state did not ask a racial identification question after its 1813 census (Loveman 2014, 79, 112). Such actions reflected an attitude that the state should stand for liberal values that would allow every man to participate in society independent of race (so long as he could obtain property and literacy). Later in the nineteenth century, certain intellectuals, like historian Diego Barros Arana, saw leaders like O’Higgins as iconic of the Chilean state, and their values (such as the rejection of race labels) as Chilean values. Ironically, Barros Arana’s historiography still revealed racialized thinking. He asserted that “Chile was undoubtedly the colony of the King of Spain that had the highest relative population of pure White race” (1886, vol. 7, 447n19). In this worldview, the “Araucanian Indian” could still function as the incarnation of the values of bravery and resistance, a historical “noble savage,” as portrayed in colonial-era literary works.⁶ Barros Arana noted, however, that while not always physically obvious, racial mixture, or mestizaje, included both races’ worst qualities (Barr-Melej 2001, 60). Coupled with the lack of education and work in Chile, the country’s mestizos were, according to Barros Arana, uncivilized, superstitious, improvident, and liable to gamble, drink, rob, and fight (1886, vol. 7, 441).

Unrest began to foment among the Latin American working class as it became clear that, despite this discourse of liberal values, the state had concentrated power and capital in the hands of oligarchs and foreign investors (Turino 2003, 180). In response, many elites and intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century appealed to the language of nationalism, praising a country’s racial mixture as positive to appear more inclusive. The result was that, by the mid-twentieth century, the elite in many ...