Kwame Dixon - Ollie A Johnson III - Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America-Routledge (2018)

Comparative Racial Politics
in Latin America
Latin America has a rich and complex social history marked by slavery, colonialism,
dictatorships, rebellions, social movements and revolutions. Comparative Racial Politics
in Latin America explores the dynamic interplay between racial politics and hegemonic
power in the region. It investigates the fluid intersection of social power and racial pol-
itics and their impact on the region’s histories, politics, identities and cultures.
Organized thematically with in-depth country case studies and a historical overview
of Afro-Latin politics, the volume provides a range of perspectives on Black politics and
cutting-edge analyses of Afro-descendant peoples in the region. Regional coverage
includes Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti
and more. Topics discussed include Afro-Civil Society; antidiscrimination criminal
law; legal sanctions; racial identity; racial inequality and labor markets; recent Black
electoral participation; Black feminism thought and praxis; comparative Afro-women
social movements; the intersection of gender, race and class, immigration and migra-
tion; and citizenship and the struggle for human rights. Recognized experts in different
disciplinary fields address the depth and complexity of these issues.
Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America contributes to and builds on the study of
Black politics in Latin America.
Kwame Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University,

who did his undergraduate work at the University of South Florida and received his
Ph.D. from Clark-Atlanta University. He was awarded two Fulbright grants and has
done extensive field research and lived in several Latin American countries, including
Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil. He is the author of Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salva-
dor da Bahia (University Press of Florida, 2016) and coeditor of Comparative Perspectives
on Afro Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2012). He teaches courses on Interna-
tional Human Rights, Latin American Politics and Comparative Racial Politics.
Ollie A. Johnson III is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of African
American Studies at Wayne State University. He is the coeditor of Race, Politics, and
Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in Higher Education (2015). He also authored Bra-
zilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964 and coedited Black Political Organizations in the
Post-Civil Rights Era. Professor Johnson received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the
University of California at Berkeley. His current research focuses on African American,
Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin American Politics.
‘Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America is an exemplary work that
brings together scholarship focusing on black movement activism as
articulated by Afro-descendant men and women, against persistent
inequalities. Afro-descendant women have been at the forefront of
articulating the needs of black citizenship. This book will be a great
resource for activists, scholars, and students interested in black activ-
ism and policy changes in Latin America.’
—Gladys Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor in the Department
of Africology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
‘Located at the cutting edge of the current wave of research on black-

ness in Latin America, the stellar cast of contributors assembled by
Dixon and Johnson in this book provides an outstanding overview of
racial politics in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its breadth of cov-
erage and the penetratingly critical stance adopted by its contributors
make the book required reading for students and scholars alike.’
—Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology,
University of Manchester
‘This volume ably brings together established and emergent scholars

to trace historical and contemporary patterns of black political mobi-
lization in Latin America.’
—Juliet Hooker, Professor of Political Science, Brown University
Comparative Racial
Politics in Latin
America
Edited by Kwame Dixon and

Ollie A. Johnson III
First published 2019
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
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and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-72702-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-48530-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-19106-5 (ebk)
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Contents
List of Figures viii

List of Tables x
Notes on Contributors xii
Acknowledgments xvi

Introduction: Comparative Racial Politics in Latin
America – Black Politics Matter 1
Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III
Part I
History 15
1 Beyond Representation: Rethinking Rights, Alliances

and Migrations: Three Historical Themes in Afro-Latin
American Political Engagement 17
Darién J. Davis
2 Recognition, Reparations and Political Autonomy of

Black and Native Communities in the Americas 44
Bernd Reiter
3 Pan-Africanism and Latin America 64

Elisa Larkin Nascimento
vi Contents
Part II
The Caribbean 87
4 Black Activism and the State in Cuba 89

Danielle Pilar Clealand
5 Correcting Intellectual Malpractice: Haiti and Latin America 111

Jean-Germain Gros
6 Black Feminist Formations in the Dominican Republic

since La Sentencia 139
April J. Mayes
Part III
South America 161
7 Afro-Ecuadorian Politics 163

Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sánchez
8 En la Sucursal del Cielo (In the Branch of Paradise):

Geographies of Privilege and Black Social Suffering
in Cali, Colombia 183
Jaime Amparo Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa
9 The Impossible Black Argentine Political Subject 211

Judith M. Anderson
10 Current Representations of ‘Black’ Citizens: Contentious

Visibility within the Multicultural Nation 229
Laura de la Rosa Solano
Part Iv
Comparative Perspectives 247
11 The Contours and Contexts of Afro-Latin American

Women’s Activism 249
Kia Lilly Caldwell
12 Race and the Law in Latin America 271

Tanya Katerí Hernández
Contents vii
13 The Labyrinth of Ethnic–Racial Inequality: A Picture of

Latin America According to the Recent Census Rounds 288
Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto
14 The Millennium Development Goals/Sustainable

Development Goals and Afro-Descendants in the
Americas: An (Un)intended Trap 318
Paula Lezama

Conclusion 344
Index 349
Figures
4.1 Experiences with discrimination 100

4.2 Group consciousness and awareness 103
4.3 Black organizing 103
8.1 Housing discrimination in Colombia ‘Apartment for renting,
but not for Blacks’ 194
8.2 Picture of ‘The most powerful women of Cali’, by Hola
Newspaper 194
8.3 Corridor of wealth 195
8.4 Poorer areas of the city 196
8.5 Frequency of homicides 198
8.6 Homicides by boroughs in 2010 201
8.7 Afro-descendant population by boroughs 205
9.1 African Diaspora Working Group (ADWG) meeting 214
9.2 Grupo de Estudios Afro-Latino Americanos (GEALA) poster by
Darío la Vega 222
9.3 Obaca by FansWorld TV 223
10.1 The answer is Colombia postcard 230
10.2 Couple of dancers. Photo from El Universal 239
10.3 Palenqueras. Photo from the website Noticartagena 240
10.4 A palenquera woman in a postcard celebrating the Colombian
Independence Day. Fonturcol 240
10.5 Black man dressed as a slave, Cartagena Tourism
Corporation stand at the 31st Anato show 241
10.6 Two women dressed as the India Catalina and the palenquera,
Cartagena Tourism Corporation stand at the 31st Anato show 242
14.1 Millennium development goals 319
14.2 Sustainable development goals 319
Figures ix
14.3 Percentage of country population that is low income 325

14.4 Percentage of country population that is middle income 326
14.5 Percentage of country population that is upper-middle income 327
14.6 Percentage of country population that is high income 328
14.7 Racial and ethnic wealth gaps have grown since the Great
Depression median net worth of households in dollars, 2013 329
14.8 Poverty rates of Afro-Descendants versus non–Afro/non–
indigenous population in selected countries, 2014 333
14.9 Brazil’s income distribution – market, disposable and
consumable income – by racial/ethnic membership, 2008–2009 334
14.10 Proportion of undernourished people, 1990–1992 and 2014–2016 337
14.11 Relation between poverty and global and chronic
malnutrition for children under five years old, mid-1990s.
Nine countries, national averages 338
14.12 Unemployment rate and average school attainment by group
age, gender and ethnic/racial membership, 2014 340
Tables
7.1 Afro-Ecuadorians elected to Congress, 1979–2006 168

7.2 Poverty according to unsatisfied basic needs (NBI) according
to the Census of 2010 174
7.3 Afro-descendants elected to the Assembly of 2013–2017 176
7.4 Afro-Ecuadorians elected to the Assembly of 2017–2021 177
8.1 Years of education, per capita income and salaries by ethnic
group, Cali, 2012 199
8.2 Occupations by ethnic group 200
13.1 Afro-Latino identification by country, 2002–2015 296
13.2 Labor force by gender, ethnic–racial group, and country,
2002–2015 298
13.3 Labor force by educational attainment, ethnic–racial group,
and country, 2002–2015 301
13.4 Unemployment rate by gender, ethnic–racial group, and
country, 2002–2015 303
13.5 Informality rate by ethnic–racial group and country, 2005–2011 305
13.6 Employed persons by occupation, ethnic–racial group and
country, 2002–2015 307
13.7 Duncan Dissimilarity Index of selected ethnic–racial groups
and country, 2002–2015 309
14.1 Percentages of Colombian poor and indigent population for
2003, by urban–rural areas 334
14.2 Poverty, extreme poverty and Gini coefficient for selected
departments and cities with largest Afro-descendant
population, Colombia, 2014–2015 336
Tables xi
14.3 Incidence of food insufficiency by race/ethnicity, Colombian

Census 2005 338
14.4 Illiteracy rates for people over 15 years, by ethnic groups,
gender and age groups in percentages 339
Contributors
Jaime Amparo Alves teaches Anthropology at the College of Staten Island of

the City University of New York. He is the author of The Anti-Black City: Police
Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). His
current research focuses on urban governance, gang territoriality and Black
subjectivity in postconflict Colombia.
Judith M. Anderson is a Cultural Anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of

Social Sciences in the Center for Ethnic Studies at CUNY Borough of Man-
hattan Community College. As an Afro-Latin Americanist, she studies how
Africans and Afro-descendants have changed the racial landscape of Argentina,
the ‘European’ nation of Latin America. Her research focuses on the mobiliza-
tion of Black identity for political activism in present-day Buenos Aires.
Kia Lilly Caldwell is a Professor of African, African-American and Diaspora

Studies. She is the Director of the African Diaspora Fellows Program, which
provides professional development to middle and high school teachers in North
Carolina. Her research focuses on race, gender, Black feminism, health pol-
icy and HIV/AIDS. She is the author of Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black
Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity (Rutgers University Press, 2007)
and Health Equity in Brazil: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Policy (University of
Illinois Press, 2017). She is also the coeditor of Gendered Citizenships: Transna-
tional Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2009).
Danielle Pilar Clealand is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International

Relations at Florida International University. Her research focuses on race and
racialization in the Americas, Black consciousness and racial attitudes, and
Contributors xiii
racial inequality in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the US. Her current
projects focus on racial politics among Afro-Latinos in the US and racism and
racial inequality in Puerto Rico. She is the author of The Power of Race in Cuba:
Racial Ideology and Black Consciousness during the Revolution (Oxford University
Press, 2017).
Darién J. Davis is Chair of the History Department at Middlebury College

and author of several books and edited volumes on the Diasporic experience
of Afro-descendants, Brazilians, Latinos and Jews. He teaches courses on Latin
and American history, Diasporas and Transnationalism. Over the past thirty
years, he has worked for a number of human rights and black and Latino rights
organizations. See https://dariendavis.wordpress.com.
Kwame Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard Uni-

versity, who did his undergraduate work at the University of South Florida
and received his Ph.D. from Clark-Atlanta University. He was awarded two
Fulbright grants and has done extensive field research and lived in several Latin
American countries, including Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil. He is the author
of Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia (University Press of Florida,
2016) and coeditor of Comparative Perspectives on Afro Latin America (University
Press of Florida, 2012). He teaches courses on International Human Rights,
Latin American Politics and Comparative Racial Politics.
Jean-Germain Gros is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy Ad-

ministration at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. In addition to his home
university, Professor Gros has taught at the University of Ghana-Legon (2004),
Webster University-Ghana Campus (2016, 2018) and the Académie Nationale
Diplomatique et Consulaire (ANDC) in Port-au-Prince (Summer 2006). Profes-
sor Gros is the author of State Failure, Underdevelopment and Foreign Intervention
in Haiti (Routledge, 2012) and Healthcare Policy in Africa (Rowman & Little-
field, 2016), among other publications. In 2006, Professor Gros was recipient
of the University of Missouri-St. Louis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching.
Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at

Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches Anti-Discrimination
Law, Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, among
other courses. Professor Hernandez’s scholarly interest is the study of compar-
ative race relations and antidiscrimination law. Her most recent publication is
the book Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary
Law and the New Civil Rights Response (Cambridge University Press). Her next
book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination is forth-
coming from NYU Press.
xiv Contributors
Ollie A. Johnson III is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Af-
rican American Studies at Wayne State University. He is the coeditor of Race,
Politics, and Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in Higher Education (2015). He
also authored Brazilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964 and coedited Black
Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Professor Johnson received his
Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. His
current research focuses on African-American, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Latin
American Politics.
Elisa Larkin Nascimento holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of

São Paulo, as well as Master of Arts and Juris Doctor degrees from the State
University of New York at Buffalo. She has written, coauthored, edited and
translated publications, including The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race and Gen-
der in Brazil (2007) and the four-volume Sankofa collection. Her Timeline of
African Peoples and Teachers’ Supplement is a reference in teaching African
history. As a Director of the Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute
(IPEAFRO), she coordinates the Abdias Nascimento Archives project, prepar-
ing Nascimento’s documentary and artistic collections for online consultation
(ipeafro.org.br) and serves as curator of the Sankofa Affirmative Education Fo-
rum and the Abdias Nascimento Living Memory and Africa-Brazil: Ancestry
and Contemporary Expressions exhibitions.
Paula Lezama is Assistant Director of the Institute for the Study of Latin
America and the Caribbean, ISLAC, at the University of South Florida (USF).
Her research interest focuses on racial and ethnic disparities and their impact
on Afro-descendants and Indigenous communities’ welfare. Most recently, due
to her work with rural Afro-descendants grassroots organizations in Colombia,
she is interested in understanding the ways in which these communities sur-
vive, resist and persist in a hostile environment.
April J. Mayes is an Associate Professor of History at Pomona College and

author of the book The Mulatto Republic: Race, Class, and National Identity in
the Dominican Republic. She is also a winner of the Isis Duarte Prize for the
best book published in Dominican or Haitian Studies by the Haiti-Dominican
Republic Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Her most recent
publication is the coedited (with Kiran C. Jayaram) work, Transnational Hispan-
iola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies.
Marcelo Paixão is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. He is the coordinator of the Laboratory for Ethnic and
Racial Equity (LAESER), created at UFRJ in 2006, and now at UT Austin.
He has written extensively on race relations and inequalities in Brazil and Latin
America, public policies and socioeconomic development.
Contributors xv
Bernd Reiter is a Professor of Political Science at the University of South Flor-

ida, working on issues of citizenship and democracy. His recent publications
include The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Path Ahead (2017), Constructing the
Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge (2018) and The Making of Brazil’s Black
Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered (2018, with Scott Ickes).
Laura de la Rosa Solano earned her Ph.D. in Ethnology from Paris V Sorbonne-
Descartes University and a Master’s degree in Social Sciences from the École
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is a Professor of Sociology at
the Santo Tomás University and of Anthropology at the National University
of Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia. Her research focuses on Afro-Colombian
religion, race relationships and gender identities in the Caribbean; and multi-
cultural laws in Brazil and Colombia with respect to identities and celebration
conflicts. She has published in France, Brazil and Colombia.
Irene Rossetto received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of São
Paulo (USP), Brazil. She is a visiting Researcher at the University of Texas at
Austin. Previously, she was a researcher at LAESER and consultant at Food and
Agriculture Organization of the UN (UN-FAO). Her research focuses on race,
black mobilization and racial inequality in Brazil and France.
Jhon Antón Sánchez received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from FLACSO, Ec-
uador. He is an Associate Professor at the School of Law and Constitutionalism
of the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Ecuador. His areas of research
focus on the multinational state and legal pluralism. He is an expert on Indig-
enous peoples and African-descendants, racism and racial discrimination, with
respect to poverty.
Carlos de la Torre is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky.

He has been a Fellow at the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Wood-
row Wilson Center for Scholars. His most recent books are Populismos: Una
Inmersión Rápida (Barcelona: Tibidabo Ediciones, 2017) and The Promise and
Perils of Populism (The University Press of Kentucky, 2015). His edited volume
Routledge Handbook of Global Populism is forthcoming.
Aurora Vergara-Figueroa teaches Sociology at Universidad Icesi. She is the

Founder and Director of the Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos (CEAF/Icesi) and
the author of Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia: Massacre at
Bellavista-Bojayá-Chocó (Palgrave Press). Her current research focuses on memory,
grief and forgiveness among Black women victims of the guerrilla-paramilitary
war in Colombia.
Acknowledgments
Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America is a collective effort that required the
collaboration of so many dynamic people: it is, therefore, important to recog-
nize them. Ollie A. Johnson III is the coeditor of the volume who contributed
to the projects original conception, design and final output. Dr. Johnson is a
first rate intellectual and a social justice activist: his expertise on Afro-Latin
politics and racial politics is rooted in his long-standing research and fieldwork
in the Latin America. I have known him some years, but this project provided
more insights into the depth of his knowledge and his profound respect for
other scholars work in the field. Both Routledge and I owe him a great deal of
gratitude for his work and dedication to this volume.
Next to Dr. Johnson are the contributors, who deserve the lion share of the
credit. Organizing an edited volume with so many strands is not easy, but our
contributors made it worth our time and effort. We assembled the best available
talent, and these essays reflect some of the best writing to date on Comparative
Race and Black Politics focused on Latin America. We have scholars from the
US, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. It is, however, important to
note that many of our contributors come from or have roots in the region. We
believe our volume constitutes a unique synthesis of ideas and is an extended,
open-ended conversation about key issues in the region. The hegemony of
North American scholarship dominates Latin American studies, but we believe
our volume counters this as we have key scholars from the region, thus making
it regionally balanced and micro-nuanced.
The folks at Routledge Press were great and provided the support and ex-
pertise as the project moved from one stage to the next. Natalja Mortensen, the
senior acquisition editor, was with us throughout the process: she shared her
time, vision and expertise generously. The project was originally ordained to
be part of Routledge’s innovative Handbook series, but as it moved along, it
Acknowledgments xvii
was decided to place it in the category of Comparative Race/Political Science/

Latin American and African American Studies, given the paucity of literature
in the field. Others at Routledge include Maria Landschoot, and the whole
team at Routledge were central to getting the volume in print.
I wish to thank my colleague Clarence Lusane at Howard University whose
work on Comparative Race is well known. I have to send a shout out to John
Burdick (Syracuse University) and Keisha Khan Perry (Brown University)
whose work on Brazil continues to open new conversations. Finally, a special
thanks to Linda Carty and James Williams (Syracuse University), Arnold Lewis
(William Patterson University) and Alphine Jefferson (Randolph-Macon)
whose scholarship and integrity continue to inspire.
Introduction
Comparative Racial Politics in Latin
America – Black Politics Matter
This volume investigates the fluid intersection of social power and racial poli-
tics and their impact on the region’s histories, politics, identities and cultures.
Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America explores the dynamic interplay
between racial politics and hegemonic power in the region. Latin America has
a rich and complex social history marked by slavery, colonialism, d ictatorships,
rebellions, social movements and revolutions. The European conquest, the
invasion and destruction of Indigenous cultures, the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade and the dark clouds of social slavery and centuries of foreign interven-
tion weighs heavily on the peoples of Latin America. To be clear, this volume
is not a history of racial politics of the region but the racial politics in region. It
is a modest attempt to reposition how we think about the social logic of racial
structures and how they operate in Latin America and the Caribbean.
We carefully examine Black Politics in Latin America by presenting state-
of-the-art research by respected scholars and movement activists from Latin
America, the US and Europe. Our aim is to provide conceptual and t heoretical
tools to understand how racialization and other factors have affected Black
communities in the region. Racialization refers to the ways in which the codifi-
cation of racial categories and hierarchies assigns values based on skin color and
phenotype resulting in negative differential treatment in the political e conomy,
labor markets, education, health care and the administration of justice. Until re-
cently, few studies by political scientists (compared to other social science fields)
focused exclusively on Afro-Latin American politics or Comparative Racial
Politics. Regrettably, traditional US political science, the subfields, like courses
on Black Politics, Comparative Politics and Latin A merican Politics, rarely fo-
cused on the study of Black Politics in Latin A merica. Equally d isturbing, is that
the process of racialization, until recently was officially socially cleansed from
formal narratives scripts, discourses and social knowledge of Latin America.
2 Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III
This volume aims to counter the hegemonic logic of erasure by repositioning

the logic of racialization.
Some of the reasons for low interest regarding Black Politics in Latin A
merica
flow along these lines. First, Latin American governments inconsistently or
rarely conducted racial censuses. Until recently, many countries had no offi-
cial demographic statistics on Afro-Latin populations (or Blacks, Browns, etc.)
where they lived, or what their living conditions were (Loveman 2014). S econd,
the ideologies of racial democracy and harmony discouraged research on Blacks
by implying that Latin American countries had no race problems as Blacks,
Whites and Mulattos interacted cooperatively without the anger and violence
compared to the US ( Johnson 2012). Third, Black Politics (focused on the US),
Comparative Politics and Latin American Politics simply ignored the millions
of Black citizens in Latin American countries ( Johnson 2007, 2012).
These factors unfortunately still influence research on Black politics in Latin
America, but the landscape is changing. Black activists, scholars and civil so-
ciety organizations interested in racial politics in Latin America have lobbied
and pressured governments and multilateral organizations to include race or
color questions in national censuses, government surveys and studies. This has
resulted in more governments including color or ethno-racial questions and
predictably, it has contributed to more data on the status of the Afro-Latin
American populations and provided a stronger foundation for qualitative and
quantitative research on Black Politics, like some of the essays included in this
volume (Paixão and Rossetto and Alves and Vergara-Figueroa). Throughout
the region, even though it has no legitimacy, the ideology of racial democracy
continues to influence mass and elite thinking on race. Why study racializa-
tion, and Blacks, if race relations are harmonious and nonconflictive, and racial
identity is notoriously ambiguous because a majority of the population has
mixed European, Indigenous and African ancestry? When Blacks, scholars and
activists insisted that race matters, and offered a more in-depth analysis, the re-
sponse was problematic. To discuss racial inequality and link it to social justice,
according to the prevailing hegemonic discourse, equaled being a racist. In
other words, to talk about racialization and raise the issue was impolitic until
recently in many Latin American countries (Telles 2004; Telles and the Project
on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America 2014).
Recent and New Research on Racial Politics in Latin America

Recently, a new wave of US and Latin American scholarship has called d irect
attention to Black or Racial Politics in Latin America. It is crucial to u
nderscore
the work of scholars and activists from the region who have been at the forefront
producing a steady stream of cutting-edge research. Fortunately, many of them
are contributors to our volume. They include Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-
Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (2018); Carlos de Torre,
Introduction 3
Populismos: Una Inmersión Rápida (2017); Marcelo Paixão, Quinientos años de

soledad: estúdios sobre las desigualdades raciales en Brasil (2016); Jean Gros, State Failure,
Underdevelopment and Foreign Intervention in Haiti (2012); Tanya Hernandez, Racial
Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, C ustomary Law and the New
Civil Rights Response (2012) and Elisa Nasimento, The Sorcery of Color: Iden-
tity, Race and Gender in Brazil (2007). These scholars and so many more from
the region have made important recent interventions on racial politics in the
Americas.
Likewise, political scientists such as Michael Hanchard (Orpheus and Power,
1994), Ollie Johnson (Racial Representation and Brazilian Politics, 1998), Mark Sawyer
(Racial Politics in Cuba, 2006), Kwame Dixon (Afro-Colombians and Transnational
Social Movements, 2008, 2012 and 2016) and Juliet Hooker (Race and the Politics
of Solidarity, 2009) made strong cases for the systematic study of Black Politics in
Latin America. They recognized, nonetheless, that Afro-Latin American politics
remained undertheorized and marginalized as a subfield much like the study of
Black politics in the US in the 1970s before insurgents like Mack Jones and others
changed the tone of the debate.
Hanchard’s rich Gramscian analysis asked why no major national Black social
movements existed in Brazil given the precarious situation of Afro-Brazilians
and the existence of other mass movements in the country. His book focused on
the role of racial hegemony and strategic choices by Black activists t hemselves.
Hanchard analyzed Black activists for overemphasizing their Black cultural
identity to the neglect of their potential constituents’ more direct social, eco-
nomic, and political needs and concerns. Responding two decades later to
Hanchard, Keisha-Khan Perry (Against the Land Grab: The Fights for Racial Justice
in Brazil, 2013) and Kia Caldwell (Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women,
Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity, 2007) used an intersectional and gender
analysis to emphasize that there are mass-based Black social movements doing
the work Hanchard prescribed in Brazil. Perry and Caldwell argued that Black
communities throughout Brazil and Black women more specifically are leading
grassroots movements for decent housing, safe communities and other basic
needs against large powerful corporations and local politicians. These powerful
interests want community land for redevelopment, tourism and beautification
projects despite the displacements of hundreds and thousands of mainly poor
and Black residents from their traditional neighborhoods.
In the 1990s, Ollie Johnson began a project to document the number of Black
elected officials at the national level in Brazil. This research resulted in the first
mapping of racial representation and the confirmation of Black underrepresen-
tation in the Brazilian Congress. Additional research has e stablished a very small
Black presence in the executive and judicial branches of government as well.
There are competing explanations for the lack of racial diversity at the upper
echelons of power in Brazil. Some factors include low Black personal wealth
and resources, the high expense of campaigns, lack of equal opportunities and
racial discrimination against Blacks are among the potential causal variables
(Paixão and Carvano 2008; Johnson and Heringer 2015).
Like Johnson and Hanchard, Kwame Dixon’s work on Ecuador, Colombia
and Brazil is important to highlight. His field research in Ecuador and Colombia
frames the Black struggle in the Americas via the lens of international human
rights. His dissertation, Afro-Ecuadorians and the Struggle for Human Rights (1997),
situated the struggle of Black Ecuadorians within a human rights framework
using international human rights law and critical theory. He argued that the
Ecuadorian government’s actual practices toward its Black population was in
direct violation or at variance with the international human rights treaties, it
had signed. In Colombia, Dixon was one of the first wave of researchers to
investigate Law 70, a law providing legal rights to Afro-Colombians. Dixon
concluded that although Law 70 was an important tool, it was uneven and
provided no remedies for the deep structural racial discriminations suffered by
Afro-Colombians. These two studies later formed the conceptual and theoreti-
cal basis for his work on Black politics and Afro-Brazilian civil society.
Mark Sawyer’s (Racial Politics in Cuba, 2006) outstanding study of racial
politics in Cuba focuses on the complicated relationship between Afro-Cubans
and the revolutionary government. He argued that Blacks largely benefited
from the revolution, but the government refused to allow Black groups to
organize themselves to articulate their group interests and concerns. Thus, the
Castro government proclaimed its eternal support for racial equality and total
opposition to racial discrimination. It supported Black nationalists and radicals
from the US and Africa, but it did not allow its own Black citizens to have space
for their race-specific advocacy activities. According to Sawyer, Afro-Cubans
experience a type of ‘inclusionary discrimination’ in which they are formally
equal citizens, but racist attitudes and institutions prevent them from having
equal job, educational and other opportunities.
Future studies by political scientists focusing on Black politics in Latin A merica
must dig deep and grapple with some fundamental questions. First, conceptually
what is Black politics in Latin America? Second, why are there so few Black
elected officials in Latin America? Third, how has the hegemonic construction
of political power impeded Blacks from elected political office in Latin A merica?
Fourth, in what countries (regions or localities) have Blacks made the most success
(or least success) in gaining office and what have been the concrete results? Along
with the study of emergent Black social movements in Latin America, sharp
insights into these burning questions will help us to better understand issues such
as marginalization, social inequality, the role of Afro-Civil Society, Black voter
electoral strategies and forms of participation, the role of Black candidates in Latin
American politics and voting patterns and behaviors of Black voters.
In the past few years, more studies by political scientists exploring many
of the aforementioned questions are producing a surge of literature. It is safe
to argue that the subfield of Black Politics in Latin America is blossoming as
Introduction 5
illustrated by the new wave of innovative scholarship. Recent works include

Gladys Mitchell-Walthour’s The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political
Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (2018). She analyzes the impact and experiences
of race on Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro. Her intersectional approach and theoretical framework
focus on racial group attachment and the hierarchies of racial discrimination
to explain Afro-Brazilian political behavior with respect to recent affirmative
action initiatives and Law 10,369. Given the paucity of studies and books on
Afro-Brazilian voting behavior and public opinion, this research fills a huge
gap in the political science literature.
Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas, Douglass, Sarminento, Du Bois and
Vasconcelos (2017) theorizes race via a hemispheric lens focusing on African-American
and Latin American thinkers. Through an examination of Fredrick Douglass (US),
Domingo Faustino Sarminento (Latin America), W.E.B. Du Bois (US) and José
Vasconcelos (Latin America), she offers deep insights into their views on race and
argues that their ideas are still relevant across the region and world. Hooker charts
a hemispheric geography of race and stresses that these thinkers, while offering
divergent views, if read in a hemispheric context, offer compelling views on the
philosophical foundations on modern thinking about racialization.
Danielle Clealand’s The Power of Race in Cuba: Race Ideology and Black Con-
sciousness during the Revolution (2017) uses surveys, interviews and e thnographic
methods to understand Black identity and attitudes and the racial ideology of
racial democracy. Many Afro-Cubans who feel solidarity with other Blacks
would support Black organizations if given the opportunity. H owever, inde-
pendent political organizations are illegal although some Black intellectuals,
artists and activists are trying to work through political party and government
institutions to raise questions about racism and racial inequality. She examines
how the official narrative of race, that is, there is no racism in Cuba, contrasts
with the actual experiences of Afro-Cubans and maps out how discrimination
creates divergent opportunities for Black and White Cubans.
Kwame Dixon’s Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da Bahia (2016) is
one of the more recent books in English focused exclusively on Black P olitics in
Salvador da Bahia. Despite their unique cultural productions, Afro referenced
identities, the relative strength of Afro-Civil Society and an active Black
political intelligentsia, Dixon posits that Blacks in Salvador have made only
modest political gains (at the municipal, state and federal levels). More disturb-
ing, the majority of Blacks in Salvador live in deep grinding poverty. He offers
the concept of Afro-Civil Society as the conceptual basis to understanding
and explaining Black Politics in Brazil and Afro-Latin America. The fact that
Blacks in a majority Black city (and majority Black state) have been unable to
gain a modicum of political power confounds many observers. Dixon examines
the social construction of political power and how such constructions limit the
range of options available to Afro-Brazilians in Salvador.
David Covin’s Unified Black Movement in Brazil, 1978 to 2002 (2006) is an

important historical study of the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU), one of
Brazil’s best-known, and at one time, most active Afro-Civil Society groups.
This study places MNU origins within a historical time frame, emphasizing
the group’s origins, philosophy, methods and strategies. This is one of the few
English language books on the MNU, which makes an important contribution
to understanding the rise of Black oppositional politics, Black consciousness
and the early rise of Afro-Brazilian social movements in the late 1970s.
In addition to single-authored volumes by political scientists, there has
been a steady stream of high-quality edited volumes on Afro-Latin A merica.
They include Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and
Transnationalism in the Americas by Petra Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer Jones and
Tianna Paschel (2016); Race, Politics and Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in
Higher Education by Ollie Johnson and Rosana Heringer (2015); Afro-Descendants,
Identity and the Struggle for Development in the Americas by Bernd Reiter and
Kimberly Simmons (2012); and Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America
by Kwame Dixon and John Burdick (2012). As edited volumes, they represent
important recent contributions to understanding Afro-Latin America.
Collectively, these new studies are representative of the emerging new
scholarship offering innovative theoretical and multidisciplinary perspectives
as well as deep regional coverage of Black communities across the Americas.
Equally important, they provide a solid theoretical foundation:
a to understand State sanctioned racialized violence (Alves);

b to understand Afro-Brazilian politics, political behavior and Afro-Civil
Society (Mitchell-Walthour and Dixon);
c to understand and analyze Black and Latin American social theories on
race (Hooker and Nasimento);
d to understand the reproduction of racial inequality (Paixão and Rosetto);
e to examine Black politics, race and discrimination in Cuba (Sawyer and
Clealand);
f to chart and analyze the rise of early MNU and Black consciousness (Covin
and Dixon);
g to understand transnational organizing and gender (Rivera-Rideau, Jones
and Paschel);
h to chart the rise of affirmative action in higher education ( Johnson and
Heringer and Hernandez).
In yet another sign of the changing landscape, The American Political S cience
Association published The Double Bind: The Politics of Racial and Class Inequalities
in the Americas – Report on the Task Force on Racial and Social Class in the Americas
(2016). The report is impressive in scope and breadth as it speaks to the objective
social experiences of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous communities in
Introduction 7
region (including the US). The report underscores the salience of racial and
class inequalities in the Americas sharply illustrating how the political systems
in the region aid, abet and, in some cases, address social inequalities (xi). It
points out that racial and class hierarchies, imbedded in racial and social codes,
result in deep disparities in socioeconomic indicators like income patterns,
wealth and access to basic services. The Task Force report underscores how
traditional political science (and the subfields) privileged political behavior or
voting while ignoring how racialization created negative differential outcomes
in the political and social system (political economy, education and criminal
justice system). The report is a move in a positive direction and suggests that
the decolonization of traditional political science is underway as new actors
enter the field.
Against this backdrop, Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America builds on the
surge in the literature. Our aim is to enrich theoretical debates on comparative
racial politics in the region by exploring the rise Black political formations, Afro-
Civil Society groups, gendered racial hierarchies, levels of political mobilization,
and Black consciousness and state responses to them. The volume offers updated
perspectives and analysis of key political trends, scholarly debates and substantive
discussions.
What Is Black Politics in Latin America?

In order to understand Blackness and Black Politics, we offer the following
presuppositions on what Blackness means in the region: Blackness is a social
construction and a form of commodification. Therefore, by definition, b eing
Black is intrinsically political. Borrowing from Dixon, Burdick, Wade and
Hartigan, ‘Blackness’, ‘Black’ or ‘Black identity’ refers to a bundle of ideas and
meaning held by particular actors in a particular society about people socially
defined as ‘Black’ or (Negro) or Afro-descended (Wade 2008). Blackness is a se-
ries of unequal power relations, a form of consciousness among Black people and
a deliberate project to produce such consciousness (Dixon and Burdick 2012).
Black Politics, therefore, refers to the struggle for racial justice and attempts
by Black peoples and their allies to challenge and reorder historically unequal
power relations and, at the same time, challenge the hegemonic c onstruction
of political power that has marginalized them. Methods include mass protests,
civil disobedience, political education, grassroots organizing, voting, seeking
elected office and a repertoire of other means.
Afro-Civil Society groups are demanding and receiving rights once
h istorically denied, while simultaneously opening up new democratic spaces
heretofore excluded to them. This radical new space is the result of years of
grassroots activism and political mobilization across the region. This new po-
litical transformation is rooted in concepts such as cultural citizenship, new
citizenship and active citizenship, each of which offers legitimate claims of
rights, space and belonging in the dominant society. By challenging racialized,

gendered and class structures, as well as developing strategies of empowerment,
Black social movements in the region are expanding citizenship and opening
new democratic possibilities (Dixon 2016).
Overview of the Volume

The volume features in-depth country and comparative studies along with
offering an historical overview of Afro-Latin politics. It examines the Black
experience with political institutions, social movements, civil society or-
ganizations and popular culture. Key themes examined include racial iden-
tity, statistical analysis of racial inequality, Black political thought and
Pan-A fricanism, recent data on Black electoral representation, Black feminist
thought and practice, social movements, anti-racism, neoliberal politics and
multiculturalism, liberal democracy, comparative approaches to antidiscrimi-
nation measures and racialized geographical spaces. Primary countries include
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and
Haiti with secondary a focus on Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.
We offer four distinct sections in our volume: Part 1 traces the historical
roots of contemporary Afro Politics, history and culture in the region. Part 2
offers case studies on Black Politics in the Caribbean focusing on Cuba, Haiti
and the Dominican Republic. Part 3 provides individual studies focused on
Ecuador, Argentina and Colombia. Part 4 offers comparative studies on Brazil
and Colombia and comparative racial inequality. What follows is an abbrevi-
ated thematic summary of key ideas of our contributors.
Part 1: Historical Perspectives

Admittedly, there are fissures, omissions and gaps in our knowledge about
Black history in Latin America. Historians of the Black Latin America have
woven together broad narratives of resistance, social agency and stories about
Black independence, Maroon communities and autonomy across the Americas.
Along this trajectory, Darién J. Davis, Bernd Reiter and Elisa Nascimento offer
three different but equally compelling essays on the pressures and counter-
pressures faced by Black Latin America. These essays serve to fill some of the
gaps, omissions and fissures of standard history and in doing so reinscribes
A fro-descendants into Latin American history.
Davis carefully traces some of the broad migratory patterns of Afro-
descendants in the region. Rethinking Rights, Alliances, and Migrations Historically:
Three Themes in Afro-Latin Political Engagement examines important historical
periods in the history of Afro-Latin America. He outlines four major periods
then provides a glimpse of each period underscoring how Afro-descendants
responded. Davis reminds us that in the modern period national prejudice
Introduction 9
conspired to restrict the rights of Afro-descendants in multiple ways. He points

out that toward the close of the 20th century, African descendants in Latin
America sought elected political office in record numbers with some success.
However, he warns that this should not obscure the deep structural issues fac-
ing Black communities in the region. Beyond representation in the political
arena, he considers how Black people have organized to secure their human
rights, cultivated alliances among distinct Black groups as well as across ethnic
and national divides.
Bernd Reiter’s essay, Recognition, Reparation and Political Autonomy of Black and
Native Communities in the Americas, argues that the contemporary r eproduction
of social inequalities have deep roots in the colonial slavery economy. His essay
links the colonial slavery model to the rise of the liberal democratic state. R
eiter,
deeply suspicious of the social and cultural logic of liberal democracy, posits
that the devastating effects of slavery and colonialism cannot be adequately
addresses by the liberal democratic frameworks to which most countries of
the hemisphere adhere. He concludes proactively that Afro-Latin Americans
cannot achieve freedom, justice, sustainable development and equality within
constraints of the individualism of modern liberal democracy. He calls for the
recognition of the profound negative impact of slavery; and for full repara-
tions for the descendants of slaves, modern day of Quilombos, Palenques and
Maroon communities. This will allow Afro-Latin Americans a form of self-
determination and control of their own destiny.
Elisa Nascimento’s Pan Africanism and Latin America reconceptualizes the
traditional Pan-African paradigm as she repositions Afro-Latin America
within the broader Pan-African struggle. She locates the essential founda-
tion of Pan-Africanism in the long line of independent African thought and
tradition in the Americas. Pan-Africanism as a global movement is not new,
but she demonstrates how it has been the foundation for many Black social
movements in Latin America. Recent and contemporary anti-racist Afro-Civil
Society human rights movements combine the Pan-African perspective with
an emphasis on women’s rights and their role as protagonists in leadership po-
sitions. Nascimento convincingly argues that not only is Afro-Latin America
an essential characteristic of Pan-Africanism but a key element in the histories
of Black peoples’ attempt at Self-Determination, political independence and
cultural autonomy.
Part 2: The Caribbean

We now turn our attention to the islands of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican
Republic each with its own unique historical vectors. The paradox of racial-
ization in Cuba is the focus on Danielle Clealand’s essay, Black Activism and
the State in Cuba. Unlike some of the one-sided monochromatic debates on
race about Cuba, Clealand skillfully navigates the multiple complexities and
contradictions of socialist Cuba. She carefully examines the strategies employed

by the Cuban government throughout the revolution to suppress or limit anti-
racist activism and the ways in which the state has dominated the rhetoric sur-
rounding racism and racial inequality on the island. She acknowledges Cuba’s
progress in some areas, but points out that the Cuban state continues to deny
the existence of structural racial discrimination while other governments now
acknowledge it. Clealand posits that the government should follow its best rev-
olutionary traditions of social justice and allow a robust public debate on the
new racial realities in Cuba.
Enter Jean-Germain Gros’s Correcting Intellectual Malpractice: Haiti and Latin
America. Often written out of Latin American history, Gros makes a compelling
historical, comparative and political case that Haiti is indeed a part of Latin
America and especially Afro-Latin America. Metaphorically and politically
speaking, Gros argues many of Latin American political realities, be they
underdevelopment, wealth inequality, the difficult transition to democracy,
race and color conflicts, are magnified in Haiti. He then situates Haiti within
the parameters of Afro-Latin America while examining what he calls Haiti’s
unending transition to democracy since the collapse of the Duvalier father to
son dictatorship. Against this backdrop, Gros compares and contrasts Haitian
politics with other countries in the region.
Long overlooked but now flourishing Afro feminist praxis and thought in
Black Latin America is experiencing a renaissance. April Mayes’s Black Feminist
Formations in the Dominican Republic in La Sentencia is an example of this fresh
new scholarship. She turns our attention to the raw intersection of race, class,
gender and immigration politics in the Dominican Republic. Mayes master-
fully analyzes the gendered and racialized dimensions of a 2013 Dominican
Constitutional Tribunal decision. The decision revoked the birthrights of
roughly 200,000 people, mainly Dominicans with Haitian roots. Her essay,
using an intersectional approach, analyzes how Black feminists have responded
creatively to the ongoing challenges to this decision and anti-Haitianism in
the Dominican Republic. Black feminism has a long history in the Dominican
Republic, but this more recent iteration, and thanks to the work of activists,
Black feminism has moved beyond the country’s urban centers and intellectual
classes. Mayes shows how Black women activists have effectively integrated
Black feminist thought and practice into the movement for immigrant and
other rights.
Part 3: South America

This section examines Black Politics in Ecuador and Argentina with two essays
on Colombia. The surge in Black political mobilization, racialized geogra-
phies and the commodification of Black culture is the focus of these essays.
Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sánchez, in Afro-Ecuadorian Politics, carve
Introduction 11
out three important historical periods of racial politics in order to analyze and
make sense of Black Politics in Ecuador. They trace the stages of Ecuador’s
multiculturalism, which are monocultural Mestizaje, neoliberal multicultural-
ism and autocratic multiculturalism. Each period has implications with respect
to Black identity and politics. They study state policies that created ethnic
and racial identities, efforts of stigmatized racialized groups to challenge or to
accommodate to state policies and Afro-Ecuadorians recent participation in
the political system. They acknowledge former President Rafael Correa’s im-
portant anti-poverty and social inclusion policies, but criticize his intimidation
tactics against mainstream and leftist opposition.
Argentina is a country where there has been a sharp uptick in Black so-
cial movements and political mobilization over the past two decades. Judith
A nderson’s essay, The Impossible Black Argentine Politics Subject, examines the
rise of Black social movements and traces the efforts of Black Argentines to
forge modern Black identity. Africans and Afro-descendants in Argentina have
made a variety of efforts to forge a unified Black identity for social and political
mobilization. Anderson discusses how Afro-Argentines, despite being a small
population, creatively engage local, national and international issues to call
attention to their concerns.
Jaime Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa’s chapter, In the Branch of Paradise:
Geographies of Privilege and Black Social Suffering in Cal, Colombia, underscores
the problems of Blackness in Cali, Colombia. While Cali is internationally
known as for its strong edged, rhythmically rich Salsa, vibrant night life and
as Colombia’s ‘Blackest’ city, the precarity of Black urban life suggests that
race plays a fundamental role in predicting access to economic, educational
and even vital opportunities. Alves and Vergara-Figueroa provide a rich
multilevel analysis of variables such as illiteracy, income and violent death in
order to analyze spatial patterns of structural violence produced at the inter-
section of race, class and gender in Santiago de Cali, Colombia. Blacks are at
the bottom of practically all social indicators, including literacy, income and
violent death.
Through the lens of ethnography, Laura de la Rosa’s essay explores the inter-
section of racial identity, carnival and tourism in Cartagena de Indias. Current
Representations of ‘Black’ Citizens: Contentious Visibility within a M
ulticultural Nation
argues that Afro-Colombians are quite vibrant and visible, especially in major
cities like Cartagena, and featured prominently during carnival celebrations
and tourist promotions. Unfortunately, the celebration of African Heritage is
deeply problematic and disturbing. De la Rosa reminds us how Colombia’s
tourist industrial complex perpetuates primitive and exotic stereotypes of
Blackness, which disguise the many challenges Afro-Colombians face. Like
Alves and Vergara-Figueroa, she directly questions Colombia’s new multicul-
tural initiatives given the commodification of Afro-Colombians for tourism
and other state-led initiatives.
Part 4: Comparative Perspectives

The last section features four comparative essays on racial inequality,
antidiscrimination measures, Black women’s social movements and UN
Developmental Goals. Returning to gendered spaces, Kia Caldwell’s chapter,
The Contours and Contexts of Afro-Latin Women’s Activism, examines some of the
driving factors related to increased forms of women’s mobilization in the region
focusing on Colombia and Brazil. She explores similarities and differences in
Afro-Latin American women’s experiences and forms of mobilization.
Tanya Hernández’s essay, Race and Law in Latin America, analyzes antidis-
crimination mechanisms of criminal laws in the region and examines the
strengths and weaknesses of criminal laws with respect to Afro-descendants.
She notes that in recent years, there have been social justice advances for
A fro-Latin Americans, such as new constitutional recognitions, affirmative
action programs and inclusive ethno-educational requirements. Unfortunately,
these new progressive laws are uneven, and some are never implemented or
ignored (or reversed) when opposition forces come to power.
Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto’s chapter, The Labyrinth of Ethnic-Racial
Inequality, offers a statistical analysis of Afro-descendants’ disadvantages in the
labor market of ten Latin American countries: Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica,
Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Uruguay. Their
essay, using the most recent data, underscores the complexity of racializa-
tion in the labor markets across the region. Despite a very complex picture,
their research suggests that Afro-descendants generally have the worse access
to the labor market than White or White Mestizo groups, but better than
Indigenous peoples. Paixão and Rossetto confirm that Latin America remains
one of the most unequal regions in the world. Within that context, Afro-Latin
Americans and Indigenous peoples register some of the highest levels of un-
employment and possess limited formal educational opportunities with few
exceptions.
Our last essay is Paula Lezama’s The Millennium/Sustainable Development
Goals and Afro Descendants in the Americas: An (Un)Intended Trap. She analyzes
the living conditions of Afro-descendants in selected Latin American countries
vis-à-vis the pre- and post-Millennium development and sustainable goals
development agenda. Lezama argues that despite being well intentioned, the
MDG/SDG goals’ most salient structural problem is their silence with respect
to racial- and ethnic-based social and political inequalities.
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Introduction 13
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Part I
History
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 Rodríguez, director of Mundo Afro, a small
Uruguayan Black rights organization, welcomed Black activists, intellectuals,
community organizers and politicians to a conference in Montevideo to intro-
duce his organization to the region and to foster new national and transnational
modes of thinking, intervening politically and working together for the better-
ment of Afro-America. Rodríquez’s emotional words also represented a call for
sustained political engagement and activism as an antidote to social and eco-
nomic 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).
Rodríquez’s call was not new. For centuries, Afro-Latin American com-
munities 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 engage-
ment in a democratic era throughout Spanish-America and Brazil. Despite the
18 Darién J. Davis
gradual change in visibility of individuals of African descent in national political

arenas, Rodrígues’s call remains urgent today as Afro-descendant communi-
ties 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 geographi-
cally, 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
d islocations. 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 eventu-
ally 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
A fricans from their homes to serve as workers for the European colonial proj-
ect. The second major wave occurred after abolition at the end of the 19th
century when Atlantic multinationals lured Afro-descendants from their na-
tions 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 ‘mi-
grants’ that the establishment casts as outsiders and ‘Natives’. While this work
highlights these dynamics in the post–Cold 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 ‘Afro-Latin America’, which,
like most identity constructions constitutes, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson,
an ‘imagined community’. Until recently, ‘Afro-Latin America’ 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 ‘Latin America’, although former Spanish colonies such as Jamaica
and Trinidad complicate this definition. For decades, many observers of Latin
Beyond Representation 19
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 pervad-
ing Afro-Latin American customs and traditions (Davis, White Face, xv–xxv).
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, 17–21).
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 sug-
gest 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 his-
tory (1492–1800) 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 un-
der 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 govern-
ments 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
20 Darién J. Davis
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 m inorities such as
in Mexico and Uruguay, for example, emancipated Blacks also responded
d ifferently 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 cit-
izenship. 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 v isibility
continue to challenge communities of African descent, new forms and p rocesses
warranted new ways of thinking, organizing and engaging politically. Today
contemporary Afro-Latin Americans continue to battle the persistent and com-
plex colonial political ideology of exploitation that disenfranchised B lackness
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, v isibility
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
A fricans and their descendants to supplement or replace Indigenous labor
during the establishment of colonies. Between 1501 and 1900, the forced
m igration of A fricans constituted a central part of the European colonial en-
terprise. 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 in-
terested 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 Maché
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 (Martínez Alier, 12).
Afro-descendants’ 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 in-
volved in the abolitionist movement. Vicente Guerrero, for example, joined
the abolitionist movement in Mexico and later became one of the few
A fro-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, re-
sistance 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 [1605–1694] in the north-
east of Brazil or the Quilombo of Quariterê 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 import-
ant 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 con-
vert. Candomblé and Santería, for example, largely maintain the dominant
Yoruba base in the A mericas. According to Joseph Halloway, several upris-
ings in colonial Bahia had a strong Yoruba influence. For example, Islam
also inspired Africans to resistance in the 19th century as the Malê Revolt
of 1835 in B ahia, Brazil, clearly indicates (Reis, 118). Europeans converted
many A fro-descendants sometimes nominally and sometimes en Masse. The
Lima-born Afro-descendant Juan Martin de Porres Velásquez reportedly used
22 Darién J. Davis
his Catholic faith and connections with the Dominican order for multiple pur-
poses, 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. Martin’s 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 (Mariátegui, 42–47).
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 profes-
sions 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, 7–23). Evidence also
indicates that Quilombos and Palenques resisted the Iberian attempt to create
h ierarchies 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,
A fricans and their descendants played key roles in the political struggle for in-
dependence. Their contributions were most visible in the first Black revolution
on the island of Hispaniola, which not only abolished slavery on both sides of
the island but also declared independence and embraced Blackness as a political
and spiritual force. Moderate leaders such as Toussaint Louverture, who helped
channel the wrath of enslaved Africans and American-born Black men and
women, as well as more strident leaders such as Jean Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s
first president, relied on the aid of allies such as Les Amis des Noir in Paris, and
later rewarded White Polish and other Europeans who fought with Haitians
against France with Haitian citizenship, promoting a White integration and
Mestizaje based on Blackness (Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 188–196).
Unlike Haiti, however, most of the independence leaders in the Spanish-

and Portuguese-American countries were White or Creoles and pursued
independence and political consolidation first and pushed for slowly grant-
ing enslaved Africans full liberty over time (Creoles initially meant Europeans
born in the America, but the Spanish often allowed rich White families to buy
privileges. Eventually, Creole came to be synonymous with American). Up-
ward mobility meant proximity to Whiteness while maltreatment and death of
A frican descendants fueled the need for a prolonged system of forced migration
of Africans to meet the Latin American elite’s demand for labor. At the same
time, the personalized practices of manumission based on ability to pay, legal
agreements or good will created a small but significant population of freed
people of color. These dynamics enforced a social hierarchy based on status that
benefited White Creole and Luso-Brazilian elites and discouraged racial solidarity
among African descendants.
Afro-Latin Americans, nonetheless, played critical roles in the political
consolidation of independence throughout the region, often joining Creole
leaders such as Simon Bolivar, San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins against
the Spanish. Afro-descendants valiantly fought and died for national causes
believing that independence would mean freedom from colonial government
and eventually universal liberty. Loyal and patriotic Afro-Uruguayans such as
the man simply known as Ansina, who served General José Gervasio Artigas in
Uruguay, and the Venezuelan independence fighter Pedro Camejo, known as
El Negro Primero, represent vivid examples of Afro-Latin American contribu-
tions to the creation of the young republics (Boothroyd).
The fact that Latin Americans refer to them by their nicknames illustrate
both a popular affection and erasure of their individualized histories and
genealogies. Throughout the 19th century, Afro-Latin American individuals,
groups and associations leveraged their knowledge and skills for themselves and
their communities. Afro-Argentine Candombe associations such as Mucumbi,
Brasilera, Maravi, Muñambani, Buera Barangó, Nagó and Mahí secured protection
and benefits under 19th-century leaders such as Juan Manuel Rosas as well
as under Justo José de Urquiza (Chamosa, 347–378). Afro-Argentines hon-
ored other Afro-Argentine soldiers such as Domingo Sosa, José Maria Morales
and Estinislão Maldones in mutual societies or social clubs (Reid Andrews,
85–100). In Brazil, enslaved and freed Afro-Latin Americans fought in the War
of Triple Alliance on the side of Paraguay and on the side of the allies of Brazil,
Uruguay and Argentina (Izecksohn).
Black self-reliance and political organization with selected allies persisted in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries despite the overt and veiled anti-Black
ideas of Whitening, racial mixture and eugenics, which later became patri-
otic, if not nationalist symbols, and policies of many Latin American nations.
National intellectuals such as Argentines Domingo Sarmiento and Esteban
Echevarría, Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, Mexican José Vasconcelos, Cuban Elías
24 Darién J. Davis
Entralgo and Uruguayan José Rodó attempted to cast their respective nation’s
identity as White, Mestizo or Mulato, often encouraging Black and Indigenous
integration and in some cases disappearance. Their ideas indirectly and di-
rectly had an impact on how the political policies of the state and how the elite
viewed Black communities. Not surprisingly, most Latin American nations en-
couraged European migration while restricting migrants from Africa and Asia.
Massive multinational capitalist projects at the turn of the 19th century
along with the onset of the Great War (1914–1918) led to a second wave of
massive migration and dislocation, now mostly of Afro-descendants born in
the A mericas and migrant Asians. European migrants continued to enter Latin
America soon after abolition, but capital projects and construction, including
the building of the railway systems throughout the Americas and the con-
struction of the Panama Canal, led to massive movement of people of African
descent, transforming cities and towns throughout the region. Not coincidently,
this period witnessed the emergence of the first transnational Black movements
as Afro-descendants from the Caribbean, North America and Europe began to
dialogue with one another (Davis and Williams, 143–167).
Unlike the forced African migrants in the colonial period, Afro-descendant
workers from throughout the Caribbean, and particularly from former E nglish
or French colonies, moved to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas to work
for multinational capitalist projects. Local elites in many places such as Cuba,
the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Panama, Nicaragua and Costa Rica often
pitted ‘Native’ born Blacks against Black migrants and their descendants,
whereas national governments in places such as Panama, Brazil, Venezuela and
Colombia limited rights, movement as well as the cultural, religious and lin-
guistic expression of migrants. The most salient example of these dynamics
arose in the labor relations on the construction of the Panama Canal, which
opened in 1914. In 1940, the government of Panama denied citizenship to
many ‘Blacks’ and Asians.
Preparations for the canal began as early as 1882, but the construction under
the American John Wallace, the chief engineer, began in 1904. To bring the
project to fruition, the Americans relied on the labor of 75,000–100,000 men
and women, the majority of whom were migrant workers from the West Indies
and most of them Afro-descendants. More than five thousand workers perished
while tropical diseases and harsh working conditions left many others disabled.
During and after the completion of the canal, the migrant laborers rebuilt their
lives and transformed the city of Colón and Cristobal, and surrounding areas
including Panama City even as they faced American Jim Crow segregation
and Panamanian nativist hostility. American officials limited Black workers’
rights and prohibited West Indian workers who remained in Panama from
unionizing in American-controlled Canal Zone. Not to be deterred, Afro-
descendant organizers created their own Panama Canal West Indian Employees
Association and reached out transnationally to the United Public Workers of
America-Congress of Industrial Organization for assistance and to other local

and international allies, including Afro-Panamanians and African-Americans
to secure a series of rights afforded to their White counterparts (Corinealdi,
Conniff, Newton).
Parallel dynamics occurred in Brazil when a much smaller group of
Caribbean migrants moved to northern Brazil (in the current state of Rondônia
near the Bolivian border) and engendered a particular Afro-Brazilian political
model. American investor Percival Farquhar, who had purchased the rights to
build the railroads for the Brazilian government, contracted a New York-based
firm to recruit workers to build tracks through the towns of Santo Antônio and
Guajará Merim. Brazilians of all races referred to the migrants as ‘Barbadians’,
regardless of their national origin because that nationality made up the majority
of the population. Brazilian nativists often pitted migrants against Natives and
Afro-Latin Americans (of Brazilian or Caribbean descend had to contend with
this challenge while recognizing cultural differences (Blackman, 1–9).
Foreign capitalists in Brazil and structural Brazilian racism exerted
d ifferent pressures on Barbadian-Brazilians in the first generation than on
A fro-Brazilian. For example, in eras of economic expansion, some Barbadians
and their children made economic and social advances in commerce and in-
dustry, whereas others secured jobs and reputations in areas such as teaching.
These allow them to influence politics and the local economy in ways that
many other Afro-Brazilians could not. Dynamics changed when economic
opportunities were scarce. In certain areas, cultural differences and tensions
among Afro-descendants often emerged around language, religion and color,
as many Caribbean-Brazilians had darker complexions. Just as Africans in the
colonial period relied on their religions such as Candomblé, Santería or Vodun
for sustenance and as a base for political engagement, Barbadians relied on
their Caribbean-inflected Protestant religions faith for spiritual sustenance.
In a predominantly Catholic and Afro-Brazilian religious milieu, Baptist and
A nglican churches became an important place for political solidarity among
migrant families in the face of Brazilian nativist intolerance (Blackman, 1–9;
Rocha and Alleyne, 1–42).
Early multinational capitalist expansion spurred by companies such as the
Boston-based United Fruit Company, the New Jersey-based South Porto
Rico Sugar Company and the Connecticut-based West Indies Sugar Finance
Corporation required inexpensive labor in other areas. Sugar plantations in
Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and fruit plantations along the Carib-
bean coast of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras, lured Black
workers from across the region, reshaping demographics within a decade.
Afro-descendants were among the leadership of labor unions throughout the
region, and Garvey’s local Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
chapters in Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua and Honduras forged vibrant
political activists. Garvey had traveled to the town of Limón, Costa Rica, in
26 Darién J. Davis
1910, where he established a small newspaper and commissioned the building

of the Black Star Line building to serve as the Central American headquarters
of the UNIA. Women like Leona Turpeau de Mena, who organized a chap-
ter of the UNIA in Limón, also helped to forge transnational alliances in this
period (Leeds, 1–27).
World War I and II encouraged the mass movement of peoples from the
Caribbean to Europe, while bringing Asian workers from China, India,
Japan and elsewhere, further changing the demographics of the region. Afro-
descendants from Latin America such as the Puerto Rican Rafael Hernandez
fought in the segregated Black regiments (Ayala, 196). Cuba was preparing
to send 25,000 conscripted soldiers to France to fight with the allies in 1918,
but the end of the war made their departure unnecessary (Histclo.com). Afro-
descendants from Puerto Rico and Brazil also went to battle in Europe during
World War II (História Ilustrada).
The Cold War witnessed a new type of regional displacement as Afro-
descendants, like many other Latin Americans, became swept up in the ideo-
logical and proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union. The most
dramatic and long-lasting struggle emerged in Colombia where the civil war
from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century displaced African descen-
dants and Indigenous peoples leading to migrations throughout the Americas
and Europe. Afro-Cubans also fled Castro’s socialist regime, but many more
remained and initially benefited from to educational and social gains of the Rev-
olution. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba was responsible for sending A fro-Cuban
soldiers, doctors and cultural ambassadors to countries throughout the world
mainly the global south. Based on these events, Afro-descendants remained
politically engaged both inside and outside the region.
A generation earlier in Cuba, Afro-Cubans Nicolás Guillén and Blas Roca
exposed the hypocrisy of the White elite who spoke out against racial discrimi-
nation but continued to attend social bourgeois clubs that often denied entrance
to Afro-Cubans. Ironically, since 1989, Afro-Cubans on the island have com-
plained of increased racism, discrimination and lack of opportunities p articularly
in the tourist industries (Roca, 2; Domínquez, 10–33; Brouwer). In Cuba as
elsewhere, Black Latin Americans also understood that p olitical organization
and forging alliances were critical to Afro-Latin American communities both
philosophically and practically given the historical lack of resources and access
to the political process. Black activists have long understood this and have often
forged short-lived alliances that have not reaped long-run benefits. Such was the
short-lived integration of many Afro-Brazilians, including the young activist
Abdias do Nascimento, into the integralist movement that not only promised
more jobs and protection for Brazilians but also harbored fascist tendencies or
Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Colombian alliances with guerilla movements that
terrorized communities during the Cold War (Olavo, Abdias Nascimento, doc-
umentary film).
While some Afro-descendants gained visibility, national attention and

honors throughout the 20th century particularly in arenas such as sports and
music, collective rights and access continue to be a disenfranchising legacy of
the colonial past with specific legal ramifications for Afro-descendant commu-
nities. Poverty and lack of access to education also constituted impediments to
securing rights and dignity. Political actors have had to find ways to honor in-
dividual achievements that edify the community without falling into colonial
tropes that praise individuals while stigmatizing communities. Those practices
have had dire consequences and allowed elites to use these differences along
with colorism for their own power. The case of the maltreatment of Haitians in
the Dominican Republic since 1937 attest to this reality even though the two
nations involved are comprised of populations who are, in the majority, of Afri-
can descent. Nationalism continued to stymy alliances in the mid-20th century.
At the same time, many Latin Americans continued to b elieve that they did not
harbor racial prejudice, giving credence to what Fanon called one of the pitfalls
of national consciousness (Fanon, ‘The Pitfalls of N ational Consciousness’, The
Wretched of the Earth). The fact that many White and Mestizo/Mestiço elites con-
tinue to promote their privilege as a birthright and a badge of honor while at the
same time celebrating Mestizaje, miscegenation or racial intermingling contin-
ues to be a major challenge to Afro-Latin A mericans quest for full citizenship.
The Cold War also inhibited democracy, civil society, Afro-Latin A merican
activism and intersectionality because it divided the world into two sides:
‘The West’ and ‘the East’. Despite the attempts of many countries to form a
Non-Aligned Movement, the so-called ‘war’ diminished the possibilities of
marginalized people gaining visibility and securing rights that were not in
sync with the rights of the broader war (Executive Volume 6 No. 36, 16–21).
Latin American militaries in Brazil (1964–1985), Ecuador (1972–1979), Peru
(1948–1956; 1968–1979), Argentina (1966–1983), Uruguay (1972–1985),
Paraguay (1959–1985), Nicaragua (1937–1979) and Panama (1972–1981) often
censured dissent and squashed political activity that they deemed threatening
to law and order. Radical groups such as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas also targeted Afro-descendants,
many of whom they viewed as traitors for not supporting their cause (Human
Rights Watch, Colombia).
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Afro-Latin Americans participated in the
agitations of the generation, and many risked displacement and exile. Ironically,
military men such as Fulgenio Batista and Rafael Trujillo, both of A frican
descent and backed by US military power, used their political clout to pro-
tect their own interests rather than promote programs for social justice. One
of the major roadblocks to Black political organization in Latin America has
been the national authoritarian political structure that stymied political and
cultural dissent. Any comparisons with movements in the US or Europe must
take into consideration these political differences that not only criminalized
28 Darién J. Davis
protest in ways similar to France and the US in 1968 but also made it out-
right illegal. In Cuba, UNIA chapters lobbied for the rights of migrant work-
ers who C uban nationalists often pitted against ‘Native’ Blacks. In the case
of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, nationalism had explicitly anti-Communist
and anti-Haitian tinge. Dominican authorities attempted to banish Blackness
from Dominican-ness targeting Haitians as dark and harmful outsiders and
usurpers, using typical hate rhetoric that continue to be used by anti-immigrant
demagogues today (Turits, 589–639).
Despite these constraints, Afro-Latin Americans did not remain silent. They
found ways to organize and remain politically engaged, sometimes subver-
sively, sometimes relying on nontraditional venues and often using cultural
production to canalize their discontent with the system. In this context, music,
art, poetry and popular culture became important ways to engage politically.
Afro-descendants all over Latin America also looked to the relative freedom of
expressions of African-Americans who celebrated Blackness in multiple forms
in the 1960s and the 1970s (Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black
Aesthetics, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book). Contemporary Afro-Latin
American activists often recall how North American activists such as Angela
Davis, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King as well as Black performers from
James Brown, Bob Marley to Nina Simone inspired them (Lima Peixoto and
Zé Otávio Sebadelhe, 12).
In this era, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA’s presence continued to strengthen
in places such as Cuba, Panama and Costa Rica, particularly in the face of state
abuses. Indeed, Garvey’s Afrocentric message continues to be relevant in the
21st century precisely because of the movements of people of African descent
across national boundaries (Clarke, 15; Rudwick, 428). In Brazil, few overtly
political national organizations emerged at this time promoting or celebrat-
ing Black culture. Nonetheless, the legacy of organizations such as the Black
Experimental Theatre (Teatro Experimental do Negro or TEN) founded in 1944
in Rio de Janeiro and Peru Negro created in 1969 in Lima endured well after
their founding. These organizations created spaces for organizing, celebrating
and reflecting in their respective countries. Not coincidently the Pan-African
movement, which had developed at the beginning of the 20th century as a
political project by British and American intellectuals, grew to include Latin
American organizations (Walters, 326).
TEN’s ‘First Congress of the Black Brazilian’ commemorated the 100th
anniversary for the abolition of the slave trade in Brazil. Nascimento chal-
lenged the political establishment to accept Afro-Brazilians as equal citi-
zens and later elected to the national Chamber of Deputies as a member of
the Democratic Labor Party. Nascimento also maintained relationships with
Black activists in the Caribbean including the writers of Negritude, the US
and Europe, forging transnational links that Afro-Brazilians would later build
upon. TEN also used its journalistic arm, the newspaper Quilombo, to highlight
Black successes globally while working with White allies who understood the
cause. The ‘Congresses on Black Culture in the Americas’, organized between
1977 and 1984, also allowed Afro-descendants to come together and compare
k nowledge and establish links. Cross national cooperation developed through
dialogue and not without its tensions as differences across national cultures,
languages and modes of operations logically had to be negotiated. These dy-
namics indicate that even though Afro-Latin Americans are not a monolith,
activists and c onscious political leaders understand their shared struggle against
racism (Ratcliff, 27–34). By breaking down constructed barriers, and forging
alliances across linguistic, national and legal barriers, they have continued to
fight for social justice in the tradition of their ancestors.
The Contemporary Era: New Ways of Securing Rights,

Visibility and Intersectional Activism
The return or emergence to democracy across the region from the 1980s onward
led to a strengthening of civil society institutions and the emergence of more overtly
political organizations dedicated to securing rights and access for Afro-descendants.
In addition to identity and consciousness raising, organizations dedicated and run by
Afro-descendants focused on social discrimination in the economy, politics, hous-
ing, education and health care; policing, jails and prisons; and affirmative action.
Afro-Latin American intersectionality expanded to connect diverse Afro-Latin
American with other social movements particularly gender, sexuality and migrant
rights groups at the very moment when Latin American countries opened their
doors to new migrations of p eoples of African descent. Contemporary intersec-
tionality strongly emphasizes social justice, but it also recognizes that approaches to
social justice may differ among actors who share similar goals.
Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us that movements intent on reifying spe-
cific identities without paying attention to the differences within a group
and the different ways that different actors approach the issues of social jus-
tice may lead to unintended tensions and counterproductive outcomes for
civil society (Crenshaw, 1241–1299). Afro-descendants learned early on the
importance of alliances and negotiation among different Black constituents
with different agendas as well as with non-Black allies to achieve clear goals
such as security or educational rights. In addition, Afro-descendant activists
such as Afro-Peruvian Elena María Moyano did not only fight exclusively for
A fro-descendant issues. Moyano worked to fight against poverty and support
women and family health regardless of background as president of the Popular
Federation of Women of Villa El Salvador in Peru and later as deputy mayor
of the municipality of Villa El Salvador. Her activism brought her into con-
flict with the police and with the leftist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso,
the leftist Masoist organization that assassinated her in 1992 (Edmistin, The
Autobiography of María Elena Moyano).
30 Darién J. Davis
Afro-Latin American political activists and community leaders remain un-

der attack today. The situation in Colombia has been particularly troublesome
because paramilitary groups continue to threaten communities that are trying
to protect land rights in regions of Colombia. Since the 1990s, armed gun-
men and vigilante groups have threatened Afro-Colombian community leaders
and activists pursuing reforms to help protect federally designated lands for
A fro-Columbians. Twenty years later, political actors are still under threat. In
January 2017, paramilitary groups murdered four Afro-Colombian commu-
nity organizers. The victims included a local protestant priest Juan de la Cruz
Mosquera and his son Moisés Mosquera Moreno, a member of the Community
Council of the Salaquí River Basin, Emilsen Manyoma, a community leader
from Bajo Calima, and her husband, Joe Javier Rodallega. These commu-
nity leaders were helping the community to legally claim ancestral lands as
collective property (Pablo Medina Uribe, ‘Who is Killing Colombia’s Black
Human Rights Activists’).
In the post–Cold War period, Afro-Latin Americans elsewhere have also
become targets of violence by skinheads, neo-Nazis and other vigilantes. This
has not prevented Afro-Latin Americans from organizing to support and de-
fend their communities. Afro-descendant intersectional politics has also al-
lowed political actors to build and strengthen alliances locally, nationally,
transnationally and cross-ethnically. National organizations throughout the
region have developed vibrant national platforms, thanks to the history of
cross-national dialogue in the preparation for the 2001 UN Conference against
Racism and Xenophobia. Mundo Afro in Uruguay; Geledés, Instituto da Mulher
Negra in Brazil; Asociación de Mujeres Afrocolombianas in Colombia; the Asociación
de Mujeres Garifunas de Guatemala in Guatemala; Organización Negra Centroamer-
icana in Honduras and the Federación de Comunidades Negras in Ecuador have
played critical roles in building a politically engaged Afro-America.
Other organizations, such as the Frente Contra o Racismo, have worked cross-
ethnically on the issue of religious tolerance. Candomblé followers in Brazil,
for example, joined with Jews to call for freedom of religion and protec-
tion and to fight against neo-Nazis and skinheads and intolerant citizens
in the Christian dominant country. Afro-Brazilian Pai de Santo of the Can-
domblé religion Ivanir dos Santos claimed that a union was essential because
of w idespread discrimination against both communities. At the same time,
he called on members of the more affluent Jewish community to help with
anti-poverty campaigns and unfair treatment of Afro-descendants in the
criminal justice system (Chor Maio, ‘Against Racism’). The surge in political
power of Christian fundamental groups in national and local political circles,
many of them with significant Afro-Brazilian and working class support, has
meant an assault on traditional Afro-Brazilian religions and lack of finan-
cial support to cultural projects that aim to preserve these cultural practices
(Pragmatismo).
Transnational platforms in the wake of the 2001 Durban Conference con-

tinue to develop important political actors in organizations such as the UN
and the Organization of American States (OAS) and other international aid
agencies working to fight racism, poverty and to promote gender rights. Many
Black organizations such as Geledés in Brazil and the Unión de Mujeres Negras
in Venezuela understand that the Afro-descendant community share multiple
identities and that communities such as the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and
transgendered) and non-Black marginalized groups could be important allies
on the national and international levels. Organizations such as the Proceso de Co-
munidades Negras in Colombia and Mundo Afro in Uruguay have developed skills
to work both nationally and internationally. Mundo Afro’s organization of ‘The
First Seminar on Racism and Xenophobia: A Program for Afro-A mericans’,
resulting in another regional transnational network, purposefully left out
national divisions calling itself the Strategic Alliance of Afro-descendants or
simply the Alliance, and later the hemispheric-wide body for the 21st-century
AfroAmérica XXI (Davis, Pachel and Morrison, 19–50).
Other Black organizations are more explicitly transnational, forging re-
gional and global networks. The Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas y Caribeñas
is one of the pioneers of the transnational and intersectional dialogues in
which women have played a leading role. Other organizations such as the Red
Continental de Organizaciones Afroamericanas, Organización Negra Centroamericana,
Rede de Advogados de Operadores de Direito contra o Racismo – Brazil, and Red
Andina de Organizaciones Afro have all worked to increase the visibility of Black
causes, continuing the history of intersectional dialogue since the 1990s. These
organizations, in turn, have inspired intersectional alliances and dialogues with
Indigenous communities (Davis, Pachel and Morrison, 19–50).
The debates and activism by Black civil organizations in the 1980s and 1990s
brought attention to the lack of representation of Afro-descendants in politics,
forcing governments to reach out to these communities even if only symbolically.
As we have seen, by the turn of the 20th century, Afro-descendants emerged
as political leaders and representatives in many national government agencies.
This was a direct result of years of organizing and activism. Because of the
strong bonds, education and national and transnational training, Black organi-
zations understand how many elites work to maintain the status quo through
tokenism, exceptionalism and nationalist ideologies such as racial democracy,
Mestizaje and anti-Americanism. Black activists have asked for, and in some
cases secured specific rights and policies that will benefit A fro-Latin American
directly. They have also convincingly demonstrated that a healthy Afro-Latin
America means a healthy Latin America. Specific gains include the changes in
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution recognizing the country’s multiethnic charac-
ter and providing seats in Congress for Afro-Colombians and A merindians,
and the 1993 agreements granting collective titles to land occupied by their
ancestors. In the constitutional debates in Brazil, Afro-Brazilians secured the
32 Darién J. Davis
creation of the Palmares Foundation within the Ministry of Culture, which is

responsible for enacting and supporting social, cultural and economic activ-
ities that would preserve and promote Black influences in Brazilian society
(‘Law no. 7668 of the Brazilian Constitution’, Presidência da república).
While many scholars have pointed out the limits of these gains, it is
nonetheless important to view them as advances negotiated through dialogue.
Dialogue required stability, however, and political and economic instability
disproportionately affects Afro-Latin Americans. In places such as Venezuela
where there is an African-Venezuelan network of nongovernmental organi-
zations (NGOs), many Afro-Venezuelan activists such as Jesus Chucho Garcia
supported the government of Hugo Chavez and the possibility of making lives
better for poor Afro-Venezuelans. Garcia also had many reservations, but was
optimistic because Venezuela had signed the anti-racism agreement in Durban
(Garcia, 29–35). In 2017, however, many of the recommendations have not
been implemented, and Afro-Venezuelans continue to suffer disproportion-
ately and many of them have joined the pool-of-economic migrants who have
recently left the country.
Afro-Latin Americans throughout the region have also lobbied for various
types of affirmative action programs. Like Colombia’s and Brazil’s constitutional
laws, the affirmative action programs are incomplete, but they are also a testa-
ment to the power of Afro-Latin American political engagement in the contem-
porary era, which is connected to the historical struggles of A fro-descendants.
Since 1999, Brazil has developed its affirmative action programs on the state
and national levels, ranging from quotas for Afro-descendants and Indigenous
students at public universities to quotas for positions in government agencies. In
1996, Colombia created the Afro-Colombian Educational Credits Program for
Afro-descendants. In Ecuador, the government has agreed to a series of diverse
affirmative action programs including agreements with local governments to
build housing specifically for Afro-Ecuadorians, educational scholarships for
Afro-Ecuadorians. The Honduran and Uruguayan governments have also cre-
ated scholarships for postsecondary education for program for Afro-Honduran
students (Tanya K. Hernández, ‘Affirmative Action in the Americas’, The
America Quarterly (Summer 2013)). Recent attempts to role back affirmative
action programs remind us that these advancements are far from permanent. In
addition, Black activists must still address how they view and include pheno-
typically White Mestiços/Mestizos who identify as African-descendant.
As established political actors celebrate their successes and struggle to re-
define and shape better policies, Latin American societies continue to change.
One of the most important changes in the contemporary period has been
demographic. As previously mentioned, ‘Afro-Latin America’ is neither a
monolith nor is it static. As we have also seen, migration has played a central
role in shaping the contours of Afro-descendant communities and their pol-
itics. Latinos of African descent constitute a significant percentage of Latinos
in diverse places in the US from New York and North Carolina to California
and Hawaii. Latin America has also become home to thousands of new immi-
grants of African descent. New contemporary Afro-descendant migration to
and within Latin America represents a fourth wave of migration and constitutes
a critical part of the new approach to Afro-Latin American politics (Vaughn
and Venison, 223–248).
New African-descendant Migrations: Brazil, Argentina,

Chile and Elsewhere
While migrant rights have become a central issue for social justice activists
in the past several decades, scholars rarely associate the issue with Afro-Latin
American history. Migration, migrant rights and political organization have
nonetheless played critical roles in Afro-Latin American politics, particularly if
one understands the human trafficking in the colonial and modern era as forced
migration. In the aftermath of abolition, national states throughout Latin
America, like their North American counterpart, enacted policies to restrict
African and Asian migration to the region and encourage European White
migration largely because of racist ideas of progress and because of the desire to
whiten the populations. Those policies began to change in the US in 1965 with
the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act and in Latin America a generation
later (Kenned, 137–149). The end of the Cold War brought about new neolib-
eral policies and rapid globalization, and the international emergence of Latin
American states such as Brazil, Argentina and Chile making claims on the
global stage in organizations such as the UN and the OAS and a fourth wave
of immigration. As these countries began to exert more power, they played a
significant role in shaping new migration policies as it relates to migrants and
refugees from the global south and from Africa and Haiti in particular.
Black migrants have moved to South America in record numbers in the past
two decades. An estimated 1.2 million migrants of African descent have moved
to places like Brazil, Argentina and Chile between 2000 and 2015. Like their
predecessors in previous waves of migration, Afro-descendants have continued
to organize to secure lives with dignity. Former President Luis Inácio ‘Lula’
da Silva has highlighted a history of shared colonization and African slavery
that connects Africa and the Caribbean with Brazil, and the new migrants in
Argentina have led to renewed interest in the county’s African past and present
(O Tempo político). The circulation of African cultural products predates the
circulation of bodies. Modern Caribbean musical influences from reggae and
calypso reverberate throughout the northeast of Brazil, for example. As early as
the 1950s and 1960s, intellectuals and activists such as Abdias do Nascimento
and Leon Guntram Damas expounded on their versions of Negritude. In 2001,
Gilberto Gil visited Jamaica and released a tribute to Bob Marley Kaya N’Gan
Daya, cementing the connections between the two regions.
34 Darién J. Davis
Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s 1999 song Haiti poignantly illus-
trates Brazil’s shared colonial and racial history with Haiti (Veloso and Gill,
CD track 1). The song lyrically, esthetically and politically protests the m urder
of 111 prisoners abused by the Brazilian state. It was a powerful denuncia-
tion of the prison industrial complex and the disproportional incarceration
of A fro-descendants more than a decade before the publication of Michelle
A lexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
(2012). Although the song is more about Brazil than Haiti, it links Haiti and
Brazil on multiple levels in terms of the history of poverty, marginalization,
death, lack of human rights and racism. But, neither Veloso nor Gil could have
predicted that Brazil would play a decisive role in the political life of Haiti
and that many elite Brazilians would benefit directly from the exploitations of
Haitians in Brazil. Moreover, Haiti’s political chaos after the ouster of P
resident
Jean Paul Aristide in 2004 and devastating earthquake of 2010 led to an un-
precedented movement of people from the Caribbean nation to Brazil and in
a transformation of Brazil’s political and diplomatic presence in Haiti (www.
youtube.com/watch?v=mVZD_O89NMc).
Caribbean migrants had traveled to northern Brazil since the early 20th cen-
tury, but their presence was not as nationally widespread until mass immigra-
tion at the beginning of the 21st century (Araújo, MA thesis, 2015). Operation
MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) changed that
with the involvement of 989 Brazilian troops (7 police and 982 soldiers) in
2004. This figure increased to 2,000 after the 2010 earthquake (Kai Michael
Kenkel). While Brazil’s participation was clearly motivated by humanitarian
and political rationales, Brazil’s presence in Haiti also allowed for the creation
of a migration corridor between Haiti and Brazil through third and sometimes
fourth countries. The arrival of thousands of Black immigrants to Brazil ini-
tially helped meet the short-term high demand for laborers as the economy
expanded after 2005. Contractors, for example, relied on Haitian laborers to
help build the stadiums for the World Cup in 2014, and agribusinesses in the
northeast and factories in São Paulo had also lobbied for low-paying laborers
willing to work in conditions that many Brazilians would not endure (Panja,
‘Brazil World Cup Seeks Haitian Migrants Amid Worker Shortage’; Jorge
Heine and Andrew Stuart Thompson, ‘Fixing Haiti’).
As a result, Brazil witnessed the largest influx of people of African descent
since the abolition of slavery. The recent influx of Black Haitians has led to
racial tensions and anti-Black sentiments similar to those that Black activists
have complained about for generations. The assaults were also anti-immigrant
(Aranha and Onça; Folha Online). As the Haitian-Brazilian community has
developed, migrants have reported cases of aggression and discrimination across
Brazil, as well as in border towns in Peru that Haitians use to enter Brazilian ter-
ritory (‘Citizenship Pathways and Border Protection: Brazil’; UNHCR, ‘Brazil
chapter’). In 1980, the Brazilian government created the National Immigration
Council, the agency responsible for implementing migration policy and issuing
legal documents to facilitate immigration, with visa categories. Brazilian laws
theoretically favor educated migrants over noneducated low-skilled migrants,
although changing economic realities impact the flow of migrants (Amaral and
Fusco, ‘Shaping Brazil: The Role of International Migration’, www.migration
policy.org).
True to the history of Afro-Latin American politics, Haitians and H aitian-
Brazilians and their allies began to organize and respond politically with their
own associations, often in consultation with Afro-Brazilian allies and other so-
cial justice activists. Organizations such as the Associação dos Haitianos de Itajaí-SC
work closely with groups such as Quilombo Raça e Classe, the Movimento Mulheres
em Luta, the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores da USP (Sintusp) and Oposição Alternativa da
Apeoesp (Cruz, ‘Imigrantes haitianos fundam associação’). Associação dos Haitianos
de Itajaí’s Secretary General Fedo Bacoua explained that Haitians organize to
resolve problems related to work, discrimination and lack of documents and to
fight against the ‘genocide that Black people face in this country’ (Yale Global
Online, ‘More African Immigrants Finding a Home in Latin America’; Lisa
Nikolau, ‘Africans join the mass m igration movement through Latin America’;
Luis Andrés Henao, ‘African immigrants drift toward Latin America’).
Haitians are not the only new Black migrants. Because of the Lusophone
connections, smaller waves of Angolans, Mozambicans and Afro-Portuguese
have also migrated to Brazil since the 1960s. Add to that a significant number
of Afro-Venezuelans who have left their country to flee economic and political
instability. New African migrants also include refugees from Nigeria, Congo
and Senegal (BBC Online News October 14, 2014).
Even though their numbers are relatively small, Brazil has also received im-
migrants from other nations. After Haitians, the most significant Caribbean
group has come from Cuba. The trajectory of Afro-Cuban Carlos Moore, a
child of Jamaican migrants to Cuba, is representative of the circulation of Black
bodies across national borders. In his autobiography Pichón: A Memoir: Race and
Revolution in Castro’s Cuba (2008), Moore explains his own journey from Cuba,
to Europe and Brazil, connecting his journey to the broader struggles and
against what he suggests was White Marxist superiority in Cuba and his con-
nection to Black struggle in Brazil. With the ascent of the Worker’s Party, Brazil
and Cuba forged closer ties that also had an impact on migration between the
two countries. The bilateral agreement Mais Médicos (More D octors) brought
many Black Cuban doctors to work in Brazil as temporary migrants. In 2013,
several Black doctors reported racist and xenophobic incidents including ver-
bal and physical insults (Revista Forum August 2013, Maurício Moraes, BBC
Online). These incidents indicate the connection between racism, xenophobia
and anti-migration issues. Similar tensions have changed the political dialogue
in Brazil and in other countries such as Mexico, Argentina and Chile (Aljazeera
Online; Yale Global Online).
36 Darién J. Davis
In Argentina, the arrival and increased visibility of peoples of African de-

scent from Africa and Haiti has forced many Argentines to deal with their own
anti-Black history. New Afro-descendants in Argentina and in other localities
in Latin America are finding opportunities, which they cannot find in their
home countries. Racism, nonetheless, continues to block access and restricts
avenues for securing a dignified existence in their adopted homes. Here again,
we see that African descendants have turned to one another and to their allies
to organize, forge ties to build political power across nationality and citizen-
ship. The number of Cabo Verdians, the migrant community with the longest
history going back to the 1920s, has increased since the 1990s. Cape-Verde
community organizations such as the Cape-Verde Union also date back to the
early 20th century (La nación, December 30, 2006; Miriam Gomes, ‘An African
Community in Argentina: Cape Verdians’).
Although the total number of immigrants of African descent in A rgentina
remains small according to official statistics, Cape Verdians number more
than 12,000 and other African migrant associations boast numbers between
4,000 and 5,000 Africans (Marta Mercedes Maffia, 539–561). The Society of
Mutual Help Cape-Verdean Union represents one of the oldest groups, and
the A ssociation of Senegalese Residents in Argentina, formed in 2007, is one
the largest recent African-descendant group. There are others that include a
diversity of African and Afro-Latin American migrants, citizens and allies.
They include the House of the Indo-Afro American Culture, the Civil Asso-
ciation Union of Africans in the South Cone, the Civil Association Africa and
its Diaspora (made up of Africans, Afro Peruvians, Afro-Ecuadorians, Afro-
Uruguayans), the Nigerian Association in La Plata River and the Association
of Haitian Residents. In May 2007, the Movement of the African Diaspora
in Argentina created an umbrella group, which faced many of the historical
challenges of intersectional collaboration engenders (Marta Mercedes Maffia,
539–561; Bernarda Zubrzyski, 86–94).
Many Argentine organizations, including the Buenos Aires National
University, Commission of Support to the Refugee, Center of Legal and
Social Studies, the Pastoral of Migrations, the Collective for diversity, the
Nation Advocacy, National University of Lujan and the Argentine Institute for
Equality, Diversity and Integration, have been critical Afro-Latin American
allies in the political debates around citizens’ rights, respect and dignity. Others
have worked to help transform Argentine society and recognize migrant and
minority rights. The particular visibility of Africans from diverse multilingual
and religious places, such as Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Cameroon and Guinea, have also led to the emergence of new
Afro-descendant organizations fighting for rights and supporting one another.
Chile presents an interesting migrant case study because the country has
recently emerged as an important Latin American destination for migrants after
the brutal years of the Pinochet regime (1973–1990). Like Argentina and Brazil
in the post–Cold War era, the economy fared relatively well as the country
revised its immigrant policies. In 2017, Chile established a new law creating
a Council for Migration Policy comprised of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Interior Ministry and Ministry of Justice (‘IOM Helps Chile Prepare New
Migration Policy’, Press release poster January 24, 2017). As in other countries,
historical racism and exclusion plague Afro-descendants but have not discour-
aged Afro-descendants from intervening in the debates on human rights and
migration in Chile (Valle, 13–18). In 2003, 2,428 Haitians arrived in Chile.
In 2016, their numbers reached 41,065 migrants, many of them arriving from
neighboring countries (Folha Online, Para fugir da crisis hatianos trocam brasil
pelo Chile, May 8, 2016). Haitians and other groups have found allies and sol-
idarity in many quarters including NGOs such as Solidarity America despite
the alarmist headlines such as ‘Stampede of thousands of illegal Haitians in
Chile’, which portray Black Haitians as invaders and chaotic (Santiago Times,
‘Stampede’, August 17, 2016). Meanwhile, Haitians and other migrants are
continuing to contribute to Chilean society. In areas such as ‘Little Haiti’, Black
migrants have contributed to the revitalization of communities in the north-
eastern town outside Santiago, home to Chile’s largest industrial park Quilicura
(‘Little Haiti’). The Organization of Haitians in Chile represents an important
new voice on the Chilean political stage. Other Afro-descendants from Brazil,
Peru, the Dominican Republic and Colombia have also left their countries for
Chile (Minority Rights, ‘Profile’; Yesenia Barragan, ‘Afro-Colombians and the
Peace Agreement in Colombia’).
The data from Chile suggest that about 22.5% of the displaced population
identified as Afro-Colombian. Afro-Latin Americans from around the region
have also become a part of the migration stream through Chile and other coun-
tries. Many of these migrants have already established roots and have integrated
into their communities, creating a new generation of Afro-Latin Americans.
Consider, for example, the new populations in Costa Rica at the beginning
of the 21st century just as the country is honoring the historic presence of
Africans through its new Ministry of Afro-Costa Rican Affairs following the
mandates of UN’s Decade of the Afro-descendant (2015–2024) (NPR, ‘Costa
Rica’; Tico Times).
Conclusion
Afro-Latin American politics and political agitation developed out of necessity
since the founding of American colonies and enslavement of Africans. Modes
of actions and community organizing have been diverse, uneven and often in
response to crisis or immediate needs of survival. External and internal threats,
including violence, nationalism and elite exploitation of difference, have all
worked to diminish many of the political, economic, social and cultural con-
quests or gains. Despite these challenges, Afro-Latin American communities
38 Darién J. Davis
along with their leaders, their organic intellectuals and allies throughout Span-
ish and Portuguese America continue to forge new, albeit often imperfect,
modes of thinking about politics.
The politics of Afro-descendants have endured and been shaped by
four major waves of migratory dislocations as enslaved individuals ripped
away from their homelands, transnational workers, displaced refuges and
contemporary economic migrants. Through all of these challenges, Afro-
descendants have insisted on political engagement for individual and col-
lective development. Afro-Latin Americans have made incredible strides in
their quest for dignity and security in a region that they helped build over
centuries. The colonial legacies of racism and marginalization still plague a
vast majority of the population today, but Afro-descendants have forged al-
liances within and across cultural boundaries and have broken down barriers
between ‘migrants’ and ‘Natives’. Afro-descendants are not only representing
their countries locally and nationally but transnationally and t ransregionally
as well, thanks to the struggles of activists and communities who have gone
before them.
Social media have played an important role in connecting activists,
politicians and community organizers in new and innovative ways, allowing
Afro-Latin Americans to continue to engage in the political debates that
promote rights, forge alliances and support disenfranchised communities
locally, nationally and transnationally. The mainstream media, whether tra-
ditional or online, remain a challenge to Afro-Latin American political en-
gagement to stories in two ways. First, Afro-Latin Americans remain largely
invisible, and second, visibility and attention continues to overemphasize
the exceptional individual narrative, thus highlighting the fact that Vanessa
Alexandra Mendoza Bustos became the first Afro-Colombian to win Ms.
Colombia in 2001 or that Lázaro Ramos and Tais Araujo finally become
the first Black actors to become the protagonists for the primetime tele-
novela on the powerful Globo Television in 2015. Stories like the first Black
political appointments are important, but without stories about Afro-Latin
American community issues, we will not understand the larger political and
economic dynamics at work. Analysis and attention to structural changes
that bring visibility, dignity, education and a living wage to more Afro-
descendants must accompany celebration to determine whether filmmaker
Joel Zito Araújo is correct that ‘little is [really] changing’ (The Guardian
online Wednesday October 7, 2015). Araújo’s statement may indeed be cor-
rect for mainstream media spaces such as Globo and Telemundo, but even in
places where we have not seen significant change, it is clear that the political
work of Afro-Latin Americans will continue. The social, economic and cul-
tural challenges for Afro-descendants from the 16th century to the present
have been remarkably consistent, but so have the political interventions by
Afro-Latin Americans and their allies.
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2
Recognition, Reparations and
Political Autonomy of Black
and Native Communities in
the Americas
Bernd Reiter
This chapter argues first, with the Brazilian theorist Jacob Gorender (1923–2013),
that slavery was the predominant structuring force in the making of modern
American reality. Slavery created the playfield upon which all future g enerations
had to interact. Everywhere in the Americas, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego
and very notably in the Caribbean, power, wealth, land, access, social prestige
and honor were informed by and indeed constructed through slavery. With
only very few exceptions (Haiti, Cuba and, to some extent, Mexico), there was
no breaking up of social, racial and financial hierarchies constructed during
slavery times, so that today’s realities are directly linked to this past.
I then argue that the devastating effects of slavery and colonialism cannot be
addressed with the liberal democratic frameworks to which most countries of
the hemisphere adhere. Within those, first or Native people as well as Blacks
will always remain minorities – constantly at risk of falling prey to the tyr-
anny of the White and Mestizo majorities that surround them and control the
countries they live in.
The only place for Black and Native communities of the Americas to
prosper is within their own communities. Native American groups all over the
hemisphere have long recognized that they cannot rely on their colonizers and
their descendants to secure their well-being – and they have thus struggled for
the political autonomy of their communities ever since Europeans started to
conquer them and steal their lands. Their struggle has been facilitated by early
contracts signed, but then violated, but also by the fact that European intruders
invaded their ancestral lands, thus facilitating flight and resistance. Until very
recently and only in a few countries of the Americas, Black communities have
not been given access to land in the aftermath of slavery and thus face difficul-
ties when seeking to create politically autonomous territories where they are
the majority. However, the recent success of Quilombo communities in Brazil as
Recognition, Reparations and Political Autonomy 45
well as the successful quest for collective land rights in Colombia highlight the
relevance and viability of this strategy.
The case of Germany’s support of Israel demonstrates, however, that
supporting territorial political autonomy alone is not enough for securing the
well-being and prosperity of former enslaved and forced labor victims. Political
autonomy must be actively supported by the recognition of guilt of the evils
inflicted by slavery and similar institutions – and it must be accompanied by the
payment of reparations so that autonomous political communities become eco-
nomically viable. Only when these conditions are met, can the legacies of slav-
ery be overcome and justice and equal opportunity established. Without justice
and equal opportunity, violence is likely to remain endemic, and a peaceful
living together seems elusive.
Slavery
The importance of slavery in structuring contemporary American reality has
been underestimated, where ‘American’ here refers to all of the Americas, as
well as Caribbean. African and Native American slavery was a reality in all of
the Americas from 1500 to the mid- to late 19th century, from Canada to Chile
(Andrews 2004). Of the more than 10 million African enslaved brought to the
new world, almost half ended up in Brazil and some 2 million in the Caribbean,
where sugarcane plantations were the basis of the economy (Knight 1978).
In most countries of the Southern Hemisphere, African and Native A merican
enslaved people and their descendants were either physically eradicated, as in
Argentina, pushed into the most remote areas of the national territory, as in
Colombia, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, or –
where they were too many to be dealt with in this way – robbed from the
means to rise to equal citizen status through the application of sometimes legal
and sometimes illegal racism (Winant 2002; Andrews 2004).
In addition to slavery, which lasted between 300 and 400 years in the
A mericas, other institutions of systematic exploitation such as the Encomienda
and the Mita systems, all of which relied on forced, unpaid labor of Indigenous
people, created the basis on which the future of the Americas was constructed.
It allowed colonizers and their descendants to construct wealth to the det-
riment of the enslaved and otherwise exploited, and it enacted and enforced
the social and racial hierarchies that became the foundation of the indepen-
dent American countries of the future. The political and economic hierarchies
constructed during colonial times were only dismantled in Cuba, Mexico and
Haiti, but even there, former enslaved people and indentured servants never
received compensation.
Racism continues to stifle the life chances of African descendants in the
Americas today – particularly those with darker complexion and noticeable
‘African’ features. The liberal democratic frameworks that were established in
46 Bernd Reiter
most of the Americas after independence have been unable to provide minori-
ties with equal protection and equal opportunity. To the contrary, in most
countries of the Western Hemisphere, White elite pacts were forged to exclude
non-Whites from the benefits of citizenship and from equal access to education,
health, housing and decent jobs. In the US, this elite pact has been explained
by Anthony Marx (1998) as one where southern Whites only accepted joining
the union if Blacks were relegated to second-class citizenship status. Similar
pacts have been described for Colombia (Muñera 2011), Jamaica (Holt 1991;
Thame 2011), Haiti and the French Caribbean (Dubois 2004, 2005), Cuba
(Helg 1995) and Mexico (Sue 2013). The comprehensive work on race in Latin
America produced by Edward Telles (2014) allows us to grasp that racism has
been an integral element in the construction of political, social and economic
hierarchies everywhere in the Americas – from Canada to Tierra del Fuego.
This chapter argues that such deeply ingrained and highly normalized
exclusion, discrimination and marginalization cannot be undone within the
liberal democratic frameworks predominant in the region. In most countries,
the transition from slavery to freedom was one that led from the plantation
to domestic servitude for Black women, and to joblessness, for Black men.
Nowhere in the hemisphere has there been a concerted effort toward repa-
ration, restitution, reconstruction or even recognition of the former enslaved
and forced laborers. In most countries, former enslaved people, once released
into freedom, were pushed away from the land into the slums of emerging
cities, where instead of finding opportunities, they faced hostile White or
Mestizo majorities that passed anti-loitering and anti-vagrancy laws to con-
trol the impoverished former enslaved. Some countries, like Argentina, found
ways to physically eradicate its Black population through war and White-only
immigration policies (Andrews 2004).
Other countries, like Bolivia, which had relied more on Indigenous slave

labor, devised systems where the former enslaved were kept out of the d ominant
and hegemonic political, social, economic and even cultural systems and rel-
egated to the status of strangers in their own land and to the legal status of
children requiring White or Mestizo tutelage. Nowhere in the Americas were
former enslaved people actively integrated into mainstream society after eman-
cipation. They were, instead, released into highly competitive societies and
forced to compete with those who had not only accumulated different assets
and capitals over the past centuries – but they had done so with the help of
exploiting the enslaved. A more unfair competition can hardly be imagined –
particularly in capitalist systems where the amount of assets when entering
competitive markets determines, to a great extent, the outcome. In such mar-
kets, ‘catching up’ to those who entered them earlier and with more assets is
virtually impossible (Hirsch 1976).
To provide former enslaved people and their descendants in the Americas
with a fair chance at succeeding in life and being able to compete with all those
who have constructed their riches and secured their access to land and property
by exploiting the enslaved and forced laborers, recognition, reparation and po-
litical autonomy are required. Here is the reason why they are required.
Slave Societies
The country of the Western Hemisphere where slavery lasted the longest and
where the most Africans and Indigenous people were enslaved is Brazil. In
colonial Brazil, the enslavement of Indigenous people started in 1534, with the
creation of Sesmarias, or colonial domains, and it lasted officially until 1755 –
but was in practice until the 1820s (Albuquerque 1986). Africans and their
descendants were enslaved in Brazil until 1888 – thus longer than anywhere
else on the continent.
It should thus not surprise that Brazilian scholars have produced impres-
sive accounts about slavery. Among the most impressive is the work of the
nonprofessional scholar, communist activist and anti-fascism fighter Jacob
Gorender. In his Opus Magnus O Escravismo Colonial [1978] (2001) – ‘Colonial
Slavery’ – Gorender argues that New World slavery cannot be explained with
reference to the previously existing economic systems leading up to it. Instead,
for Gorender, what emerged in the New World in and after the 1500s was an
entirely new system, sui generis, without any roots in classical slavery, African
slavery, or other systems of exploitation or bondage known until then. Never
in the history of human kind, as far as we can tell, have people been robbed so
absolutely of their human dignity and reduced to objects without rights, with-
out legal personhood, without citizenship and hence without hope and future
as in modern slavery.
Enslavement existed previously and outside of the Americas, for sure. But
enslavement was either temporary, connected to debt and war, as in precolonial
Africa, or closer related to domestic servitude, as in classical Rome and Greece.
Nowhere do we have accounts of slavery stripping a person of his or her very
personhood, taking away their names, language and culture as consistently and
violently as in the Americas. The life expectancy of a slave in Brazil was seven
years after his or her arrival (Rodrigues 1988 [1906]). Seven! The punishments
inflicted upon runaway slaves are the thing of horror movies and included mu-
tilations, cutting of limbs and wearing of iron masks and other devises on their
bodies. Branding, cutting and mutilating were the norm. So were sexual, phys-
ical and emotional abuse. Slave masters sought and found ways to reduce slaves
to less than animals, robbing them of even the tiniest means to resist. In most
slave societies of the Western Hemisphere, the speaking of African languages
was forbidden, drumming was outlawed, African dancing made illegal, and
African religion declared against the colonial law. Enslaved people were not
allowed to learn how to read and write the languages of their masters, and their
assembly was controlled and actively undermined. The enslaved were robbed
48 Bernd Reiter
of everything, but their physical bodies were thus reduced to machines. Cheap
and highly effective machines at that, as they allowed their masters to grow rich
and construct wealth, mostly in the form of land and property (Gorender 2001).
When slavery ended, America was the most unequal region of the world –
and it continues to be so today. Nowhere in the Western Hemisphere has
there been an official apology for slavery. Nowhere has there been an offi-
cial recognition of the harms, ills and suffering that slavery brought upon
Africans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, let alone an attempt
to address these wrongs. Reconstruction was only attempted in the US.
Here, the US Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land was created
in 1865, after the slave-holding American south had lost its right to enslave
others – but it was closed again by Congress in 1872 (Foner 2002). Instead
of providing land to the formerly enslaved, President Johnson issued pardons
to Confederates restoring their land titles (Foner 2002, 159). The 40 acres
that the Bureau sought to give to every freeman from public land never ma-
terialized, by order of the president. Instead, the land that had been given
to the formerly enslaved before that order was given back to their previous
owners. According to Eric Foner (2002, 159), probably the most eminent
historian of the American Reconstruction era, ‘Once growing crops had
been harvested, virtually all the land in Bureau hands would revert to its
former owners’.
Nothing of the sort was even tried in Brazil, Colombia, Honduras,
Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico or
Guadeloupe. Where revolutions occurred, as in Mexico, Nicaragua and Cuba,
land reforms were conducted, but nowhere did they address the specific plights
of the formerly enslaved. Postemancipation did not lead to targeted educa-
tion, housing, health and property measures for formerly enslaved people, no-
where. And, more importantly, nothing was done to take away the riches of
those who had acquired them illegally through slavery – in any country of the
hemisphere. Instead, when slavery formally ended, the social, economic and
political hierarchies constructed during 300 to 400 years of slavery became the
playfield upon which post-slavery societies were erected and upon which the
formerly enslaved and their former masters competed for jobs, income, wealth,
future prospects – as well as prestige, status, recognition and honor.
In the aftermath of slavery, when some formerly enslaved succeeded against
all odds and thanks to the unbroken will and sense of community of their peers
to reach humble levels of economic or political power – invariably, the former
masters reacted violently, killing, lynching, threatening and robbing the former
enslaved not only of their goods and achievements but also of their right to vote
and be educated (Alexander 2010). If, in most countries of the slave-holding
Americas, such violence did not occur, it is because their Black and Indigenous
populations never posed a threat to the economic and political power of slavers
and their descendants (Marx 1998).
The dominant way to intimidate, disenfranchise and block former enslaved

populations and their descendants from rising up and potentially compet-
ing with their former masters in South American and the Caribbean was to
undermine the very possibility of taking any sort of collective action. This
was achieved by instilling, disseminating and, if necessary, enforcing an
a ll-encompassing ‘Mestizo nationalism’ that made it impossible for the formerly
enslaved to formulate and claim any sort of special status (Marx 1998). After
being robbed of everything, even their names, cultures, religion and identities,
let alone property, education and income, the formerly enslaved, the day after
they were released from bondage, were thus told: you do not have the right
to claim any sort of special treatment. You are just like everybody else in this
Mestizo nation: brown, mixed and not special. Anybody and any organization
that dared to contest this hegemonic narrative was declared an unpatriotic trai-
tor (Muñera 2011).
When, around the 1920s and 1930s, a wave of popular unrest and upheaval
swept over most of the Americas, potentially threatening the well-established
hierarchies constructed during slavery, the follower-class of former slavehold-
ers, now called ‘political class’ in the Americas, asserted their firm grip on
power, restricting franchise and establishing quasi-feudal systems of power and
control. Only in Mexico did this upheaval lead to a restructuring of social,
political and economic hierarchies, but even there, new elites quickly formed
to avoid a genuine societal restructuring and a rise of the ‘Wretched of the
Earth’ to political and economic power (Skidmore 2013).
When another wave of popular unrest started to sweep across the continent
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the only solution for traditional elites was to call
on the military. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the military ruled eleven Latin
American nations. Only Haiti and Cuba were able to undo, to some extent,
the societal, political and cultural structures inherited from colonial times and
replace them with new and different ones. But even in Cuba, racism has re-
mained a characterizing element of Cuban reality – even if less powerfully so
than anywhere else in the Americas (Ferrer 1999; De la Fuente 2001).
American societies have thus remained, to a large extent, slave societies.
Social relations, access to power, politics, economics, prestige, culture and life
chances are all still following the structural patterns established during co-
lonial slavery. This is not surprising, as the kind of slavery established here
was something new, sui generis, in its absolute dehumanization. The US civil
rights movement of the 1960s stands out as an attempt to attack these inherited
inequalities, but its achievements, although significant, have not changed the
basic structure of inequality so ingrained in all American societies and their
social, cultural and economic institutions. In the US, the average net worth
of a Black household in 2014 was $6,314, compared to $110,500 for Whites.
According to the 2010 Census, African-Americans, who make up 13% of the
total population, account for 40% of the incarcerated population. According to
50 Bernd Reiter
the US census, unemployment among Blacks has consistently remained double

that of White Americans. Education shows the same pattern, with some 40%
of Whites, compared to some 20% of Blacks, holding a college degree. The
achievement gap separating Black from White Americans has remained un-
changed in such crucial areas as education, employment, income and – most
starkly, wealth (Mazzocco et al. 2006; Spence 2016).
And yet, the US is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that had
a broad and significant civil rights movement by and for African descendants.
Brazil has only in 2004 started to seek ways to promote the education and job
prospects of its large Black population. Colombia, although having a constitu-
tion since 1991 that proclaims rights and protections for ethnic minorities, has
yet to take concrete steps to live up to its own constitution, despite the small
victories concerning collective land titles (Paschel 2016). Bolivia, where the
majority of enslaved and indentured laborers were Native peoples, has also only
recently declared itself a plurinational state and is only now actively seeking
ways to promote the well-being of its historically marginalized groups, African
descendants included. The stories of Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Panama,
Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, as well as those of the many Caribbean
nations, some independent and some remaining under the postcolonial tutelage
of their former colonizers, are all similar. Most have done very little to nothing
to promote the well-being of the descendants of the formerly enslaved, and all
of them have shied away from taking measures to level the playing field and
establish fair and equal opportunities for their formerly enslaved populations –
despite the protests and organizational efforts of their Black populations who
have contested their exclusion and marginalization and the prevalent racism of
their countries ever since they were forced to step foot on its shores (Winant
2002; Andrews 2004). However, in most countries of the hemisphere, almost
no actions were undertaken for those who were pushed to the very bottom of
social and economic hierarchies, let alone against those who built their riches
on the backs of Black and Native slaves.
Only Haiti was able to effectively make a break with its slavery past, but the
price it had to pay for such radical action, conducted so early (starting a Black
revolution in the 1790s), have been nothing but enlightening, as the rest of the
Western Hemisphere, backed by the former colonial powers, seemed long un-
willing to accept the freedom and equality of the formerly enslaved and, once
achieved, found ways to punish them for their daring to be equal ( James 1989).
As the components of racially structured societies have remained unchanged,
nowhere in the Americas have the descendants of former enslaved people been
able to level the political, economic or even the cultural playing fields that
mark their daily encounters with those who benefit from historically accumu-
lated privilege (Hooker 2009). Worse, in addition to not encountering equal
opportunities due to unequally distributed assets and financial, social and cul-
tural capitals that have been accumulated by some (White and Mestizo) groups
over centuries, the descendants of the enslaved also face personal racial stigma,
also inherited from the past, which further stifles their prospects. They are
perceived, by most White or Mestizo observers, as ‘damaged goods’, poten-
tially spoiled and sub-par (Loury 2002). This perception is an efficient way
for nonformer slaves to make general assessments about the worthiness of un-
known others, as Glenn Loury (2002) has so convincingly demonstrated. The
descendants of enslaved people have to compete on markets as equals that are
tilted against them, as they enter these markets without any assets – financial,
political, social or cultural. In addition, they are not even perceived as equal
players, due to racial stigma, thus further stacking the cards against them. They
compete on unfair markets, handicapped.
Liberal Democracy and Majority Rule: Making It Worse

Where liberal, representative democracies are composed of structural majori-
ties and minorities, minorities will, by definition, not be able to see their pref-
erences become policies. Alexis de Tocqueville (1988) described this problem
when visiting the US in the 1830s, and a whole set of political science literature
since has dedicated efforts toward better understanding the problem of the ‘tyr-
anny of the majority’. No satisfying solution to this problem has been found, to
the best of my knowledge. At best, minorities can count on protections from
abusive majorities, but their political will cannot become the rule of the land, as
long as they diverge structurally and systematically from the majority. Either a
minority stops being a minority and blends into the majority – or its preferences
will be ignored routinely (Barry 1979; Schumpeter 1950; Tilly 1998).
The great American promise, everywhere in the Americas, of course, has
been to do just that: blend in. The accounts we have on ‘How the Irish became
White’ (Ignatiev 2008), or how other immigrants were able to blend into the
American mainstream (Roediger 2006) all point to this possibility in the US.
The same promise, however, infused the immigration policies of places such as
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and others, where ‘blending in’ translated into buying
into the dominant narrative of the Mestizo nation – and letting go of any claim
to be different (Muñera 2011).
However, given racial stigma, Black and Native peoples of the Americas have
been unable and at times unwilling to simply ‘blend in’. They continue to stick
out – no matter how assimilated some of them have become to their country’s
cultural mainstream. Blacks and ‘indios’ continue to be stigmatized, looked
down upon, and stereotyped – even in countries like Brazil, where A frican
descendants account for a numerical majority. If anything, Brazil demonstrates
that a numerical Black majority can still be perceived, and treated, as a minority
by those claiming to be ‘White’ (Reiter 2008, 2018). Their very existence and
their unwillingness, or inability, to ‘blend in’, which implies letting go of their
group’s identity and becoming a mere citizen-individual without any further
52 Bernd Reiter
characteristics and attachments, primordial or otherwise, points to the limits

of the liberal democratic systems to which they halfway belong. It is telling in
this regard that some South American ‘indios’ fared better under conservative
than under liberal rule in countries such as Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and
Colombia, precisely because of the liberal focus on individuality and its stern
denial of group rights.
Because of their adherence to majority rule and reliance on individualism,
liberal democratic systems cannot provide solutions for the entrenched prob-
lems of racism, racialized inequality and inherited (White or Mestizo) privilege
(Hooker 2009; Young 2011).
Rethinking Democracy through Community

The only place where discriminated minorities can find refuge is within their
own communities. Several Native, or first people of the Americas, have long
understood this – and sought distance from the invading European intruders and
their descendants. In North America, this struggle to regain political autonomy
by wrestling it away from White America and Canada can be traced back to
the wars different tribes fought against the White invaders of their lands – ever
since those invaders set foot on it. The great Ottawa leader Pontiac fought back
the British in the 1770s, and many other tribes and tribal a lliances achieved
partial, if temporary, victories against the French, the British, the Spaniards,
the Portuguese – and their creole successors. The aim of all these struggles was
not only to repel the White invaders but also to defend Indian statehood and
self-rule. The Iroquois Confederacy is said to have been founded as early as
1570, and it successfully fought back the French in the 16th and 17th centuries
(Deloria 1969). In the early 1800s, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh endeavored
to forge a Pan-Indian confederacy to fight back against the A mericans so that
Indians could live apart and among themselves (Tucker 1956; Dowd 1992).
The Stoney Indians of Canada finally achieved self-government in 1946 –
even though several agreements assuring their independence had been signed
much earlier, in the mid-19th century (Snow 1977). Almost all Native tribes
of the Americas can look back at agreements and treaties signed and broken –
until they finally achieved land in the form of reservations and autonomy in
the 20th century. Vine Deloria (1933–2005), for many years director of the
US National Congress of American Indians, locates Indian nationalism in the
1960s. However, he also explains that, ‘The idea of self-government for I ndians
began almost as soon as Indians had fairly continuous contact with non-Indians’
( Deloria and Lytle 1984, 266). To some, self-government and land came very
late and in many cases, the reservations they were able to secure for themselves
are either too small or too barren to make a decent living on them – or both.
Nunavut only became an autonomous territory of Canada in 1999. In Colom-
bia, Manuel Quintín Lame (1883–1967) formulated a manifesto for political
autonomy in 1918, but the Colombian government only provided for Indige-
nous self-rule in 1991. The Zapatistas of southern Mexico finally declared war
on the Mexican government in 1994, issuing a declaration, which started with
‘Ya Basta’ – Enough. Since then, they have labored to construct political auton-
omy (Stahler-Sholk 2008, 2014).
Indigenous struggle everywhere in the Americas has been, almost by
definition, a struggle for political autonomy and self-rule, and it almost always
has a territorial dimension (Blaser et al. 2010; Dinerstein 2014). According to
Vine Deloria, who discusses the situation of Indigenous, or First People, in the
US, ‘In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act was passed. Under the provisions
of this act reservation people were enabled to organize for purposes of self-
government’ (Deloria 1969, 16). Deloria finds that in general, ‘Tribes that can
handle their reservation conflicts in traditional Indian fashion generally make
more progress and have better programs than do tribes that continually make
adaptations to the White value system’ (Deloria 1969, 21). He also asserts, ‘The
awakening of the tribes is just beginning. Traditionalists see the movement
as fulfilling the ancient Hopi and Iroquois religious predictions of the end of
White domination of the continent’ (Deloria 1969, 246).
Echoing the demands of Indigenous, or first people everywhere in the world,
Deloria sees the only solution to the problems of Indigenous people in their
territorial sovereignty, political autonomy and self-rule: ‘What we need is a
cultural leave-us-alone agreement, in spirit and in fact’ (Deloria 1969, 27). Black
communities, by contrast, face a more complicated struggle, as they cannot rely
on a ‘homeland’ and on contracts signed in centuries past with invading forces.
Today, most African descendants in the Americas live in urban settings. They
were never given access to land. However, some African descendant communi-
ties in Brazil have embraced the same strategy as some N ative groups, seeking
their own territory, distance from the White and Mestizo cultures surrounding
them and political autonomy so they can become makers of their own destiny.
In Brazil, Colombia, Suriname and Jamaica, attempts to establish free Black
communities, known as Maroon, Quilombo or Palenque communities, are well
documented during slavery times (Price 1973).
In Brazil, the most known and influential attempt of establishing a Qui-
lombo was the ‘Quilombo of Palmares’, a conglomerate of free, fortified cities
in the northeastern hinterland of the current states of Bahia, Pernambuco,
Sergipe and Alagoas. It is difficult to obtain a realistic description of these
free cities from the only source available: the accounts of Portuguese and
Dutch army members describing what they saw, but did not understand
or cared to understand, during the several attempts at destroying Palmares
( Reiter 2009).
Available accounts are tainted with the chauvinism of the winner, as well
as that of the colonizer and slaveholder. Nevertheless, it is by now broadly
accepted that Palmares consisted of several cities, all created around 1630. The
54 Bernd Reiter
Dutch, who controlled this part of Brazil from 1630 to 1645, destroyed the first
settlements in 1644, but Maroons (runaway slaves) continued to resettle in the
same region, mostly because of its proximity to the major plantation centers
of Olinda and Recife but also because of the geographical conduciveness of
this area, as it facilitated hiding from intruding armies and establishing forti-
fied cities. What was called Palmares actually referred to a conglomerate of at
least nine free cities, of which the following have been documented: Zambi,
Arutirene, Tabocas, Dambrubanga, Subupira, Macaco, Osenga, Amaro and
the Palmares of Antalaquituxe, led by brother of the leader who resided in
Macaco.1 Macaco was the capital of what has been called a ‘Federation’ by early
Brazilian researchers, such as Nina Rodrigues, with more than 1,500 houses
and a church. Other cities were smaller, ranging from having 800 houses in
Subupira, to one with 220 houses. All cities were fortified and highly orga-
nized. Each city had a well-structured government, which include a legisla-
tive, a judicial and an executive branch, with a police force. The leader of the
Federation held the title ‘Zambi’ (Reiter 2009).
The sophistication of the internal organization of these cities and their
successful regional cooperation and interaction among each other, as well as
with surrounding plantations and settlements, led some 18th and 19th cen-
turies h istorians to refer to Palmares as a free, ‘Black republic’ or a ‘Black
state’.2 Palmares was destroyed in 1697, but its mere existence and the com-
plexity of its internal organization allow us to perceive that the creation of free
communities and cities was an important and constant strategy of resistance
during slavery.
The Brazilian state currently recognizes some 2,000 Quilombo communities,
with an estimated total population of about 2 million.3 Contemporary Q uilombo
communities are officially termed ‘Reminiscent Quilombo Communities’ and
the sheer number testifies to their continued importance as a repertoire of re-
sistance against slavery and discrimination.
In Colombia, runaway slaves known as Cimarrones created free republics,
some of which lasted for several hundred years, known as Palenques (Price 1973).
The Palenques created in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia were founded
in 1600 under the leadership of Benkos Bioho, a runaway slave who was most
likely taken from West Africa. The Palenques created by him and others around
him stand out among other Maroon, Quilombo or Cimarron experiences because
they were never conquered by the Spaniards. The descendants of the original
Maroons still live in the same location today. The villages and towns created by
these Cimarrones were truly free, offering refuge to other Africans and their
descendants, as well as to non-Africans (Reiter 2015). They relied heavily on
trade. They established their own constitution and, apparently, took collective
decisions democratically. Palenques are the true birthplaces of democracy in the
Americas and also the places where a strong, active and equal citizenship was
created and continues to be practiced (Reiter 2015).
Palenque de San Basílio, the only continuously existing Palenque of the

Americas, maintained political autonomy and freedom during the colonial era
and maybe even to the beginning of the 20th century, but eventually lost it,
when the Colombian state started to integrate previously neglected territories
into one, national political space. National integration under the predomi-
nant liberal-individualistic model, coupled with deep-seeded racism able to
survive and thrive under the guise of abstract liberalism have eroded Cimar-
ron autonomy in Colombia, despite the new Colombian Constitution of 1991
that promotes popular participation and explicitly recognizes ethnic diversity,
granting special rights to communities of Afro-descendants. Palenque, however,
has never ceased to fight back and seek political autonomy. Doing so, Palenque
de San Basílio affirms its long republican tradition. Palenqueros are actively en-
gaged in hundreds of kuagros (age-based associations), dozens of juntas and
a community council. ‘To Palenqueros, participation truly is a ‘habit of the
heart’, and strong civic engagement is everybody’s reality’ (Reiter 2015, 14).
Community, in short, has been the place of refuge, resistance and renewal
for the descendants of slaves, both Black and Indigenous, all over the A mericas.
In urban areas, where territorial political autonomy is more difficult to achieve,
Black cultural and religious communities have served the same purpose as
reservations have for Native people. Black churches and clubs have indeed
been safe havens for the descendants of enslaved people all over the Americas
( Reiter 2009). However, in rural areas, territorial political autonomy still seems
the most efficient way to protect Native people as well as the descendants of
A frican enslaved people and allow for their prosperity – if supported by mea-
sures of reparations. In urban settings, it might be worth exploring the viability
of ‘urban Quilombos’ – that is, traditional Black territories as the recipients of
reparation measures, particularly in the areas of infrastructure, housing, educa-
tion, health and college funds.
In advocating for a strengthening of Black and Native communities as the
recipients of reparations and autonomy, I do not argue for Apartheid. Instead, I
find that investment into those communities attacked and destroyed by slavery,
marginalization and persistent racism via reparations is the only way to level
the playing field so that their members can compete on today’s markets with an
equal chance to win and thus become equal members of their national commu-
nities. Community is also the only place where recognition can be achieved or,
in this case, restored. Reparations, recognition and political autonomy are thus
the core elements of this call for community autonomy.
Recognition, Reparations and Territory: The Case of Germany

Nazi Germany used and abused over 20 million forced and enslaved laborers,
in many cases working them to their death. By 1944, 26.5% of the German
workforce consisted of foreigners who were forced to work for the German
56 Bernd Reiter
Reich (Hayes 2004; Plato et al. 2010). The German state, even if reluctantly
and against internal opposition has, at least partially, faced the evil it perpetu-
ated against Jews and others. It confiscated those riches that were accumulated
by relying on enslaved labor, dismantled such industries as Krupp and sent
its chief executive officers to prison, after they were found guilty during the
Nuremberg trials. Germany recognized Israel’s right to sovereignty and sup-
ported its efforts to achieve it. Post–War World II history textbooks discuss
the World Wars in detail, and all German children learn about Germany’s war
mongering and genocide.
To be certain, payments and reparations cannot undo the wrongs inflicted
upon a people – and there were plenty of Israelis opposing the receipt of rep-
arations from Germany (Slyomovics 2014). Paying your way out is, after all,
the cheap way out. Healing must start with the admission of guilt. This, in the
German case, was only achieved after losing a war and mounting international
pressure to do so – and even then, not all Germans agreed to take responsibility
for what they had done, or allowed to be done. But despite popular pressure,
Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor (1949–1963), expressed an
apology to Israel in 1951 (Lavy 1996). ‘The Germans agreed to pay between
DM 3.4 and 3.5 billion; agreement was also reached on the annual payments,
including the obligation to deliver goods in the amount of DM400 million
before March 31, 1954’ (Balabkins 1971, 134).
Indeed, between 1953 and 1967, Germany paid 3 billion German Marks4 of
reparations to Israel and 450 million to the Jewish Congress. With this money,
Israel bought equipment and raw materials for the emerging, publicly con-
trolled Israeli industries. Israel updated its electrical grid and invested about
half of the incoming money into Israel’s railways. Mining equipment and water
canalization infrastructure were also high on the list of Israel’s priorities. So
was buying fuel and investing in commercial ships. In 1956, the German state
contributed 87.5% of Israel’s state income (Segev 1991).
In the year 2000, 55 years after the end of the war, the German government,
in cooperation with six partner organizations from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,
Poland, Czech Republic and the Jewish Claims Conference, finally created
the foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future to process claims of for-
mer enslaved laborers and their descendants. From 2001 to 2007, they received
some $8,000 each. In all, 4.37 billion Euros were paid to about 1.66 million
beneficiaries in 100 countries (Report to Congress, Bureau of European and
Eurasian Affairs 2006).
The German state outlawed the use of symbols of unconstitutional organi-
zations, any preparation and incitement of war, as well as the dissemination of
means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations, the usage of symbols of
unconstitutional organizations and the incitement of hatred against segments
of the population. The usage, or display, of any symbol related to Nazism is
punishable with up to three years of imprisonment.
Nothing of the sort has even been tried for the descendants of enslaved peo-
ple and forced laborers in the Americas.
Equally important for the sake of leveling the playing field and establishing
equal opportunities for all would have been not only giving land to Blacks so
they could produce but also taking away those riches accumulated by Whites
during, and because of slavery, particularly on plantations. However, even
though a confiscation act was passed in the US Congress in 1862, President
Lincoln steered against large-scale confiscations, limiting the tenure of confis-
cated land to one generation, so that the land would eventually revert back to
their original owners.
What stood in the way of a genuine end to inequality in the US as elsewhere
in the Americas was racism. Eric Foner (2002) quotes Col. Samuel Thomas, the
director of the Mississippi Bureau of Reconstruction in 1865, who thought ‘the
basic problem … was that the White public could not conceive of the negro
having any rights at all’ (Foner 2002, 150). In the US, the use of racist symbols
to this day is supported by the ‘free speech’ protection clause, as written in the
First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791. Instead of receiving
reparations and land, former slaves witnessed the emergence of the Ku-Klux-
Klan, in 1865. By the 1920s, the Klan counted on some 4 million members and
operated in almost all southern states. Instead of seeing the riches they helped
accumulate taken away from their former masters and distributed among them,
freedmen and women found themselves without land, without shelter, without
access to quality education or quality health provision.
Everywhere in the Americas, Black and Indigenous populations witnessed
the passing of vagrancy laws, which demonized them and sought to push them
out of cities, thus adding insult and blame to injury. This reality is particu-
larly sobering when considering the fact that the US government played such a
critical role in the process of paying reparations for slave laborers in Germany.
In a report to the American Congress, issued by the Bureau of European and
Eurasian Affairs, from March 2006, we can read:
The United States Government played a critical role in a multilateral ef-
fort that resulted in the establishment of a Foundation under German law
entitled ‘Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future’ (‘Foundation’). The
Foundation was capitalized with 10 billon German Marks (DM), valued at the
time as approximately five billion dollars. Since June 2001, the Foundation has
been making payments to survivors in recognition of the suffering they en-
dured as slave and forced laborers. The Foundation also covers other personal
inquiry and certain property damage caused by German companies during the
Nazi era, including claims against German banks and insurance companies
(Report to Congress, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs 2006).
While supporting reparations for those, the US legislature has been sternly
unwilling to do the same with the descendants of the over 3 million enslaved in
the US at the end of the American Civil War. In fact, a bill seeking to establish a
58 Bernd Reiter
committee to study slavery and its effects and elaborate the appropriate measures
to undo the harms done during American slavery has been proposed every year
since 1989 by Congressman John Conyers Jr., but it has never become law.
While affirmative action, quotas and collective land titling in Brazil,
Colombia and Bolivia are all actions that seek to favor historically excluded
populations, none of these measures includes an active dismantling of the priv-
ileges accumulated by those who benefitted from the enslavement of others. It
is, however, only by actively leveling the playing field that we can achieve equal
opportunities and justice (Rawls 2001; Sen 2009; Hacker 2011). Such a leveling
would demand an identification of those who directly and indirectly benefitted
and continue to benefit from slavery, encomienda, mita and other forms of
slavery, forced labor and indentured servitude – and strip them from the riches
these systems of exploitation have allowed them to accumulate.
The Only Way Forward

Reparations cannot undo guilt. An understanding, and acceptance, of how
White privilege was constructed in the Americas, namely, on the backs and to
the detriment of Indigenous and Black populations, must achieve this. This can
only occur if privileged Americans of all those countries with a history of slav-
ery, encomienda, mita and similar systems of systematic exploitation are made
to understand not only the nature of their own privileges but also the contin-
ued stigmatization that Native Americans and African-Americans experience
every day – and the consequences this stigmatization has for them. The only
way to achieve this is through education. American schools everywhere, from
kindergarten to high school, must teach how White privilege was constructed
and is perpetuated today. American history would have to be taught in different
ways in every American nation, recognizing the Indigenous and Black contri-
bution and White exploitation and American nationalisms would have to be
changed and offer a way to see the injustices inflicted upon African-A mericans
and Native Americans so that they can then be imagined as full and equal
members of the American community from which they are currently excluded
(Bowles and Gintis 1998; Bowen and Bok 2000).
After a collective admittance of guilt in the form of changed school curric-
ulums and an altered American nationalism, action must follow in the form of
reparations. The historical gap that separates current generations from slave-
holders might seem wide, but the benefits from past racial injustice are all too
visible today. Most descendants of former plantation owners still live on their
plantations and so do the descendants of the former enslaved. Most of those
descendants of enslaved people who moved to the north still live in segregated,
poor neighborhoods.
Justice demands not just recognition, but equal opportunities and unless the
playing field is level for all players, free competition will not offset those past
wrongdoings that have structured the playing field and unlevelled it in the past.
Affirmative action policies are far too little and far too specific to achieve jus-
tice. Justice must be constructed on equal opportunity and equal o pportunity
has to be created, and enforced, before people compete against each other, as
even the guru of liberal individualism, John Rawls, admits (Darity and Myers
1999; Rawls 2001; Hacker 2011). For the countries of the Americas to achieve
racial justice, the lessons from Germany must be learned and applied:
1 All symbols glorifying racism must be classified as hate speech and

outlawed;
2 The riches accumulated during slavery and through slave labor must be
taken away from their current holders and given to those who have actu-
ally constructed them and then suffered from the legacies of slavery;
3 Black institutions have to be created and massively supported by the state,
with the resources repossessed from slaveholding. These institutions in-
clude infrastructure, health, education and transportation.
While the achievement of these goals will pose technical difficulties, the prin-
ciples under which German reparations were paid must be upheld, that is those
individuals who have benefitted from slavery, encomienda, mita and similar
systems of systematic exploitation must be identified and the worth of their pos-
sessions must be assessed and traced back to current days. Those who have been
enslaved have to be identified along with their ancestors. They have to be com-
pensated and offered institutions that allow them to prosper (Bonilla-Silva 2011).
Only when past wrongdoing is addressed, recognized and rectified, can we
hope to move on to a better, more just and fair future. Only with these measures,
can we hope to lift the shame and the guilt from the shoulders of White America
so it can start interacting with Black and Indigenous America in a normal way,
unburdened from the weight of the past (Bittker 2003; Katznelson 2005).
Conclusion
Given the continued force of structural racism and racial stigma in all Amer-
ican countries, from Canada to Chile and the Caribbean, a few lessons seem
unavoidable:
1 Liberal democratic frameworks, with their emphasis on individual rights,

cannot protect Black and Native American communities because they
transform them, automatically, into powerless structural minorities, unable
to enforce policies that favor their interest;
2 The liberal ideologies that go hand in hand with liberal democratic systems
are unable to take adequate account of groupness and the needs of Black
and Native communities in their midst;
60 Bernd Reiter
3 The only safe havens for Black and Native people are their own commu-
nities. To live in safety and to be able to prosper, these communities need
protection and the ability to make collective decisions for their members,
thus political autonomy;
4 For Black and Native communities to become viable, reparations have to
be paid from all those who have benefitted from slavery;
5 Recognition requires that beyond reparations, Black and Native commu-
nities need to receive official apologies for the ills inflicted upon them
h istorically. This also requires a rewriting of national histories and a
rewriting of most textbooks dealing with national histories in order to
highlight the wrongs done on these communities and to highlight their
contributions to the construction of the nations they live in.
The widespread violence characterizing all of the Americas has structural

reasons. It is caused, in part, by the extreme inequalities that mark the A
mericas.
The descendants of formerly enslaved people are forced to live with the descen-
dants of their former masters, without there ever having been a break in history.
There are no official apologies, no recognitions of harm done, no restitutions and
no reparations. To the contrary, most countries of the hemisphere have created
national regimes that make it impossible for the formerly enslaved to even claim
a special status within the national fabric. The former masters still control most
of the land and wield political power in almost all American countries, with very
few, and recent, exceptions. They do so smiling, avoiding blame and projecting
failure on all those they have taken advantage of to get where they are now. In
the US, those who benefit today from wrongs done in the past hold up confed-
erate flags – and are supported by the state to do so. Elsewhere in the Americas,
former slaveholders have become political and economic elites, now employing
the former enslaved as domestic servants, field hands or underpaid workers.
Liberal democratic systems cannot protect structural minorities – not even
in theory. The case of Israel shows that the only way to protect a community
is by establishing political autonomy. Israel also shows how far a community
can come if they achieve recognition from their former oppressors, reparations
from all of those who constructed their wealth and power through slave labor,
and territorial autonomy.
It is time for Black communities of the Americas to learn this lesson from
Israel. They can also learn it from Native Americans, who have embraced
this same strategy over centuries. In rural areas, the formation of Quilombos,
Palenques and Maroon societies offers a promising possibility – as long as they
are supported with reparations and investments into their infrastructure. In
urban areas, it is worth thinking about the viability of urban Quilombos as
the recipients of reparations and restitution measures – or simply Black and
Indigenous neighborhoods, as all over the Americas, segregation is a reality to
this day. No other solution seems viable, as Black and Native people will never
‘blend in’ with the American White and Mestizo mainstreams. Their commu-
nities will also never be able to prosper as long as they remain minorities within
liberal democratic systems.
Notes
1 Rodrigues, Nina 1988 [1906]: 74.
2 Sebastiao de Rocha Pita. 1730. Historia da America Portuguesa. Lisboa: Officina de
Joseph Antonio da Silva.
3 Brazilian ‘Special Ministry for the Politics of Promoting Racial Equality – SEPPIR.’
4 Assuming the Allied Forces rate of 10 marks = 1 dollar in 1945, 3 billion marks
represent 300 million 1945 US dollars then and some 7 billion US dollars of current
purchasing power.
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3
Pan-Africanism and Latin
America
Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Introduction
Pan-Africanism is identified initially as the 20th-century international political
movement that brought together African and African Diaspora activists, artists
and intellectuals in the fight against racism and colonialism, leading to the victory
of the independence struggle in Africa. For the most part, it addressed these is-
sues mainly in Africa, the US, and the English- and French-speaking Caribbean.
Only in the last quarter of the century did the Pan-African movement begin to
include ‘Latin’ America. I use the word ‘Latin’ in quotes because this designation
is deceptive because it describes a region with majority Indigenous and African-
descendant populations, where national and regional cultural identities are shaped
out of African and Indigenous heritage resisting oppression and domination by
hegemonic minority Latin elites. The deceptive nomenclature is expressive of the
way Black populations of the region have been largely ignored until very recently.
In the latter 20th century, few African, Caribbean and African-American activists
were aware of the African populations of ‘Latin’ America. Yet, their history is a
long one, rich and intense with anti-racist and anti-colonialist struggle.
Inclusion of the region in the formal Pan-African movement began with
the active participation of C.L.R. James (Trinidad), Abdias Nascimento
( Brazil) and Carlos Moore (Cuba) in the preparatory process leading up to the
Sixth Pan-African Congress held in Dar-es-Salaam in 1974 and Nascimento’s
intervention at the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and C ulture
(Lagos 1977), followed by three Congresses of Black Culture in the Americas
(Colombia 1977, Panama 1980, Brazil 1982) under the leadership of Manuel
Zapata Olivella, Gerardo Maloney and Abdias Nascimento. During the same
period, Australian aborigines and Pacific Island peoples also demanded inclu-
sion in a broader notion of African Diaspora.
Pan-Africanism and Latin America 65
The ideological contours of Pan-Africanism are inextricably bound to the

broad body of independent African thought. Independent intellectual p ositions
have been crucial to the development of Pan-Africanism in all its forms.
K ilombismo was formulated by Abdias Nascimento on the basis of African-
Brazilian traditions and histories of resistance, and those in ‘Latin’ America and
the Caribbean, at the same time that Molefi K. Asante proposed Afrocentricity
as a theory based on nationalist positions grounded in the 19th-century thought
of US scholars and activists such as Martin R. Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden,
Frederick Douglass and others. Kilombismo and Afrocentricity are contem-
porary developments in a long intellectual tradition that has nourished and
sustained the Pan-African legacy.
This legacy remains substantially alive, independently of formal identifica-
tion as such, in the contemporary political thought and activity of Africans in
South and Central America and the Caribbean. While events and initiatives
may not bear the name ‘Pan-African’, they are characterized by a broad vision
of belonging that spans both the African continent and the Diaspora. In the
reflections and theoretical positions of local Black activists and thinkers, refer-
ences to Pan-Africanism and to the links among people of African origin all
over the world are common and basic to the discourse of mobilization in many
fields, from education to artistic expression and political activity.
‘Latin’ America in the Panorama of Pan-African Resistance

(1500–1900)
Imposition of the title ‘Latin’ America is largely the result of the Mestizaje ide-
ology of Spanish and Portuguese ruling elites, with its goal of whitening rooted
in Eugenics and the manipulation of miscegenation narratives. This ideology,
which I have referred to as the Sorcery of Color (Nascimento 2007), sustains
and buttresses the genocide of Black people described by Abdias Nascimento
(1989, 2016). One of its legacies has been to obscure the presence of Blacks in the
region. In some countries, the strategy of genocide was largely successful, and
Black populations today are tiny remnants of formerly significant communities.
But in many countries of the region, Africans and their descendants are ma-
jorities or significant minorities whose untiring resistance against enslavement
shook the foundations of colonial economies and embodied h istories that were
silenced in official national narratives (Nascimento 1980). One of the most
prominent phenomena in this panorama of resistance is the formation of ma-
roon societies, independent African communities of people who rejected and
escaped enslavement. The word ‘maroon’ in English is derived from the Spanish
Cimarrón, used in Mexico and other Spanish-American contexts. In Cuba and
Colombia, they were called Palenques; in Venezuela, Cumbes. In Brazil, the
term Quilombo derived from Angola jaga Kilombo (Nascimento, B. 2008). The
Republic of Palmares, in northeast Brazil, was a conglomerate of Kilombos that
66 Elisa Larkin Nascimento
resisted Portuguese, Dutch and Brazilian military onslaughts over a century

(1595–1696). Some 30,000 in number – a huge population for the time – the
people of Palmares engaged in diversified agriculture and commerce with sur-
rounding towns and settlements. Palmares is only one example of the countless
Kilombos that permeated the territory of Brazil throughout its colonial and post-
colonial history (Moura 1972; Nascimento 1989; Reis and Gomes 1996).
In most ‘Latin’ countries, throughout colonial times and up to the end of
the 19th century, there were more African descendants than Europeans, and
slave rebellions were a constant. Even in places like Chile, where the whiten-
ing process erased almost all traces of African presence, Blacks outnumbered
Whites from 1540 to 1620 (Mellafe 1959). In the 19th century, Buenos Aires,
Argentina, a third of the population, was Black (Rama 1967). At the time of
independence in the 19th century, Venezuela had more than twice as many
Africans as Europeans. The Black population of Cuba in 1840 was larger than
the White, Native and Spanish put together (Guillén 1966). Colombia was
80% Black as late as 1901 (Velasco 1966). An illustrative example is the island
of Santo Domingo, today’s Dominican Republic, which had 25–30 thousand
Blacks compared to some 1,200 White colonists, not counting 2–3 thousand
escaped slaves, according to a 1542 report submitted to the Council of the
Indies (Franco 1996, 38–39). In 1522, Africans had risen up against the colony’s
governor, Admiral Diego Colón, beginning a long tradition of armed palenque
resistance similar to that of Cuba (Franco 1996, 35–48; Riva 1996, 49–59).
Manuel Zapata Olivella (1993, 159) notes that Cartagena, Colombia, had the
‘unhappy fate of being the main [Spanish] slave port on the continent throughout
three and a half centuries. It shared this preeminence with Veracruz (Mexico)’.
Beltran (1946, 111–112) states that from 1519 to 1650, two-thirds of all Africans
‘imported’ to Spanish territories were taken to Mexico. In 1537, Mexico City saw
its first rebellion, and by 1570, there were 2,000 people living in Cimarrones (Beltran
1946, 111), with military confrontations in at least 18 towns and cities (Franco 1975,
287). Colombia’s history of palenques is long and powerful, with the saga of guerrilla
warrior King Benkos Bioho and his fortress at San Basilio as only one outstanding
example (Escalante 1996). In Venezuela, cumbes in the 16th century came together
to elect a common leader, King Miguel the African, who established a capital city,
organized an army, attacked the Spanish town of Barquisimeto and became so pow-
erful that the Spanish were obliged to negotiate a peace treaty. Venezuelan cumbes
resisted all over the country through the 19th century (Franco 1975, 412). These are
only a few examples. As Clóvis Moura observes (1972, 122) with respect to Cuba,
Palenques, Kilombos, Cumbes and Cimarrones were a
a force of permanent attrition against the colonizing forces and the co-
lonial economy. From the 16th century to the eve of the 20th, violent
protest by enslaved Blacks against the system that oppressed them is a
constant presence in [the region’s] social life.
The role of African culture was critical to this resistance. African religious and epis-
temological tradition, integrated from different ethnic origins, was a fundamental
inspiration, a mobilizing force and a strategic tool of communication (Franco 1975,
288; Clarke 1977, 11). Awareness of common struggles complemented this cultural
base, as in the Balaiada revolt in Recife, Brazil, in 1824. Emiliano Mandacaru
and his troops sang ‘Just as I imitate Christophe / That immortal Haitian / Hey!
Imitate his people / Oh, my sovereign folk!’ (Moura 1972, 106).
Like Palmares in Brazil, Yanguicos in Mexico, San Basilio in Colombia, Bayano
in Venezuela, Cuban Palenques and Caribbean Maroons often had structured
social, political, military and agricultural organization based on African models,
drawing from and integrating diverse ethnic origins ( James 1969; Clarke 1977;
Price 1996). Defense systems were sophisticated and sometimes impenetrable.
These African communities engaged in armed resistance against the colonial
powers all over the region, again and again forcing them to negotiate treaty
settlements.
This resistance was concurrent with that of Africans on the continent
( James 1969; Clarke 1977). There are few records of explicit articulation
among communities fighting in Africa and among the different colonies of
the A mericas, but the nature of the historical record likely omits such expres-
sions. The similarity of these struggles, the reproduction of African forms of
organization in Cumbes, Palenques, Cimarrones and Kilombos, and the underlying
African cultural dimension indicate community of spirit in the pursuit and
experience of freedom. They point to unity of aspirations and achievements
across the African world. Such, indeed, is the essence of Pan-Africanism.
Intellectual Groundings of Pan-African Thought and Practice

The intellectual underpinnings of Pan-Africanism lie in a tradition of in-
dependent African thought that far predates the late 20th century, when it
became known as Afrocentric (Asante, 1998). Critique of racism, affirmation of
A frican cultural values, and placing Africans at the center of their own history
as its protagonists are key elements. This tradition developed in the context of
Western domination as an act of resistance, its protagonists weaving together
links between Continent and Diaspora on two major fronts. First, the epis-
temology subjacent to insurrection: the philosophical and spiritual values of
African ancestral traditions. Second, works written and published by African
descendants in Western language and discourse. A symbolic point of departure
for appreciation of this dual heritage may be the vodou ceremony carried out by
Boukman Dutty and Cécile Fatiman in Bwa Kayiman, Haiti, in August 1791,
which set off the insurrection of 50,000 that grew into general revolt and led
to the revolution of 1804 (Bellegarde-Smith 2004, 59–62). This is one among
many examples of African tradition at the core of combat. It is not religious
practice in the Western sense: African traditions are epistemological systems
that impact all aspects of life. The second front, discourse in the Western tra-
dition, is exemplified by Haitian writers whose critique of racist anthropology
was dense and voluminous. Anténor Firmin’s response (1885) to Gobineau’s
infamous essay on the inequality of human races is a prime example, along
with Louis-Joseph Janvier’s L’Égalité des races (1884) and Hannibal Price’s De
la réhabilitation de la race noire (1900). Earlier examples are the 18th-century
antislavery treatises by Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (2004) and Ottobah
Cugoano (1999).
There is no doubt that Africans in ‘Latin’ America contributed to both
these currents of African Diaspora tradition. Examples from Brazil are the
Candomblé, the Malê Revolts (Reis and Gomes 1996), the manuscript of
Esperança Garcia (Ferreira 2008) and the works of Maria Firmina dos Reis and
Luis Gama (Duarte 2014, 111–142).
Nineteenth-century journalism was ripe in Argentina with Black press
publications like La Raza Africana o sea El Democrata Negro and El Proletario (Morner
1967, 24) as in Uruguay, with La Conservación, founded in 1872, and Nuestra
Raza, which published into the 20th century (Pereda Valdés 1965, 203–205).
They represented a plethora of Black social and cultural organizations, as did
Brazil’s active Black press in the same period (Butler 1998, Nascimento, E.L.
2008; Andrews 1980, 2004). In Uruguay, this process culminated in the cre-
ation of an independent Black political party, the Partido Autóctone Negro, which
called for racial and social equality and for Afro-Uruguayan political con-
sciousness (Pereda Valdés 1965, 203–205). Such activism fits into the context
of 19th and early 20th-centuries nationalist thought in the US that paved the
path of Pan-African intellectual autonomy in writings by authors like Martin
R. Delany, Frederick Douglass, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Alexander Crummel
and others.
Pan-African Events (1900–1980)

The most widely influential Pan-African movement of the early 20th c entury
was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), created by
Marcus Garvey. Its trade union base grew out of Jamaica and Costa Rica,
where its headquarters were based in the coastal town of Limón. This ‘Latin’
connection came by way of the labor movement, reflecting worker migrations
among the Caribbean islands and between them and the coasts of Central and
South America, partly to build the Panama Canal and related railway network,
creating enclaves of English-speaking Black populations in places like Limón
and Bluefields, Nicaragua. By the 1920s, UNIA had grown into the largest
international African movement in history, with over 1,900 divisions in more
than 40 countries, and between 500,000 and 2 million members in the US
alone. In 1926, it had 52 branches in Cuba, 47 in Panama, 23 in Costa Rica
and 8 each in Honduras and South Africa. There were branches in Barbados,
Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sierra Leon,

England, Australia, among others. UNIA parades and demonstrations took
crowds of 10,000–25,000 people to the streets during the 1920s. When Garvey
was arrested, 150,000 people demonstrated in Harlem demanding his release;
international rallies, campaigns and demonstrations from Jamaica to Moscow
to South Africa created such intense political pressure that President Calvin
Coolidge was forced to commute his sentence (Martin 1983, 60–84, 113–115).
Garvey’s political goal was summed up in his slogan ‘Africa for the Africans,
at home and abroad’, which meant building a united Africa, free of European
hegemony, as a ballast of strength and support for Blacks all over the world.
Technical skills, infrastructure and technology were crucial goals for Africa.
Thus, he was convinced that ‘we should send our scientists, mechanics, and
artisans to build railroads, educational institutions, and all institutions neces-
sary’ (Essien-Udom 1964, 385). The idea was to build Africa as ‘a nation of our
own, strong enough to lend protection to the members of the race scattered all
over the world and to compel the respect of the nations and races of the earth’
(Garvey 1969, 39).
At UNIA’s First Convention of Peoples of the African World, held in
New York in 1920, 25,000 delegates from many corners of the world issued a
Declaration of Rights, in which they condemned colonialism and asserted ‘the
inherent right of the Black man to control Africa’. They adopted green, black
and red as colors of the African people’s freedom; demanded an end to lynching
and race discrimination in Diaspora countries, and advocated the teaching of
African history in public schools (Martin 1983, 60–64).
The broadly popular Garvey movement was born into a wider context of
Black affirmation and mobilization, conditioned in the US by the return of
African-American survivors of World War I to a nation that was committed to
their people’s subjugation, derision and dehumanization. Systematic lynching
accompanied by institutional racism in every aspect of life led to protest and re-
sistance by Blacks. Hundreds were killed in St. Louis, leading to major protests
in Harlem in 1917. A year later, Garvey began publishing UNIA’s weekly The
Negro World. The next year, Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Art and Literature
in the United States (1918) heralded the Harlem Renaissance, whereas Jean
Price-Mars’ La Vocation de l’Elite (1919) ushered in the Indigénisme movement
in Haiti. Along with Garveyism, both these movements would reverberate
worldwide.
A decade earlier, the Niagara movement founded in 1905 by William Monroe
Trotter and William Edward Burghardt (W. E. B.) Du Bois had called for ac-
tive and direct opposition to racial segregation. It opposed the ‘Atlanta Com-
promise’ of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee I nstitute, whose
approach dominated the civil rights organization of the time, the National
Afro-A merican Council. The Niagara movement promised a ‘mighty current
of change’, and in its wake the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) was founded in 1909. W. E. B. Du Bois was one

of seven African-Americans among the 60 prominent individuals who signed
the call to discuss racial justice in the face of persistent nationwide lynching
as well as riots in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois. The
NAACP’s official website today states that it was born ‘echoing the focus of Du
Bois’s Niagara Movement’.1 Its journal The Crisis, edited by Du Bois, would be
one of the major voices of the Harlem Renaissance, along with Garvey’s The
Negro World.
W. E. B. Du Bois was a powerful organizer and intellectual whose name is
rightly associated with Pan-Africanism as its major proponent over time. He
participated in the Pan-African Conference of 1900 and presided over four
Pan-African Congresses between 1919 and 1927, precisely during the heyday of
Garveyism and the UNIA. He participated in the Fifth Pan-African Congress
in Manchester (1945) and from 1961 until his death in 1963 he lived in Ghana,
where he worked on his Encyclopedia Africana, an eminently Pan-African proj-
ect. While Garvey’s message and movement were Pan-African in essence and
character, it was Du Bois who formally established the political project named
Pan-Africanism on an institutional level, dealing with international agencies
like the League of Nations as well as civil society organizations based in Europe
and in Africa.
As in any major social movement, there were personal, political and
ideological differences among Pan-Africanists, and particularly between G arvey
and Du Bois (Clarke and Garvey 1974, 95–101, 195–197). Such differences pre-
vented them from working together to advance the interests of Black people.
As in other social movements, these differences were inflated and inflamed by
US and other governments’ targeting Pan-Africanists with repression, infil-
tration, sabotage and dirty tricks (Kornweibel 1998). The formal Pan-African
movement was mainly concerned with Africa, the US, and the English- and
French-speaking Caribbean. Its leadership was composed of eminent person-
alities from those regions, such as Du Bois himself (US), Kwame Nkrumah
(Gold Coast/Ghana), C. L. R. James and George Padmore (Trinidad).
The Negritude movement was the artistic and literary voice of Pan-
Africanism. Its major exponents were Aimé Césaire of Martinique and Léopold
Sédar Senghor of Senegal. It embodied the cultural expression of the Pan-
African ideal and was crucial in its contribution to the political victory of
African decolonization. Its roots in Price-Mars’s Haitian Indigénisme and
the Harlem Renaissance marked Negritude’s fundamental identification with
Black peoples’ mass cultural movements: the same cultural groundings that in-
formed and sustained the formal Pan-African political movement and the mass
mobilization of Garvey and UNIA.
It was at the 1900 Pan-African Conference, organized by Trinidadian bar-
rister Sylvester Williams, that W. E. B. Du Bois made his stellar, prophetic
statement that the problem of the 20th century would be that of the color line
(Du Bois 1986, 372). The Pan-African movement emerged at a time when
identities formed by dispersions and Diasporas were using the Greek prefix
‘Pan’, meaning ‘all’, to designate their unity beyond national borders. Pan-
Hellenic, Pan-Slavic, Pan-American, Pan-Arabian and Pan-Islamic initiatives
dotted the 19th-century landscape. Most of these designations came as identity
affirmations in opposition to European colonial hegemony. The Pan-African
Conference of 1900 called for ‘responsible self-government’ in Africa.
Four Pan-African Congresses followed later, under the leadership of W. E. B.
Du Bois. The first was held in 1919 as the League of Nations was formed in the
wake of World War I. The Congress presented a petition to the victorious allies
at Versailles, proposing an African Human Rights Charter to assure that interna-
tional supervision of formerly German-African territories be ‘confided to their
inhabitants, in care of the League, as future self-governing nations’ ( Padmore
1972, 101). An international human rights code to protect Africans would be
enforced by an executive bureau. Education, abolition of slave labor and corpo-
ral punishment, and specific attention to the ‘growing needs of native popula-
tions’ were also envisioned. In 1921, the Second Pan-African Congress met in
London, Brussels and Paris, issuing a ‘Declaration to the World’ that demanded
a Black representative be seated on the League of Nations Mandate Commission
for the Southwest Africa Territory (Namibia). The response of the ‘civilized
world’ was the brutal bombardment and massacre of thousands there by General
Jan Smuts, a founder of the League and main architect of the Mandate system.
The Third and Fourth Congresses were held in Lisbon and London in 1923 and
in New York in 1927, respectively. Tunis was chosen as venue for the Fifth Con-
gress, but French authorities advised Du Bois that such a meeting could be held
anywhere in France and not in Africa (Padmore 1972, 121).
The Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester, England, in 1945,
grew out of the activism of African students like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo
Kenyatta, joining West Indian socialists and activists like C. L. R. James and
George Padmore to gather African journalists, nationalists and trade unionists
who would participate in the Conference of the World Trade Union Federation
in London and Paris. A long history involving some of Africa’s most eminent
personalities had led to creation of the Pan-African Federation, which enlisted
Du Bois’ support for the Fifth Pan-African Congress. Its delegates declared, ‘if
the Western world is resolved to dominate humanity by force, then Africans
may have to appeal to force as the last resort in the effort to attain Liberty, even
if superior forces destroy them and the world’ (Padmore 1972, 407). Anti-
colonial struggle was taken to a new level. By 1947, Nkrumah and Kenyatta had
returned to Africa prepared for armed resistance; ten years later, the Gold Coast
became the Republic of Ghana. Nkrumah asserted that Ghana’s independence
has no meaning if it is not linked to the liberation of Africa, and among his
first initiatives as head of state was to convene the Conference of Independent
States and the All African Peoples Conference, held in Accra in 1958. These
were followed by the All African Trade Union Federation meeting and the
Positive Action and Security in African Conference in 1959 and the Confer-
ence of African Women in 1960 (Asamoah 1993, 236–241; Manuh 1993, 121).
Unity among African nation-states became the order of the day, leading to the
creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union
(AU). Tension between the continental notion of Pan-African unity and the
Diaspora perspective that had coined and created the international movement
would continue even after creation of the AU’s Sixth administrative region, the
Diaspora, in 2003 (Kamei 2011; Khamis 2013a, 2013b).
The relative absence of references to South and Central America and the
Spanish-speaking Caribbean stands out in this period. George Padmore (1972)
mentions Brazil in the context of Portuguese colonialism, but does not refer to
racism against its African population. Du Bois (1972, 53–4, 60–3, 195) mentions
slave insurrections in the Caribbean and in South and Central America, but
does not integrate them into his broader Pan-African view. The Pan-African
‘triangle’ had its corner points in Africa, Europe, the US, and the French- and
English-speaking Caribbean. Its languages were basically English and French.
An important exception was the African League, a federation of associations
from Portuguese Africa founded in 1921 with headquarters in Lisbon. Under
the leadership of José de Magalhães, the League was active in the Second and
Third Pan-African Congresses and was largely responsible for creation of the
short-lived International Pan-Africanist Association. The documents of this
organization exist only in Portuguese, due to the central role of Magalhães,
who wrote its statutes (Geiss 1974, 245–6). However, it did not extend the
reach of Pan-African affairs to Brazil or to South America. Given the exclusion
of Blacks from access to education in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking coun-
tries of the region, it is no surprise that very few had the opportunity to become
fluent or literate in English and French.
But the most important determinant of the isolation of ‘Latin’ America from
Pan-African affairs is the ideology of whitening, Mestizaje, ‘racial democracy’.
The program issued by the Universal League for the Defense of the Black
Race in Paris, for example, convened ‘all Africans and Afro-Americans (except
some in Latin American countries because there prejudice was vigorously
suppressed)’ (Geiss 1974, 311).
Despite these barriers, Blacks in ‘Latin’ America were not entirely isolated
from the African world. The Black press in Brazil, for example, contained
references to the Garvey movement, African-American affairs in the US
and liberation movements in Africa (Butler 1998; Nascimento, E. L. 2008).
At every opportunity, they supported African liberation movements. A case
in point is the Black Experimental Theater (TEN, its Portuguese acronym,
stands for Teatro Experimental do Negro). Abdias Nascimento founded this
organization in 1944 and edited its newspaper Quilombo, which featured inter-
views and articles by personalities like Katherine Dunham, George Schuyler
and Marian Anderson, as well as essays and book reviews by and about the
Negritude movement and the journal Présence Africaine, edited by Senegalese
writer Alioune Diop. TEN’s artists and intellectuals were vocal supporters of
the Negritude movement, whose tenets they adapted to the Brazilian context
(Nascimento 2007, 138–226).
Under its first President Leopold Sédar Senghor, leader of the Negritude
movement, Senegal hosted the First World Festival of Black Culture in 1966,
emphasizing a Diaspora perspective. The anomalies of state politics were clear,
however, when the Brazilian government excluded from its official delegation
precisely those artists and intellectuals who worked with the concept of
Negritude. Nascimento’s exposure of this episode as an example of Latin pa-
ternalist racism in his Open Letter to Dakar (1966) was the first indictment of
racial discrimination in Brazil to reach the African world audience. The official
Brazilian delegation was led by art critic Clarival do Prado Valladares, whose
ensuing article (1966) hailed ‘African Backwardness, or Chronicle of the 1st
Festival of Black Arts’.
The Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in 1974,
was sponsored by African states. Intending to emphasize Diaspora concerns,
C. L. R. James was named head of the Caribbean Steering Committee. The
preparatory meeting held in Jamaica in 1973, with the participation of Amy
Jacques Garvey, was the first Pan-African meeting with delegates from two
‘Latin’ American countries, both of them political exiles by virtue of their
anti-racist activism. Abdias Nascimento of Brazil, with its rightwing US sup-
ported military regime, and Carlos Moore of Cuba were joined by Bobby Sykes
of Australia, representing its ‘aborigine’ population. This situation brought into
focus two crucial aspects of post-independence Pan-African affairs: the role
of governments and the scope of the Diaspora. These two issues are mutually
intertwined because Diaspora populations are mostly dominated majorities or
minorities in multiracial states. Prominent Pan-African activists and intellec-
tuals who opposed their governments, among them Eusi Kwayana of Guyana,
were being excluded from the Congress in deference to diplomatic requests
invoking the OAU’s clause of noninterference with internal affairs of states.
Exclusion of African liberation movements, which could be justified under the
same reasoning, would have been absurd. In solidarity, C. L. R. James, whose
work had been indispensable to the organization of the Congress, refrained
from attending. The Steering Committee declared that it could not accept an
inferior status for South America and the Caribbean, condemned the exclusion
of representatives from the region, demanded that the Liberation Movements
have full freedom to express their concerns and that ‘the small people’s dele-
gation from Brazil, led by Abdias Nascimento, be fully and officially recog-
nized’ (Campbell 1975, 152–3). Considering the importance of the region and
Brazil’s key role in it, C. L. R. James and the Steering Committee had planned
a full day of Congress deliberations on Brazil. However, as the only Brazilian
d elegate, Abdias Nascimento’s participation at the Congress was hamstrung not

only by the language barrier but also by the prevailing ‘correct line’ of scientific
socialism, which frowned on affirmation of African cultural affinities, ‘making
the Congress deliberations sound like Pan-Africanism’s obituary’ (Nascimento
1989, 11–12; Nascimento and Nascimento 1992, 167). Carlos Moore was si-
lenced entirely.
Indeed, the 20th-century Pan-African movement was caught in the d ilemma
of its time, the conflict between Marxist and liberal capitalist forces. African and
Asian freedom fighters’ experience with the socialist left had made it clear that
Marxism was not necessarily aligned with them in the fight against racism and
colonialism (Record 1971; Padmore 1972; Moore 1972, 1988; Wright 1977).
Abdias Nascimento’s life and work confirmed this experience in Brazil (Na-
scimento 1989, Nascimento and Nascimento 1992). Yet the alternative in a
world dominated by imperialism could not be capitalist liberalism. In the case
of Cuba, Castro’s strong assistance to African forces fighting colonialism and
neocolonialism in Africa contrasted with Cuba’s ban on independent Black
political organizations (Sawyer 2006) and its refusal to address racism at home,
as well as its leadership’s uncritical assumption of White supremacist notions
and attitudes, deeply entrenched in Cuban culture and history (Moore 1988).
Emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement among former colonies e xpressed
their search for independent political positions. Pan-African thought was in
need of autonomous ideological references to maintain the movement’s inde-
pendence. Abdias Nascimento’s Kilombismo2 (1980) would be a unique con-
tribution from the ‘Latin’ Diaspora. Drawing on African historical experience
and tradition rather than relying on European references, Kilombismo sets out
parameters for building an African theory of liberation and a political model
for the organization of multiracial, pluricultural states like Brazil ( Nascimento
and Nascimento 1992, 64–7).
In 1976, the founding congress of the African Writers’ Union convened
at Dakar as the Encounter for African World Alternatives, largely due to the
Ogunic force of Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka. Carlos Moore’s efforts ensured the
presence of ‘Latin’ American delegates like Venezuelan dramatist Alberto
Galindez. Ten years after his Open Letter, Abdias Nascimento arrived at Dakar
for this nongovernmental event. He emphasized the importance of African
world cultural and historical ties while informing the gathering about unique
Latin forms of racism (Nascimento 1989, 2002a).
The Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture took
place in Lagos in January 1977, under the aegis of African governments. The
Brazilian military regime sent a nearly all-White official delegation headed by
the same Clarival Valladares who had presided over the one in Dakar in 1966.
It also did everything in its power to ensure that Abdias Nascimento, who was
in Nigeria as a visiting professor at the University of Ife, would not be allowed
to address the Festival Colloquium. Nascimento and this author registered as
observers. We informally circulated his paper, which had been printed in mim-
eograph by Ife University, to official delegates. With the support of African
and African-American artists and intellectuals like Wole Soyinka, Ola Balo-
gun, Molefi Asante and Maulana Karenga, Abdias Nascimento made his case
before the Colloquium plenary (Nascimento 1981, 1989, 2002b). His forceful
denunciation of racism in Brazil was an outstanding feature of that event: the
Nigerian press not only reported on it but also published the full text of his
contribution in book form (Nascimento 1977).
Meanwhile, in Colombia, the Black physician and anthropologist Manuel
Zapata Olivella was organizing in South and Central America to convene the
First Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, which Nascimento attended
in Cali in August 1977. Three of these historic events placed ‘Latin’ America
squarely in the Pan-African context. At the Second Congress, held in P anama in
1980, Nascimento presented his thesis of Kilombismo (Nascimento, A., 1980)
and was elected vice president in charge of the Third Congress, which was or-
ganized by his Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute ( IPEAFRO) and
held at São Paulo’s Catholic University in 1982. For the first time, a represen-
tative of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was received in B razil,
along with delegates from many countries in South and Central A merica
( Nascimento and Nascimento 1983–1987, vs. 1–4).
Simultaneous with Abdias Nascimento’s presentation of Kilombismo at the
Second Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, Molefi K. Asante published
Afrocentricity: the Theory of Social Change (1980). These were major contribu-
tions to the development of Pan-African thought and scholarship nonaligned
with the ideological poles of Marxist socialism or liberal capitalism. Their
foundational basis was the work of Cheikh Anta Diop and his forerunners,
followers and heirs like Martin R. Delany, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Théophile
Obenga, Martin Bernal and Ivan Van Sertima, to mention a scant few. Two
observations are in order with regard to the ‘Latin’ American contribution.
Abdias Nascimento’s work, even before he developed Kilombismo, empha-
sized the importance of Black women and their history to the understanding
of African experience and struggle (Nascimento 1977, 1989). Closely related
to this aspect is his emphasis on the African tradition of the Candomblé, with
its deeply female dimension, as epistemological foundation and source of in-
spiration, fighting spirit and strategy. Equally important is his emphasis on the
environment, a concern inherent to this African tradition.
Intensification of Pan-African Activity (1980–Present)

In the 1980s, a major focus of Pan-African energies was concentrated on the fight
against Apartheid and support for Namibia’s independence. The UN Regional
Symposium of Latin America and the Caribbean in support of N amibia was
held in Costa Rica in 1983 with the participation of Abdias Nascimento, Lélia
Gonzalez and Carlos Roberto da Silva from Brazil. Nascimento was then a Fed-
eral Congressman; shortly after the Costa Rica symposium, he drafted a decla-
ration condemning Apartheid’s illegal occupation of Namibia and secured the
support of all the opposition parties in Congress (Nascimento 1983–1987, vs. 2,
38–39; Nascimento 2014, 313–314). IPEAFRO organized a Brazilian n ational
symposium, held in 1984 on the 100th anniversary of N amibia’s struggle against
colonialism (Nascimento and Nascimento 1983–1987, vs. 4, 5). As a member of
Congress, Nascimento insistently raised the issues of A partheid and Namibian
independence in the House Foreign Relations Committee, introducing legis-
lative proposals to break relations with South Africa and to recognize South
West African People’s Organization, thereby taking the Pan-African demands
of the Brazilian Black movement to the federal Congress (Nascimento and
Nascimento 1992, 164–165; Nascimento 2014, 317–324).
The international conference ‘Negritude, Ethnicity, and Afro Cultures in
the Americas’ held at Florida International University, Miami, in 1987, was
organized by Carlos Moore (1995) with the presence of Aimé Césaire, Léopold
Sédar Senghor, Maya Angelou and many other outstanding writers and intel-
lectuals. Abdias Nascimento’s contribution did not fail to note the anomalies
of Senegal’s state courting of Brazilian paternalists, the proponents of ‘racial
democracy’. He called attention to ‘the danger of literary and academic niceties
in the context of Brazilian White supremacy’. Too often, he said, have African
leaders ‘been duped by the seductive slogans and pretty mirages designed by
the Brazilian ruling class to obfuscate and perpetuate African Brazilians’ dom-
ination’ (Nascimento & Nascimento 1992, 115). But this did not prevent him
from recognizing ‘Negritude’s intrinsic value as simultaneous expression of
Africans’ specific identity, humanity, and struggle for liberation in all corners
of the world’ (Nascimento & Nascimento 1992, 116–117).
In 1985, the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Center for Pan-African Culture
was established in Ghana at Du Bois’s former residence in Accra. This landmark
institution invited Abdias Nascimento to deliver the second inaugural lecture
in its annual series (Nascimento & Nascimento, 119–168). This gesture was a
significant indication of growing recognition of ‘Latin’ America as part of the
Pan-African world. Similarly, in the late 1980s, Burkina Faso, with support
from UNESCO, created the international Institute of Black People and Sene-
gal promoted a Pan-African Culture Festival (FESPAC). Both efforts included
Abdias Nascimento and other ‘Latin’ Black leaders, notably Lélia Gonzalez.
These examples of the region’s participation in Pan-African affairs occurred
against a background of accelerated regional mobilization in South and Cen-
tral America. By the 1990s, Black movements in various countries, including
Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Ecuador and Uruguay, had
made national gains and were organizing coalitions and regional conferences.
At the Seventh Pan-African Congress held in Kampala, Uganda, in April 1994,
a Brazilian delegation represented the São Paulo Forum, which congregated
activists from various countries of South and Central America and the Carib-
bean.3 As this fact suggests, Afro-Brazilian movements were collectively at the
forefront of an intensifying wave of Black activism in ‘Latin’ A
merica. This pro-
cess would culminate in the regional preparatory meeting for the Third World
Conference Against Racism, held in Santiago, Chile, in December 2000, and
in the region’s role at the 2001 Durban Conference and the follow-up meetings
on the fifth and tenth anniversaries that sought to monitor implementation of
the Durban Program of Action.
The motor of this phenomenon was the rise of identity politics and the fight
against the Mestizaje ideology of racial harmony that had kept African descendant
‘Latins’ out of the Pan-African triangle. Black movements had seized the political
clout to inscribe tenets of ethnic plurality and multiculturalism in, for example,
the Brazilian and the Colombian Constitutions of 1988 and 1991, respectively.4
Indeed, as Catherine Walsh (2012, 16) observes, in diverse national contexts:
African descendant peoples and concerns are not only made visible, but,
more significantly, racism and discrimination are named, individual and
collective rights are proffered, and equality and social inclusion are as-
sumed as the central axis of the state and its political project.
Organizations like Uruguay’s Mundo Afro, Colombia’s Black Communi-

ties Process and National Association of Displaced African Descendants, the
Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations and similar ones from Honduras,
Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru (Rahier 2012), as well as Costa Rica,
Nicaragua and Panama, were active in articulating this growing regional
Pan-African movement in the Americas.
The activity of Black women was outstanding in this context. In 1992,
crowning previous organizational efforts, the First Afro-Latin American and
Afro-Caribbean Women’s Meeting established July 25 as the international date
commemorating Black women’s struggle and resistance in the region (Santos
2008, 292). Since then, the month of July has witnessed meetings and conven-
tions all over the region.
Black women were at the forefront of the regional preparatory gathering
in Santiago and the Third World Conference Against Racism in Durban;
A frican-Brazilian women were prominent in this scenario. During the pre-
paratory process, the collective leadership of African-Brazilian women was
underlined by creation of the National Articulation of Brazilian Black Wom-
en’s Organizations, which today brings together 27 groups from all over the
country, among them were Geledés Institute of Black Women and CEERT
Center for the Study of Labor Relations and Inequalities (São Paulo), Criola
Black Women’s Organization (Rio de Janeiro), Maria Mulher (Rio Grande do
Sul), Odara Institute of Black Women (Bahia) and the National Articulation of
Quilombo Communities.5
Black female leaders and organizations were then and still are at the fore-
front of diverse areas of public policy demands in Brazil, as in the region. To
give examples is to exclude equally important ones, and I apologize to those
unrecorded here, but among the Brazilians Sueli Carneiro, founder of Geledés,
is a leader in national and regional Black women’s rights; Jurema Werneck
(Criola) in health-care activism; Cida Bento (CEERT) in labor relations and
corporate policy; Lúcia Xavier (Criola) in women’s rights and religious in-
tolerance; Valdecir Nascimento (Odara) and Nilza Iraci (Geledés) in violence
against Black women and youth; Dora Lúcia Bertúlio of Curitiba in law; and
Diva Moreira of Belo Horizonte in public policy administration. Nilma Lino
Gomes of Minas Gerais and the late Luíza Bairros of Rio Grande do Sul and
Salvador, Bahia, were both outstanding executives of the federal Secretariat of
Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality, the federal government agency
created in 2003. Among examples from outside Brazil, the political career of
economist Epsy Campbell Barr in Costa Rica is outstanding. She was twice
elected to the Federal Congress and has played a key role in combating racism
and working for racial equality on the local and regional levels. Her activity in
regional and international events has been intense and continuous.
The Durban Conference was a watershed, with activists from all over the re-
gion participating in both the official and the parallel nongovernmental organi-
zation (NGO) conference. In this civil society forum, Abdias Nascimento gave
a keynote address on the Latin model as a paradigm of contemporary racism
(Nascimento 2002a, 351–359). On the official side, Brazil played a prominent
role in the preparatory meetings, culminating, in Durban, with the election of
female Black activist Edna Roland as General Rapporteur of the Conference.
Since the Durban Conference and its preparatory process, the increas-
ingly intense mobilization of Blacks and specifically Black women in ‘Latin’
American and the Caribbean has been a constant factor in the development
of Pan-African affairs. The tenth year of the Latinidades Afrolatinas Festival,
a Black women’s regional event held annually in Brasília since 2007, is but
one mark of this growing and continuing trend. Equally important are the
continuing initiatives of a younger generation of Afro-Latino activists whom
I will cite collectively in the person of Amilcar Priestley, who spearheads the
AfroLatin@ Project / Proyecto AfroLatin@, founded in 2005 and based in
New York, where it holds its annual Afro-Latin@ Festival. The Project has an
active website and network rich with news, interviews and information from
different countries in the region.6 Amilcar is the son of Panamanian activist and
intellectual George Priestley, one of the major actors in the three Congresses
of Black Culture in the Americas (Cali, Colombia, 1997; Panama, 1980; São
Paulo, Brazil, 1982).
The UN has proclaimed the International Decade of African Descendants
(2015–2024). Regional organization is underway in various forms. Within
the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN
Women), Black women of Brazil and ‘Latin’ America have organized to make
the Decade a part of UN gender policy. This is only one front in the ongoing
contemporary scenario of Pan-African activism in ‘Latin’ America.
A forceful symbol of this new visibility of the region’s role in Pan-A frican
affairs is UNESCO’s recent nomination of the Valongo Wharf in Rio de
Janeiro as a World Heritage site. At this dock alone, close to a million enslaved
Africans entered Brazil in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The slave
traffic spanned the 16th and 17th centuries as well, and Brazil was the last to
abolish slavery in 1888. According to some authoritative estimates, about five
million enslaved Africans arrived alive in Brazil; fully ten times as many as in
the US. The Valongo nomination highlights the key role that Brazil and ‘Latin’
America deserve in the Pan-African landscape, as Abdias Nascimento never
tired of pointing out.
Conclusion
The case of ‘Latin’ America demonstrates the changing nature of the idea of
Diaspora. Practically absent from Pan-African discourse until the 1970s, the
region emerges as an integral and important part of the Pan-African world
by virtue of its history and contemporary experience of consciousness and
struggle. The recent phenomenon of increased mobilization within the region
highlights the conceptual diversity of Pan-African affairs, which can be seen
as regional, international or continental. While the idea of continental Pan-
African unity that envisioned a United States of Africa is still present – as, for
example, in the 2016 institution of a passport common to all African nations7 –
it has been reconfigured with the official incorporation of the Diaspora as the
sixth administrative region of the AU. To a great extent, this gesture was a
response to the growing force and importance of remittances made by recent
African emigrants in Europe and the US to their families in Africa. Reported
figures grew from US$4–6 billion per year sent to Africa in 2005 to US$20 bil-
lion sent in 2008 to sub-Saharan Africa alone (Kamei 2011, 59). Another aspect
was the continuing exodus of high-level professionals and entrepreneurs out
of Africa, creating new contemporary Diasporas and depriving the continent
of trained technical and intellectual manpower. Notwithstanding the many
parallels, similarities and continuums, these phenomena are distinct from the
historical Diaspora that resulted from the slave trade centuries before, mostly
in the Americas.
The AU Diaspora region was conceived and developed in the context of
a revival of Cheikh Anta Diop’s notion of the African Renaissance, which
galvanized African leaders like Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Abdoulaye
Wade of Senegal to work for a united effort to build and consolidate inte-
grated A frican development and cultural policy. Both World Conferences of
African and Diaspora Intellectuals were explicitly couched in the language of
the African Renaissance (Asante 2006). In this context, the historical Diaspora
was more significantly visible. However, the AU was severely challenged on
the issue of effective institutional mechanisms for Diaspora participation in its
deliberations (Araya 2007).
With respect to ‘Latin’ America, Brazil’s brief attempt to play a positive
leadership role in the AU Diaspora region is noteworthy. Under President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s foreign policy dedicated unique emphasis and pri-
ority to relations with Africa. Brazil hosted and significantly contributed to the
realization of the Second Conference of African and Diaspora Intellectuals, held
in Salvador in July 2006. Later, with the Third World Festival of African Arts
and Culture held in Dakar in 2010, Brazil again participated and contributed sig-
nificantly. At age 96, Abdias Nascimento was appointed Good Will Ambassador
by the international coordinating committee and Senegal’s Ministry of Culture.
As part of its policy to encourage student exchange and scholarship opportuni-
ties for Africans, Brazil created the University of International Integration of
A frican-Brazilian Lusophonia. However, the future of Brazil’s Africa policy and
its special role in supporting the Diaspora region and African world initiatives
was severely compromised by the political and economic crisis of 2016.
This question leads to an important consideration: governmental ver-
sus nongovernmental conduction of Pan-African affairs. The independence
of African nations was a main goal and consequence of the earlier move-
ment. African leaders who took office at the helm of new nation-states made
Pan-A fricanism a state policy and led state-sponsored Pan-African gather-
ings. But government-run events like the Sixth Pan-African Congress and
F ESTAC ‘77 were plagued by anomalies arising from state interests that oper-
ated in direct contradiction to those of Pan-African dialogue and unity. Some
participants considered the NGO conference at Durban to be more construc-
tive than the official governmental event. There have been calls for disman-
tlement of the AU Diaspora region in favor of nongovernmental Pan-African
action (Khamis 2013b).
It seems certain that Pan-Africanism will remain a dual phenomenon,
one of state actors and intergovernmental agencies and organizations on one
hand, and a civil society movement of NGOs, activists, artists and intellec-
tuals on the other. This is because Pan-Africanism speaks to fundamental
issues of identity affecting human lives. In my own experience in Brazil,
the reference to building relationships among African continent and A frican
D iaspora is a constant, positive and productive one in the context of edu-
cational initiatives dealing with ethnic and race relations. My conclusion
is that the impact of Pan-A fricanism transcends the formal political arena,
extrapolates the reach of governments and intergovernmental agencies, and
affects the lives of people on the ground, in schools, communities and advo-
cacy activities, contributing to the development of positive self-esteem and
improved human relations.
In this chapter, only a scant surface of this subject has been touched.
Further research and scholarship will unveil new and important aspects of
the ‘Latin’ dimension of Pan-African tradition. In the meantime, there is no
doubt that Black activism in South and Central America is a growing and
increasingly intense regional and international political force. While recent
events like the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and the
inauguration of reactionary political regimes there and in the US imply
significant setbacks, it is also clear that African-American consciousness in
the ‘Latin’ region has consolidated over decades and is ready to confront the
challenges.
Notes
1 www.naacp.org/oldest-and-boldest/. (Accessed August 5, 2017).
2 The Brazilian orthography is Quilombismo. I have adapted the spelling in English.
3 This Congress featured the participation of Graça Machel (widow of Samora), Betty
Shabbaz (widow of Malcolm X), Patricia Rodney (widow of Walter Rodney), Julia
Wright (daughter of Richard Wright), Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) and
Dudley Thompson (ex-ambassador of Jamaica and participant at the Fifth Pan-
African Congress), among other notables like Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o
and Ali Mazrui, editor of the Eighth Volume of UNESCO’s General History of
Africa (Essack 2012).
4 Article 7 of Colombia’s 1991 Constitution ‘recognizes and protects the ethnic and
cultural diversity of the Colombian nation’, whereas Article 8 establishes that it is
the ‘obligation of the State and of individuals to protect the cultural and natural
assets of the nation’. With regard to the Kilombo communities of San Basílio and
Chocó, Transitory Article 55 establishes a period of two years for the implemen-
tation of legislation recognizing, ‘according to their traditional practices of pro-
duction, the right of traditional Black communities to collective property rights to
be defined by this same legislation’. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution criminalizes racial
discrimination (Article 5), establishes the multiethnic and pluricultural nature of
Brazilian society (Articles 215 and 242) and provides for Kilombo communities’
preservation and territorial recognition (Transitional Provisions, Article 68).
5 Other organizations in the Articulation today are Black Women’s Institute of Amapá
(IMENA) and Mãe Venina of Curiaú Quilombo (AMMVQC) (Amapá), Ceará
Black Women’s Institute (INEGRA), Irohin and Pretas Candangas (Brasília, DF),
Malunga Black Women’s Group and Lélia Gonzalez Reference Center (Goiás), Mãe
Andresa Black Women’s Group (Maranhão), Black Women’s Institute of Mato Grosso
(IMUNE, Mato Grosso do Sul), Nzinga Black Women’s Collective (Belo Horizonte,
Minas Gerais), CEDENPA Center for the Study and Defense of Blacks in Pará (Belém
do Pará), Bamidele Black Women’s Organization in Paraíba, Black Women’s Network
of Paraná, Black Observatory and Uiala Mukaji Black Women’s Society (Pernambuco),
Ayabás Institute of Black Women in Piauí; CACES Cultural, Economic and Social Ac-
tivities Center (Rio de Janeiro); Kilombo Black Organization of Rio Grande do Norte,
ACMUN Black Women’s Cultural Association (Porto Alegre, RS), Catarina Women’s
House (Santa Catarina); AMMA Psique and Negritude Institute, Alaafia Program of
Education, Culture and Citizenship, Casa Laudelina de Campos Melo (São Paulo).
6 http://afrolatinoproject.org/, retrieved August 8, 2017.
7 http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/05/africa/african-union-passport/index.html, re-
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Part II
The Caribbean
4
Black Activism and
the State in Cuba
Danielle Pilar Clealand
In March 2015, a debate emerged in the Cuban blogosphere inspired by an

essay written by a scholar in Cuba calling for the dismantling of ‘perverse’
racial categories, arguing that the differences between races in Cuba (referring
to racial inequalities) were of little significance. The article also lambasted the
presence of racial consciousness among Blacks, calling it lethal and exclusionary
for the debate; so much so that some historic Black leaders came to recognize
their own racist ‘stench’. Although the author pointed to ways in which Black
culture and history should be emphasized, he was clear in his conceptualization
of racism as a matter among individuals, separate from the Cuban political and
economic systems. The article trivialized the significance of racial difference
and inequalities in Cuba, pointing to racism’s incompatibility with socialism.
These arguments inspired responses from Black Cuban scholars, writers and
artists who, some more politely than others, argued for the importance of Black
affirmation and the existence of racial inequality. The article’s author is a mem-
ber of the Aponte Commission, the state organization created to address racism
on the island. His words borrow from a dominant discourse that places systemic
racism in Cuba’s prerevolutionary past and thus demonstrates that this discourse
will continue to be promoted even among those that are tasked with investigat-
ing the scope of racism. It represents the continued immutable rhetoric of the
government that lacks the vision to respond to growing debates about racism
in Cuba.
The government’s unwillingness to change its discourse to reflect on and ad-
dress the racism that is being practiced on the ground causes a rupture between
politics and practice. Through speeches, appointments and now the new state
organization to address racism, the state has denied (1) the existence of struc-
tural racism, (2) the need for a national conversation regarding racism that
may challenge their control of the narrative and (3) the importance of Black
90 Danielle Pilar Clealand
affirmation and consciousness. The Aponte Commission echoes the framing

of race as prejudice and neglects to offer real debate regarding racial profil-
ing by police, limited opportunities within the tourism industry and general
employment discrimination. Consequently, the leadership loses an important
opportunity to respond genuinely to the very issues of social justice that they
have rhetorically defended since 1959. These issues are the inequities and rac-
ist practices that several collectives of Black activism confront on a consistent
basis. In an effort to expand the boundaries of the revolutionary process, many
scholars and activists have insisted in their writings and meetings that without
an honest and critical examination of racism on the island, no progress can be
made toward racial equality.
This chapter identifies three strategies that the revolutionary government
has adopted with regard to existent racism and racial inequality: engagement
during the early years of the revolution, silence and repression until the political
opening in the 1990s, and acknowledgment and cooptation, which is repre-
sented today through a state organization such as the Aponte Commission. I
argue that although the latest strategy represents a widening of the limits that
the state has put on race talk in the public sphere, the government continues
to deny the presence of racial inequality. In their (unsuccessful) cooptation
of racial activism, government officials and spokespersons ignore the racist
practices and blocked opportunities that affect Black Cubans and miss an im-
portant opportunity to include this significant population in their program for
social justice.
There is evidence that those affected by racism in Cuba would promote a
more substantive set of policies that would address the issue. Survey and in-
terview data will reveal in this chapter that systemic racism is an experience
that many Black Cubans have encountered or are aware of and consequently,
under and above ground (private and public) collectives favor more awareness
regarding racism, Black organizational activity and Black affirmation. The
public responses to the article represent a clear disagreement between state
positions disavowing racial inequality and Black consciousness and the p ositions
among those organizing on the ground. In addition to public discussions, racism
has produced a private dialogue beneath the surface among ordinary Cubans
that not only communicates a distinct Black experience but also communicates
the need for racial activism and dialogue on a larger scale.
Cuban politics continue to be redefined since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The economic crisis that followed caused the government to adapt to new
realities and allow a broader political and social debate. Since the Special P
eriod,
economic reforms, the presidency of Raul Castro and changing global alliances
have fostered new policies and openings. Writings in academic journals began
to appear in the 1990s that pointed to issues of race and several groupings of ac-
tivists and intellectuals initiated meetings and debates meant to push the govern-
ment to join the dialogue. The abovementioned Aponte Commission represents
Black Activism and the State in Cuba 91
a new approach from the state, but within the same framework of denial. The
Commission is an attempt to coopt the debate and the organic collectives pro-
moting them, emphasizing socialism’s achievements in eradicating racism, rather
than its role in maintaining it. The other government effort to adapt to new
inequalities and experiences of racism among Blacks that followed the Special
Period has also been symbolic rather than substantive: the a ppointment of Black
and Mulato officials to the national government by Raúl Castro.
Aside from these actions, the issue of racism has received very little a ttention.
Various national campaigns have taken on issues of health, sexism, h omophobia,
the environment, among others as Cuba’s ideological platform has pushed for
more social awareness and action. Efforts to promote racial dialogue were silenced
in the earlier years of the revolution and today are given lip service through the
creation of a state organization that does not confront the rhetorical and struc-
tural limits enforced by the leadership. Blacks have long been considered one
of the revolution’s most steadfast groups of support (Zeitlin 1967; Casal 1979;
Sawyer 2006). However, the changing economic climate brought on by the
Special Period, dollarization and increasing inequality has reduced that support.
Now more than ever, as Raúl Castro prepares to step down and the revolution
must solidify its support, the government would benefit from a genuine dia-
logue and course of action to combat racism and racial inequality.
Race and the Revolution

State discourses have historically suppressed racial affirmation, using u nifying
ideologies that name racial democracy as one of the triumphs of Cuban social-
ism. More than just ideological rhetoric, the Cuban government, at the start
of the revolution, instituted various policies of desegregation and strategies (1)
to reinforce and legitimate the idea that racism had been eradicated and (2) to
discourage racial affirmation and discussion of racism on the island (Spence
Benson 2016). The latter strategy has characterized Black consciousness and
organizing as divisive and a threat to national unity under the revolution. The
government’s efforts in the early 1960s were supported by many and served
to solidify much of the support that the revolution had among Blacks. The
literacy campaigns, agrarian programs, closing of racially exclusive private
schools to universalize education, and racially inclusive growth of the health
and education sectors legitimized the Cuban government as true promoters of
racial justice. R
edistributive policies increased the minimum wage, c ontrolled
prices, introduced agrarian reform, reduced rents and guaranteed employment
( Eckstein 2003). With the elimination of private ownership, Cuba became
the most equal society in Latin America in terms of distribution of wealth
(Eckstein 2003). Need in certain sectors produced access to employment for
non-Whites that had not been present prior to the revolution. Teachers and
health-care industry jobs in particular were made available to many, and
training in these fields was open to all. Indeed, desegregation and opening
access to higher education and professional positions changed the racial struc-
ture of Cuban society and introduced a historical level of racial equality. Today
when asked about employment discrimination or structural racism, many, ei-
ther in formal interviews or informal conversations, point to the high number
of Black Cubans in healthcare and education as proof that there is equality of
access to employment sectors. The lack of Blacks and mulattoes in high govern-
ment positions and the emergent sector is justified through evidence of Blacks
in these more inclusive sectors.
The literacy campaign remains one of the most significant successes of the
revolution. Literacy rates and primary school enrollment experienced steep in-
creases during the initial years of the revolution (Domínguez 1978). Access
to education was made available to rural and marginalized urban areas. The
curriculum in each school was universalized, and private school was elimi-
nated. Finally, university education was free of cost, and in the later years of
the revolution, university classes were introduced through television programs.
These measures further legitimized the idea of equal opportunity in that edu-
cation was now free for all and available to all. Indeed, Universidad Para Todos
became one of the mantras of the revolution and continues to be touted today
as a major accomplishment toward access to education.
On the second anniversary of the revolution, the Cuban government an-
nounced that it had taken all of the required steps to ensure equality. A forced
national silence regarding racism’s continued existence followed the short
period of attention toward racial policy. Any discussion of racism became taboo
and could easily lead to political consequences. Castro’s discourse of historical
legacies to explain any continued existence of racial prejudice in Cuba was, and
continues to be, part of the foundation of state rhetoric on race. D efining rac-
ism as an evil inherited from Cuba pre-1959 relieved the new socialist s ystem
from any responsibility to further examine racial inequality beyond class
(Sawyer 2006). Consequently, the government banned all race-based publica-
tions, organizations and societies (de la Fuente 2001). Many supporters of the
revolution support the silence around racism as well, arguing that a discussion
of inequities can undermine the revolution and threaten national unity. During
my field research, I encountered some that expressed anger, apprehension and
disappointment regarding the topic of my work. Certain individuals tried to
make it difficult for me to access particular connections in Cuba to further
my research, insisting that I was trying to create a problem that (1) does not
exist or (2) is detrimental to revolutionary unity. It is important to note that
anti-racist activists struggle with these same reactions from fellow supporters of
the revolution as well as government officials. Despite the incomplete nature of
introducing racial equality to Cuba, the Cuban revolution provided opportu-
nities and advancements for Blacks that were unprecedented and accounted for
much of their support of the revolution.
Notwithstanding the progress that was made during these initial years, there
was more work to be done to tackle the racist structures that operated in Cuba
since independence, inherited from the colonial era of slavery. The project
of desegregating facilities and social circles only attacked the problem of seg-
regation superficially. Housing, primarily in Havana, still remained largely
segregated with Whites remaining in more desirable, central neighborhoods
and Blacks living in historically poorer neighborhoods. Quality of housing
also differed among these neighborhoods, giving Whites a clear advantage.
Furthermore, although after 1961 the government was put in charge of hir-
ing state workers, few Blacks were found in prestigious government positions
(Adams 2004). Laws prohibiting discrimination were not initially created to
support the integrationist policies, and Black activists were not given a space
to press the government for more concerted effort (de la Fuente 2001). Black
representation was encouraged in many professions, but notably absent in oth-
ers. Media representations of Blacks were woefully lacking and continue to be
today. Black cultural and religious expression was suppressed by the state, and
desegregation was never accompanied with necessary philosophies and demon-
strations upholding Black affirmation (Moore 1988, 1997; de la Fuente 2001).
In short, formal segregation ended, but white hegemony did not.
The universalization of Cuban culture simultaneously combined the pro-
motion of Eurocentric culture and esthetic with a raceless outlook. Both served
to deny the contributions and importance of Blackness within Cuban culture.
Black politics then suffered from both dogged notions of white superiority
among all races and the denial of a space to challenge these notions. During
the early years of the revolution, several Black artists and writers attempted
to challenge the prohibition of racial topics in an attempt to promote Black
a ffirmation within the revolution. They were all silenced, and some experi-
enced repression as a result (Moore 1988; Guerra 2012). This did not change
until the Special Period.
President Castro euphemistically dubbed the economic devastation that
occurred in Cuba following the fall of the Soviet Union as the Special P eriod
in the Time of Peace. The early 1990s in Cuba was a time of economic
reorganization in which the revolution was transformed in significant ways.
Tourism, joint investment and US dollars (now Cuban Convertibles) became
the foundation of the Cuban economy, filling the large void left by the USSR.
As a result, those who benefitted most in post-1990 Cuba were those who pos-
sessed hard currency because of remittances or the ability to attach themselves
either formally or informally to the tourism and foreign industries. The crisis
was not only one of finances, it was also a social and political crisis that the
government was forced to navigate in many forms. One of the ways in which
they did this was to create a slight political opening. This meant that dialogue
regarding the crisis and other social ills that previously were prohibited in pub-
lic discussion could be debated among writers, academics and artists. During
this period, anti-racist activism began again. In addition, to the new pockets
of art and activism that arose, social releases were sought through the legaliza-
tion of the public practice of religion and the temporary policy that permitted
Cubans to build rafts and leave the island in 1994 (Eckstein 2003; Sawyer 2006;
Perez-Stable 2012).
Dollarization has been the most transformative of all of the economic
reforms that took place during this time. Cuba has a dual currency where
dollar stores exist to absorb the hard currency that citizens and tourists possess,
and these stores carry many of the products Cubans need, including clothes,
toiletries, appliances and other household items, food items, among others. The
state continues to pay its workers (the majority of those employed in the formal
economy) in Cuban pesos, and this has led to high levels of participation in the
informal sector and Black market to acquire hard currency. Alongside their
state jobs, many Cubans must engage in outside activities to supplement their
income if they are not part of the new privileged class that works in the emer-
gent sector (tourism and foreign enterprises). All racial groups are subject to the
race to acquire US dollars and Cuban Convertibles. However, Whites do have
an advantage in that they are more likely to (1) receive remittances from family
members living abroad and (2) gain employment in industries in the emergent
sector (Espina Prieto and Rodriguez Ruiz 2006; Sawyer 2006; Blue 2007).
The advent of tourism and dollarization has produced racial inequality that
is visible to most Cubans. Even more visible than economic inequality among
Blacks, Whites and Mulatos is the inequality of treatment that Blacks receive
in tourist spaces. Racial profiling of Blacks by the police and the overall crim-
inalization of Blacks have become part of Cuban society in ways that did not
exist in the revolution before the Special Period, particularly in tourist spaces.
These changes occurred in addition to the structural inequities that have ex-
isted throughout the life of the revolution. Blacks suffer from employment dis-
crimination and are underrepresented in higher ranking positions: managers,
professionals, scientists and intellectuals and self-employed Cubans who often
have access to higher currency because self-employment is often connected to
the tourism industry (Espina Prieto and Togores Gonzalez 2012). Although
much of the racial inequality that arose in the 1990s is linked to the economic
reforms of the Special Period, these reforms do not account for all of the racial
disparities. The lack of attention to racial inequality by the government through-
out the decades of the revolution maintained elements of white privilege. Blacks
are, for example, more likely to live in poor housing conditions and, despite the
efforts by the government to equalize access to education, are underrepresented
at the university level (Espina Prieto and Togores Gonzalez 2012).
Within this context, Black activism is quite necessary. As the government
continues to deny the existence of structural racism and unequal access, its non-
racist outlook acts as propaganda rather than a commitment to social justice.
Cubans of color who supported the initial steps that the revolution made in
guaranteeing equal access and an integrated society are being replaced by a

generation who grew up during the Special Period and beyond who see racism
and its effects in their daily lives. It is this particular population who would be
better served with a genuine dialogue and set of policies to address the racial
gaps that continue to exist.
Black Activism and The Revolution

Racial activism in Cuba has only been granted the freedom to exist since the
Special Period. The early years of the revolution, which focused on desegre-
gation and deep structural changes, were not a product of racial activism, but
rather a decision by the state to include racial integration as part of the govern-
ment’s reforms. The level of progress and attention toward racial equality was
determined by the state in the early years of the revolution and continues to be
today. The revolutionary government response to racism can be characterized
by three major periods: (1) engagement in the first two years through redistrib-
utive policies and integration, (2) silence and repression in the years following
1961 until the Special Period and (3) permissibility and current cooptation of
Black activism. The latter two strategies have derived legitimacy from the first
period of engagement where Blacks gained societal inclusion. Black Cubans
benefited well beyond 1961 from the reforms that were initially implemented
(de la Fuente 2001), and the state consequently continues to tout these accom-
plishments and has relied on the measures to sustain, not only Black support of
the government but the belief in racial democracy and the absence of racism
(Clealand 2017).
The limits that the revolution placed on racial progress – the subsequent acts
of silence and repression – are less clear and not part of political rhetoric. Blacks
were brought into the revolution, but the state’s short-lived commitment to
these communities allowed for the continuation of White hegemony and Black
marginalization in many areas. The Black voice was suppressed, and as a result,
activism disappeared until the early 2000s. Any attempts to confront the set
political boundaries were met with accusations of being counterrevolutionary
(Guerra 2012). The government’s will to broaden the pledge to Black advance-
ment and visibility ended in 1961.
At the end of the 1960s, several Black artists and activists came together to
discuss the absence of a comprehensive set of policies to address racism fol-
lowing desegregation. Issues of Black poverty, criminality, representation and
Black cultural inferiority were presented by many of these artists in their work,
specifically in the plays of Sara Gomez. At Cuba’s First Cultural Congress in
1968, author and intellectual Walterio Carbonell was accused with other activ-
ists of supporting ideas of Black power. Carbonell had made several attempts to
advise the Cuban leadership regarding racial issues and fought to include Black
and African content in the new Cuban curriculum (Spence Benson 2016).
Although access to education and newly inclusive job sectors created far higher
levels of racial equality, structural inequalities remained. In addition, Black
representation and participation in the revolution’s governmental bodies were
limited at best. That year, individuals within this collective met the Minister
of Education with the expectation that they would be able to express their
concerns and ideas as revolutionaries and in turn push the government to ex-
pand their commitment to racial justice. On the contrary, they were accused
of representing counterrevolutionary messages and again of promoting Black
power. Those who were targeted were either silenced or received criminal
punishment, and the government made it clear that anyone who brought up the
existence of racism within the revolution would be sanctioned (Moore 1988;
Guerra 2012).
The Special Period widened the limits in which Black elites could debate the
effect of racism on Cuban society. Throughout art and academia, the bound-
aries of civic discussion changed during the economic crisis, and much of the
critique that we see in academic journals and newspapers today could not have
been brought forward in the first three decades of the revolution. Nonetheless,
the state continues to closely monitor and control the limits of that discussion
and, in turn, the limits of racial progress and activism. Political and social con-
sequences are enforced if those given the liberty to talk publicly about racism
go too far and the boundaries are not always clear. The policy of silencing con-
tinues to exist, albeit with less severe consequences such as the loss of a job or
membership in the Communist Party. In the past few years, Black scholars have
been removed from prestigious positions because of writing that crossed this
line, despite being supporters of the revolutionary process. As a Black scholar
explained in an interview,
We are seeing racist acts even more after the Special Period. This has
become a problem and now people are saying that we have to denounce
this. We have to organize to address these racial conflicts; but it’s very
hard for someone to address a singular racial incident and also address the
practice that is institutionalized. It’s also very hard to participate in an
individual act of social activism without being accused of something else.
So we have to organize in an open space. We have to organize together.
Although there are groups that have formed to debate racism and how to com-
bat it, these organizations have been limited to exclusive audiences and have
only been minimally supported by the state. In several of my trips to Cuba,
for example, the Vice Minister of Culture attended meetings where racial
debate took place, but attendance was never followed up with action. Rather,
the official present would talk at length about the importance of the debate
and the importance of racial equality without making any political or future
commitments.
Black activism in Cuba continues to confront issues of racism despite the

limits and consequences that some have had to endure. The voices that seek
to bring light to racial disparities throughout history are never silenced per-
manently, and the current wave of elite activism is a testament to that. Various
organizations have been created since the political opening in the 1990s, and
many of the same actors have remained at the center of the fight toward racial
equality and Black consciousness even as organizations disband and reform.
Organizations such as Color Cubano, La Cofradia de la Negritud, La Alianza
Regional Afrodescendientes para America y el Caribe, Grupo Afrocubanas, El Club
Espendru and others have brought important debates to the attention of the
government. Additionally, these activists have begun to use the Internet and
blogosphere as tools to communicate their positions, increase awareness of their
activities as well as open up a space for the discussion of race and racism in Cuba.
One such example, Desde la Ceiba, a newsletter by Tato Quinones, a writer and
anti-racist activist, uses the online medium as a way to build consciousness,
publicize events and publish essays, many regarding race and Afro-descendants
in Cuba. He has called the blogosphere the new journalism in Cuba.
The hip-hop movement has also been central to the movement, not only
with lyrical content that addresses Black people in particular but with their
direct participation in many of the movements listed above. This participation
has led to essential collaborations between scholars and artists. Moreover, hip-
hop in Cuba has served as a critical critique to Eurocentric values and domi-
nant racial ideologies, allowing for community access to pro-Black, anti-racist
messages (Saunders 2015). Members of the hip-hop community, through their
music and expression, do the work of Black consciousness-raising that other
activists without such an accessible, public platform are unable to do.
The many important grievances that anti-racist activists have brought to the
table include Black representation in the media, school curriculums and the
tourism industry as well as issues of racial profiling and poor housing in Black
and marginal neighborhoods. The state, although aware of the concerns of
these groups, has not offered any concrete policies to address the enduring
problem of systemic racism and racial inequality. Thus, although the repression
that activists experienced in the 1960s is no longer a reality for activists who
call on the government for an honest dialogue regarding racism today, the state
still does not commit to any action. Rather, the government has doubled down
on their position that structural racism does not exist and will not publicly ad-
dress racist practices that are clear to many. Previous research has found that in
fact, Black Cubans are affected by racial profiling by the police and commonly
experience racial discrimination of a structural nature (Clealand 2013, 2017).
Cooptation, the most recent strategy of the state, is represented by the gov-
ernment agency that has been created to address racism in Cuba: the Aponte
Commission. The commission was created in 2011 and is part of the Union of
Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC); it is described by the Cuban media as a
group of artists and intellectuals that ‘reject any kind of discriminatory mani-
festation because of color that prevails in society’ (Mesa Giralt 2015). The com-
mission also promotes recapturing the historical memory of Black figures and
contributions through lectures, events and the development of digital archives
on the subject. The commission adopts the state position both on the scope of
racism and the solutions focusing on education and awareness: the commission
speaks for the regime while allowing it to present a commitment to Black
citizens. The strategy of exclusion that characterized the phase of silence and
repression in the early years of the revolution is not recognized by its members,
rather the revolution is discussed as the main arbiter of racial equality. Racism
is presented as something outside the revolution’s mechanisms and attributed to
individual feelings of racial prejudice and remnants of the past.
The strategy of cooptation is similar to the efforts that many Latin A merican
states have taken in the past 10–15 years. Countries such as Ecuador, Brazil, Peru,
Colombia and Honduras have managed to include Afro-descendant p ositions
by appointing leaders to government positions that allow for the state to control
some of the activities and strategies of Black activists (Rahier 2012; Paschel 2016).
Those that have been appointed to the Commission display that framing racism
as a matter of inclusion, exposure and dialogue is not a strategy used exclusively
by Whites to keep racial policy at a superficial level; Blacks participate in this
performance as well. The new president of the Commission, Pedro de la Hoz,
has been quoted as saying, for example, ‘Racism doesn’t exist in Cuba because it
is not institutionalized. What exist are racial prejudices….what is most difficult is
to change people’s minds’ (Ravsberg 2016). As Catherine Walsh argues,
It is in this context that the new politics of inclusion is given direction,

meaning, and stage. The changing state shows itself through modern and
stylized Black bodies and faces, whose voices, when heard, appear to most
often whisper in-tune with the regime.
(Walsh 2012, 29)
The creation of the Aponte Commission is a comparable attempt at cooptation of

the movement as in other Latin American countries, but similar to these countries,
other activist leaders in Cuba continue to do their own independent work; the
work, although separate from the state, remains within a revolutionary framework.
The Aponte Commission has promised to promote a national dialogue re-
garding Blackness and racism across Cuba’s provinces and declared that the
results of its work will be taken to academic circles and then introduced into
the curriculum at different educational levels (Mesa Giralt 2015). The rhetoric
that has been published thus far both acknowledges problems associated with
racism in Cuba and negates how entrenched race remains throughout the coun-
try’s institutions. Their official statement, for example, contends that racial
problems have not been completely resolved in Cuba and that racial prejudices
originating from people’s subjectivity and voluntary exclusions are acts of ra-
cial discrimination (UNEAC 2013). They focus on the individual prejudices
and the ‘devaluation of Black culture’ that ‘has not been eradicated in the very
short time of power that the revolution has had’. Moreover, the verbiage also
includes the point that equality of opportunity exists for all Cubans. Much like
the change in treatment of Black activists over the decades, the rhetoric of the
commission, as an arm of the state, is representative of a widening of political
limits. Nonetheless, the idea of equal opportunity and the lack of attention to-
ward racist practices that can be addressed through policy represent only that: a
widening of rhetoric but the same lack of commitment to true racial progress.
In March 2017, the commission presented their goals under the new orga-
nization’s president along with their projects in several provinces in order to
promote Black culture, history and contributions in academic and workshop
settings. The new president, Pedro de la Hoz, was quoted as saying that the
‘racial problem’ has become visible most recently in the lack of promotion
of the values and historical and cultural contributions of Africans and their
descendants. With this in mind, he identified the principal objective of the
commission: (1) to struggle against discrimination and the traces of racism left
over from the Republican period and (2) to rescue the Black historical memory
that Cubans remain unaware of. Work done across the island has included the
creation of a digital library of Black and African content, historical and liter-
ary debates, discussions regarding racial stereotypes on television and casting
choices, and other publications that would include Afro-descendant contribu-
tions (Arenas 2017). The focus of the commission on contributions without
identifying practices that subordinate Afro-descendant populations in Cuba is
part of the historical incompleteness of the government’s approach.
The creation and maintenance of resources that contribute to the documen-
tation of the Black contribution in Cuba is of primary importance. Lectures,
workshops, discussions and other events that increase awareness of these con-
tributions and seek to dismantle stereotypes are significant additions to what
has been a social and historical narrative rooted in White hegemony. Few
studies have examined Cuban perceptions of racial representation in the media,
yet when asked about representation or racism in general, I have found that
several interviewees discussed the absence of positive Black images on television
(Clealand 2017). Nonetheless, the mission of the commission and joining com-
mitment of the state do not alter the structure of racial inequality. The com-
mission focuses on their work as a way to promote the narrative of ‘a country
without prejudice’ rather than a country that combats racism and racist practices.
Discrimination
Evidence suggests that structural racism affects Black and Mulato lives on a
daily basis and continues to be entrenched within the country’s institutions.
Effective measures to combat racism in Cuba must reach beyond highlight-

ing Black contributions and encouraging nonprejudicial thoughts. Racism and
inequality were exacerbated by the economic crisis, but Black representation
in areas such as the media, managerial positions and government positions has
been d isproportionally low throughout the decades of the revolution. These are
all measures of employment discrimination, which occurs most acutely in the
tourism sector. Racial profiling by the police as well as surveillance of Black
people in tourist areas are part of everyday experiences that have not been dis-
cussed by the state. Finally, geography continues to be connected to race where
marginal neighborhoods are often majority Black, particularly in Havana.
The data for this project consist of a survey taken from March to October
2008 and from April to May 2009 in the city of Havana as well as 42 in-depth
interviews conducted during the same time period. The survey was conducted
among Black Cubans to analyze the components of Black identity and Black
consciousness. We surveyed 409 respondents ranging in age from 14 to 78 and
in educational levels from the completion of primary school to postgraduates.
I found that 45% of a sample of Black Cubans experienced discrimination.
Of those individuals, the majority pointed to structural d iscrimination (62%)
whereas 38% reported discrimination by another person (see Figure 4.1).
A lthough these two kinds of discrimination are far different (what I term
structural vs. attitudinal), together they contribute to the most common ways
in which racism affects Black lives. Many of the racist phrases that exist in
Cuba and were reported by those who experienced attitudinal racism may not
be part of a systemic practice, but they are certainly representative of racist
patterns that were not solved by the revolution’s policies of integration. The
majority of the phrases point to White superiority in physical appearance, class
Employment Police General/Systemic
37%
38%
9%
16%
Structural Discrimina on Atudinal Discrimina on
Figure 4.1 Experiences with discrimination.

Source: Clealand (2013).
and intelligence. Sayings such as she is Black but intelligent or she is a white
Black person (because of intelligence or a demonstration of good manners) are
common in Cuba. Similarly, the saying, Es un Negro de Salir is used to describe
a Black person who is attractive and/or has European features.
When given the opportunity to explain their experience with discrimi-
nation, many expressed that Cuba has always suffered from systemic racism,
particularly among the police and regarding employment opportunities. In the
area of employment discrimination, respondents said, [‘]the best jobs are mostly
for the lighter race, especially the hotels or jobs in the embassies’ and ‘job offers
are subtly managed for Whites; with or without money, it doesn’t matter, only
Whites get these jobs’. Job opportunities in the emergent sector were a large
part of why access is limited:
people that have access to money, for example in the stores, hotels, etc.,
are not only better placed, but think that they are better than you because
of that placement. This happens even if they are less cultured than the
Black person they are mistreating.
One respondent wrote, ‘because of Cuban society and the policies of the
country’s administration, the best positions are for Whites’. Others reported
d iscrimination in their current jobs where promotion was only offered to
Whites or they experienced discriminatory treatment by their coworkers.
Treatment by the police was a recurring response by Black males – 9% of
those who reported discrimination referred to racial profiling. One respondent
wrote that police often stop him because of his attire as a construction worker
and painter. Dress is not only used as an excuse to stop someone and ask for iden-
tification, it is also used to stop someone from entering a hotel, a requisite that
does not apply to Whites. Although this experience has declined in frequency in
recent years, it was particularly common during the two decades following the
establishment of tourist facilities. As a hotel worker shared with me,
Security guards often have to make up an excuse to keep Black people

out of hotels. They will often say that they are poorly dressed and in this
way can tactfully keep someone out without saying what it is really about.
Others noted repression on the part of police in Havana and the constant r equest
to see identification when in the city’s center or near areas popular with tour-
ists. Respondents also claimed that they are at risk not only when traveling near
or with tourists but with other White Cubans. For example, ‘Always, always
regardless of the place or circumstance that I’m in, I’m approached and harassed
by police when I’m surrounded by white people. They only stop me’. Among
all of the examples of racism that were presented, the issue of racial p rofiling
and the overall surveillance of Blacks by the police and security guards in hotels
and stores are the most obvious forms of discrimination. While racial profiling
is known to most, it is one of the glaring realities that the government will not
address.
In a recent open letter/complaint, a Communist Party member exposes the
details of his arrest in January 2017, writing that he was forced to spend the
night in jail for harassing tourists. He argues that not only was he entertaining
foreign friends of his, which included conferences, dinners and so on, as a cul-
tural promoter, but that once he arrived in the jail, it was full of other Black
Cubans who were accused of the same crime. Many of these Cubans were
dancers, musicians, drivers and others who inevitably are in constant contact
with tourists and nonetheless are subject to racial profiling by the police and
state apparatus. He writes,
We are all revolutionaries and these acts of injustice produce negative

feelings toward the PNR [National Revolutionary Police] and the Cuban
Revolution. They are making an error and people see it as abuse at the
expense of the population. What can be said about the image that visitors
will have after seeing people that they are conversing with or enjoying
themselves with arrested and detained for no reason?
(Abd’Allah-Alvarez Ramírez 2017)
This experience is one example of the disparate treatment that non-White

Cubans often receive by the state police.
If we take into consideration how prevalent discrimination is for Black
Cubans, the government has failed to adequately address the issue. After the
economic changes of the Special Period, problems of racism have become more
visible than they were in 1968 when those that wanted to fight for equality
and Black visibility were silenced. Today, Cuba and its citizens face various
economic difficulties: the dual currency, reduction of the welfare state, eco-
nomic inequality and the effects of semi-capitalist reforms all point to a change
in the societal structure coupled with economic insecurity. Blacks who were
once the foundation of the revolution’s support are facing increasing inequali-
ties and racial discrimination.
Voices of Black Consciousness

There are various private discourses throughout Black communities with regard
to racial issues that could be transferred and addressed in public spaces should
the state agree to open the dialogue on structural racism. Although there is no
singular set of Black racial attitudes, there are various strains of thought among
Blacks that point to high levels of racial consciousness. Previous works on mea-
sures of consciousness are shown in Figures 4.2 and 4.3 (Clealand 2017). When
respondents were asked whether anti-Black racism affects them personally and
100%
90%
80%
70%
Strongly Agree
60%
52.2% Agree
50%
Neutral
40% 37.1%
Disagree
30% 27.0% Strongly Disagree
21.5% 19.8%
20% 14.1%
11.5%
10% 7.4% 6.3%
3.0%
0%
Group Consciousness Awareness of Racism
Figure 4.2 Group consciousness and awareness.

100%
90%
80%
70%
Strongly Agree
60%
Agree
50%
40.8% Neutral
40% 33.8% Disagree
30% 25.4% Strongly Disagree
21.4%
19.2% 19.0%
20%
12.2% 13.2%
8.8%
10% 6.2%
0%
Black Organizaon Organizaonal Exclusion
Figure 4.3 Black organizing.

whether Blacks should be aware of racism in Cuba, the results demonstrated

clear levels of solidarity regarding the experience of racism. The first question
regarding experience shows that 58.7% of the sample either strongly agreed or
agreed whereas 27.2% either disagreed or strongly disagreed.
Thus, a majority of the sample identifies with their racial group and its expe-
riences. For the second question regarding awareness of racism in Cuba, 79.2%
of the sample agreed that Blacks should be aware of the racism in Cuban society
whereas only 9.3% did not agree or strongly disagreed. This finding shows that
the level of awareness of racism in Cuba is quite high, which challenges the
notion that the revolution already solved this problem. As a respondent shared
with me while answering this particular question, ‘every single Black person
knows about racism here in Cuba. There’s no reason to have a meeting about
that, everyone knows’. The results also show that consciousness reaches beyond
awareness to a sense of connectedness to other Black people who experience
racism. If Blacks are personally affected by others’ experiences of racism, they
are identifying with the experience of marginalization specific to membership
of a racial group. This kind of solidarity or consciousness is important for the
potential to organize to achieve certain rights and representation for Black
Cubans and an end to racist practices. Moreover, Figure 4.3 shows that the
majority of the sample believed that Blacks should organize.
This particular result shows not only a measure of group consciousness but
also a willingness to commit to action toward a goal. If organizational meetings
to debate and combat racism were opened up to the population at large, there is
evidence to suggest that it would be not only well received but also well attended.
Interview data also reinforce the idea that there would be support for Black af-
firmation, dialogue and organization. Some of the contradictions that show up in
the survey data regarding the nature of a Black organization may be connected to
the sources (or lack of sources) on the subject. The state is not the only entity that
has silenced discussions regarding racism in Cuba. Several interviewees talked
about the ways in which their family members, particularly those who believed
in the revolution’s role in eradicating racism, silenced discussions within the
home or never addressed the issue of race. Racial consciousness has many origins
for each individual. In addition to individual experience, information regarding
race within the family can be a source of consciousness. If families transmit these
messages of racial consciousness, this can often offset the dominant discourse
that discourages racial organization. Moreover, families can promote ideas that
challenge images of Blacks in the media that reinforce negative stereotypes and
indifference regarding racial identification. As a university student explained,
It’s education. I’m not talking about education from school; it’s familial
education. My family, my mother, my father always taught me to have
consciousness because Black pride influences a lot. Family teaches you
that. The images, the stereotypes, what is taught in the mass media, what
people see and the ideas that people formulate all go against Black pride
but they often define for us what a Black person is in our society. So I am
able to think the way I do, but someone who is similar to me may not
think in the same way because they come from a different family. I try to
be better every day and I’m conscious of the role that I represent in my
society; there are few Blacks that are where I am.
The interviewee feels that formal education may not produce consciousness,
and in fact the pursuit of alternative texts is often the only way to obtain
access to the Black experience in Cuba. Another interviewee described the
beginning of his racial consciousness after being exposed to Black history
that he had never been taught before. He talks about learning about the
first Black political party in Cuba, the Independent Party of Color, from
a friend:
I had never heard about the party. I learned about it from someone else
who had me listen to Anónimo Consejo’s song about it and he explained
to me what happened. That’s how I came to think about race differently.
He also lent me the book, Our Rightful Share, and with that book I real-
ized so many things. Being from Santiago I felt close to the movement
and I started to identify with it.
The interviewee is referring to the rap group, Anónimo Consejo, who wrote a
song about the Independent Party of Color in Cuba in the 2000s. Our Rightful
Share (Helg 1995), which documents racial politics during the wars of inde-
pendence and the new republic including the history of the Independent Party
of Color, is a source of knowledge and pride among many Blacks who have
been exposed to it, particularly those involved in racial activism. The book was
mentioned by several of my interviewees. The presence of writings that discuss
racism in ways that have been hidden from the educational system p roduces
new knowledge and consciousness regarding race. It may follow that inclusion
of such texts or similar information at the high school and university level
would have a great influence on Black political and racial attitudes in Cuba.
Although the Aponte Commission has promised to take this task on, the pos-
sibilities of the curriculum including present forms of structural racism are
extremely slight.
Racial consciousness was also expressed through the election of Barack
Obama, which produced quite a bit of dialogue in Cuba. When Barack Obama
won the election, it produced a sense of pride for many Black Cubans, and
Blacks were following the election closely, not just for political reasons but
because Obama represented a historical advance for Black people throughout
the Americas. A 70-year-old housewife expressed this sentiment:
All of our presidents have been white, why doesn’t a Black person have
the right to be president? I was so happy, we were so happy here in Cuba
with Obama. Maybe other Black people that are full of it weren’t, but
many were because Black people have a right to be president. I feel proud;
not only because of what he can bring to the country, but to have a Black
man in that position is very important. The way he speaks, the way he
acts, the man is marvelous.
The interviewee points to the role that racial solidarity had among Blacks with
the election of Barack Obama. This, coupled with the high awareness that I found
among my Black interviewees of the number and names of Black members of
the Central Committee, suggests that within a democratic system, Black Cubans
would be likely to use race as a consideration when voting for political candidates.
Blacks who display a high level of Black consciousness do not always discount the
importance of national and racial unity. Black consciousness, in other words, does
not connote racial separatism or a rejection of revolutionary ideals. One female
hip-hop artist shared her opinion on the saying, Todos Somos Cubanos, as a way to
distance the population from racial difference and toward national unity.
It’s not a lie that we are all Cuban (que todos somos cubanos). There are times
when yes, color doesn’t matter, that we are Cuban. Color doesn’t matter
in certain struggles and up to a certain point that saying is right. What
affects us is the lack of awareness of who you are. A person without the
right references or knowledge clashes with a lot of issues in society. So
we can defend the project of we are all Cuban, but what is important is
knowledge. I am Black and historically this has happened to my ancestors
and my family, I come from this place. Socially we have to be Black. That
is important.
Many Blacks who support the revolution argue that consciousness can increase
awareness without abandoning revolutionary beliefs. Without this conscious-
ness, the fight against racism will not be possible as citizens will continue to
ignore the influence that race has on life chances and opportunity or believe
that the fight for civil rights could be exclusionary.
Black interviewees who did believe structural racism was present in Cuba
expressed frustration with the lack of consciousness among other Blacks.
There are so many experiences that we go through and they don’t always
produce consciousness. Incredible! Filling out the survey, people around
me actually put that they never had an experience with discrimination.
That just gets me! How is it possible that so many things, so many things
happen to us and it doesn’t always click? The police pass seven white
people and they ask you for your identification and it’s highly discrimina-
tory. We need to discuss the issue. But it’s only discussed in closed circles,
while generations of Cubans continue to grow up around this idea that
we are all equal in this society, there’s education for everyone, and we all
have the same opportunities. If the police only ask you for your identifi-
cation, it’s not a remnant of the past.
This interviewee, a graduate student, points to many of the dominant dis-

courses that affect people’s awareness of race. For him, ideology has a role
in barring Blacks from recognizing racism, even when it happens to them

directly. Those who are working on the issue of racism either cannot or
do not extend the dialogue beyond their meetings among themselves. The
extension of this dialogue, although politically sensitive, could have an im-
portant influence on Black communities in Cuba. Their level of conscious-
ness, knowledge and commitment to the issue could prove to be critical in
consciousness-building among Cubans. The leader of one of the independent
organizations that explores the effects of racism talked about the important
role of consciousness:
The first thing is that we are all human beings. The second is that I am
a Black woman. The third is that I am Cuban. And that is changeable,
it could be that I go somewhere else and become a citizen. And that is a
feeling, a position that you take before life. I can’t take off my skin; they
haven’t invented anything to be able to do that. No matter where I go, I
am a Black woman. And if there is a project to promote me as a woman
and as Black, I can’t feel offended or reject it. If I feel offended then my
self-esteem is very low. And my social conscious is messed up. I look in
the mirror and what am I? A Black woman. If Black families do not as-
sume their Blackness, there is a conflict. And no one in the party is going
to use me either, that depends on me. If I don’t have strong legs I’m going
to be, I don’t know, whoever, a Condoleezza.
Politically, she discusses the danger of being used, whereby the organization’s
contact with the Communist Party would show a commitment among them
to address this issue without having to enact clear policies or changes. She
does not want to be treated as a ‘token’ the way that she thinks Condoleezza
Rice has been used in the US. Regardless of her characterization of US racial
politics, her interview displays a commitment to the political advancement of
Blacks. The desire to expand the reach of anti-racist organizations and activism
does not only exist within the populace but among the membership of these
very organizations as well.
Conclusion
Cuba is at a political crossroads where support for continued socialism in a
post–Cold War global economy has become more and more difficult. As Raul
Castro prepares to step down in 2018, the government faces a potential cri-
sis of governability. Black Cubans, who have been critical to the revolution,
no longer constitute the stronghold that they once did. In addition, racism
and the devaluation of Blackness by the police, the media and within tourist
spaces challenge the argument that the revolution champions social justice and
equality. Black activism has been at the forefront of these changes and has
confronted the government on various occasions to act on behalf of Afro-

Cubans in Cuba. State actors have continued to give lip service to the need
for real structural changes. In doing so, they lose an important opportunity to
stand up for racial equality.
Consequently, the Black movement in Cuba right now cannot emphasize
changes in policy nor can they force the government to acknowledge structural
racism within the revolution. The government has not given any indication
that it would respond to such an initiative. Rather, it is only willing to promote
issues of Black visibility and partake in the celebration of Black cultural and
political contributions. Black activists can only hope to initiate change through
consciousness-raising activities that bring awareness to the scope of racism in
Cuba and promote Black affirmation and consciousness.
In 2008, I attended the Hip Hop Symposium organized by the Cuban Rap
Agency. The agency at the time was led by a member of the rap group, Obsesión,
and thus reflected the mission of the group. For many years, Obsesión has been
one of the primary hip-hop groups to promote messages of Black affirmation
and consciousness. Consequently, one of the workshops included in the sympo-
sium was about racial issues. It was led by one of Cuba’s racial activists, Gisela
Arandia, who has worked to organize debates and other collectives to push the
government to recognize issues of racial inequality. The symposium was at-
tended by members of the hip-hop community throughout the many provinces
in Cuba, and the race workshop in particular served as a consciousness-raising
exercise as well as a space for attendees to share their experiences with racism
and feelings about Eurocentrism in Cuba. Workshops such as these along with
music and art that push the envelope to promote Black pride to fight messages of
inferiority are first steps toward building the foundation for a larger movement
that promotes counterhegemonic narratives. As one of the responses to the ar-
ticle first cited in this chapter states: in order to combat racism,
we must broaden our debate and knowledge so that all citizens can truly
enjoy the rights expressed in our Magna Carta. Only when citizens rec-
ognize that their rights are not violated in practice, will we then be in the
society that we fight for today.
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5
Correcting Intellectual
Malpractice
Haiti and Latin America
Jean-Germain Gros
Introduction
A glaring weakness in Latin American studies is the uneasiness displayed by
some Latin Americanists toward including Haiti in their analyses of the re-
gion. One hears it said at conferences, and not always in hushed tones, that
Haiti ‘belongs’ more to sub-Saharan Africa than Latin America. Those who
espouse this view often remark that Haiti is the only least developed country
in the Western Hemisphere, a distinction it shares with a majority of A frican
countries but which puts it at odds with its American neighbors (from a geo-
graphic standpoint, the claim is actually false). To the extent that Haiti receives
coverage by Latin Americanists, it is often parsimonious, at best, and, at worse,
selective: limited to discussions of natural disasters, pandemics and dictatorships,
perpetuating what Paul Farmer called ‘Haiti’s bad press’. But why should Haiti
have to be in one regional/cultural imaginary or another? Why this compulsion
by scholars to put things in boxes and pretend that they are hermetically sealed?
A principal thesis of this chapter is that Haiti, like any other country, is a
social construction in a geographic space heavily influenced by history, the
choices of Haitian rulers and technology. Haiti, then, is more than one thing;
thus, it must be situated in more than one locale. To be specific, it is African,
(Latin) American and virtual, thus transcendent of physical space, even as the
latter remains very important as a locus of collective action and individual
struggle. (I doubt I would have written these lines if Haiti was just an abstrac-
tion and not an actual place where I was born, grew up until my teenage years
and would like to become an ancestor.) Social constructions are not immutable.
National identity, for one, rather than written in stone, is dynamic, part of the
attempt to build community, enhance the security of the state, create external
links and consolidate the authority and legitimacy of local elites. It is a political
112 Jean-Germain Gros
project, which means it is heavily agency driven. National identity is also his-
torically determined and constantly reshaped.
This chapter examines Haiti’s seemingly unending transition to democracy
since the collapse of the Duvalier father-to-son dictatorship. Here Haiti, ad-
mittedly, diverges from the typical Latin American experience, inasmuch as the
debility of the state is considerably more acute in Haiti than it is elsewhere in
the region, which greatly problematizes the sustainability of liberal democracy
(Gros 2012). But Haiti also has much in common with Latin America in general
and Afro-Latin America in particular. Regions can be constructed on the basis
of common challenges, thereby refuting the notion of Haitian exceptional-
ism. While these challenges are shared across geopolitical space, they also have
their own idiosyncrasies, shaped as they are by locales or ‘settings of interac-
tion’, which give them their contextuality (Giddens 1984, 118). Specific areas of
convergence between Haiti and Latin America include the cyclical resurgence
of populism (Lavalas in Haiti, Chavezism in Venezuela), the capacity of the
military to roll back democratic gains by overthrowing elected government
(Haiti in 1991, Honduras in 2009, both with US connivance) and prolonged
conflict between the executive and legislative branches, which can paralyze the
political system and lead to constitutional crisis (Haiti in 2000, 2004, 2008,
2010 and 2015; Brazil in 2016). Extreme inequality in Latin A merica – with
Haiti being the most unequal society in the region – means that liberal de-
mocracy tends toward populism, as politicians have every incentive to em-
brace redistributive proposals to garner votes (World Bank 2013). However,
it matters whether populism takes place in a context of a democratic pact, a
working state and relative prosperity.
One important topic discussed in the chapter is the intersection of color and
class in Haitian politics. In fact, the chapter and the volume most closely con-
verge in the exploration of relations between dark-skinned and light-skinned
Haitians, which have their counterparts in Latin America in racial tensions
among Amerindians, Afro-Latinos (and Latinas), descendents of Spanish settlers
born in the New World (Creolos) and more recent European immigrants. Ra-
cial antagonism in Latin America and color conflict in Haiti are both rooted
in the colonial experience and reflect continuing class inequity intermixed
with racism (the latter transmogrified in color prejudice, or Préjugés de Couleur,
in Haiti). They are two sides of the same coin that are also shaped by local con-
ditions. Thus, the Lavalas movement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, like its prede-
cessors (e.g., the Mouvement Ouvriers-Paysans of Daniel Fignolé in 1956–1957),
was (is) an attempt by the dark-skinned majority primarily in the slums around
Port-au-Prince to integrate the political system and, through government pa-
tronage, to secure a piece of the Haitian pie for itself, which is unfortunately
too small to feed everyone to satiety, especially as Haiti’s population continues
to grow. This generates a zero-sum politics broadly along color lines because
the vast majority of Haitians are dark skinned and poor while the ‘rich’ tend
Correcting Intellectual Malpractice 113
to be of lighter pigmentation. The overthrow of Aristide, not once but twice

(1991, 2004), was generally supported by Haiti’s traditional light-skinned elite,
which feared the economic consequences of the political empowerment of the
dark-skinned masses (e.g., demand for higher wages in the private sector, pa-
tronage jobs in government and social benefits), in the absence of a broader
pact on democratic governance, which might have benefitted the elite. But
lest I am accused of oversimplification, there were light-skinned Haitians who
supported Lavalas, just as there were dark-skinned Haitians who were viscerally
anti-Lavalas and anti-Aristide.
I am not making a reductionist argument based entirely on color; in fact,
when I speak of ‘color’ in the Haitian context, I am not referring to skin tone
exclusive of other correlating, and socially constructed, factors, such as hair,
nose, lips, mastery of French, place of residence, family lineage and so on
(the issue is explored in greater detail later in the chapter). Nor, however, will I
demur recognizing that race and color often trump class in ‘Western’ political
history. Of course, issues connected to these constructs are always messy. To
every rule, there are exceptions; lines are not impermeable and can, therefore,
be crossed. The question is whether some clear trends can be elucidated that
warrant generalizations.
Historical and Comparative Background

One of the most common misconceptions about Haiti is that it has always been
ruled by strongmen and democracy has been totally absent in the Haitian expe-
rience. Keeping in mind that ‘really existing’ democracy has changed across the
ages, from very limited franchises to more expansive ones, Haiti’s postcolonial
history can be seen as one protracted struggle to craft the democracy of the
day in order to contain strongman rule. The overthrow of dictators, some-
times with the active participation of key segments of the population through
uprising and revolution, sometimes with their tacit support through the coup
d’état, far from reflecting a Haitian penchant for instability and anarchy, in fact,
reflects a rejection of authoritarian rule. This does not mean that Haitians have
wholly embraced liberal democracy, much less succeeded in institutionalizing
it, only that they have found variants of nondemocracy objectionable and wor-
thy of being opposed.
President Alexandre Pétion (1808–1818) faced such an implacable opposition
in the Haitian Senate that he essentially ruled by decree much of the time,
hence as a dictator, but so did Simon Bolivar toward the end of his life. Pétion’s
successor, Jean-Pierre Boyer, did not fare much better. Aside from the risible
monarchy of Faustin Soulouque (1849–1859), all of Haiti’s governments after
1820 have been republican in character with very liberal democratic constitu-
tions. The devil has been in the details of implementation. This is not very dif-
ferent from the political history of much of Latin America, where pro-Spanish
monarchists, military dictators, populists, putative democrats and demagogues

pullulated the landscape, producing Caudillismo, Golpe de Estado, Junta, Auto-
golpe and other colorful terms for authoritarianism, well into the second half of
the 20th century (Vanden and Prevost 2002).
Haitian history can be seen as a struggle between the masses of Haitians,
who are excluded from the economy of the country and a Lilliputian elite of
politicians and risk-averse entrepreneurs hell-bent on extracting the last parti-
cle of surplus value without sharing. The net result is a society mired in poverty
in social inequality. The root cause of these misfortunes, to steal from Edmond
Paul’s les causes de nos malheurs (1882), goes back to the early independence pe-
riod and ultimately to colonialism itself. Haiti was the first, and perhaps only,
country in the world to rid itself of one mode of production, that is, agrarian
capitalism based on slavery, without replacing it with anything remotely com-
parable. Like it or not, the plantation was the agrarian version of the modern
factory: it sets the stage for industrialization in many countries. Eric Williams
(1944) brilliantly demonstrated the relationship between modern capitalism and
slavery. Unfortunately, rather than moving forward from agrarian capitalism to
basic industrialization, for example, transforming cash crops into value-added
finished or semifinished products, Haiti went backward with subsistence agri-
culture, which was ‘fine’ as long as population growth was kept at a moderate
pace. The Haitian revolution did accidentally align production capacity with
population size, as it resulted in the death and forced departure of 150,000
residents or 30% of the population (Gros 2012). But the decline was reversed
by natural growth within 100 years of independence. This would explain the
exodus of Haitian peasants to Cuba and the Dominican Republic (DR) in the
first two decades of the 20th century to work on the same types of plantations
(sugar, tobacco and coffee) the ancestors had either burned down or broken up
during and after the Haitian revolution, some of which were in all likelihood
owned by descendents of the very families that the revolution had forced out
(Speaking of Plus ça Change!).
Latin American history is not much different. The countries of the region
were born in the birth pang of 18th-century revolution, in some cases aided by
Haiti. Wealth inequality is acute in both Haiti and Latin America, except that in
Haiti so little wealth is produced that the main effect of extreme inequality, that
is, extreme poverty, is painfully apparent even to the most hardened visitor.
Land scarcity is a problem in many Latin American countries, just like in Haiti.
The push factor of land scarcity and population growth and the pull factor of
urbanization and emigration have resulted in massive population movements
in Latin America, just like in Haiti. Many Latin American economies remain
woefully undiversified, thus overly dependent on a limited number of primary
products (Matières Premières) or semiindustrial goods for revenue. The narrow-
ness of the economic base exacerbates vulnerability to external shocks; peri-
ods of robust economic performance trade places with periods of stagnation
bordering on economic collapse (Peru in the late 1980s, Mexico in 1996,

Argentina in 2001, Venezuela 2016–2017). Import substitution industrialization
efforts in the 1950s and 1960s largely failed to fundamentally transform the
economies of the region. At best, they are semiindustrialized. There are some
(rare) exceptions of success: Chile. Neoliberal solutions in the 1980s and 1990s,
such as free trade, privatization of state-owned enterprises and currency deval-
uation, did not have the expected positive results in Latin America and Haiti.
In fact, in Haiti, things went from bad to worse. After inequality, corruption
is probably the Achilles’ heel of Latin America, as it is in Haiti. Finally, social
problems in Haiti and Latin America are racialized in various ways with one
commonality: dark-skinned people tend to be at the bottom of the social ladder.
I do not mean to ignore the differences. They are significant. For the most
part, they have to do with internal institutional differences and the role of
external actors in the dénouements of Haiti and Latin America. Unlike Haiti,
the revolutions that led to the birth of modern states in Latin America were not
led by Black slaves, and they did not result in the decimation of the colonial rul-
ing classes through death and forced emigration. Simply put, these revolutions
were much less disruptive of the political economies of the Latin American
countries, which, therefore, did not have to start from scratch at independence.
New World–born White planters (Criollos) essentially replaced Iberian-born
Peninsulares at the helm of former colonies now independent states, who then
proceeded to dominate Amerindians, Africans and people of mixed races. In
this sense, the revolutions leading to independence in much of Latin America
bear a greater resemblance to the American revolution than the Haitian revolu-
tion. Precisely because of who led the Latin American revolutions and stood to
benefit from them, the world (meaning the traditional imperial powers and the
US) reacted very differently to the independence of Latin America compared to
that of Haiti. Where Haiti was shunned – France going so far as to require Haiti
to pay in exchange for diplomatic recognition – most Latin American countries
were welcome to the so-called concert of nations of the 19th century, or at least
were not punished for the impudence of wanting to be free.
Flushed with more cash from the Industrial Revolution and its colonial
possessions than it knew what to do with, Britain became the world’s banker,
extending loans to Latin America on relatively generous terms, which made
possible limited industrialization. Officially shut out of the spoils of the im-
perialist conclave in Berlin, which saw the partition of Africa, the US moved
to secure Latin America for US capital – its concern about the region at this
time heightened by the emergence of a unified and aggressive Germany. So US
banks, too, extended loans, often backed by gunboat diplomacy (renamed Big
Stick Ideology), to prevent default. Haiti was a bystander to all of these devel-
opments, its economy limping along the road of subsistence agriculture. Such
foreign capital (loans) as Haiti did receive – from France, of all places – came at
usurious interest rates, while the nominal value was further reduced when elite
Haitians took their cut under various pretexts. The net result was no economic
modernization, and a lack of integration of the economy of Haiti in the ‘global’
economy, due to weaknesses in the production system (obviously a vicious cir-
cle). Sacks of coffee and cocoa beans were exported every year, but nothing that
would make an appreciable difference in the execrable lives of peasants – which
is to say: most Haitians at the time – as middle men (Espekilatè) and taxes on
trade siphoned off profits from these activities. Latin American countries have
been very much part of the international division of labor, although occupy-
ing a dependent position. Not even a US occupation (1915–1934) significantly
changed Haiti’s social institutions and external relations (Lundahl 1979). If
anything, American imperium in Haiti exacerbated social contradictions such
as color conflicts.
Where this chapter is concerned, perhaps the most fateful difference be-
tween Haiti and Latin America has to do with the state. In the course of the
19th century, and after much turmoil within and between countries, a majority
of Latin American countries did manage to construct relatively effective
centralized authority. The problem in the region has been elite disagreement
regarding control of the state and the proper role of the Catholic Church in
secular government. In spite of its reputation for authoritarianism – clichéd in
the dark-haired, mustachioed, military man clad in crisp uniform with a thou-
sand Croix de Guerre on the chest to boot – all of the countries of Latin America
that became independent from Spain have had republican forms of government
with liberal constitutions. These institutions were of course suspended, de facto
or de jure, under military rule, but the absence of premodern forms of gov-
ernment in the region (e.g., monarchies, empires) meant that democracy never
disappeared from the political agenda. Partial bureaucratization implied that
the state in Latin America could perform the basic functions of statehood: tax,
protect borders, maintain internal order, develop infrastructure and deliver a
modicum of social services. Patronage allowed for the integration of supporters
of ruling political parties in the state, and for it to be broadly sensitive to the
needs of the working classes. Peronism did not magically appear in Argentina
after World War II.
Haiti has a history of putative republicanism and liberalism, too; but unlike
Latin America, the state in Haiti is limited to Port-au-Prince, and its capacity
to perform some of the aforementioned functions of statehood even in the
capital city is, at best, perfunctory. State incapacity in Haiti is connected to
the complete absence of a professional, or even semiprofessional, bureaucracy.
However, the problem with the Haitian state is not simply a lack of capacity,
it is also the absence of a culture, or ethos, of performance for the citizenry
rooted either in classic patronage or some type of social democratic ideology.
Haitian public administration is a huge spoils system long monopolized by the
presidency but increasingly shared with parliament, whose members insist on
jobs for their supporters or projects in their constituencies, personally managed
by them, in exchange for showing up at the hemicycle. This is straight-up

individual corruption, not party-based corruption or classic patronage, which
can have some value: mass mobilization and inclusion in government. In Latin
America, elite factions were generally of similar social origins. In the main,
they were White (whether Creole or European), Catholic landowners, traders,
bureaucrats, priests and soldiers, producing a certain coherence in government
personnel and policy.
For much of Haitian history, elite factions were split between dark-skinned,
light-skinned and, toward the end of the 19th century, foreign-born Haitians of
Middle Eastern, American and European origins (the comprador bourgeoisie).
Elite division fanned political intrigue, mistrust, policy incoherence and cor-
ruption. No society can be democratic or prosperous, absent a minimum of
social capital (trust) among citizens. Warlordism from below, right up to the
American occupation, compounded the problem as competing elite factions
summoned peasant leaders in their pay to march their forces on Port-au-Prince
and install their favorite minion as president. The emergence of the comprador
bourgeoisie (the Brandts, the Madsens, the Mevs, the Boulos, the Bigios, the
Bakers, the Apaids, etc.) as the dominant faction of the Haitian elite widened
the gap with the masses as the orientation of this faction, in economic, cultural
and even diplomatic terms was primarily external to Haiti. Many of Haiti’s
elite entrepreneurs double up as the consuls of foreign governments, raising
legimate questions about their loyalty. For example, in 2010, Gregory Mevs, a
scion of the Mevs family, was the consul for Finland. In 2004, Gilbert Bigio,
one of the richest men in the Caribbean, was the honorary consul of Israel, an
achievement probably facilitated by the family’s roots as Sephardic Jews from
Aleppo, Syria (Luxner 2004). An elite faction with an external ethos links its
fate neither to the development nor to the democratization of the country of
which it is ostensibly a part. It is strictly concerned about accumulation, even
of the most primitive kind, which leads, in fact, to decisions deleterious to the
aforementioned social projects. The travails of democracy in Haiti can be at-
tributed in large part to the hegemony of an elite clan generally supported by
the US that is profoundly indifferent to the collective welfare, because it does
not identify with the demos. The chapter now turns decisively to this issue.
The Agonizing Transition to Democracy

The most recent struggle for democracy in Haiti began on February 7, 1986,
when Jean-Claude Duvalier fled the country, as a result of a fledging uprising.
Much has been made of the longevity of the combined Duvalier dictatorship
(1957–1986), to suggest that Haitians are so used to authoritarian rule that they
are ill-prepared for democracy. What this argument ignores is that, in spite of
massive fraud in 1957, François Duvalier was probably the choice of a majority
of Haitian voters, who may have quickly soured on their choice but would
not have another chance to change their mind (Duvalier appointed himself
president-for-live in 1963, before his first mandate expired). Throughout much
of the 14-year reign of the elder Duvalier, he was continually challenged by
a variety of groups. In the late 1950s, opposition to the nascent dictatorship
came from parliamentarians not in Duvalier’s political party and the commer-
cial bourgeoisie. In the early 1960s, university students opposed the regime
as Duvalier was maneuvering to take up permanent residence in the national
palace without popular assent. Until 1968, or just three years before Duvalier
died, armed invasions by exile groups were almost an annual ritual. In other
words, Haiti has been unwelcome ground for authoritarianism. If so, what ex-
plains Haiti’s three-decade transition to democratic rule, during which not one
election has been successfully managed, including the 1990 poll that brought
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, to this day the uncontested leader of the
excluded and impoverished masses? By contrast, democracy in Latin America,
the transition to which began roughly at the same time as Haiti, is largely con-
solidated. The coup d’état has become as rare in the region as democracy used
to be uncommon.
The sustainability of liberal democracy in countries with a history of au-
thoritarian rule essentially depends on two interrelated conditions: a pact
among members of the elite or selectorate, that is, ‘Those people … who have
an institutionally granted right or norm to govern that gives them a say in
choosing the government’ (Mesquita et al. 2000, 60), and a state with the co-
ercive capacity to enforce that pact. The problem in Haiti, as stated earlier, is
that the dominant faction of the elite has zero interest in democracy, which it
sees (wrongly) as the empowerment of the masses at its expense. Thus, it refuses
to enlarge the selectorate to include even the more moderate members of the
popular opposition, much less those perceived as ‘radicals’. But enlargement of
the selectorate is precisely what needs to happen during the period between the
collapse of authoritarian rule and the first transition election, so that hitherto
excluded groups, especially if they were prominent in the overthrow of the
ancient regime, are included in the democratic pact. The importance of an
inclusive selectorate lies in the fact that groups previously excluded tend to be
of the populism type, emerging as they are in the shadow of corrupt, brutal and
enduring regimes. Populism is a schismatical ideology that asserts deep, almost
irreconcilable, differences between elites and masses and advocates using state
power to implement mass-friendly policies, especially as regard to economic
inequality.
There is an intimate connection between populism and liberal democracy.
After all, the electoral component of liberal democracy strongly encourages
the offering of policies that can garner a plurality, if not a majority, of votes.
Because in most societies most people are not wealthy, the politics of liberal
democratic elections will tilt strongly in favor of redistributive policy propos-
als, alongside other appeals (e.g., to race, religion, ethnicity). In fact, the danger
of democracy, as the ancient Greeks recognized, is that it may stoke the low-
est common denominators among people via demagogues. This is why ‘really
existing democracy’ typically maintains antidemocratic institutions (e.g., non-
elected judges, central banks, police forces) as safeguards against the madness
of the crowd. Thus, at the same time that liberal democracy may encourage
populism, it also constrains it through civil liberty guarantees, the rule of law,
protection of property rights, separation of powers, procedures for capturing
power (which often require organization and money, not just popularity),
checks and balances, and the like. In sum, liberal democracy is a mixed basket
of fruits and thorns for all the actors involved, which should promote policy
moderation and political compromise. The containment of populism is not
possible unless populist forces are part of the democratic pact, regardless of the
(short-term) risks, including the legitimate takeover of power. To use Weberian
language, the charisma of populism must be routinized by the legal-rationalism
of liberal democracy, and this cannot happen unless populists are ‘all in’.
I have in mind here, as models of political inclusivity during the transition
the national conference in Francophone Africa in the early 1990s. Countries
that underwent the process have generally fared better than those that did not.
Two countries where democracy moved in opposite directions, in part because
of the choice they made regarding the national conference, are Benin (national
conference) and Cameroon (no national conference) (Gros 1995). Even in those
countries where a national conference did take place but democracy remains
wanting (Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo),
there were significant strides made immediately after the gathering, which re-
sulted in the defeat of longtime incumbents, such as Denis Sassou-N’guesso
in Congo-Brazzaville, and limits on presidential terms (2) in Gabon. These
achievements were subsequently rolled back, but the national conference lay
at least the groundwork for inclusive democracy. When the selectorate is in-
clusive, there is a higher chance that the rules of the democratic game will be
widely accepted, as all groups will have participated in their making. Election
officials are less likely to be looked upon with suspicion, and election outcomes
are more likely to be accepted by losers as reflecting the will of the people. In
other words, when the selectorate is inclusive, elections help to settle political
differences among selectorate factions, rather than turning these into enduring
intestinal fights, which put enormous stress on already weak political institu-
tions, not to mention the economy.
Unfortunately, what often happens is the instrumentalization of populist
groups: they are used by entrenched elites during the struggle against the old
order only to be sidelined after its collapse. This creates a situation where the
revolution is betrayed after it has been hijacked. In some cases (e.g., Egypt), the
romantic heroes of yesterday become the imprisoned villains of today. Even
where the selectorate is expanded to include new forces, they may be mis-
trusted by the old forces, who may be loathe to see them come to power even
democratically, as this may fully expose the lack of popular support for people
accustomed to ruling more by ascription than talent or result. In other words,
even where the democratic pact is inclusive, there are likely to be conflicts
among groups with long-standing animus and differing interests, which are no
longer submerged under the weight of opposition to a common enemy. This
brings up the second condition for the sustainability of liberal democracy.
There must be a state with the capacity to enforce the pact when it is being
undermined, and for all intents and purposes, this means a working judiciary
and, especially, a credible military. The task of the armed forces is not to seize
power for itself, but to be a deterrent to those who might try to act illegally to
reverse the course of political misfortune. In some instances, the Church can
also play an important mediating role, although its lack of enforcement power
necessarily renders the efficacy of its intervention dependent on the good faith
of the protagonists. There is an obvious paradox here that is essentially uni-
versal: in order for liberal democracy to work in any country, there needs to
be a strong state to support democracy, just as a strong democracy is needed
to contain state power. Therein lies the difference between Haiti and many
Latin American countries: a democratic pact was never agreed to among Haiti’s
contentious factions, which include the comprador bourgeoisie; furthermore,
Haiti’s failed state could not enforce a pact, even it was concluded. It is import-
ant to spell out what a pact is.
A pact entails agreement between two parties who set aside differences in the
interest of pursuing common goals. At minimum, a democratic pact means that
contending groups agree on how to settle differences (e.g., through elections),
even as such differences remain fundamental to their identity. So a pact does
not dissipate all conflicts, it establishes, ex ante, the rules for their temporary
resolution. This makes the pact different from dissimulation, wherein one set
of actors hide behind another after some payoffs. In Haiti, this is historically
called Politique de Doublure, in which wealthy light-skinned Haitians put in
power dark-skinned politicians, who, in exchange for crumbs, they expect to
do their bidding. In South Africa, this is called state capture. In the absence of a
state that can use its coercive power to enforce the democratic pact and, where
necessary, impose solutions on warring factions, conflicts are likely to go on
forever, sapping whatever energy democracy promises and reducing popular
support for it. People may even come to equate democracy with anarchy, there-
fore, longing for a return to authoritarian rule.
‘Color’ in Haitian Politics

The sources of the Haitian democratic transition rut having been identified,
the reasons for their being now need to be explored. This is where the question
of color comes in, by which I do not mean skin texture alone. In Haiti, color
is a sociological, hence constructivist, category that entails constant addition
and subtraction of associative factors. It is not strictly epidermic. It incorporates

other personal physical traits, such as hair texture (curly or so-called straight),
nose shape (flat or pointed), density of the lips (thin or thick) and less personal
nonphysical traits, such as mastery of French, how French is spoken even when
it is mastered (with correct or incorrect pronunciation of vowels, especially u),
family lineage, school experience and place of residence. As the (Mulatto)
character Félicia hysterically said of her prospective (dark-skinned) brother-in-
law, Paul Trudor, in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness (2010, 71):
‘A black man! A black man in our family. And one of the lowest sort! Can you
believe this? It’s not so much the color of his skin that I mind, but his vulgarity
and especially his father’.
The inclusion of nonphenotypic characteristics might tempt some readers to
consider color a sideshow, which would not be entirely correct. Color in the
literal sense remains important in Haitian social life, inasmuch as it may confer
on the person who inhabits it immediate (dis)advantages in certain situations.
For example, a light-skinned Haitian, who shows up in a government office,
may be offered the type of attention that would not necessarily be bestowed on
her dark-skinned countryman by equally dark-skinned civil servants (the more
light-skinned and the more pronounced the features associated with whiteness,
the more automatic this attention is likely to be). It is not a liability in 21st-
century Haiti for a business venture to have at least a light-skinned or a white
person as a partner, as this literally opens doors. Such a person can more easily
feign being wealthy or possessing international (especially A merican) connec-
tion, which may facilitate obtaining a bank loan or government contract. There
are Haitian parents, even now and even in the Diaspora, who would prefer to
have theirs sons and daughters marry light-skinned partners to ‘improve’ the
race (meaning having light-skinned future offspring). Color is of varying sig-
nificance in Haitian social relations, reflecting the political effervescence of the
moment. Sometimes reference to someone’s color can be little more than play
or friendly banter. Other times, color cleavages can result in violence between
elite members, who know each other very well and may have attended the same
schools since childhood (basically these historically: Jean-Marie Guilloux,
Saint Louis de Gonzague, Petit Séminaire Collège Saint Martial, Lycée
Alexandre Pétion and a few others).
Color, in its fullest construction in the Haitian context, is not a residual or
confounding variable in Haiti, nor are race, ethnicity and religion elsewhere.
Marx was right about many things, but he clearly overestimated the significance
of class, at the expense of other social constructions, which have been deter-
mining in world history. What does it mean to acknowledge ‘It’s a White man’s
world’, or, in Haiti, to call a person of some opulence a Blan (White man)? Just
as there is an esthetic of beauty, which is culturally determined and reinforced
by propaganda (i.e., advertising), there is also an esthetic of power and wealth,
by which even deprived groups accept and expect holders of these assets to look
a certain way. When this state of affairs has existed for a long time, people may
see it as natural and may become quite upset when the status quo is disturbed.
The visceral reaction of some working-class, White, Americans to the Obama
presidency can be understood from this perspective. The esthetic of power is
not projected in the resplendence of military uniforms and the broadly phallic
evocation of the deadliest weapons of war. The body itself, with skin color,
muscles, bones, reproductive organs and all, is both object and subject of power,
recalling Foucault’s concept of biopower (Gros 2016).
The desire to dominate others may well be innate in human beings, perhaps
vestige of a time when we battled simply to survive. Most people also recognize
the awesome power of the modern state and what it means to be ‘in control’
of it, even in the age of globalization. However, most people lack the ability to
dominate those who are not directly related to them by marriage or blood, and
even congenital power is time limited: children grow up to become adults and
match their parents in physical strength and ability to earn an independent liv-
ing. Thus, there is a gap between natural propensity and actual ability to exert
power, which is filled (has to be filled) vicariously in a variety of ways, from the
mundane (e.g., sports fans and ‘their’ team) to the mortally serious. D emocracy,
far from being exempt from domination sentiment, is an expression of it, which
is why the American founding fathers doubled down on the ‘tyranny of the
majority’. The difference between democracy and nondemocratic forms of
government is that the former architecturally constrains power, in the process
(hopefully) moderating the temptation of its abuse through enlightened self-
interest (today’s majority may wish to govern with magnanimity because it may
be tomorrow’s minority). In divided societies with strong identity politics, peo-
ple ‘exercise’ power and wealth through elites, reinforcing their sense of superi-
ority over other groups, even if those elites actually support policies d eleterious
to their class interest. (I do not agree this is false consciousness. Who says true
consciousness has to be class based?)
The Haitian revolution may not have succeeded if poor Whites (Petits Blancs)
had formed an alliance with the Gens de Couleur against the Blacks (Gros 2012).
But the poor Whites were often the most vociferous proponents of the most
retrograde laws in Saint-Domingue toward the end of the 18th century. Other
than their skin color, they had nothing the more prosperous Gens de Cou-
leurs (Mulattos) could envy. They used the lone ‘asset’ they possessed to make
common cause with the Grands Blancs until both were destroyed, a dénouement
that can only be described as the most poetic of justice. Ordinary citizens do
not derive only psychological relief in keeping in power elites with whom they
share a sense of kinship; communion may be of real benefits to both.
The alignment of color with wealth and, for a good part of Haitian history,
state power goes back to the colonial period when Mulattos or Gens de Couleur
(as distinct from Affranchis) may have owned as much as one-third of the plan-
tations and one-fourth of the slaves. Generally, the offspring of White men and
enslaved Black women, in other words, products of the Old World born in the
New, these people were Creoles in the true sense of the word (Mintz 1994).
Neither completely Europeans nor completely Africans, they saw themselves
as a race apart destined to lead Haiti, the same way White Creoles in the US
did so believe. Years of violent political struggles made Haitian society flexible
enough to allow those who may be of darker complexion, but meet the other
presumed characteristics of being light skinned, to become part of the ruling
elite. The American occupation also forced light-skinned Haitians to be more
accepting of their African ancestry, thus somewhat (and I stress somewhat) less
antagonist toward their dark-skinned compatriots.
Former Haitian President Michel Martelly is not exactly light skinned; how-
ever, because of his family lineage, his wife Sophia and his place of residence
(Péguyville, just above the historical Mulatto enclave, Pétionville), he may be
considered a Mulatto, although his profession and stage antics may have made
him a prodigal son of that social construction at one point. It is no accident
that, in the course of Martelly’s presidency (2012–2016), new political groups
arose (Pitit Dessalines, Children of Dessalines) that revived the old cleavage be-
tween the Black and Mulatto factions of Haiti’s traditional elite. Leaders of
these groups accepted Martelly’s social belonging, upon which they grafted
his alleged political heritage (Pitit Pétion, Children of Pétion), even though his
appearance and former lifestyle may have been at odds with those of a tradi-
tional Haitian ‘bourgeois’.1 The elasticity of color in Haitian social life makes
it not a caste, as ethnologists and anthropologists working in Haiti wrongly
asserted for a good part of the 20th century. At the same time, once again, it
should not be presumed that color is merely a veil for other cleavages, such as
class. Probably every Haitian, if pressed, would acknowledge her African ori-
gin with some pride and a great deal of assurance in the equality of the human
races, but this has not gainsaid the construction of color as a demarcating line
among Haitians. It is ironic that the one country in the Americas that fought so
heroically against the oppression of one race by another should have informally
retained color as a basis for social stratification. The consequences have been
profound.
Authoritarian Rule and the (Com) Pacting of Democracy

I can now return to the question as to why post–Duvalier Haiti never con-
cluded a democratic pact. When any authoritarian regime collapses, it releases
pent-up energy that is hard to organize. The more lasting the longevity of the
regime, the more energy it releases in various forms. New leaders emerge to
man the political parties being created; civil society groups mushroom; the
press becomes much more vocal. One may even refer to this period as socially
orgasmic. A democratic pact is difficult to conclude under normal circum-
stances, it is doubly more so under conditions of uncontrollable excitement.
Post–Duvalier Haiti was definitely not insipid. Traffic at Toussaint Louverture

International Airport increased manifold as soon as Jean-Claude Duvalier
fled on February 7, 1986. It was something of a pastime for the idle youth of
Port-au-Prince to spend their day at the airport to see which famous exiles
had landed. The latter swarmed the place like locusts with all manner of un-
realistic expectations, including of course taking over the presidential palace,
the ultimate prize in Haitian politics. They immediately clashed with coun-
trymen who never left. The Haitian army, which had been subdued under the
Duvaliers, began to reassert itself; in fact, power was left largely in its hands,
as reflected in the (mostly military) junta that replaced Jean-Claude Duvalier.
But the army, in spite of appearance to the contrary, was in a state of profound
decay, not least because of the involvement of high-level officers in illegal ac-
tivities, which undermined morale and esprit de corps. The Catholic Church
was split between a conservative clergy close to the fallen regime and the basal
Ti Legliz (small church) movement oriented toward liberation theology; charis-
matic protestant sects also challenged the dominance of the traditional Catholic
Church. Starting in the 1970s, Haiti became an important transit point for
narcotics headed for the US. Thanks to this activity, opportunities for capital
accumulation were no longer confined to a very small group of industrialists
and importers of foodstuff and luxury goods.
There was a certain naiveté bordering on irresponsibility by democratic
forces in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Duvalierism. The emphasis
was on crafting a liberal constitution that would be as constraining of executive
power as possible and then go to elections to fill in the elective posts created by
the new dispensation. The constitution was hurriedly put through a referen-
dum in 1987, which saw its overwhelming approval. It envisaged a strong na-
tional parliament and the devolution of power to departmental and local elected
officials. It put Haiti on a path of continuous elections at all levels of the gov-
ernment machinery, paying little attention to their cost and the potential effects
on the national treasury. Meanwhile, there was significant underestimation of
the depth of the depravity to which Haiti had sunk under the Duvaliers, who
basically sacrificed modernity on the altar of despotic rule. Regime policies
had left a black hole in the universe of political liberalism, not to mention the
public administration or bureaucracy. Such crucial transition issues as voter
ID cards, voter registration lists, voter education, an independent judiciary, a
trusted electoral commission and a professional army respectful of the principle
of civilian rule were not forthcoming and had to be built from scratch. The
formal economy was at its nadir. The low-paying jobs in the light assembly
parks outside Port-au-Prince city limits produced more slum dwellers than a
middle class with decent purchasing power. The countryside was decapitalized
in 1983–1984 by a USAID-sponsored, harebrained, scheme to replace Haiti’s
Creole swine with American pigs from Iowa in the name of fighting African
swine fever (Gros 2010). Alongside the building of democracy, Haiti needed to
build a state and a vibrant economy to prevent the transformation of democracy

into anarchy by popular frustration and demagogues.
The color question compounded the challenges to democracy described
above. Unlike the rest of Latin America, where a White Creole elite had
ruled politically and economically in most countries since colonial time, with
A fro-Latin Americans marginalized in both realms, in Haiti the American oc-
cupation (1915–1934) and the long years of the Duvaliers resulted in a split be-
tween a dark-skinned political elite and a light-skinned economic one. In truth,
this schism in the 20th century was renewed in 1946, with the election of Léon
Dumarsais Estimé, but it had appeared as early as 1804, when Black generals, in-
cluding Dessalines, appropriated land previously owned by French planters. To
be perfectly clear, each faction was penetrated by members of the other, so what
I am talking about here are overarching trends, not completely exclusive cate-
gories. But such had been the color-based division of Haiti’s selectorate that the
marriage of Jean-Claude Duvalier to light-skinned Michèle Bennett resulted
in much grumbling among old-time, dark-skinned, Duvalierists, one of whom
(i.e., Luc Désir, former head of the dreaded secret police) resolved to assassinate
the president, apparently in the hope of maintaining the separation. The light-
skinned economic elite, which included the comprador bourgeoisie, had done
well under authoritarian rule. It had no interest in democracy, which, in fact,
it feared would bring in Moun Sa Yo (those people, meaning the dark-skinned
poor of the slums) into the ruling coalition, who might dare ask the ‘wealthy’ to
perform the basic duties of citizenship: paying taxes. The dark-skinned political
elite, which included Duvalierists and Haiti’s very small m iddle class, was not
better disposed toward democracy because it equally feared people rule might
result in its displacement by Moun sa yo. Thus, a democratic pact across the
class-color divides was never seriously contemplated. The politics of democratic
transition would be a fight to the last man.
To summarize, Haiti did not conclude a democratic pact after Duvalier, be-
cause (a) the atomization and euphoria of the moment prevented a sober assess-
ment of the conjuncture and what needed to be done; (b) the lack of cohesion
among elite factions, split as they were along color lines and in control of dif-
ferent types of assets, provided disincentives to democracy; and (c) the loathing
by elite factions of emerging civil society groups (e.g., the basal small churches)
resulted in their seeing these groups more as combustible forces to extinguish
than as reliable partners in a democratic pact. That many of these groups were
also led by Moun Sa Yo did not help to endear them in the eyes of elite factions.
The insights of rational choice theory may be helpful here. As a general rule,
the larger the number of actors in any game, and the more divergent their
interest, the more difficult it is for them to agree to cooperate. Even if Haiti had
managed to eke out a democratic pact among its boisterous political factions,
it is doubtful that there was a state to enforce it. Like Louis XIV, the Duvaliers
were the state. François Duvalier had deliberately destroyed the remnants of the
bureaucratic state that the American occupation had bequeathed. He had ef-
fectively substituted the army (formerly the National Guard) with the T ontons
Macoutes. When given a choice between devolving power to subalterns and
development and monopolizing power and underdevelopment, dictators often
choose the second pair. Thus, Haiti’s worst dictatorship ended with the flair of
a B-movie on February 7, 1986, when Jean-Claude Duvalier left the country
with the neopatrimonial state in the trunk of his favorite BMW, with the ir-
repressible Michèle in the passenger front seat inhaling a cigarette through a
holder.
Aristide and the Aftermath

The election of Jean-Bertand Aristide in December 1990, the most important
political event to have occurred in Haiti in post–Duvalier Haiti up to that time
after the ratification of the 1987 constitution, took place in the absence of a dem-
ocratic pact, a working state and a recovering economy. This condition never
bodes well for democracy; instead, it is fertile ground for political instability
and a certain kind of populism. Of the connection between democracy and the
economy, Przeworski et al. (1996, 42) note, ‘Economic performance, then, is
crucially important for the survival of democracy in less-affluent countries’. In
fact, there seems to be a safety premium on democracy: ‘no democratic system
has ever fallen in a country where per-capita income exceeds $6,055’ (1996, 41).
Even before Aristide took over on February 7, 1991, there was an attempted
coup by Duvalierists led by the notorious former minister of the interior Roger
Lafontant in January, which was quickly put down. Aristide’s opponents did not
quit. Throughout his nine months in office, murmurs of coups, plots and other
cabals, never in short supply in the Port-au-Prince rumor mill (Teledyol, trans-
lation: telemouth), were rife. They may have been well founded: Aristide was
overthrown on September 30, 1991. Palace coups are almost textbook evidence
of elite disagreement. The 1991 coup was led by none other than B rigadier
General Raoul Cédras, who Aristide had handpicked to lead the army, although
he appointed Cédras only on an interim basis, perhaps in an attempt at main-
taining control, which may have backfired. In spite of fiery rhetoric denouncing
capitalism, US imperialism and the bourgeoisie during the campaign, Aristide’s
government in 1991 was unexceptionally mainstream in its policy orientation.
There was no attempt at wealth redistribution, although tax collection did go up
between February and September 1991. Like Chavezism in Venezuela, L avalas
(Flood) is a Latin American version of populism heavily influenced by urban-
ization without development – in other words, lumpenproletarianization –
and color. Unlike Chavezism, Lavalas has always been hampered by depen-
dency on foreign aid, state failure and lack of control of the means of legitimate
violence. This deficiency of populism is not new in Haitian political history.
Pierre-Eustache Daniel Fignolé faced the same challenge in 1957 with his
Workers-Peasants Movement (Mouvement Ouvriers-Paysans). He was in power

for only 19 days when he was overthrown by the army and unceremoniously
sent into exile, where he would remain until 1986.
How does a movement without a reliable source of revenue, such as oil, and
tenuous control of the means of violence satisfy its supporters and remain in
power? Answer to this question goes a long way toward explaining the behav-
ior of Lavalas. It also helps to differentiate among forms of populism in Latin
America. Without private sources of revenue, either supplied by Providence
through natural resources or wealthy taxpayers, any populist movement has to
rely on the next best alternative: the state. Here, rather than extracting from
nature and/or wealthy citizens to fatten its coffer, a state already bereft of funds
adds unemployed supporters to its payroll, transforming itself into a patronage
sanctuary. In sum, populism delivers private goods that satisfy short-term intes-
tinal needs rather than sound public policy that is transformative of class rela-
tions. One problem is that there may be so many unemployed and unqualified
militants and so few formal jobs to dole out that state patronage is perceived as
a zero-sum game, in which case the movement, like a cheap suit, may begin
to tear at the seams. Yesterday’s zealots become today’s embittered dissidents,
who may be ready to offer their services to the highest bidder. Intramural vi-
olence borne of frustration and a sense of betrayal becomes a real possibility
here. A regime can palliate this problem by allowing supporters who cannot be
absorbed into the public administration or the army to prey on the population
(e.g., kidnapping, carjacking, armed robbery) or otherwise engage in illegal
economic activities (narcotraficking, smuggling of imported goods, etc.).
To secure its power, populism may substitute street violence for legitimate
violence, which it does not control. Here street mobs make up a pressure co-
alition while more respectable regime supporters are retained as members of a
governing coalition (Gros 2012). Where the state is in an advanced stage of de-
cay, populism will rely on a charismatic leader, in which case it will be a kind of
personal rule with preferential treatment for the poor. Where there are working
institutions, populism will still be positively disposed toward the underprivi-
leged, but it will pursue its goals through these institutions, rather than the sheer
magnetism of a leader. In democratizing countries undergoing rapid urbaniza-
tion, the social basis of populism is invariably the urban poor, who, compared to
peasant farmers, are relatively easy to mobilize to provide votes and apply street
pressure. In Latin America, including in Haiti, Afro-Latin Americans over-
whelming comprise the urban poor, except in countries where Europeans and
Amerindians constitute a large majority of the population (Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay, Bolivia, etc.). The result is that populism in much of Latin America
tends to be strongly mixed with race (color, in the case of Haiti).
It matters, then, whether populism emerges in the absence or presence of
a working state or, for that matter, a viable economy. In this regard, there is a
huge difference between Chavezism and Lavalas, even though they are both
populist movements. Venezuela has retained its military, of which Chavez was
a high-level officer. Throughout his time in office, Chavez kept control of the
armed forces and did not have to rely on mobs. Such street pressure as has been
applied in Venezuela has been complementary to, rather than in replacement
of, the forces of legitimate violence. Chavez kept the rule of law, although he
appointed to the bench judges sympathetic to his cause; members of parliament,
duly elected, also came from his party. Elections were not really fair, inas-
much as Chavez controlled vast state resources, which could be distributed to
supporters without legislative allocation or oversight. However, elections were
largely free; Venezuelan voters did not have to vote for Chavez in open ballot
elections, in return for being beneficiaries of his largesse. There was (is) an op-
position press. Venezuelan populism was (is) rooted in the institutions of state
and democracy, which strengthened Chavez vis-à-vis his critics. As long as he
kept winning elections, no one could accuse him of being a dictator or anar-
chist. And, of course, Chavez was legally (though controversially) succeeded
by Nicolas Maduro, again underscoring Venezuela’s democratic populism.
Reference can be made to Brazil here under Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who also
pursued pro-poor social policies nearly similar to Chavez but under an ideology
that is more social democratic than populist, and using more anodyne rhetoric.
The key point to be retained here is that populism can be transformative of
social relations and politics; it is not always transient, superficial and divisive.
Democracy cannot simply be procedural; that is so say, a means for deciding
which elite faction will misrepresent the interests of the demos the least. It also
has to be socially substantive in countries like Haiti and those of Latin Amer-
ica, where inequality is rampant. The statistics are depressing, where Haiti is
concerned. Only 50% of Haitians have access to potable water; at least 40% face
chronic hunger; 60% live on less than 2 USD per day; health-care coverage is
the lowest in the Americas; the literacy rate is at 54%, but probably less than
10% of Haitians fully master French, one of two national languages. Liberal
democracy, totally devoid of social policy aimed at ameliorating these abysmal
conditions, borders on cruelty, or at least farce. Democracy has to designate
the poor – in other words, the majority – a protected class under these circum-
stances. Pro-poor policies can be pursued without scaring off the rich, if they
emanate from the normal democratic process and are, therefore, predictable
and legal, and if the rich can see the benefits of these policies to themselves.
In Haiti, practically none of these conditions obtains. The absence of working
institutions has meant that populism has been entirely tied to Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, with all of the eccentricity of the one-man show. What Haiti needs,
then, in addition to a working state, is democratic populism led by a party with
pro-poor policies that can capture power and competently govern. But how
can Lavalas accede to power without its historical leader? This is obviously
the horn of a dilemma. The more a political movement depends on the cha-
risma of one person, the more its institutionalization is likely to be delayed, but
institutionalization risks marginalizing the very leader who is the life blood of
the movement and without whom it may not survive.
Given the narrowness of the national tax base and Haiti’s vast needs, a demo-
cratically populist government would have to reach a truce with the Lilliputian
but moneyed elite (we are back to the idea of the democratic pact). This might
be possible, if the state, in exchange for collecting more taxes, undertakes to
provide public goods that benefit everyone (security, justice, infrastructure de-
velopment, refuse collection, etc.), in addition to delivering social goods tar-
geting the poor. These public policies would make the state credible in its
commitment and earn it legitimacy. The services that are easiest and cheapest
to provide (e.g., refuse collection), even by a failed state, might be prioritized,
to give the state immediate credibility. The state elite should also engage trans-
national Haiti, by granting diasporic Haitians the same rights as their national
compatriots. They could inject Haitian public administration with the human
resources it sorely lacks. The absence of competent local interlocutors impedes
the capacity of the Haitian bureaucracy to absorb foreign aid, forcing donors to
turn to nongovernmental organizations, which further undermine state capac-
ity. The Diaspora could help break this vicious circle.
Annual remittance from diasporic Haitians represents between one-fourth
and one-third of Haiti’s gross domestic product (GDP), which could substitute
for foreign aid. The transformation of a modest portion of transfer payments
into government bonds (diabonds), perhaps backed by international financial
institutions or bilateral donors, could net the state hundreds of millions in
hard currencies, which could finance universal and socially targeted projects.
Pro-poor policies could themselves be part of a new social contract between the
state and the poor, wherein, in exchange for various forms of state aid, recipients
agree to attend adult literacy and family planning programs, send their children
to school, use gas canisters instead of charcoal, plant trees, build and maintain
irrigation canals and feeder roads, repair and clean up urban streets and so on. I
have in mind here for Haiti the example of Bolsa Familia in B razil. Under this
program, the government provides monthly cash payments to poor families, in
return for having their children vaccinated and attend school. According to the
World Bank, 94% of Bolsa Familia funds reach the poorest 40% of the popu-
lation. In other words, the program is very effective at reaching beneficiaries.
Furthermore, ‘Studies prove that most of the money is used to buy food, school
supplies, and clothes for the children’ (World Bank n.d.). Thus, Bolsa Familia is
also effective in alleviating the most devastating effects of poverty (hunger and
malnutrition) and in paving the way for breaking the cycle of poverty.
Of course, Brazil has a working state and Haiti does not; Brazil is also much
richer than Haiti. Policy is more likely to succeed under conditions of state ca-
pacity and relative abundance. But Bolsa Familia also represents 0.046% of 1%
of social expenditures in Brazil. Assuming a somewhat heavier burden on the
Haitian treasury, a pro-poor program might be affordable, in spite of Haiti’s
penury. In 2016, Haiti mysteriously found 52 million US dollars to organize

elections in which less than 22% of Haitians actually voted. The problem in
Haiti is often not the lack of money, but rather the perennial misplacement of
priorities in the vain hope that decisions made this way will somehow turn out
right. (They never do.) Haiti may even have certain advantages over Brazil in
pursuing a Bolsa Familia–like policy. Brazil is a federal state where governors
are very powerful, especially those from the largest states. Brazil also has an
extreme multiparty system which makes policy coherence by the ruling co-
alition very difficult. Haiti is a unitary state with a strong executive branch.
Any Haitian president with a strong pro-poor program is more likely to be
impeded by business interests, lack of administrative capacity and corruption
than the normal checks and balances of the democratic process and (or) the
state machinery (e.g., federalism). In Haiti, like in Brazil, because the poor is
overwhelmingly dark skinned, pro-poor policies would have the further ef-
fect of decreasing color inequity. In many mature developed countries, state-
making, economic development, democracy and racial justice came roughly
in this sequence, and even then these projects remain incomplete and under
threat, requiring constant vigilance.
One Latin American country that has had impressive success in aligning
state-making, economic development and democracy (but not racial justice)
through the pact (or social compact) is the DR. The DR is literally the closest
country in Latin America with which Haiti can be compared, thereby helping
to refute the myth of Haitian exceptionalism. The next section examines the
recent political history of these two states sharing the island of Hispaniola. It
substantiates the main thesis of the chapter, namely, Haiti belongs to the region
(although not exclusively so).
Haiti and the Dominican Republic

For much of the 20th century, authoritarian rule prevailed on both sides of the
island. Economic development between Haiti and the DR was nearly equally
mediocre, although conditions in the latter were always attractive enough to
attract citizens of the former. The politics of color is even more virulent in
the DR than in Haiti, because of the Dominican elite’s instrumental use of
anti-Haitian sentiments to consolidate its power. Yet, the DR’s GDP is at least
five times larger than Haiti’s, whereas its democracy is consolidated, as reflected
in a series of national elections and peaceful transfers of power since 1996. The
DR’s score (0.715) on the United Nations Human Development Indicators in
2015 was much higher than Haiti’s (0.483), reflecting perhaps a government
preferential treatment for the poor.
Like Haiti, the DR embraced political modernization in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Before that, the Dominican political system could be described, at
best, as a spasmodic democracy lodged between lengthy periods of neo-sultanism
under Raphael Trujillo and the more Bonapartist authoritarianism of Joachim

Balaguer. The first has been defined as a regime in which ‘all individuals, groups
and institutions are permanently subject to the unpredictable and despotic in-
tervention of the sultan, and thus all pluralism is precarious’ (Linz and Stepan
1996). Marx provides a very astute definition of the second, which he viewed as
a regime in which a conservative leader undertakes limited reforms that may be
deleterious to the interest of a ruling class, in order to coopt the radical demands
of the subordinate classes. A Bonapartist state, therefore, requires a degree of
autonomy vis-à-vis all social forces, which allows it to reform the class system
without overturning class relations. Nevertheless, such a regime in develop-
ing countries is capable of promoting (limited) social change, unlike neo-
sultanism, which is all about maintaining the ruler in power. In this regard, the
Duvalier and Trujillo regimes were both neo-sultanic. On the other hand, al-
though all three were cut in the authoritarian mold of Latin A merica, Joachim
Balaguer was different from François and Jean-Claude D uvalier. Balaguer was
sufficiently ‘modern’ to set the DR on course that would facilitate success when
serious reform did come, even though he may not have been a serious reformer
himself and tried to hold it back in 1994. Subtle differences between countries
sometimes turn out to be determinant at critical historical junctures (Acemoglu
and Robinson 2012).
The difference, then, between Haiti and the DR is that whereas both coun-
tries started their transition to democracy roughly at the same time, the DR did
so at a much higher level of political and economic development than Haiti. In
fact, it can be argued that, except for the overthrow of Juan Bosch in 1963 and
the US invasion in 1965, the Dominican political and economic system had not
experienced the shock and decrepitude that its Haitian counterpart had suffered
since 1957 at the hands of the Duvaliers. In the DR, there was a weak but func-
tional state, which provided some social services; the Dominican armed forces
were at least semiprofessionalized and not the object of competition by an ir-
regular militia; corruption was rampant but ‘centralized’ around Balaguer and
his family, thus under some type of control. In contrast, the Duvalier regime
and its successors in Haiti provided practically no social services to the popu-
lation; the Haitian armed forces were in a state of advanced decay; corruption
was generalized, fueled by a drug trade, which allowed even low-level officers
and civil servants to live high on officially meager and irregular salaries. The
Duvalier legacy was probably the worse starting point from which any country
could attempt to transition to democracy.
Beginning in the 1970s, the DR had also experienced a spectacular trans-
formation of its economy from a producer of tropical cash crops (sugar, co-
coa, coffee and tobacco) to mining, light manufacturing and tourism. Thus,
the value of traditional cash crop exports decreased from 1.8 billion USD in
1981 to 530 million USD in 1993 (Hartlyn 1998). This decline was nearly
fully compensated for by revenues from tourism alone, which increased from
368.2 million USD in 1985 to 1.5 billion in 1992 (Betances 1995). In 1984,
Grupo Puntacana built the Punta Cana International Airport, the first
privately owned infrastructure of this type in the Caribbean. Dominican en-
trepreneurs became less dependent on state patronage and more on innovation
and risk-taking for capital accumulation, two features that remain foreign to
the Haitian bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, direct foreign investment (DFI) was at
the heart of the development of the mining sector. Globalization has political
ramifications. The DR’s integration in the world economy as a primary com-
modity producer – the DR held tightly to its sugar quota by the US Congress
even as its economy was becoming more diversified – mineral exporter, and
tourist destination gave external actors (e.g., the US, Canada, the European
Union [EU]) a significant voice in Dominican politics and made the local elite
a partner in political change.
In sum, the interests of the Dominican bourgeoisie and foreign capital con-
verged around maintaining a stable political environment conducive to private
local capital flow and DFI, which together fueled economic growth, and if that
entailed a kind of democracy in the post–Cold War world order, when authori-
tarian rulers had suddenly become toxic, then so be it. Haiti was ‘integrated’ in
the world economy, too, but primarily as an importer of foodstuff for its grow-
ing population amidst environmental degradation and agricultural stagnation.
Haiti was a destination neither for foreign capital nor for tourists. The Haitian
bourgeoisie made money from the misery of the Haitian people, not their pros-
perity. It had a greater interest in maintaining kleptocratic government that
granted it monopoly protection than in supporting democracy. External actors
did not find a partner in the Haitian ruling class as they did across the border.
Not once but twice, in fact, the Haitian economic elite would play a key role in
overthrowing a mildly progressive elected government (Lavalas). Pretransition
differences between Haiti and the DR blew the political destiny of the two
countries wide open.
Finally, this touches directly on a key argument of the chapter – that is, the
transterritoriality of the nation-state – diasporic Dominicans, especially those in
New York City, were (are) involved in the affairs of the homeland in ways and
on a scale that favor(ed) democracy. The DR gives transnational Dominicans
full citizenship rights, Haiti fudges the issue, paying lip service to the political
enfranchisement of diasporic Haitians but being much more interested in their
transfer payment. Through remittance diasporic Dominicans funnel billions of
dollars to the DR (3.8 billion USD in 2015), which the government has been
loathe to see reduced, because of an expected negative impact on the country’s
foreign currency reserves. Diasporic Haitians are prolific in this area, too, but,
at 1.3 billion USD in 2015, the size of their transfer is nearly three times smaller
than that of their Dominican counterparts, although the much smaller size of
the Haitian economy (10 billion USD vs. 50 billion USD in the DR) may ac-
tually mean that Haitian remittance has a greater impact on Haiti’s economy.
The shadow of diasporic Dominicans loomed very large in the crisis oppos-
ing Balaguer and Pena Gomez in 1993–1994, both of whom had, in fact, been
transnational Dominicans themselves. Exile often imparts unto those who have
experienced it an outlook they may not have obtained if they had never left the
homeland. Ironically, it also brings people together as much as it divides them.
Fluidity in the exchange of ideas, money and space between transnational and
national Dominicans, and, every importantly, mastery of a common language
by the protagonists, may have facilitated communication and the emergence
of compromise. By contrast, the insular, almost schizophrenic, policy of the
Duvalier dynasty toward diasporic Haitians, many of whom did not set foot
in Haiti for decades, meant that in the aftermath of the collapse of the regime
transnational and national Haitians – in other words, global Haiti – were really
strangers to one another (this was of course before the Internet and mobile te-
lephony). The distance was exemplified most prominently in the Anglicization
of Kreyòl by Haitian exiles in the US, which became a source of bemusement,
if not risibility, of the Diaspora as it attempted to insert itself in the post-
Duvalier body politic. There was much resistance by national Haitians, who
feared that the incorporation of their transnational compatriots in the country’s
affairs would be at their detriment (the effect of the limited pie). This exacer-
bated the gap between transnationalism and state-making. In contrast, in the
DR transnational, Dominicans were very much equal to national Domini-
cans in citizenship status. The government even facilitated chartered flights, so
transnational Dominicans in New York City could fly to the homeland, vote
on Election Day and return to their adopted land all in the same day. Simply
put, in the DR, transnationalism fostered a kind of cosmopolitan democracy,
which could counter the more nativist authoritarian impulses of Balaguer.
Transnationalism also enhanced state performance, by infusing fresh talent in
the public administration and facilitating the free flow of ideas through think
tanks in New York City universities and the DR. In Haiti under the Duvaliers,
the policy of exit with no return precluded the infusion of modern ideas in the
political culture.
In spite of the aforementioned positive developments, democracy in the DR
almost did not happen in 1994, as Joachim Balaguer of the Social Christian
Reformist Party (Partido Reformista Social Cristiano) tried to cling to power after
an election that, even by Dominican standards, was marred by profound irreg-
ularities. For example, at least 200,000 voters mysteriously disappeared from
the voting rolls, mostly supporters of Francisco Pena Gomez, then the main
opposition leader and candidate of the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD).
Transition outcomes are determined by a combination of three things: struc-
tural conditions (already discussed), contingencies, in other words, momentary
situations, which provide windows of opportunities that can quickly close, and,
concomitantly, decisions made by key actors in the interstice of the first two
(such as, e.g. whether to sign a pact). Prodemocracy contingencies in the DR
essentially consisted of popular pressure applied by Francisco Pena Gomez and

the PRD through massive street protests in the capital, Santo Domingo, where
Pena Gomez had been mayor from 1982 to 1986, and international pressure
from the Organization of American States, the EU, Canada, and the US whose
citizens supplied the lion’s share of tourists to the DR. A travel advisory (or, in
the extreme, outright ban) by the authorities in these countries could bring the
burgeoning tourism industry, if not the entire economy via a boomerang effect,
to a standstill.
In between the structural conditions and the contingencies stood D ominican
actors, who had to decide how to manage (in fact, end) the street protests,
occasional violence and international pressure in ways that would not harm
the gains previously made in the economy. Dominicans, specifically elite
Dominicans, were the most significant actors responsible for democracy in the
DR. Interestingly, in the conflict opposing Joachim Balaguer and Francisco
Pena Gómez in 1994, a coup by the Dominican military was never seriously
contemplated as a solution imposed from above, as might have been expected
previously in the DR or contemporarily in Haiti. By the early 1990s, in spite
of the travails of democracy, the DR military had been sufficiently reformed
to formally stay out of politics. It probably did not hurt that the institution had
been taken care of by Balaguer, albeit in ways that were not always licit, and the
US so that the military had a greater interest in a peaceful resolution to the con-
flict, rather than having to manage the risks of a direct takeover. The key local
actors in the Dominican drama, such as incumbent Joachim Balaguer, chal-
lenger Francisco Pena Gomez, the bourgeoisie, the military and the Catholic
Church, were nearly unanimous that political stability and a capital-friendly
environment could not be sacrificed, thus Pacto por la Democracia (translation
is hardly needed here), which was the actual name of the agreement between
Balaguer and Pena Gomez (Pierre Etienne 2011).
Under the pact, Balaguer was able to stay in power but had to cut his term
in office by two years. In other words, there was no brutal end to the postelec-
toral conflict between Balaguer and Pena Gomez, which might have catapulted
Dominican society into more uncertainty. The pact provided an orderly way
out, wherein the two protagonists partly obtained what they wanted. Balaguer
remained in office, whereas Pena Gomez would have another go at his nemesis
in two, rather than four, years. In essence, the pact created a cooling off pe-
riod during which, significantly, new alliances could also be formed. In other
words, and I concede this was probably more of an unintended consequence
of the pact as opposed to a planned outcome, by extending the end of the con-
flict over a period of years, new actors could enter the fray and reshuffle the
proverbial deck. Balaguer, then 87 years old and practically blind and deaf, was
thought to be especially amenable to being eased out by younger rivals. The
pact also led to constitutional reforms forbidding consecutive terms for incum-
bents and allowing elections to go into a second round in case no candidate
obtained more than 50% of the votes during the first round. The latter reform
would prove particularly fateful for Pena Gomez.
The terms Pacto por la Democracia were clear and balanced, and the conse-
quences for violation dire for the actors and the Dominican economy. As a
result, the pact was largely respected. Balaguer ended his term in 1996, and
his nemesis, Pena Gomez, won a plurality of the votes in the first round of the
election held that year, but not an outright majority to avoid a second round.
Balaguer, the old fox (El Viejo Zorro), then threw his support behind Leonel
Fernandez of the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), the brain trust of another
nemesis: Juan Bosch. Leonel Fernandez then went on to win the presidency
in 1996, Pena Gomez expired two years later in 1998, Juan Bosch joined him
in the sepulture in 2001, and Balaguer bowed out last in 2002. A better script
could not have been written by the best writers in Hollywood. The Dominican
political class was rejuvenated by a coincidence of agency, structure and Father
Time. The one blemish was (is) race.
Electoral democracy in the DR in the 1990s was essentially consecrated on
the altar of antagonism toward Pena Gomez’s Haitian ancestry and skin color.
There is no plausible explanation, other than race, to Balaguer’s support for the
PLD in 1996, given Balaguer’s personal history. The election itself was marred
by open appeals to race and Haitian fear mongering, including the enduring ca-
nard that Pena Gomez had a secret plan to unify the entire island under Haitian
leadership. The fallout between Pena Gomez and Juan Bosch, which led to the
split between the PRD and PLD in 1973, may be attributed to differences in the
political ambitions of the two men, but race, more likely than not, was a factor
as well. But race in the DR, although important in and of itself, is intertwined
with ethnicity and ancestry, in the same way that skin color in Haiti, while
also determining on its own, is also enmeshed with nonepidermic consider-
ations. Conceivably, a dark-skinned person with no demonstrable kinship to
Haiti could come to power in the DR. In fact, Leonel Fernandez has more overt
Negroid features than many light-skinned Haitians, but the lack of an ancestral
link to Haiti easily earned him the support of Balaguer and Bosch over Pena
Gomez in 1996, propelling him to the presidency. This underscores the need for
a nuanced (nonbiological) view of race and color, as I have insisted throughout
the chapter. On the other hand, it remains an open question whether a strongly
dark-skinned person and firebrand in the ideological mold of Pena Gomez in
the DR could ever be given the benefit of zero ancestral connection to Haiti by
political opponents, thus clearing the path to the presidency. This is where race
remains strictly about race while also being about other things political.
Conclusion
This chapter has tried to dispel the myth of Haitian exceptionalism, while propos-
ing a rethinking of the nation-state and region primarily as social constructions.
Other than the Haitian revolution itself, which remains the only success-
ful slave rebellion in modern history leading to the founding of a state, the
Haitian experience is fairly typical of societies born of colonialism old and new:
extreme exploitation of natives up to and including total decimation, followed
by the importation of foreign labor (i.e., slaves in the New World); enclave
production systems with an external orientation, such as cash-crop plantations,
light-assembly industrial parks and tourist resorts in the Caribbean; a Creole
elite epidermically distinct from the masses, but with possibilities of penetration
by comprador elements; a history of authoritarian rule personified in caudillos,
caciques, ‘classic’ military dictators, neo-sultans, Bonapartists, demagogues and
so on, interrupted by periods of democratic governance; extreme social in-
equality resulting in a tendency for democracy to metamorphose into popu-
lism, producing, in turn, elite reaction in the form of the coup d’état; challenge
to the ideological hegemony and conservatism of the Roman Catholic clergy
by basal religious orders, charismatic protestant sects and independent churches
in the late 20th century; globalization, which results in the transcendence of
the borders of the nation-state but at the same time consolidates national iden-
tities (thus transnationalism); and the shadow of US imperium throughout
the region.
There is no country in Latin America that is not influenced by at least some
of the aforementioned factors to one degree or another. Local agents operate
in the interstice of structural challenges to craft responses or social construc-
tions that may be different from one geography (space) to another, but this
hardly precludes the reasonable presumption of a collective identity (region),
inasmuch as there is also a shared past and present running through these social
constructions. Thus, the struggle for racial justice in Brazil becomes the strug-
gle for color justice in Haiti, but the two forms of struggle are rooted in the
t ransatlantic slave trade. These two social constructions (Brazil and Haiti) have
differing capacity for handling challenges. Brazil has the resources to mount a
credible assault on racial injustice, but historically the Brazilian elite and the
masses have denied that their country has a race problem, hence the absence
of agency and urgency. Haiti has attempted to address color inequality (at least
rhetorically) at various points in its history, but lacks the resources, the state and
the social contract (or pact), in other words, the institutions, to significantly
improve the squalor of the dark-skinned masses. The same causes often produce
different effects, depending on the social context.
Haiti and the DR have a history of authoritarian rule, and they started
their latest transition to democracy at roughly the same time, but the two
countries have experienced different transition outcomes, not least because
of pretransition differences in regime subtypes (Bonapartism in the DR,
neo-sultanism in Haiti), economic performance, quality of governance
(a weak but functional state in the DR, a failed state in Haiti with almost no
capacity to perform the basic functions of statehood) and an economic elite
sensitive to economic growth linked to foreign capital rather than dependent

on state patronage. In the end, it can be confidently asserted that the chal-
lenges facing Latin America are simply magnified in Haiti for the secular
reasons elucidated throughout the chapter. The Haitian miasma can be dissi-
pated by sound analysis. There is no reason, then, to study Haiti in isolation
from its neighbors near and far.
Note
1 Dessalines and Pétion, of course, were, respectively, Black and Mulatto soldiers
during the revolutionary war. Dessalines became emperor in 1804. Pétion became
president of western Haiti in 1807, as the country was split after Dessalines’s death
between a northern kingdom ruled by Henry Christophe and Pétion’s western
Republic.
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6
Black Feminist Formations
in the Dominican Republic
since La Sentencia
April J. Mayes
La Sentencia tiene cara de mujer, Altagracia Jean Joseph tells me as we finish our
interview in her apartment in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (DR).1 La
Sentencia, as it is known throughout activist circles in the DR and abroad, refers
to the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal’s decision, emitted in S eptember
2013, to revoke the birthright citizenship of over 200,000 people whom the
Tribunal determined had been born to parents ‘in transit’ dating back to 1929
(TC/0168-13). The Tribunal’s judgment affirmed the change to jus sanguinis
nationality, defined in the 2010 Dominican Constitution as only belong-
ing to children born to Dominican-citizen parents, either in the country or
abroad. The Tribunal confirmed that those ‘in transit’ included the hundreds
of thousands of Dominicans2 born to Haitian-immigrant parents who lacked
documentation and had been resident in the country.
Whereas the international, activist press and some human rights organiza-
tions focused exclusively on the ruling’s racist, anti-Haitian bias, Jean Joseph and
other activists I interviewed for this chapter emphasized the decision’s g ender
politics as well. La Sentencia, they insisted, ‘has a woman’s face’ because since
the 2000s, political elites aligned with the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana
(Dominican Liberation Party, PLD) have exercised a monopoly over immigra-
tion law and have created ‘an official exclusionist project’ through the deploy-
ment of both anti-Haitianism and gender-based discrimination (Kristensen and
Wooding 2013, 4). La Sentencia then is the culmination of procedural changes
that have occurred throughout the 2000s designed to keep Haitian migrants,
their children and their grandchildren in a persistent, vulnerable state, which
also facilitates their continued exploitation as laborers and their exclusion from
the Dominican body politic. That La Sentencia ‘has a woman’s face’ draws
attention to the specific ways that Black women, especially Black mothers, in
the DR are targeted by migration policy, suggesting that remedies for this crisis
140 April J. Mayes
must occur along multiple axes, addressing the institutionalized racism and sex-
ism within Dominican immigration policy (see Crenshaw 1989; Shoaff 2017).
In response to this, and for other reasons, that I will elaborate in this chap-
ter, the Black-identified women who lead the social movement in favor of
Haitian migrants’ human rights and who advocate for the citizenship rights of
their Dominican-born children have become the ideological and theoretical
architects of an intersectional approach in their protest against La Sentencia.
Building on their activist and personal experiences, in combination with the
work and theorizing of Sonia Pierre (1963–2011), the founder of Movimiento
de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana (Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women,
MUDHA), their theory of Dominican citizenship demands gender-specific
justice and validating Blackness; in effect, elevating intersectionality and inter-
culturality (interculturalidad) as foundations for a renewed Dominican national-
ity and citizenship.3 Their testimonios4 reflect strong commitments to creating a
robust, meaningful citizenship for all Dominicans.
I argue that their advocacy for immigrants’ rights and anti-racist, anti-sexist
citizenship constitutes Black feminist practice. Therefore, in addition to the
pain, trauma, physical dislocation and terror that La Sentencia has produced
hundreds of thousands of people, a unique political space has opened within
Dominican civil society and this space, it is argued, is Black and feminist. In
a situation where it is unlikely that the current government will overturn the
Tribunal’s decision, Black feminist activists in the DR are recreating Dominican
civil society, insisting that protecting immigrants’ rights requires paying atten-
tion to Black women’s experience and to their demands for change.
White Nation, Black Labor

One might find it surprising, even blasphemous, to argue that Black feminism
exists in the DR, a country infamous for its official anti-Black, anti-Haitian
rhetoric. Like many republics throughout the Americas, Dominican intellec-
tuals, social scientists and political elites constructed a nationalist narrative on
the edifice of deeply held mythologies about the racially harmonious legacies
of Spanish colonialism and Dominican racial democracy. Narratives of racial
democracy in the DR, as elsewhere, were most often anti-Black and when not
explicitly anti-Black, made the acknowledgment of racial difference anathema
to national unity. Throughout the 19th century, Dominican political and intel-
lectual elites drew from a diverse range of ideas regarding the Dominican na-
tion. Intellectual elites’ ideas regarding Dominicans’ proximity to W hiteness,
near-Whiteness or to non-Whiteness varied, often complementing their
arguments about how Dominicans’ ethno-racial composition undermined the
national project (Martínez-Vergne 2005, 28).
For example, in the 1850s and again in the 1870s, when political elites in
the US considered annexing the DR to the US, Dominican politicians and
Black Feminist Formations 141
their US-based supporters argued for Dominicans’ whiteness in opposition to

Haitians’ Blackness. However, after the War of Restoration (1863–1865) from
Spanish Rule (1861–1865), when Puerto Plata became a major base of support
for Cuban and Puerto Rican anti-colonial insurgents, Pan-Antillean activists
such as General Gregorio Luperón (1839–1897) insisted on Caribbean historical
unity and elevated racial mixture as a positive good for a Caribbean-wide, in-
dependence project. Yet, even this forward-looking, radical idea elevated racial
harmony as a Hispanic cultural value. Worse still, some Dominicans in the
19th century advocated an ideal of racial mixture in which they denied the
presence of African ancestry among Dominicans while arguing for its funda-
mental and negative presence among Haitians, the ‘Black Republic’. In this
view, Dominicans were a mixed-race people, but they were fundamentally
European and Indian, an Indo-Hispanic nation (Candelario 2005; Mayes 2014;
Reyes-Santos 2015).
Some Dominican elites’ adherence to anti-Black, racial democracy is not in
itself unique in the broader story of race and nation in the Americas. There are,
however, a few historical and geographical realities that make the Dominican
story quite different. First, the country’s proximity to Haiti, Haiti’s rise as ‘the
Black Republic’ in the New World, and constant warfare between the two
countries provided negrophobic Dominican intellectuals with a nearby and
well-known enemy onto which the anxieties and failures of the Dominican
national project were amply projected. Haiti and Haitians were convenient
scapegoats for the challenges of Dominican nation-state formation. Then, as
Silvio Torres-Saillant (2000) argues, the absence of ‘racial self-assertion’ (1091)
among African-descended Dominicans, a product of ‘a deracialized social con-
sciousness whose origins date back to the fall of the plantation economy in
colonial times’, allowed the vilest, negrophobic ideologues to assume discur-
sive hegemony over Dominican national identity (1094). A final contributing
factor was US economic intervention and military occupation of the entire
island, which helped solidify Dominicans’ racial distance and difference from
Haitians. US military officials and diplomats treated Dominican ‘mixed-race
Indios (Indians)’ much differently than they treated ‘Black’ Haitians. As Ginetta
Candelario (2005) has argued, the ideological displacement of Blackness onto
Haitians through the articulation and celebration of Dominican Indigenous-
ness and Whiteness is best understood in relation to US imperialism in the
Caribbean region (36).
Indeed, US commercial expansion into the Caribbean and military occu-
pation of the island also established a pattern of Haitian migration to the DR,
consolidating the presence of Haitians in Dominican agriculture, especially in
the sugar industry. Mechanized sugar production fully developed in the DR in
the last quarter of the 19th century and, with it, demand for cheap laborers. For
most mill owners and sugarcane cultivators (Colonos), Dominicans proved an
expensive workforce because they could not be as easily controlled as foreign
142 April J. Mayes
workers. Dominican peasants were also unreliable laborers because access to

land gave them enough leverage to negotiate the terms of their labor power and
resist the allure of their proletarianization (LeGrand 1995, 567).
As a result of their inability to keep Dominicans working in cane, sugar
estate managers recruited Black workers from the English-speaking colonies
because they were desperate for work and they came with experience in cane
cultivation and sugar refining; many of them had also trained as bookkeepers,
train operators, mechanics and engineers. For example, Hugh Kelley IV, who
managed his family-owned Porvenir Sugar Estate into the 1940s, preferred
hiring English-speaking British West Indians in lower management positions
because, as he put it, ‘they were the ones running the place. They were the
ones who showed me the ball’ (Humberto García Muñíz Interview with Hugh
Kelly 1991). With the US occupation (Haiti: 1915–1934; Dominican Republic:
1916–1924), the relationship between Haitians and sugarcane labor not only
grew but it became institutionalized. US military governors in both countries
created the legal mechanisms and contractual arrangements by which sugar
companies recruited Haitian workers to labor during the zafra, sugar harvest,
and then return home once the season ended. By the 1930s, Haitian laborers
comprised the majority of workers in Dominican cane fields; once the harvest
ended, many moved around the country, working as seasonal laborers in other
areas of Dominican export agriculture, such as bananas and cacao (del Castillo
1978, 1985; Bryan 1985; Martínez 1999; Mayes 2014; Hintzen 2014).
The sugar estates’ hiring preferences, combined with assistance from US
military governments to facilitate labor migration, created a hierarchical,
three-tiered labor regime. Descendants and widows of Eng lish-speaking
workers whom I interviewed in the 1990s told me that company managers
openly practiced racial and ethnic segregation and discrimination. In C onsuelo
Sugar Estate, for example, the racial and ethnic hierarchies found in the work-
force were replicated in housing. As Don Luís showed me around Consuelo,
one afternoon, he noted that US managers resided in the best homes on one
side of Consuelo’s housing compound that also included houses for (White)
Cuban and Puerto Rican upper-level employees. Cocolo (British West Indian)
engineers, mechanics and administrators lived opposite their White counter-
parts in smaller, but decent homes. Cane cutters, comprised in the majority
by Haitians, some Cocolos, and a few Dominicans, lived in the inadequate
and neglected housing in the middle of the cane fields (Bateyes) (April Mayes
Interview with Marrero Aristy 1998 [1939]).
The historical evidence shows that anti-Black racism targeted cane w
orkers –
whether they were Haitian or not – and that labor practices which were insti-
tutionalized during the US occupation of both Haiti and the DR transformed
anti-Blackness and anti-Haitianism from the ideological fodder of a small group
of elites based in Santo Domingo into something else. What that ‘something
else’ became is still debated among specialists. Thus far, scholars have shown
that discriminatory policies against Haitians enabled labor coercion and

exploitation in the sugar industry by keeping Haitians on sugar estates (Martínez
1999; Hintzen 2016). Scholarship has also demonstrated that anti-Black ethnic
nationalism has been an elite- and state-driven project of national consolida-
tion through the creation of Haitians as biological and economic threats to the
nation, prior to and during General Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship (1930–1961)
(Sagás 2000; Simmons 2009; Cadeau 2015; Wright 2015). Other research ar-
gues that anti-Haitianism has been sustained within Dominican institutions,
such as museums (Candelario 2005); or within development policy (Howard
2007); fortified in language and popular notions regarding color and identity
(Hoetink 1967; Howard 2001; Valdez 2015); and persists in contemporary intel-
lectual production (Guilamo 2013). One especially brutal and violent outcome
of state-driven anti-Haitianism, which also received sanction from local politi-
cal brokers and assistance from average Dominicans, was the Haitian Massacre,
ordered by General Rafael Trujillo in October 1937. B etween October 2 and
October 8, Dominican military, local police forces and citizens killed between
6,000 and 25,000 Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent; many died while
they were trying to cross the border into Haiti (Hintzen 2016; Paulino 2016).
That the majority of the massacre’s victims may have been women and chil-
dren has led Ginetta Candelario (2016) to argue that Black-identified women
and their children ‘embodied a future the patriarchal [Trujillo] state wanted
to purge from the Hispanic, C atholic and administratively indigenized body
politic’ (110).
The Politics of Dominican Anti-Haitianism

The Haitian massacre of 1937 marked the nadir of the Dominican state’s deal-
ings with Haitian migrants and buttressed General Rafael Trujillo’s broader
efforts to wrest control of the border zone away from local agents, bring the
border’s residents more firmly under the rule of the nation-state, and force-
fully insinuate the state into the sugar industry. Just before and certainly after
the Haitian massacre, the regime’s ideologues worked steadily to whitewash
Dominican history, cultural traditions and language in an effort to demonstrate
the massacre’s genesis in the history of conflict between the two nations and as
a result of the racial differences and distance between Dominicans and Haitians
(Turits and Derby 1993; Turits 2002).
The massacre’s devastating effects on communities and families on both sides
of the border did not end Haitian migration to the DR, although it significantly
diminished the number of Haitians workers in Dominican sugarcane fields.
The Dominican and Haitian governments signed binational labor agreements
in 1952 and 1959 (CIDH 2015, 59). Labor scarcity into the 1940s and 1950s
may have given Haitian migrant laborers some leverage to negotiate with sugar
estate managers. Managers on the Canadian-owned Ozama sugar estate, for
144 April J. Mayes
example, reported that Haitian workers asked the administration for permission
to return to Haiti once the season ended. The administrators initially believed
that the workers, hearing rumors that police were coming to the estate, wor-
ried that they would become targets of increased anti-Haitianism. However,
the Canadians learned that after they had accepted the Haitian workers’
requests for repatriation, the laborers had persuaded the Haitian consul in
Santo Domingo to sell them their work permits and had gone elsewhere
in the Dominican Republic, seeking work.
A more common outcome, to be sure, was that labor scarcity and Trujillo
era nationalist sentiment encouraged sugar estate administrators to assert even
more control over Haitians. In 1955, the same Ozama administrators forcibly
deported Haitian labor organizers (LeGrand 1995, 567 and 575).
After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, his personal holdings in Dominican
sugar were restructured into the Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (State Sugar Council,
CEA). The CEA paid USD$1 million to President François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier
(1957–1971) and USD$3 million to his son and successor, Jean Claude ‘Baby
Doc’ Duvalier (1971–1986), annually, in exchange for providing Haitians with
labor contracts to work in the DR (Khan 2010, 121). Samuel Martínez (1999)
argues that these contracts,
gave employers and Dominican security agents new coercive powers. By

legally committing a bracero to work only for the employer who paid the
passage from Haiti, the contract handed the security forces a standing jus-
tification for forcibly relocating Haitian immigrants to the sugar estates.
(74–75)
The agreements between the CEA and the Duvaliers were supposed to provide
workers with certain protections and benefits, such as livable accommodations,
access to schooling for their children, transportation, medical insurance, wages
and a pension. Yet, while the CEA paid millions to the Duvaliers, Haitian
workers were left without their promised wages, pensions, accommodations
and transportation. Many Haitians remained living in sugar estates Bateyes be-
cause they were too poor to return to Haiti or because prospects for employ-
ment were better in the DR (Ferguson 2003, 8–11). One significant outcome
of this scheme was the increased violence experienced by Haitian workers on
both sides of the border. Dominican security forces used coercion, corruption
and violence to compel Haitians to leave their country and then to leave the
DR when the season ended (Martínez 1999, 75).
The cash payments to the corrupt Duvalier regime, combined with the
v iolence and mistreatment of Haitian workers and their families living in
Bateyes, caught the attention of international observers who characterized
Haitian labor in the DR as a form of modern-day slavery. In 1979, the Anti-

Slavery Society of London embraced the cause of Haitian workers employed
at the Rio Haina sugar mill on the heels of accusations that the Dominican
m ilitary, probably at the behest of the mill owners and managers, refused to
allow Haitian workers to return to their homes in Haiti. The New York-based
National Coalition for Haitian Refugees persuaded Americas Watch to in-
vestigate (Martínez 2014, 183). As reports spread about deportations of Hai-
tian workers at the end of the sugar season in 1980, the Anti-Slavery Society,
among other human rights organizations, presented a case to the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, thus transforming Haitian labor migration
to the DR into a human rights crisis. The 1980s also witnessed the release of
two films, Bitter Sugar (1981) and Sugar and Modern Slavery (1987), that moti-
vated calls for boycotts of Dominican sugar given the horrible conditions of life
in sugar estate Bateyes (Ferguson 2003, 11). International activism on Haitian
workers’ behalf culminated in 1990 when the UN Human Rights Committee,
A mericas Watch and the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees urged the
US to withdraw trade benefits from the DR to force the Dominican state to
change its policies regarding Haitian labor migration to the country, depor-
tation and working conditions. In September 1990, US media outlets such as
the Miami Herald called for a boycott of Dominican sugar to end what many
considered slavery in the DR (Wucker 2000, 109–110; 130–131).
The political uses of Haitians by Dominican political parties only in-
creased international critique. The mid-1980s were times of immense finan-
cial hardship and economic and political turmoil in the DR (as they were in
Haiti). Dominican political parties, such as the PLD, the Partido Revolucionario
Dominicano (Dominican Revolutionary Party, PRD), and the Partido Reformista
Social Cristiano (Social Christian Reformist Party, PRSC), used anti-Haitianism
as a tool of distraction while they implemented unpopular economic policies.
For example, during the Dominican debt crisis of the 1980s, President A ntonio
Guzman Fernández (PRD) ordered the deportation of Haitian workers from
sugar estates at the end of the sugar season at a time when labor unions, com-
munity associations and peasant organizations protested increased taxes and

lowered state subsidies on basic food items, gas and cooking oil. In 1984 and
1985, in the midst of riots over food shortages, President Joaquín Balaguer
(PRSC) also trotted out anti-Haitian policies. Then, in 1991, President
Balaguer deported approximately 14,000 Haitians (40,000 left to avoid vio-
lence) (Wucker 2000, 132–137).
During the election year of 1996, the PLD forged an alliance with Balaguer’s
party and with the far-right, xenophobic party, the Fuerza Nacional Progresista
(National Progressive Force, FNP) to guarantee a victory in the presiden-
tial elections. One consequence of this unholy trinity was the exploitation of
anti-Haitian racism as a campaign strategy against its main political rival, the
PRD. As a result, the PRD’s candidate, Francisco Peña Gómez, the son of
146 April J. Mayes
Haitians killed during the massacre, became the target of racist assaults. PLD
activists also claimed that Peña Gómez, in league with the Haitian government,
encouraged voter fraud by allowing undocumented Haitians resident in the
DR to vote for the PRD. PLD presidential candidate, Leonel Fernández, won
that election. Since then, with the exception of one term, from 2000 to 2004,
the PLD has maintained political power (Sagás 2000).
President Leonel Fernández (1996–2000; 2004–2012) and his successor,
Danilo Medina (2012-present), left the question of Haitian migration in the
hands of the far-right parties, the PRSC and the FNP. From 2004 until 2014,
the PRSC’s leader, Carlos Morales Troncoso, ran the Foreign Ministry whereas
José Ricardo Taveras, of the FNP, held the reins of power over the M igration
Directorate. As Leiv Marsteintredet (2014) argues, right-wing political elites
have mobilized in an effort to ‘regain control over the citizenship regime’
they believe the government has ceded and lost to international human rights
courts (73). The DR’s right to define the boundaries of citizenship and access
to nationality enjoys broad consensus among all major parties. Most import-
ant, Marsteintredet shows, ‘over time, and building on historical anti-Haitian
sentiment and discrimination, the legal-institutional conflict between the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights and domestic institution[s] was raised
from lower-ranking institutions to the highest national authorities’ (82).
Right-wing politicians have gained control over key state institutions and
used their power to shape migration policy and define citizenship and Dominican
nationality. Their hegemony is evidenced in the significant and far-reaching
changes in migration laws and administrative procedures that have character-
ized migration policy since the early 2000s. Scholars and activists alike agree
that the ministries’ assertive postures are direct responses to the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights, its decisions in favor of plaintiffs of Haitian ancestry,
and to the local, grassroots campaigns that pushed this legal agenda.
As attention turned to the plight of Haitian workers in Dominican sugar-
cane fields in the 1990s, a number of institutions, including Dominican-based
groups, turned to the international court system for recourse. MUDHA,
working with law clinics based at the University of California Berkeley and at
Columbia University, brought their first case to the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights in 1998. That case, Yean and Bosico v. the Dominican R epublic, cen-
tered on the right of Dominican nationality for two children, Dilcia Yean and
Violeta Bosico, both born in the DR to Dominican-born mothers who were
also of Haitian ancestry. In 1997, these mothers, accompanied by a lawyer from
MUDHA, went to the local civil registrar’s office to request their daughters’
birth certificates. Their applications were denied and then their access to the
documents rendered impossible once the official required that the women pro-
vide Haitian national identity and electoral cards (Adamson 2007, 67; Martínez
2011, 65). The Inter-American Court found that the Dominican government’s
‘in-transit’ clause was too vague and undermined the girls’ human right to
birthright nationality. Finding in favor of the children, the Inter-American

Court finalized the case in 2005 and 2006, calling on the Dominican govern-
ment to accept Yean and Bosico as Dominican nationals.
The political consensus to regain control over the right to determine the
boundaries of nationality and citizenship went into full effect even before
the court rendered its decision in the girls’ favor. A key component of this
was the General Law on Migration passed in August 2004, before the Inter-
American Court announced its ruling. Leiv Marsteintredet (2014) claims that
the 2004 Law was the first legal development in Dominican migration legisla-
tion since 1939 (82). The 2004 General Law on Migration (Law 285-4) created
a distinction between resident migrants whose children could access Domini-
can citizenship and nonresident migrants whose children could not: ‘The law
thus expanded the definition of ‘transit’ from a maximum of ten days stay in
the 1939 Migration Law to being a non-resident migrant, which [included]
temporary workers and undocumented migrants’ (83). Once the Inter-A merican
Court announced its ruling, the Dominican senate passed a nonbinding reso-
lution rejecting the court’s decision and the Supreme Court of Justice, later the
Constitutional Tribunal, ruled to defy the Inter-A merican Court’s decision
by upholding migration legislation that denied D ominican-born children of
foreign-born parents their right to citizenship.
Over the next two years, the Central Election Board ( Junta Central
E lectoral, JCE) implemented procedures that made the Migration Law of 2004
retroactive and deepened its exclusive effects. During his term as president
of the plenary of the JCE in 2006, Roberto Rosario, a PLD party insider,
issued Circular 17. Circular 17 defined as ‘irregular’ all those civil registra-
tions made by foreign-born parents who had not been able to d emonstrate
their legal status in the country at the moment of their children’s birth.
It, therefore, charged civil registries to revise all birth certificates issued,
upon request, by citizens. The following year, Judge Castaños Guzmán, who
defended the Dominican government in the Inter-A merican Court, used
his term as president of the plenary of the JCE to issue Resolution 12–2007,
suspending ‘the reissuing of fresh copies of the Acta de Nacimiento to
any person whose documents demonstrated any sign of irregularities in
the past, and ordered the purge of these persons from the civil registry’
( Marsteintredet 2014, 84).
The most pernicious elements of the General Law on Migration further
institutionalized gender-based discrimination against migrant Haitian and
Dominican women of Haitian ancestry, especially mothers. This occurred
at various levels. First, while fathers may register their children at the civil
registry, they often choose not to do so because they must appear with the
mother’s documentation, in addition to their own. Sometimes, authorities
refuse to allow fathers to declare their children, forcing mothers to register
their children, but if the mother lacks documentation or, as provided under the
148 April J. Mayes
provisions of the General Law on Migration, if officials question the mother’s

status as a legal resident, they can deny her children Dominican nationality and
demand that she surrender the documentation she has until further notice. This
particular feature of the law most directly opposed the Inter-American Human
Rights Court demand that the parents’ status should not affect the child’s claim
to Dominican nationality.
Second, Article 28 of the law required hospital staff to determine the legal
and residential status of mothers who gave birth in Dominican hospitals. If
hospital personnel suspected that the mother was foreign-born (i.e., H aitian),
she received a differently colored certificate of live birth (Constancia de
Nacimiento). The law ordered migration authorities to regularly inspect health
centers to make sure doctors and nurses adhered to the provision. From the
outset, researchers noted that,
it is common for health personnel, who are not sensitized about this is-
sue, to assume that the mother lacks [Dominican] nationality or is a legal
m igrant based on the color of her skin, her accent, or her last name. [This]
constitutes gender- and ethnic-racial discrimination
(OBMICA and Open Society 2013, 3–4)
Jenny Morón Reyes of MUDHA explained to me that La Sentencia has only

exacerbated the gender inequalities of the General Law on Migration by de-
monizing Black motherhood: ‘La Sentencia is aimed at women because we are
made entirely responsible for the identity of our children. [La Sentencia] places
onto women an enormous social burden and this is a form of social violence’.
Morón also noted that women in these situations ‘receive additional social
and emotional burdens’ because many of them have children with different
statuses, and they have to explain these distinctions to their children and, pre-
sumably, their partners. This latter problem refers to the additional headaches
created by the government’s poorly conceived and clumsy attempts at rectify-
ing La Sentencia in the wake of international and local criticism. In the months
following the Tribunal’s decision, the government emitted a plan to regulate
all foreign-born people residing in the DR and all those who had been de-
nationalized. The Ley de Naturalización (Law 169-14, Naturalization Law) di-
vided the denationalized population into two groups. Group A includes people
born in the DR to undocumented parents who, prior to the Tribunal’s deci-
sion, had received documents affirming their Dominican nationality – either
a birth certificate or a national identity card, Cédula. People in this group,
which according to government estimates numbered around 53,000, received
Dominican nationality. Group B refers to people born to undocumented par-
ents residing in the DR whose births were never registered. People in this
group had to r egister as foreigners and go through a two-year naturalization
process (Wooding 2014, 103, 109).5
In our interview, Altagracia Jean Joseph explained how migration laws have
deepened and strengthened domestic patriarchy within heterosexual relation-
ships. Mothers are particularly vulnerable. Not only do mothers have to defend
their citizenship rights and the nationality rights of their children, many con-
tinue to face abandonment by their partners. Jean Joseph surmised,
You know that in this country, 80% of women are single mothers. We
have had a case where a [Dominican] father told the mother [of Haitian
ancestry], ‘Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do because, in truth, if
it were me, the child would be declared [Dominican]. Now the problem
is yours.
Morón, for her part, resists the idea that so many Dominican women are, in
fact, single mothers and, instead, regard this statistical point as a structural issue.
As she explained,
we have found in our work that women are living with the fathers of
their children, but that in the majority of these households, one partner
has a problem with documentation. These women are with men who
are either Haitian or who are Dominican-Haitian, and [the men] have
problems with their documents.
Morón pointed out that this creates a myriad of challenges. Undocumented

men do not declare their children, transforming their offspring into illegitimate
children and their partners into single mothers. Hence, the high rate of single
motherhood. Moreover, children who remain undeclared by their fathers lack
the protections and rights that come with paternal recognition. Migration laws,
including La Sentencia, negatively affect Black mothers by placing greater legal
burdens on them, because, as the only documented parent a child has, they are
held legally responsible for their children’s nationality and totally responsible
for their care.
What these activists highlight is that the Dominican state’s commitment
to ‘re-domesticate the citizenship regime’ occurs through the policing and
devaluing of Black women’s sexuality, reproduction, and mothering. The
m igration regime is a technology of racial and ethnic exclusion and sexual
regulation. Through it, Black women have been, borrowing Nancy Fraser’s
(1997) formulation, ‘misrecognized’. In addition to being looked down upon,
d ismissed and abused in their interactions with state officials, the misrecogni-
tion of poor, Black women as Haitian and foreign prevents them from ‘partic-
ipating as [peers] in social life… as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of
interpretation and evaluation that [constitute them] as comparatively unworthy
of respect or esteem’ (280). Jennifer Shoaff (2017) argues that in the DR, the
media’s demonization of Black mothers situates Black women as ‘deviant’ and,
150 April J. Mayes
‘obfuscates [their] actual lived experience, rendering [them] largely invisible

within the national imaginary and beyond’ (118). Black women’s inability to
leverage the power of citizenship means they cannot demand resources from
the state or accountability from its representatives either as mothers or not.
Indeed, the migration regime as institutionalized the regulation of Black wom-
en’s sexuality and race/ethnicity by elevating the idea that Black women are
not citizens and that they are bad mothers. This ideology only compounds the
inequities they face created by their poverty, legal vulnerability, racism and
sexism. It is from interlocking forms of oppression that contemporary Black
women activists draw their understanding of the structural forces and material
conditions that shape their lives and the lives of the women in the communities
for whom they advocate. As Black women activists, they insist on a multiaxis
approach because their experience of discrimination and the state’s deployment
of exclusion affects them as women, as Black women, as poor women, as moth-
ers and as women with unknown, residential status.
Black Feminism in the Dominican Republic

One could trace the roots of Black feminism in the DR to the last quarter of
the 19th century when Salomé Ureña de Henríquez graduated the first class of
female school teachers (Normalistas) who, in turn, trained the next generation
of teachers who also became social reformers, feminist activists and advocates
for poor women and their children in the first decades of the twentieth. These
included African-descended activists such as Evangelina Rodríguez and
Petronila Gómez (Mayes 2008; Mayes 2014, 119–121, 125–128; Candelario,
Manley, and Mayes 2016).
Kimberly Simmons (2009) documents another iteration of Black feminist
consciousness that emerged in the 1990s among college-educated Dominican
women who self-identified as African-descended such as the poet Sherezada
‘Chiqui’ Vicioso. Central to Vicioso’s transformation in her self-identification,
from a light-skinned woman to a Mulata (mixed) Afrodescendiente (African-
descendant), was residing in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s
and becoming a student-activist at Brooklyn College. Working alongside
A frican Americans and other Caribbean peoples of African ancestry, Vicioso
confronted her Blackness and Caribbean-ness at the same time. As she told
Simmons, ‘Regardless of what I thought of myself at that time, I was considered
a Black woman. Secondly, I was a Caribbean woman. It was an identity and
a geographical issue’ (94). A group of college-educated, self-identified Black
women founded the short-lived organization, Identidad, in 1989 led, at one
point, by the feminist theorist Ochy Curiel. Simmons reports that Identidad
organized workshops, held consciousness-raising meetings and conducted
research. The goals of the organization included increasing awareness about
Afro-descended identities, uncovering the participation of Black women in
nation-state formation, countering negative stereotypes concerning Black

women, advancing Black womanhood as a positive identity and helping women
become aware of both gender and racial oppression (100).
This Black feminist consciousness and practice left important legacies at
the First Meeting of Black Women of Latin America and the Caribbean, co-
organized by Ochy Curiel in 1992 (Primer Encuentro de Mujeres Negras de América
Latina y el Caribe), an event attended by over 300 people. Through Sirana Dolis,
a MUDHA cofounder, there is a direct link between the Dominican Black
feminist activism in the 1990s and today. Sirana revealed that although her en-
counter with identifying as a Black woman began with her work in MUDHA
in the 1980s, her attendance at the Primer Encuentro ‘awakened [my] identifica-
tion with lo Afro because we are the poorest and most excluded’.
While echoes of these previous Black feminist formations are present in the
contemporary movement, this second wave of Black feminist activism in the
DR differs in important ways. Dominican women of Haitian ancestry have
extended the influence of Black feminism in the country through their grass-
roots work and intersectional advocacy. In the hands of Black-identified, human
rights activists, Dominican Black feminism has shifted from an u rban-based,
intellectual movement to a broad-based social movement with its roots in
the Bateyes, among women who are not college educated and who confront
anti-Black racism not in the US, but in the DR.
For example, Sonia Pierre and Sirana Dolis drew on their experiences living
as laborers and raising families in Bateyes, and it was this lived experience that
gave them first insight into the intersection of racial, gender and class oppression
in their lives and in the lives of Haitians more generally. Sirana’s activist history
began in the mid-1970s when she joined the progressive Catholic Church and
various Comunidades de Base (Base Communities) that, at that time, sponsored
exchanges between Dominican and Haitian-based community organizations.
Sirana admitted: ‘I was always aware of women’s issues in the community’. At
that time, the Centro Cultural Dominico-Haitiano (Dominican-Haitian Cultural
Center, CCDH), founded in 1982, was the principal organization advocat-
ing for Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born children. In 1983, Sonia
Pierre and Sirana Dolis organized a ‘women’s section’ because, as Sirana told
me, Sonia Pierre had developed a trenchant critique of the Left’s treatment of
women and gender issues. MUDHA emerged when, ‘we did not see the pos-
sibility of making women’s situation visible’. From its beginnings, MUDHA
defined itself as a human rights organization that advocated for Dominican
women of Haitian descent, their integration into Dominican society, and gen-
der and racial equity more broadly. One of its guiding principles has been:
‘Ethnicity and gender constitute two sides of the same coin’ (Declaración de las
Misión de MUDHA).6
Despite their separation, MUDHA and the CCDH operate similarly. They
are organizations that ‘have developed an alternative grassroots model of rights
152 April J. Mayes
activism that aims primarily at building their constituency’s ability to promote

and defend its own rights’ (Martínez 2011, 63). They operate health clinics,
train community organizers, conduct house visits and ensure access to educa-
tion (64). Working from this community-based approach, MUDHA has taken
the further step of promoting the participation of Dominicans of Haitian an-
cestry in the political process through the election of Haitian-descended city
council members and provincial representatives. In his analysis of the CCDH
and MUDHA’s work, Samuel Martínez (2011) notes that one significant deci-
sion made by many activists in these and other organizations is their ‘[refusal] to
pass as Dominican’ which Martínez argues, ‘is neither an empty gesture of de-
fiance nor a romantic displacement of political energy toward ethno-nationalist
aims’. Insisting on their dual identities as Haitians and Dominicans, Martínez
writes,
a necessary precondition for Haitian immigrants to organize as a group…

[and] acceptance of the idea that a person can be both Haitian and a
member of the national mainstream… is crucial to the Haitian struggle
for rights and justice.
(67)
Building on these insights, I argue that the women leaders I spoke to, identifi-
cation with Black womanhood provided them a politically critical lens through
which to evaluate the sources of their and their constituencies’ oppression and
occasioned an opportunity to redefine Dominican-ness around an affirmation
of Blackness, linked not just to culture, but also to labor rights, gender equity
and human rights more broadly. Lo Afro is a multilayered concept that involves
culture and ancestry, but is also a lens through which to make visible and demy-
stify power structures. Jenny Morón Reyes, also from MUDHA, emphasized,
we are women, feminists, [and] Black women. You carry lo Afro within
you. We are clear that we are women and we demand what is ours…
because they have always stamped out what we are. Living in a Spanish
culture is too much, because that’s not my life.
For Altagracia Jean Joseph, lo Afro meant the integration of issues: ‘These can’t
be considered as separate struggles. Look, there are women who are subjected
to their husbands’ [authority]. We are holistic, we are women [and] we are
Black women’. Even more to the point, Morón noted,
we can’t even talk about just ‘women’ anymore. We are divided between
documented and undocumented. So, when those same feminist women are
fighting for the rights of everyone, [they forget] that there is this separation
now [between] the majority of women and Dominican-Haitian women.
One way out of this separation is validating Black womanhood. Ana B elique
shared a slightly different story about coming to terms with her identity as
a Black woman. A leader within the organization, Reconoci.do Belique
explained that her parents ‘did something that, I discovered later, not many
parents do. I never had a problem seeing myself as a Black woman. I know
that I am a Black woman, proudly a Black woman’. Belique credits her fa-
ther, in particular, with teaching her and her siblings to be proud of their
Haitian and African ancestry because, ‘he didn’t want us to feel inferior to
White people’. Belique has taken these lessons to her activism: ‘I consider
myself unabashedly a Black woman and I am fighting to diminish Euro- and
Hispanic-centrism’.
As Kia Caldwell (2007) argues about Black women activists in Brazil,
a ssuming an identity as a Black woman was a formative experience for her
informants, one central to their reassessments of their political, cultural and
social subjectivities. Caldwell shows that the activists who embrace Black
womanhood, especially in a context where many African-descended women
are not raised talking about Blackness within their own families, challenge
dominant racial discourses in Brazil and teach their children and others around
them how to do the same. Also, accepting a Black identity helps activists criti-
cally assess and creatively resist the structures of racialized and gendered power
in Brazilian society. Caldwell argues that, ‘self-identification as a mulher negra
[Black woman] can be seen as an act of resistance precisely because it involves
the inversion and rearticulation of dominant racial significations’ (129). Adding
to this analysis, Samuel Martínez’s insight about the importance of activists
asserting their identities as Haitian, the activists’ Testimonios suggests that ‘Black
womanhood’ is a category of identification that creates a new discursive space
where Dominican-ness and Haitian-ness coexist. Blackness expands the circle
of belonging by challenging racist ideologies and sexism. At the same time, its
frontal attack on the exclusionary logic of anti-Haitian forms of Dominican
nationalism produces a new discursive practice in which it is possible to be both
Haitian and Dominican. Through Black womanhood, as Ana Belique said, ‘we
can be Dominican without denying that our Haitian-ness, our culture, our
sentiments’.
In addition to resisting dominant narratives of national belonging, Black
womanhood generates alternative ideas about the nation and about citizen-
ship. Dominican black feminism challenges the construction of ‘differential
citizenship’ through its sustained support of immigrants’ and human rights.
Dominican Black feminism aspires to build a ‘new citizenship’ by demand-
ing both political inclusion and, as in Brazil, ‘a more egalitarian format for
social relations at all levels, including new rules for living together in society’
(Caldwell 2007, 135). Jean Joseph made this clear when I asked her if her activist
work regarding La Sentencia contributed to renovated understanding of what it
means to be Dominican. She explained,
154 April J. Mayes
Yes. You see it when Dominicans of Haitian ancestry like me, Ana María
[Belique] Rosa Iris, Flor Angel, you see us in environmental and feminist
protests; protesting police abuse. We are there for each other. We have
decided to help each other. We are actually talking about it and we are
calling it a process of social integration where you don’t see me as the
Dominican of Haitian ancestry who was denied her documents, but as a
Dominican who is being mistreated or, ‘Ah! The gay Dominican who is
being mistreated.’ No as a Dominican who is being mistreated and as a
Dominican deserves to be treated with respect…. I tell the young people
I work with, ‘Look, you have to work to make things better here because
you are not going to leave. You have to make the country stronger. You
have to work to make society more just, with respect, with rights, so that
your children will grow up in that society.’
When I asked her what she hoped to see in the future, Ana Belique echoed Jean
Joseph’s comments. She mentioned hoping to see Dominicans of Haitian an-
cestry ‘completely integrated socially, but not only in terms of our documents.
I hope to see an intersectional social politics, one that includes all Dominicans.
I want to see a politics that recognizes everyone’s rights’.
Indeed, among these activists, intersectionality is not only the theoretical
framework that helps them, and the people they work with, achieve critical
awareness of the relationship between racism, patriarchy and heterosexism but
it is also a movement strategy. In their study of the organization, Asian Immi-
grant Women Advocates, Jennifer Jihye Chun, George Lipsitz and Young Shin
(2013) found that activists deployed intersectionality strategically and conscien-
tiously in their community organizing and advocacy. For these authors, inter-
sectionality includes grappling with personal and communal identities because
‘all struggles over power concern the social meanings applied to constructed
identities and identification to some degree’ (937). This is particularly true in
the DR where some identities, such as Black womanhood and Dominican of
Haitian ancestry, are rendered impossible because right-wing nationalist dis-
courses are supported politically and intellectually. In addition to providing
activists with a way to assert a group identity in the process of social change,
and to assess the relationships between multiple types of oppressions, intersec-
tionality allows activists ‘to envision and enact new social relations grounded
in multiple axes of intersecting, situated knowledge’ (917).
In other words, intersectionality assists Black feminist activists in the DR
to analyze how racism and sexism have operated most recently in migration-
related legislation, constitutional reform and La Sentencia to deny Haitians and
Dominicans of Haitian ancestry their civil, political and social rights and deny
them Dominican nationality. At the same time, Black feminist activists de-
ploy an intersectional politics in their activism and community organizing in
order to radically change the meaning of democracy, citizenship and national
belonging for all Dominicans by working in coalition to broaden the struggle

for human rights from an issue that concerns only immigrants and their chil-
dren to one that relates to all of Dominican civil society. Finally, Black feminist
activists use intersectionality to refashion the cultural, identity-based politics
of Lo Afro as a vehicle for structural change. Keisha Khan Perry (2016) makes
this point in her analysis of Black women organizers in Brazil. There, as in the
DR, Black women’s expression of black consciousness involves both drawing
upon elements of Black culture as sources of inspiration and power and also the
struggle over material resources. In Perry’s study, this included land, housing
and infrastructure in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. In the DR, Black feminist con-
sciousness includes the affirmation of Black womanhood and the demand for
the material benefits attached to nationality and citizenship.
Conclusion
Such was the level of national and international outrage at the Dominican
Constitutional Tribunal’s decision, La Sentencia, that in the two months af-
ter its rendering, intellectuals and activists published 77 editorials, nearly 300
newspaper pieces and over 400 articles, blogs, and book chapters (Wooding
2014, 102). This chapter may be added to the now thousands of opinion pieces
and analyses about La Sentencia, but I have tried to move the conversation in an-
other direction, hopefully in one that honors the activists whom I interviewed.
In this chapter, I have argued that since the 2000s, migration policy in the DR
is a regime that manages access to nationality and citizenship through the reg-
ulation of race and sex. I have shown that the struggle for citizenship and na-
tionality in the DR is a fight for human rights, but it is led by Black-identified
women who know and act upon their experiential and critical knowledge of a
migration regime that has long coupled race- and gender-based exclusions to
fabricate an ideology of difference between Haitian-ness and Dominican-ness
and imbue that so-called difference with political, social and economic power.
Thus, the movement for immigrants’ human rights and on behalf of
denationalized Dominicans comprises Black feminist struggle in the DR. Do-
minican Black feminism is crafted by self-identified Black women who interpret
social reality from their unique vantage points and apply their interpretations
of racial-, gender-, class- and sexuality-based oppression in creating avenues of
change (Hills Collins 1990, 22). This is evidenced by the direct contact some of
its leaders have had with region-wide Black feminist movements, in the current
leaders’ self-proclamations and affirmations of their Black womanhood, and by
the advocates’ use of an intersectional approach in their community activism
and in making visible the structural and ideological oppressions that negatively
affect the lives, bodies and life chances of ascribed and self-identified Black
women. Black feminist movement in the DR also makes great use of intersec-
tionality strategically. As a result, movement leaders have built on the holistic
156 April J. Mayes
approach of the CCDH and MUDHA and are providing the foundations for a
democratic renewal within Dominican society, forged in a conceptualization
of justice firmly grounded in their lived experiences as Black women living,
working, loving and Luchando (fighting) in the DR.
One important change that directing our attention to these activists may
incur is to shift the focus of international solidarity away from legal processes
within the International Human Rights Court System and toward building re-
lationships with and within Dominican civil society. In our conversation, Ana
Belique noted that it was important to bring cases to international courts, but
this has meant ignoring and failing to invest resources in generating change from
the grassroots. As she admitted, ‘we are now reclaiming that work of going to the
people and changing how people think’. In this sense, Black feminist activism in
the DR resonates with struggles throughout Latin America over the forced dis-
placement of Afrodescendientes (African-descended people). Indeed, Dominican
activists have called denationalization an act of civil g enocide. Black feminists
leading the fight over citizenship rights, material resources and recognition link
the movements in Dominican Bateyes to environmental and urban-based justice
activism in New Orleans, Detroit, Bahia, Brazil and Colombia’s Pacific Coast.
This is where Afro-Diasporic solidarity might do its best work. In addition
to supporting these groups and activists financially, the activists I interviewed
called on Afro-Diasporic communities to continue applying political pressure
on the Dominican government through their protests and phone calls to con-
gressional representatives. Ana Belique also added:
We need the Diaspora, because you have more access to resources, to the
data, to help us combat nationalist discourses. We know that this is all a
social construction done by intellectuals. We need to tell the story differ-
ently, to construct another social reality.
Those of us in the Diaspora can assist this process through research, interac-
tions, conversations and dissemination of information in various languages. We
can facilitate the coming together of various organizations through confer-
ences and seminars, helping to hold and to expand this precious space of Black
feminist practice. These groups have a long history of understanding ‘rights
infringements, injustices, and social exclusions that confront Haitian nationals
and Haitian descendants not as discrete types of abuses but as interrelated and
mutually supportive injustices’ (Martínez 2014, 188). Solidarity with the orga-
nizations and broader social movements advocating for Haitian immigrants’ and
denationalized Dominicans’ human rights requires adopting the posture taken
by their leading advocacy organizations: that the locus for change resides among
the people and communities who have been and will continue to educate them-
selves, generate and mobilize resources, and train others in advocacy work.
Notes
1 I am using her name with permission. All translations of the interviews are mine,
and my informants signed consent forms to be recorded, for their interviews to be
used for this study, and for their names to be used. I am forever grateful to Ana
Belique, Altagracia Jean Joseph, Jenny Morón Reyes and Sirena Liliana Dolis for
allowing me to interview them. The interviews all took place in November 2016.
2 In keeping with the activists’ framing of the issues, I use the term ‘Domini-
can’ to identify anyone born in the DR regardless of their parents’ nationality
or legal status. At the same time, it is important to note some key differences
in terminology. The activists I spoke with also used ‘Dominican’ to refer to
themselves and to everyone that has been denationalized. In bringing attention
to m igration law’s differential treatment, however, they also use Dominican of
H aitian ancestry (Dominicana/Dominicano de Ascendencia Haitiana). Another term
that has been used to describe this community is Dominican-Haitian (Dominico-
Haitiana/D ominico-Haitiano), but activists informed me that this is a misnomer
for two reasons. First, the terminology, Dominico-Haitiana/Dominico-Haitiano, pre-
sumes that one has or can have dual Dominican and Haitian nationality. This is
not the case because children born to Haitian parents living in the DR do not au-
tomatically receive Haitian nationality nor is the movement necessarily interested
in affirming the Haitian nationality of those who lost Dominican citizenship.
Second, this phrasing assumes an equivalence to US-based notions of ethnic iden-
tity (i.e., A frican-American, Italian-American) that are available for Dominicans
of Haitian ancestry.
3 Interculturality/Interculturalidad is an ‘ethos or manner of being … [in which] one
assumes the absolute responsibility that comes with the will to become, to a cer-
tain point, co-authors of [our] reality of our identity and the identity of others’.
Interculturality is also a political and ethical practice rooted in relationship with
others, dialogue, recognizing the human dignity and rights of all others, and cri-
tique of totalitarian and totalizing identities (Adames 2013, 93, 94–99).
4 Testimonios stem from Latin American traditions of storytelling, knowledge produc-
tion and wisdom transmission. While scholars define Testimonio differently, there
is consensus that, broadly speaking, it refers to a literary genre and/or cultural
practice of narrating one’s life that is usually grounded in social justice activism and
oriented toward social change. Testimonios are neither memoir nor literary fiction;
rather, they are critically inflected representations of the subject or a composite sub-
ject designed to speak to the present. See, Gloria G. Barragan, “Testimonios from
the Border: Shattering the Notion that Women of Color Don’t do Theory,” Ph.D
diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2014; John Beverly, “The Margin at
the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” Modern Fiction Studies, vol.
35, no. 1 (1989): 11–28 and “Through All Things Modern: Second Thoughts on
Testimonio,” boundary 2, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1991): 1–21.
5 And, of course, the government’s plan has failed. Jenny Moron made the point that
La Sentencia and the government’s response to it effectively created over 200,000
individual migration cases that need adjudicating. Also, there are some civil regis-
tries and JCE offices more willing to work with the denationalized population and
others who are not. Whereas the government wants the international community
to believe that its remedies have been successful, Bridget Wooding (2014) reports
that 150,000 people refused to participate in the PNRE. Also, the provision regard-
ing those who fell into Group B never resolved the fact that Dominican law does
not recognize people born in the DR of parents with irregular status before 2007 as
citizens (109–110).
6 ‘La etnia y el genero se constituyen en los polos de una misma relación’.
158 April J. Mayes
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Part III
South America
7
Afro-Ecuadorian Politics
Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sánchez
Afro-descendants were invisible in White and Mestizo constructions of the

nation until the late 1990s. Differently from Indigenous people who were
counted and registered by the state since colonial times to tax them with
the Indian Tribute, the state did not register or count Afro-descendants.
Ecuadorian elites since the 1940s adopted policies of Mestizaje that aimed to
create homogenous national subjects. These narratives that acknowledged ‘the
glorious Indigenous past’ made Afro-Ecuadorians invisible. The state was
weak and could not impose its rule over all the national territory. It delegated
Indigenous and Afro populations to religious orders that were in charge of
occupying the territory and managing Indigenous and Black populations in
the margins of the state.
Afro-Ecuadorians were first acknowledged as a distinct ethnic group in the
multicultural Constitution of 1998 and were counted for the first time in the
Census of 2001. As in many other Latin American nations, policies of limited
cultural recognition were adopted under neoliberal fiscal constraints. Under
neoliberalism, the state promoted agro-export development, the e conomy was
opened to international investment, state industries were privatized, and tar-
geted social programs replaced universal social services. Supranational organi-
zations like the UN, the World Bank, and the Inter-American D evelopment
Bank (IADB) became champions of multiculturalism and promoted ethno-
development projects. Academics, state officials and activists used census
data to demonstrate empirically the links between race and inequality. Afro-
Ecuadorians became visible actors in the public sphere and politicians in par-
ties of distinct ideologies. A Black middle class was created, and previously
exclusionary White and Mestizo spaces were partially democratized. Yet Afro-
descendants continued to endure everyday forms of racism (de la Torre 2002;
Antón Sánchez 2011; Rahier 2014).
164 Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sánchez
The left-wing populist government of Rafael Correa (2007–2017) rolled

back neoliberal policies, built the state and put it at the center of develop-
ment. The boom in the price of oil gave his government resources to e nact
anti-poverty policies. Simultaneously, Correa attacked left-wing parties,
criminalized protest and created social movements from the top down. Under
Correa, Afro-Ecuadorians were incorporated as a corporatist group, and many
leaders chose co-optation to the state as a strategy to advocate for their de-
mands. In the constitutional Assembly of 2007–2008 – when for the first-time
eight Black assembly people were elected –they pushed for their recognition as
a distinct pueblo with rights to territory and culture. Afro-Ecuadorians suc-
cessfully pushed the Correa administration to enact anti-racist legislation and
affirmative action policies. When leaders became state officials, their organi-
zation lost organizers and activists to push the state for the implementation of
policies, such as affirmative action. The permitted Indigenous or Black activ-
ists in the Correa government became beneficiaries of social policies, but not
autonomous actors. Those who dared to question Correa were ostracized and
punished as traitors to the nation. Hundreds of peasants and Indigenous people
who opposed policies of mineral resource extraction for example were charged
with terrorism and sabotage (Martínez Novo 2014; de la Torre and Ortiz 2016).
This chapter analyzes Afro-Ecuadorian politics in the three historical
periods briefly described above: monocultural Mestizaje, neoliberal multicul-
turalism and autocratic redistributive multiculturalism. We study state policies
that created ethnic and racial identities, efforts of stigmatized racialized groups
to challenge or to accommodate to state policies, and Afro-Ecuadorian partici-
pation in the political system. The discussion is organized around two axes: (1)
the processes of exclusion/invisibility and inclusion of Afro-Ecuadorians
and (2) the paradoxes between co-optation and autonomy from the state for
A fro-descendant organizations and politicians. We argue that the process of
inclusion during neoliberal multiculturalism was incomplete because it did
not address policies of socioeconomic redistribution. Under Correa policies of
redistribution were enacted from the top down attempting to transform citi-
zens into grateful masses.
Invisibility and Mestizaje

Afro-Ecuadorians from the highlands and the coast of northwest Ecuador
had distinct historical experiences. In the northwest province of Esmeraldas,
A fro-Ecuadorians are descendants of free maroon slaves and of former enslaved
persons who migrated from Colombia attracted by different export booms.
The first migration wave between 1850 and 1920 was based on the export of
vegetal ivory, rubber, tobacco and some precious metals. The second wave
between 1930 and 1955 was linked to the banana boom of the late 1940s (Rahier
2014, 12–13). In 1957, a railway linking Quito and San Lorenzo in northwest
Afro-Ecuadorian Politics 165
Ecuador was completed. The increasing presence of the state apparatus resulted
in Black disfranchisement as White and Mestizos took over the best avail-
able jobs and centralized economic resources (Whitten 1974). Many dispos-
sessed Afro-Ecuadorians migrated to cities like Guayaquil or to work in banana
agro-export plantations located in the coast.
The highland population of the Chota-Mira Valley was brought in the
16th century by the Jesuits as enslaved persons to work in sugarcane produc-
tion. A fter the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, the Crown auctioned them
to hacienda owners (Whitten 2008, 304). In the 1860s, Friederich Hassaurek
(2008, 117), who was Abraham Lincoln’s minister to Ecuador, wrote, ‘When
slavery was abolished in Ecuador, the owners of the Negroes in the sugar dis-
tricts immediately employed them to work for wages, and managing to get
them into debt, secured their services as debtors’. The hacienda system lasted
in the Chota-Mira region as in the rest of the highlands until agrarian reform
in the 1960s and 1970s. Exploitation in the haciendas was based on a series
of personalized obligations on the part of rural cultivators and their families
to hacienda owners. Duties included the number of days that the head of the
household and his family had to work in the fields and as domestic servants in
the hacienda house and in the city. Laborers were given access to a small plot
of land and meager earnings. Part of their wage was paid in the form of gifts
and loans that were essential for their social reproduction. These were given as
personal favors of the hacienda owner. Starting in the late 1950s and 1960s, the
strategy of reproduction of Black peasant families that had small plots of land
without irrigation depended on the temporary migration of some of its male
members to agro-export plantations and of men and women to cities where
they worked as domestic workers and in other humble occupations.
Since colonial times of the 16th century to 1857 when the Indian tribute was
abolished, Afro-descendants and Indigenous people were integrated to the state
differently. The Spanish divided the people of their empire into ‘two republics:
that of Spanish, and that of indios. No place was ever created under colonial
rule for Black people, los negros, nor was a construction of Blackness, lo negro,
recognized’ (Whitten 2008, 303). As colonial subjects, Indigenous people had
to pay Indian tribute to the state until 1857 (Guerrero 2008). Institutions to
collect this tax and to mark populations as Indigenous were created. Slavery
was abolished in 1852, and Afro-descendants were not counted by the state
until the Census of 2001. After abolition, formerly enslaved persons were ex-
cluded from citizenship with literacy and economic independence criteria.
Since the turn of the 20th century, anthropologists and sociologists studied
Indigenous people as a group with a distinct culture and institutions, such as
the Indigenous community. Indigenista policies to rescue the ‘glorious past
of Indian civilizations’ were implemented, and indigenista intellectuals oc-
cupied important and prestigious governmental posts (Clark 1999, 113–114).
The descendants of African enslaved persons did not have a special or positive
recognition from the state. Under Mestizaje, Afro-Ecuadorians became invisi-

ble to the project of nationhood (Whitten 1981, Rahier 2014). The few found-
ing fathers of Ecuadorian social sciences that mentioned Afro-Ecuadorians in
their writings used racist stereotypes. They argued that the incorporation of
Afro-Ecuadorians to civilization was going to be problematic because of their
innate ‘criminal tendencies’ (de la Torre 2002, 19–22; Rahier 2014, 75–78).
State policies that historically targeted and labeled Indigenous as a distinct
ethnic group and as part of the national narrative, and that made Blacks invisible,
help to explain why strong Indigenous identities and organizations flourished,
whereas Afro-descendants had more difficulties in creating ethno-racial
organizations. The Indigenous movement between the 1990s and 2002 was
considered by academics to be one of the strongest in the Americas. Agrarian
reform in the 1960s and 1970s ended the hacienda system of domination and
created a power vacuum that was filled by Indigenous organizations. In 1986,
Indigenous nationalities of the three main regions (coast, sierra and Amazonia)
created the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE).
This organization led several mobilizations known as ‘uprisings’. These were
forms of collective action in which Indigenous communities blocked major
roads and marched to cities to present their demands. Indigenous organizations
were at the forefront of the opposition to structural adjustment policies. They
incorporated ethnic claims such as bilingual education and changing n ational
identity from Mestizo to multicultural and multiethnic (Martínez Novo
2014). Indigenous protests were prominent in the removal of President Abdalá
Bucaram from office in February 1997 and President Jamil Mahuad in 2000.
Afro-Ecuadorians followed a different organizational path. In the 1970s and
1980s, Black peasants in the highlands struggled for natural resources such as land
and water and used class discourses to demand socioeconomic rights from the
state (Zambrano 2011, 29–53; Johnson 2012, 181). Ethnic identities and demands
were articulated for the first time after an Afro-Ecuadorian delegation attended
the First Congress for the Black Culture of the Americas in Cali, Colombia, in
1977. In that meeting and two subsequent, Congress leaders d iscussed strategies
to create a Latin American Black Movement around ethnic and racial demands
(Antón 2011, 96). The Center for Afro-Ecuadorian Studies was formed to col-
lect oral histories from elders in Esmeraldas and the Chota-Mira Valley. This
center subsequently split into a group that focused on cultural traditions and
another more politically oriented faction (Rahier 2014, 111).
In the 1980s, the Catholic Church created in Ecuador the first Afro-A merican
pastoral under the leadership of the Comboni missionaries. This religious or-
der was invited to Ecuador in 1955 to work in the evangelization of Afro-
descendants in northwest Ecuador and to establish a presence of the state in the
frontier with Colombia (Whitten 1965). Influenced by Liberation Theology
and the Bishops meeting of Puebla in 1979 when the Church decided to cre-
ate pastoral work targeted to Indigenous and Afro-descendants, the Comboni
missionaries worked for the liberation of Afro-Ecuadorians conceived as a

distinct ethnic group. They established the Centro Cultural A froecuatoriano
to train Afro-Ecuadorian pastoral leaders and to promote their organization
around race and ethnicity. They published the newsletter Palenque to revalue
Afro-Ecuadorian history and identities. The Comboni missionary helped to
organize the Movimiento Afro-Ecuatoriano Conciencia and other local and
national Afro-Ecuadorian organizations (de la Torre 2002, 111–122).
Mestizaje made Afro-Ecuadorians invisible, yet there were moments when
Afro-descendants became recognized and celebrated as part of national narra-
tives (Rahier 1998, 2013). In 1942, Afro-Ecuadorian novelist Adalberto Ortiz
won the national award for the best novel, and in 1993 poet Antonio Preciado
was honored with the major literature recognition award. The election of an
Afro-Ecuadorian as Miss Ecuador in 1995 also disrupted narratives of Black
invisibility and of the Mestizo nation (Rahier 1998).
After the transition to democracy, Afro-descendant intellectuals and activ-
ists such as Julio Estupiñán Tello, Nelson Estupiñán Bass, Oscar Chalá, among
others became visible in the public sphere. Jaime Hurtado, founder and presi-
dential candidate for the Marxist Popular Democratic Movement (MPD), was
the most visible and prominent. He was the son of peasants from Esmeraldas
who migrated to Guayaquil where he studied law and became president of the
Federation of Law Students. He joined the Maoist Marxist Leninist C ommunist
Party of Ecuador in 1966, and founded the MPD, its electoral front in 1978. He
was the first Afro-Ecuadorian lawyer in Ecuador and the first Afro-descendant
elected to Congress in 1979. In the 1984 presidential elections, he got 7% of the
vote and in the 1988 presidential election 5% of the vote ( Johnson 2012, 190).
In 1998, ‘he and his two body guards were brutally assassinated in front of the
legislative palace in Quito’ (Whitten 2008, 305).
As an orthodox Marxist, Hurtado saw class and not race as the main axes of
oppression. He did not present himself as a Black politician, but as a revolution-
ary Marxist. As a Black man, he was the object of racist attacks in Congress.
His nickname was ‘the Negro Hurtado’ and not doctor Hurtado as lawyers are
commonly addressed in Ecuador. President of Congress Assad Bucaram referred
to him as ‘the Blackest night in history’ (Preciado 2017). His Blackness, how-
ever, was not an impediment for thousands of Ecuadorians to vote for him, yet
these left-wing voters were casting their ballots for a Marxist agenda and not for
Afro-Ecuadorian identity politics. Jaime Hurtado was not involved in efforts
to create Black organizations, such as the Association of Black Ecuadorians
(ASONE) founded in 1992 by Victor León Rodríguez. ASONE demanded the
end of racial discrimination, the right of Blacks to have autonomous political
participation, and to have quotas to nominate Afro-descendants to state insti-
tutions (Antón 2011, 115).
As presented in Table 7.1, political parties of different ideologies sponsored a
few Afro-Ecuadorian candidates for Congress. Jaime Hurtado, Ernesto Estupiñán
Table 7.1 A fro-Ecuadorians elected to Congress, 1979–2006
Year Name Party
1979–1983 Jaime Hurtado González MPD

1988–1992 Luis Muñoz Herrera Izquierda Democratica
1996–1998 Oscar Chalá Cruz Pachakutik
1996–1998 Ernesto Estupiñan Quintero MPD
1998–2002 Oscar Chalá Pachakutik
1998–2002 Jaime Hurtado (Murdered in 1999) MPD
1998–2002 Víctor Junior Leon PRE
2002–2006 Dennis Cevallos PRE
2002–2006 Rafael Erazo MPD
Source: Antón Sánchez 2013.

Note: MPD, Popular Democratic Movement; PRE, Partido Roldosilta Ecuatoriano.
Quintero and Rafael Erazo were elected under the MPD. Luis Muñoz Herrera
was elected under the ticket of the center-left Izquierda Democrática Party,
Víctor Junior León and Dennis Cevallos for the populist Roldosista Ecuadorian
Party (PRE) and Oscar Chalá for the leftist Pachakutik Party.
The ideology of Mestizaje allowed state officials and White and Mestizo
elites and intellectuals to displace racism to other world areas claiming that
Ecuador was a society free of racism. These self-congratulatory claims were
challenged by the work of social scientists that showed how Ecuador was a
profoundly racist society. Anthropologist Joseph Casagrande (1981, 261), for
example, wrote, ‘Racism in Ecuador is institutionalized to such a degree that
would shock many oppressed peoples elsewhere’.
Neoliberal Multiculturalism 1998–2007

The Constitution of 1998 conferred ‘on Afro-descendants the status of peoples’
(Walsh 2012, 18). It recognized their cultural and collective rights and trans-
formed the nation’s self-understanding to multiethnic and multicultural. The
Census of 2001 for the first time asked questions of self-identification focused
on race, ‘What do you consider yourself: Indigenous, Black, Mulatto, White,
or other’ (Martínez Novo 2015, 405). In all, 77% self-identified as Mestizo,
10% as White, 6.83% as Indigenous, 2.23 as Black and 2.74 as Mulatto (Antón
2011, 76–77). Notions of hypo-descent were used to add the Black and Mulatto
categories and as a result Afro-Ecuadorians made up 4.97% of the popula-
tion (Martínez Novo 2015, 406). Afro-Ecuadorian scholars used census data to
show how racism in Ecuador was an institutionalized system of power. They
argued that racial inequality was an impediment for Afro-Ecuadorian citizen-
ship and that the state was responsible to address centuries of racial inequity
(Antón 2011, 2015).
Multicultural policies were enacted in a context of the neoliberal re-

treat of the state and of the opening of the economy to free trade and for-
eign investment. The size of the state and its role in the economy shrunk and
universalistic policies were replaced by targeted redistribution. Supranational
organizations such as the World Bank and the IADB promoted multicultur-
alism and policies of ethno-development. In 1998, the World Bank created
Proyecto de Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas y Afroecuatorianos. It gave 50
m illion dollars for development projects for Indigenous and Afro-descendants
(de la Torre 2002, 83). The IADB focused on funding development projects
for Afro-descendants (Walsh 2012, 26). To access these funds, class demands
were replaced by proposals for small ethno-development projects. A new cadre
of technocratic Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian leaders who knew how to
present successful development projects replaced a politicized leadership
formed around the struggles for land reform (Bretón 2003). The ‘permitted
Indian or Afro-Ecuadorian’ of neoliberal multiculturalism became an agent for
ethno-development and an advocate of cultural recognition.
The Ecuadorian state and supranational organizations like the World Bank
and the IADB aimed to create a unitary Black Movement so that they could ne-
gotiate with a set of representative leaders rather than with an array of individuals
who claimed to be leaders of the Black Movement. The state was willing to
promote Black organizations because of international pressure and due to the
increasing visibility of Afro-Ecuadorians in politics (Rahier 2014, 114) The
government of Fabián Alarcón (February 1997 to August 1998) assumed
the responsibility to help to strengthen the Afro-Ecuadorian Movement. The
government of Jamil Mahuad (August 1998 to January 2000) sponsored the
First National Black Congress that founded the National Afro-Ecuadorian
Confederation (de la Torre 2002, 86).
The state created institutions tasked with directing resources to Afro-
Ecuadorian organizations. After the failure of Abdalá Bucaram’s govern-
ment (August 1996 to February 1997) to establish an Ethnicity Ministry,
Alarcón’s administration created the Council for the Development of Indian
and Black Peoples. This institution included Indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian
groups, but dissolved due to their rivalries on how to administer World Bank
funds. Indigenous people created the Council for the Development of the
Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador and Afro-Ecuadorians the Corporation for
A fro-Ecuadorian Development (CODAE). The objectives of CODAE were (1)
to achieve the human and productive development of the Afro-Ecuadorian
people, (2) to strengthen the organization of Black communities, and (3) to
revitalize A fro-Ecuadorians’ ancestral knowledge, identity and cultural values
(Floril 2010, 62).
In the early 2000s, Afro-Ecuadorian organizations demanded their corpo-
ratist inclusion to the state apparatus. In the words of a leader of Quito’s Black
women’s movement, ‘We Black people are a special group, and we need to have
our own representatives to negotiate with the state, just as public employees,
workers, Indians, and cab drivers do’ (de la Torre 2002, 84–85). The E cuadorian
state since the 1930s had encouraged the corporatist organization of all sectors
of society. Elites were organized into the chambers of agriculture, commerce
and industry. Nonelite groups such as public employees and o rganized indus-
trial workers were incorporated through the recognition of their organizations
and the granting of special privileges. Along with the transition to democracy
in the late 1970s, Indigenous people, women and Afro-Ecuadorians demanded
their corporatist inclusion. The paradox of corporatist claim-making lies in the
fact that these forms of incorporation privileged the inclusion of the leadership
and intellectuals of the excluded group to the state apparatus. These new ap-
pointed bureaucrats ended with the double task of representing the state to the
excluded groups and, at the same time, representing these groups to the state
apparatus.
A good example of the paradoxes of corporatist incorporation was the
demand of Afro-Ecuadorians to create palenques in their ancestral territories.
As a response to institutional racism, Afro-Ecuadorian organizations demanded
to control educational, health and ethno-development projects in their rural
communities. They demanded the implementation of their constitutional rights
to self-government and the respect for their traditional cultural practices recog-
nized by the Constitution. As in Colombia, these proposals illustrate a process
of ‘relocation of ‘Blackness’ in structures of alterity in ways that make it look
increasingly like “indianness”’ (Wade 1997, 37). They presented themselves
as a people and communities that had occupied an ancestral territory, has an
autonomous culture, and that needs special rights. They aimed to have auton-
omy to defend Afro-descendants’ territory from agro-export industries. The
project also aimed to give Afro-Ecuadorian communities autonomy to manage
education, health and ancestral systems of justice. Yet these proposals reinforced
dominant stereotypes that associate Blackness to the rural areas (Rahier 1998).
Moreover, these projects did not take into consideration the experiences of the
majority of Afro-Ecuadorians who lived in cities and whose experience of racial
discrimination and exclusion would not be addressed as long as they were seen
as rural folk who happened to be in the city as temporary immigrants.
During neoliberal multiculturalism, Afro-Ecuadorian organizations de-
pended on funds from the World Bank, the IDB or foreign nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs). For example, between 2002 and 2005, the IDB gave
US$500,000 to Afro-Ecuadorian organizations to study their social exclu-
sions and to train local community leaders. When in 2005, the IDB stopped its
funding, this project ended. As in other neoliberal multicultural experiences,
as long as resources lasted organizations thrived; when the funds dried out,
organizations went into crises or simply ceased to exist. Reflecting different
regional histories and entrenched mistrust between regions, Afro-Ecuadorian
leaders competed with each other to control the CODAE. During the Lucio
Gutiérrez administration, for example, CODAE was in the hands of organi-

zations from Guayaquil and Esmeraldas and organizations from Quito and the
Chota-Mira Valley felt excluded (de la Torre and Antón 2012).
Afro-Ecuadorian organizations focused on cultural recognition, without lo-
cating these demands in broader policies of distribution (Zambrano 2011; de la
Torre and Antón 2012; Johnson 2012). The politics of multicultural recognition
were more in tune with the interests of leaders than with the grass roots,
particularly in contexts of profound economic inequality. Many poor Afro-
Ecuadorians did not feel included by the organization’s cultural discourses. In
a context of structural racism that limited their employment opportunities as
professionals, access to jobs in the state became the main tool for social mobility
for Afro-Ecuadorian leaders (Antón 2011; de la Torre 2002; Rahier 2013).
During multicultural neoliberalism, Afro-Ecuadorians became more visible
in the public sphere. After the adoption of the multicultural Constitution of
1998, three Afro-descendants were elected to the Congress of 1998 to 2002
(see Table 7.1). In the election of Congress in 2002, 32 out of 742 candidates
were Afro-Ecuadorians, and 2 were elected: Dennis Cevallos for the populist
PRE and Rafael Erazo for the leftist MPD.
The ethnically monolithic White public sphere was partially democra-
tized during neoliberal multiculturalism. Juan Montaño Escobar, an Afro-
Ecuadorian intellectual, wrote weekly opinion editorials in Quito’s Diario
Hoy. The print media tried to avoid using racist language and included positive
stories about Afro-Ecuadorian professionals and activists. Afro-Ecuadorians
developed their own representations in periodical publications and videos
that formed an Afro-Ecuadorian counter public sphere. Yet television and the
print media continued to present stereotypical images and racist stereotypes
of A fro-Ecuadorians and Indigenous people (Rahier 2008; de la Torre and
Hollenstein 2010).
Under neoliberal multiculturalism, the state enacted policies to incorpo-
rate Afro-descendants. Their political participation and organizations were
strengthened, and Afro-Ecuadorians conquered collective rights to cultural
identity, territory and ethno-development. Yet the state lacked the will and the
resources to implement multicultural policies.
Rafael Correa’s Autocratic Redistributive Multiculturalism:

2007–2017
Rafael Correa rose to power after a period of profound political instabil-
ity. Between 1997 and 2005, the three elected presidents of Ecuador – Abdalá
Bucaram (1996–97), Jamil Mahuad (1998–2000) and Lucio Gutiérrez (2003–2005) –
were deposed after massive protests against neoliberalism and political corruption.
Correa was elected in 2006 with an anti-neoliberal platform and the promise to
convene a constituent assembly to get rid of a corrupt political system. He was the
ultimate political outsider and used a populist rhetoric to represent politics as an

antagonistic confrontation between the people embodied in his leadership, against
the neoliberal political establishment. Once in power, he used the state to get rid of
neoliberalism and to enact anti-poverty policies. Simultaneously, he used the state
to regulate what the private media could publish and to supervise the activities of
NGOs. He created social movements from the top and accused leftist activists of
terrorism and sabotage.
Correa’s government represented a new phase in the relationship between
the state and Afro-descendants. His administration abandoned neoliberalism,
built a stronger state and used it to regulate the economy and civil society. Cor-
rea continued with the multicultural policies of cultural inclusion. His govern-
ment differentiated between permitted ethnic subjects that accepted his policies
of distribution and recalcitrant ethnic subjects that challenged his policies and
were repressed and excluded. To analyze the ambiguities of Correa’s racial proj-
ect of autocratic redistributive multiculturalism, we explain the new role of
the state in the economy, the process of drafting the Constitution of 2008 and
the Census of 2010, the increasing visibility of Afro-Ecuadorians in the public
sphere, and the ambiguities of strategic co-optation of Black organizations to
the state and to the Correa administration.
Correa’s government reaped the benefits of an oil boom that increased the
price of oil from US$52 a barrel in 2006 to US$98 in 2013. Petroleum rep-
resents 53% of the nation’s total exports. Correa abandoned neoliberalism,
increased the size of the state and its role in the economy, built infrastruc-
ture, augmented social spending in health and education, and reduced poverty.
Spending on social programs increased from 5% of the GDP in 2006 to 9.85%
in 2011, and the minimum wage was raised from US$170 to US$240 a month.
The human development bonus –a cash transfer program for those in the lower
40% of income distribution, those who are mothers of children under 16, and
those who are above the age of 65, or are disabled –improved the income,
health and education of the poorest population. The number of recipients of
this program doubled between 2006 and January 2012 to about two million
recipients. Poverty had started to decline before Correa took power from 49%
in 2003 to 37% in 2006. Under Correa, it was further reduced to 29% in 2011.
The Gini coefficient was reduced from 50.4 in 2006 to 47.0 in 2011 (de la Torre
and Ortiz 2016, 227–228).
Social movements and the left were dissatisfied with the Constitution of
1998. They branded it as neoliberal and demanded a new constituent assembly
that would be truly participatory and not in the hands of traditional parties. As in
Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales’s Bolivia, constitution-making
became the tool for the construction of a more participatory and equal soci-
ety and also the strategy to change its institutional framework. The process
of drafting the new constitution was participatory and involved social move-
ments. For the first time, Afro-Ecuadorians were involved in the process of
constitution-making. Out of 16 Afro-Ecuadorian candidates, 8 were elected

to the constituent assembly and represented different political parties. The
Constitution of 2008 recognized Afro-Ecuadorians as a people or pueblo bearer
of collective rights. Like the Constitution of 1998, the new Charter included
Afro-descendants within frameworks of indigeneity. Rights of rural communi-
ties to their ancestral lands and culture were prioritized (Rahier 2013, 94–95).
The new hyper-presidentialist constitution (approved in a referendum with
64% of the vote) strengthened the executive branch, allowed for presidential
re-election for another term of four years, subjugated the legislative branch
placing restrictions on its oversight powers and established ‘a system of con-
trol over civil society through a variety of participation plans to incorporate
and subordinate social groups to the government’s administrative apparatus’
(Montúfar 2013, 313). The Constitution gave rights to nature and included anti-
discrimination clauses. The new Constitution also set limits to collective rights
of Indigenous people and Afro-Ecuadorians to territory and self-government.
The Constitution recognized plurinationalism, but special representation of
Indigenous nationalities or Afro-Ecuadorians beyond regular democratic rep-
resentation were not included (Martínez Novo 2014, 113). Indigenous and
ancestral Afro-Ecuadorian territories were recognized, but the process of es-
tablishing these territories became difficult to implement. Even though the
Constitution established that Indigenous people and Afro-descendants should
be consulted on whether to exploit natural resources located in their territories,
this consultation was not binding.
The Census of 2010 had the novelty of involving representatives of social
movements in its design (Martínez Novo 2015, 407). The self-identification
question gave greater weight to culture than to race, ‘How do you identify
according to your culture and customs? And the options were: Indigenous,
A fro-Ecuadorian or Afro-descendant, Black, Mulatto, montubio, White,
Mestizo, and other’ (Martínez Novo 2015, 407). This Census included
montubios who are peasants from the coast as a new ethnic group. According
to self-identification, the ethnic distribution of the country was 7% Indigenous,
7.2% Afro-Ecuadorians, 7.4% montubios, 6.1% Whites and 71.9% Mestizo.
The proportion of people who identified as White and Mestizo were re-
duced from the previous census perhaps because many had the choice to be
montubios, the proportion of Indigenous people continued to be about 7%,
and the proportion of Afro-Ecuadorians increased by 2%. The increase in the
number of Afro-descendants –that as in the Census of 2001 were counted with
criteria of hypo-descent that added Blacks and Mulattos –is explained by the
work of CODAE and Afro-Ecuadorian organizations in motivating people to
be counted in the census. Differently from Afro-descendant organizations that
used their numbers to negotiate rights with the state, Indigenous people did not
view the census positively. They associate census taking with the extraction of
resources in the form of new taxes and labor recruitment. In 1950, for example,
Indigenous people revolted against the census, and Martínez Novo reports that
in 2010 Indigenous people were suspicious of census takers. The low numbers
of people choosing the Indigenous category are also explained by discrimina-
tion, the deficient campaign of promoting the census in Indigenous areas and
the methodology of the census that sent Mestizo census takers that only asked
questions of self-identification (when they did so) to the head of the household
(Martínez Novo 2015, 413–418).
This new representation of the nation allowed social movement activ-
ists and scholars to show the links between race and ethnicity and inequal-
ity. Table 7.2 presented that Indigenous people, Montubios and Blacks had
the highest poverty and extreme poverty indexes. Data on inequality were
used by CODAE to design anti-poverty public policies for Afro-descendants.
These were also used by CODAE and Afro-Ecuadorian organizations to push
for affirmative action policies to improve employment opportunities of Afro-
descendants, Indigenous and Montubios.
Correa’s administration used census data to delegitimize Indigenous demands.
In a context of conflict with Indigenous organizations over natural resource
extraction and over autonomy of education and water use, Correa portrayed
Indigenous people as a minority that aimed to impose its particularistic agen-
das on the Mestizo national majority. In 2014, Correa said, ‘We are more, we
are many more. And here, like in any democracy, a minority that is abusive,
arrogant, and made up of stone throwers, will not rule. The majority will rule,
fellow countrymen’ (quoted in Martínez Novo 2015, 408). As a minority with a
population similar to other minorities like Montubios or Afro-Ecuadorians, In-
digenous people for Correa did not deserve any special recognition from the state.
Table 7.2 Poverty according to unsatisfied basic needs (NBI) according to the
Census of 2010
How do you identify Poverty Extreme Number Number of Total

yourself according to your NBI (%) poverty of poor people under population
customs and culture? NBI (%) extreme poverty
Indigenous 82.5 52.5 839.947 534.632 1.018.176

Afro-Ecuatorian 61.8 27.5 380.225 169.381 615.262
Black 68.6 34.7 99.810 50.485 145.398
Mulatto 58.6 25.7 164.474 72.138 280.899
Montubio 78.6 44.1 841.399 472.604 1.070.728
Mestizo 47.1 18.0 4.909.975 1.879.858 10.417.299
White 39.0 13.9 344.386 122.986 882.383
Other 45.6 18.5 24.312 9.884 53.354
Total 52.5 22.9 7.605.982 3.313.177 14.483.499
Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos del Ecuador INEC –VII Censo de población y
VI de Vivienda 2010.
Correa played off ‘Afro-descendants as a model minority’ against the un-

ruly Indigenous movement (Walsh 2012, 30). The government formed the
Secretariat for the Peoples and Citizen’s Participation (SEPPAC) and named
an A fro-Ecuadorian activist Alexandra Ocles as its director with the rank
of minister that participated in Correa’s presidential cabinet. This institution
worked in political campaigns on behalf of the government, such as the refer-
endum, to get the new constitution approved, and the campaign for Correa’s
re-election (Ocles 2012, 178). The SEPPAC sponsored organizations like the
Council for Afro-Ecuadorian Unity (CONUAE). This organization staged
demonstrations to support the government in exchange for jobs. For instance,
David Quiñónez, who served as the leader of CONUAE, became the director
of the Hospital Delfina Torres in Esmeraldas. His brother Luis Quiñónez was
named head of the Ecuadorian Consulate in New Orleans (de la Torre and
Antón 2012, 148).
Correa’s government tried to divide the leadership of the Indigenous
organization CONAIE from the rank and file. Minister Doris Solis asserted that
the government aimed to strengthen the direct dialogue between Indigenous
grassroots organizations and the government and to replace the confrontational
leader of the Indigenous movement with a less defiant leadership (de la Torre
and Antón 2012, 148). The government used clientelist distribution to incorpo-
rate the Indigenous base, as the beneficiaries of social programs felt personally
indebted to Correa. Another tool of incorporation and co-optation was state
employment. According to Indigenous leader Marlon Santi, thousands of
Indigenous people were working for the state (Ortiz 2013, 257). Indigenous
leaders who resisted the government’s policies of natural resource extraction
were charged with terrorism and sabotage.
When Alexandra Ocles was in charge of the secretariat of the peoples, a new
law that regulated the work of NGOs and banned them to engage in politics
was first discussed. In Ocles’ words, ‘if you want to do political proselytism or to
propose a political ideology you should cease to be an NGO and become a polit-
ical party’ (quoted in de la Torre and Antón 2012, 148). To regulate civil society
and NGOs, the government created legislation that requires all organizations
of civil society to register with the state. Executive Degree 16, enacted in June
2013, also gave the government authority to sanction organizations for deviat-
ing from the objectives for which they were constituted, for engaging in politics
and for interfering in public policies in a way that contravenes internal and ex-
ternal security or disturbs public peace (de la Torre and Ortiz 2016, 229–230).
To set an example, the environmentalist organization Pachama A lliance was
dissolved.
The increasing visibility of Afro-Ecuadorians in the public sphere allowed
Correa to claim, ‘Afro-Ecuadorians are the state’ (Walsh 2012, 29). Poet A ntonio
Preciado was his minister of culture; Alexandra Ocles was put in charge of the
SEPPAC and was a member of Correa’s cabinet; similarly, José Chalá, director
of CODAE, was a member of the president’s ministerial cabinet; Roberto

Cuero was appointed by Correa as Governor of the Guayas Province 2009 to
2011; Julio César Quiñónez was appointed Governor of Guayas in 2015; and in
2013, Paola Cabezas became Governor of Esmeraldas. Afro-Ecuadorians were
appointed to the National Electoral Council, the Constitutional Tribunal, the
Constitutional Court and the Council of Citizen’s Participation. In addition,
35 Afro-descendants leaders worked for the government (de la Torre and Antón
2012, 145–147).
Under Correa, Afro-Ecuadorians became more visible in politics. Whereas
in the Assembly of 2009, as Congress is named, only one Afro-Ecuadorian
was elected, and Assembly of 2013, twenty-two Afro-Ecuadorians run for
seats and nine were elected. Table 7.3 indicated that one assemblywoman was
from the opposition, and eight were from Correa’s Alianza País (AP) Party.
Three a ssembly people were famous soccer players, whereas five were activists
and professionals. The increasing visibility of Afro-Ecuadorian politicians is
explained by the efforts of Correa to show his multicultural credentials in a
context of conflicts with the Indigenous movement. The opening of political
opportunities led to an increase in the number of Afro-Ecuadorian represen-
tatives. Correa’s opposition also gave visibility to Afro-descendant politicians.
In 2013, Marcia Caicedo unsuccessfully run for the vice presidency with pres-
idential candidate Alberto Acosta in a ticket of unity of the left that included
the MPD and Pachakutik.
Table 7.4 presented that Correa’s AP continues to be the party with most
A fro-Ecuadorians elected to the Assembly. In the 2017 elections, 7 out of a total
of 137 were elected. Two were from right-wing opposition parties (CREO and
the Social Christian Party) and five from AP including one soccer player and
three former state officials.
Table 7.3 A fro-descendants elected to the Assembly of 2013–2017
NO Name of the representative Party Occupation
1 Hurtado Angulo, Iván Jacinto AP Soccer player

2 Ocles Padilla, María Alexandra AP Activist, professional
3 De la Cruz Bernardo, Herman Ulises AP Soccer player
4 Delgado Chalá, Agustín Xavier AP Soccer player
5 Gudiño Mena, Zobeida Guisela AP Professional
6 De la Cruz Gaspar, Adriana Moisotti AP Activist
7 de la Torre, Pablo AP Professional
8 Montaño Valencia, Mae CREO Professional
9 Rivero Doguer, Angel Armando AP Activist
Sources: Antón Sánchez 2013.

Note: Movimiento Creo or CREO, Creadando Oportunidades (Creating Opportunities).
Table 7.4 A fro-Ecuadorians elected to the Assembly of 2017–2021
NO Name of the representative Party Occupation
1 Montaño, Mae CREO Professional

2 Montaño, María Social Christian Morning TV host
Party
3 Chalá, José AP Academic, former director of
CODAE
4 Corozo, Jorge AP Soccer player
5 Quiñonez, Julio César AP Former governor of Guayas
6 Plaza, Lenin AP TV journalist
7 Rivadeneira, Carmen AP Activist
8 Cabezas, Paola AP Former governor of
Esmeraldas
Sources: Resultados electorales 2017. Asamblea Nacional del Ecuador http://cne.gob.ec/es.v

Note: Movimiento Creo or CREO, Creadando Oportunidades (Creating Opportunities).
The paradoxes of Afro-Ecuadorian strategic co-optation to the Correa admin-

istration were well illustrated in the conflict between Xavier Bonilla ‘Bonil’, a
Mestizo political cartoonist critical of the government that works in the news-
paper El Universo and Afro-Ecuadorian organizations. In a political cartoon
published in 2015, Bonil made fun of Assemblyman Agustín Delgado when
he had trouble reading a document sponsoring a bill in Congress. Bonil used
stereotypes that linked Afro-descendants to poverty. Delgado, a famous soccer
player, was chosen by Correa to run for a seat in the Assembly of 2013. Cor-
rea did not follow the advice of Afro-Ecuadorian leaders to choose academics
or activists as candidates, and instead chose well-known soccer players to get
more votes to control the legislative power. Fourteen Afro-Ecuadorian or-
ganizations denounced Bonil to the superintendence of communication and
demanded that he be charged with racism for his cartoon. Even though Bonil
apologized to Delgado, the state institution in charge of regulating the media
content found him guilty and forced him to publically apologize for using so-
cioeconomic discrimination in his political cartoon. Bonil’s lawyer was Lenin
Hurtado, a prominent Afro-Ecuadorian lawyer and politician, son of the late
Jaime Hurtado, and a leader of the MPD. Lenin Hurtado argued that the state
was using its power to try to silence a critic in the media and charged Afro-
Ecuadorian organizations for trivializing racism.1
This conflict showed that Afro-Ecuadorians could use laws to stop racism.
In 2015, a lieutenant of the military school was charged with racism and sen-
tenced to jail for brutally humiliating Michael Arce, an Afro-Ecuadorian stu-
dent.2 Bonil’s case is more complicated. He used racist stereotypes,3 but the
problem is that Afro-Ecuadorian organizations played into the hands of Correa
government’s war with the privately owned media.
According to President Correa, ‘the media have always been one of the de facto
powers that have dominated Latin American countries’ (Correa 2012, 100). In
2013, the National Assembly controlled by Correa approved a communication
law that created a board tasked with monitoring and regulating the content of
what the media could publish. According to the administration, such a regulatory
mechanism was needed to assure that the private media delivered information
objectively. Any attempt at watchdog journalism was viewed with suspicion, and
the president as well as other state officials used libel laws in order to intimidate
and to try to silence critical journalists. Correa’s administration sued journalists
and newspaper owners. The most notorious cases that were reported worldwide
involved an editor and three board members of the largest privately owned news-
paper, El Universo, who were convicted of defamation and sentenced to three-
year terms for publishing an editorial entitled No to Lies; the paper was also fined
US$40 million. Correa also sued investigative journalists Juan Carlos Calderón
and Christian Zurita for libel for uncovering detailed allegations of corruption by
his brother. Their book entitled The Big Brother details the favouritism Fabricio
Correa enjoyed while obtaining contracts from the state for about 150 million
dollars. Rafael Correa demanded that these two journalists pay him two million
dollars for causing moral harm. After they were promptly convicted, the Presi-
dent pardoned them. Similarly, Bonil was previously sanctioned by the state and
had to rectify the content of one of his political cartoons.
Afro-Ecuadorian organizations perhaps saw the Bonil-Delgado affair as an
opportunity to push the state to enforce antidiscrimination laws. Instead of
worrying about state censorship, the activists took advantage of the occasion to
get rid of what they considered to be offensive media representations. But by
focusing only on this case while remaining silent when Correa used racist rhet-
oric against the leaders of Indigenous organizations, they lost credibility and
played into the hands of a government that aims to censor critical media outlets.
Other costs of corporatist inclusion were that when Afro-Ecuadorian ac-
tivists and academics occupied positions in the government, their social move-
ments became in the words of Minister María Alexandra Ocles ‘headless’ and
many organizations were left in ‘a state of anomie’ (Ocles 2012, 180–181).
Even though leaders were given positions of visibility in the state, and some of
their demands were adopted as state policies, Afro-Ecuadorian organizations
participated in a government that censored the media, regulated civil soci-
ety, criminalized protest and ultimately undermined the autonomy of social
movements. They also allowed Correa to brand them as a model minority in
opposition to unruly Indians.
Conclusions
Afro-Ecuadorians are no longer invisible. Since the late 1990s, they were rec-
ognized as a distinct people with rights to culture and, to a much lesser extent,
to territory. The nation is no longer represented as Mestizo, and recognition

in the census allowed activists and academics to show with data the workings
of institutionalized racism and to enact policies to end with the legacies of
colonialism and institutionalized discrimination. Afro-Ecuadorians became
visible as politicians and state officials. They belonged to parties of different
ideologies. Afro-Ecuadorians democratized the state and society. Racism is
finally considered a crime, and affirmative action is seen as a tool to incorporate
them to previously White and Mestizo institutions. Similarly, they have been
included in the public sphere, and due to their activism, blatantly racist images
and representations are progressively diminishing in the media.
The neoliberal and the post-neoliberal state was more willing to recognize
rights to culture than rights to territory and autonomy especially when these
rights could be used to challenge natural resource extraction. The permit-
ted Afro-Ecuadorians of multicultural neoliberalism had rights to culture and
ethno-development, and under Correa was the target of state led redistribution
and multicultural recognition as long as they did not challenge state policies.
Following old patterns of corporatist inclusion, Afro-Ecuadorians were in-
corporated into the state in institutions such as CODAE that promoted policies
on their behalf. The neoliberal state, together with multinational institutions
like the World Bank and the IADB, promoted their unity. Correa followed
these policies and tried to incorporate Afro-Ecuadorians into the state and his
political party. Correa had more resources to include Afro-descendants, yet
some did not surrender their autonomy and resisted Correa’s autocratic poli-
cies. Mae Montaño from the right and Lenin Hurtado in the left were vocal
critics of the Correa´s administration. Some organizations used the opening
of political opportunities under neoliberal multiculturalism and in Correa’s
government to use the state to push for policies on behalf of Afro-Ecuadorians.
Yet the costs were that many leaders became the representatives of the state to
Afro-descendants and the voice of Afro-Ecuadorians in the state. At times,
they accepted labels of model minority to show their distinction from unruly
Indigenous organizations and get more state resources. The state under Correa
used Afro-Ecuadorian leaders to enact legislation that limited the autonomy of
civil society, such as restricting and supervising NGOs. It also counted with
Afro-Ecuadorian organizations to support policies that in the name of fighting
against racist media representation censored the media.
After 10 years of Correa in power, Afro-Ecuadorians successfully demanded
policies for their socioeconomic, political and cultural inclusion. Yet many
policies, as during the neoliberal multicultural era, were not implemented.
According to Afro-Ecuadorian academic activists (Antón 2016), the problem is
that proposals of multicultural inclusion were not accompanied with budgets.
They also argue that old entrenched bureaucracies opposed the implementation
of these policies and that the communities have not mobilized to demand that
the state fulfils its policies.
Afro-Ecuadorian struggles partially democratized the public sphere. In few

years, Afro-Ecuadorians became visible as politicians and elected representatives
of different ideologies, state officials and columnists in the print media. Their lim-
ited recognition, inclusion and visibility in the public sphere did not lead to the
abolition of racism. Even though an Afro-Ecuadorian middle class was created and
consolidated, Afro-descendants are poorer than Whites and Mestizos, for e xample,
as presented in Table 7.2. Afro-Ecuadorians continue to face everyday forms of
racism and discrimination. Yet differently from the past, they could use anti-racist
laws. After decades of denying racism, the neoliberal and post-neoliberal state fi-
nally enacted policies to eliminate the legacies of colonialism and racism.
Notes
1 www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHWBc8m1TI4.
2 www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2015/11/151120_ecuador_condena_r acismo_es-
cuela_militar_ab.
3 www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas/1/del-jazzman-a-bonil.
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8
En la Sucursal del Cielo
(In the Branch of Paradise)
Geographies of Privilege and Black Social
Suffering in Cali, Colombia
Jaime Amparo Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa
Introduction
Every year, the city of Santiago de Cali celebrates the Festival Petronio Álvarez
to honor the Black roots of Colombia. In August, the city is turned into a stage
where local residents and tourists from Colombia and beyond ‘consume’ Black
culture in the form of music, dance and ethnic food. The festival is named after
Black musician and composer Patricio Romano Petronio Álvarez Quintero,
whose songs brought the Pacific to the forefront of Colombian music in the
1950s.1 During the festival, Blacks play prominent roles in public spectacles,
and Black cultural practices are displayed in primetime TV shows as part of the
city’s cultural heritage. At least during the week-long festival, Cali becomes a
stage where Blackness and cultural diversity are ‘ethno-marketed’ by the city
government as a way to attract national and international tourism. As c ultural
critic Mateo Cárdenas highlights, by turning ‘ethnicity’ into a marketing strat-
egy the local political and economic elite sells Cali as a city free of racism
and tolerant of difference. During the Petronio Festival, ‘everyone (Mestizos
and Blacks) can be displayed in multicultural postal cards to promote the city
as a cultural touristic destination (Cárdenas 2012 86)’. Indeed, on the streets,
individuals from all racial and class backgrounds shift from erasing blackness
(‘We are all Colombians’) to reclaiming their African roots (‘We all came from
Africa’). The week-long festival hides yet another reality this article aims to
unveil: behind the image of Cali as a multicultural city lies a deeply racialized
urban setting in which Blacks2 are the main victims of police brutality, have
higher poverty rates and have lower rates of access to health care, schooling,
employment and housing. How is it that the city celebrates Blackness as part
of its identity, yet at the same time devalues Black lives in everyday life? What
seems like a paradox of the city’s and the nation’s narratives of (racial) belonging
184 Jaime Amparo Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa
is in fact its raison d’être. In this chapter, we argue that the shared acceptance of
ordinary Black disposability not only indicates that Black lives are unworthy,
but also that mundane Black suffering makes it possible to imagine Cali as a
multicultural polis and as a ‘cultural commodity’ (Kanai 2014; Cárdenas 2012).
This reasoning may be counterintuitive if we consider the ‘racially dem-
ocratic’ horizontal community constituted by the ephemeral participation of
individuals from various races and social classes in Cali’s most famous festival.
Still, what enables Cali to be exceptionally imagined as a ‘multicultural city’ is
the exclusionary presence of Blackness from urban life. The spectacular display
of Black culture in an exceptional moment also renders visible not only Black
mundane invisibility but also normalizes White/Mestizo belonging to the city.
To be sure, Whiteness is not celebrated by the cheerleaders in the festival,
nor is it invocated in the context of everyday life in Cali. It is not needed. As
some Latin American scholars have argued, Whiteness is an unmarked/uni-
versal category and the celebration of Mestizaje is yet another way to promote
Whiteness. To evoke Mestizaje in Colombia, as in most of Latin America, quite
often means to claim an affiliation to something else other than being Black or
Indigenous (for a critique, see Wade 1993; Hale 2006). In Cali, the Black sub-
ject is placed in an absence-presence schema in which they are rendered both
invisible by the racial structure of privilege the city conveys and hyper-visible
in the folkloric narratives of racial encounters and racial mixture present in
moments like the Petronio Festival. Whiteness, on the other hand, is promoted
through the anti-Black system of privilege that the discourse of Mestizaje can-
cels out in everyday life. As we elaborate below, the vast gray zone of Mestizaje
does not authorize the negation of Whiteness as a category of analysis and as
a system of privilege. As a social construct, Whiteness is lived and reproduced
through multiple ways and the daily denial of racism/celebration of Mestizaje
is certainly one of them. As sociologist Mara Viveros has suggested in the case
of Medellin – Colombian’s second largest city, in Colombia Whiteness must
be understood by taking into consideration the invisibility of Whiteness, or
its hidden constituency behind the ‘normative domination’ that turns racial
discourses superfluous (2013, 97).
If, from the perspective of Cali’s Mestizo/White elite, neither Whiteness
nor race exists, how can we account for the sharp racial divide within the
city? We take up this challenge by providing a race-centered analysis of the
geographies of death and opportunities within the city. One could argue that
in Cali, as in most of Latin America, lines of poverty and social marginalization
are racially blurred. We certainly do not argue that race is the only category
that explains patterns of residential segregation, illiteracy, poverty and unem-
ployment. We argue, instead, that in a (post-slavery) society with a legacy of
racial domination, race informs how such vulnerabilities are distributed and
lived in the urban space: our claim is hardly new. Scholars have consistently
identified a pattern that strongly correlates dark-skinned people with higher
En la Sucursal del Cielo (In the Branch of Paradise) 185
rates of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy (Paixão and Carvano 2008; Per-
reira and Telles 2014). These findings ring particularly true to Cali where –
a lthough statistics also show that there are Whites/Mestizos subjected to similar
conditions — racial belonging significantly increases the risks of gendered pov-
erty, illiteracy and homicide (Urrea and Quintin 2001; Posso 2008).
Before mapping the sociodemographic situation in Cali, we first outline the
main trends within the debates on race and racial relations in both Colombia
and Latin America. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive, our aim is to
situate Cali’s racial order within the larger ‘racial common sense’ that informs
conceptions of citizenship and access to the city. Whereas poverty and privilege
are hardly articulated in everyday conversations in terms of racial belongings,
spaces of social exclusion and spaces of privilege are deeply racialized. To sus-
tain our claims, we provide a space-based descriptive analysis, with a quali-
tative approach, of patterns of social exclusion in the city. Before proceeding
with the article, a note on methodology: the map-based data on family income,
illiteracy and violent deaths are derived from the city of Cali’s 2005–2010 Atlas
of Violence, by the Observatorio Social, which combines the 2005 Colombian
national census with the city’s household surveys to predict space-based pat-
terns of social vulnerability. The employment and occupation figures are from
the 2012 Quality of Life National Survey in combination with disaggregated
data from the 2005 Census.
Based on the overlapping of these socioeconomic variables in relation to
race, place of residence, gender and class status, our secondary/qualitative anal-
ysis suggests the existence of intersecting factors in enforcing Cali’s unequal
social order: (a) wealth distribution and poverty are place specific; that is, they
are highly concentrated in areas with homogeneous socioeconomic demo-
graphics; (b) class, gender, place of residence and racial belonging interact to
predict vulnerabilities to poverty, unemployment and violence; and (c) although
focusing only on race is insufficient to explain urban inequalities in Cali, race
plays an important role in defining one’s place of living and in deepening social
vulnerabilities, particularly on female poverty and homicidal violence among
youth. Thematic maps are presented in the following order: we first provide
general data on income distribution, illiteracy among youth, professional oc-
cupation and homicides and then provide an analysis of the s ignificance of race
in the city’s spatial dynamics. It is our belief that the gradual unfolding of data
(poverty, homicidal violence, and then racial segregation) serves us better in
unveiling the cumulative and overlapping geographies of race and privilege in
Santiago de Cali.
‘We Are All Blacks’

Although we do not aim to revisit the abundant literature on race and race rela-
tions in Latin America, it is worth highlighting the main trends and Colombia’s
positioning in this debate. Most of the current literature contests the celebra-
tory approach of racial mixing on the continent opened up by the work of
Gilberto Freyre (1978), in Brazil, and José de Vasconcelos (1966), in México.
Their approach denied the existence of racism and recognized the contribution
of Blacks and Indigenous groups to the formation of a national identity. They
also advocated that because of the fluidity of racial categories (in contrast to the
rigid racial schema in the US and South Africa), it was impossible to distinguish
who was Black and who was White. Therefore, these scholars argued, every-
body would have a ‘foot in the kitchen’ or could claim to have ‘African roots’.
In recent years, and not surprisingly in the wake of current debates concerning
affirmative action policies in the region, some scholars have resurrected the ra-
cial ambiguity approach, arguing for an understanding of Latin American racial
system on its own. They recognize the role of race in social inequalities in Latin
America but also argue that the poor are discriminated against for being poor,
not because of their racial identities as Black or Indigenous. Others argue that
Mestizaje is indeed an alternative mode to the US-based obsession with racial
binaries (De la Fuente 1995; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Fry 2000).
An alternative analytical framework recognizes the specificities of ‘racial
formations’ in Latin America – as opposed to overtly discriminatory poli-
cies and rigid racial classifications that exist in the US. At the same time, this
framework also maintains that race is indeed a defining factor in the ways Latin
American societies are organized (Twine 1997; Hale 2006; Paschel and Sawyer
2008; Wade 2008). This latter body of scholarship suggests that contrary to the
myth of racial uncertainty and ambiguity concerning racial identities, the very
negation of race as a social organizing category reveals a ‘hyperconsciousness’
of its presence in everyday life. As João Costa Vargas puts it in his recent study
on Brazil,
the hyperconsciousness/negation of race dialectic is both an effect of the

racial democracy myth and the evidence that the myth is just this – a
myth with little, if any, correspondence in how Brazilian society is struc-
tured by resources and power differentials.
(Vargas 2004, 445)
In that sense, the diverse ways people define themselves in Latin America should
not lead one to downplay the role of race, and particularly skin color, as marker of
difference. To the contrary, they reveal that there is a general awareness of what
categories should be avoided or embraced, even if it requires extraordinary cre-
ativity as indicated in the multiplicity of terms for racial c lassifications in the re-
gion. Similar to most of Latin America, the racial classification system in Colombia
is diverse and creative. To avoid association with Black and Indigenous groups,
Colombians often place themselves in a shadow zone of classification, one that
potentially allows any individual to move around the Black-Indigenous-White
racial taxonomy. Still, the ‘coexisting process of Mestizaje and discrimination’

indicates that while there may be some room for negotiating ones’ identity, some
marked bodies (Black/Indigenous) cannot escape from the racial knowledge that
structures racial relations in the country (Wade 1993, 18; also Mosquera and
León 1991; Arboleda 2007). More recently, the C olombian state has shifted its
discourses from negating racism (the ‘We are all Colombians’) to the affirmation
of multiculturalism and the promotion of Black/Indigenous identities. The 1991
Constitution recognized, at least formally, the ‘right to difference’ to the histori-
cally discriminated Indigenous and Black population and granted collective land
rights access mechanisms to both groups.
Although this shift represented a significant change in state practices, as it
formally recognized the existence of racial discrimination, the state-sanctioned
multicultural ‘ethnic politics’ produced a specific (rural-based) type of racial
identity; that is, only ‘authentic’ Blacks and Indigenous groups who con-
tinue living in rural areas were entitled to such policies. The fast-growing
Black urban population remains outside of the realm of state-promoted mul-
ticultural policies. They are not considered Black because they are not in ru-
ral areas of the Pacific coast, they do not retain a ‘Black’ culture, and they
are ‘integrated’ in the Colombian society (for a critique, see Agudelo 2004;
Valencia 2011; Cárdenas 2012). How might we understand the fate of Black
urban life in a multicultural society that recognizes the right to difference only
to those ‘authentically’ rural Blacks? While we should be cautious not to re-
gard multiculturalism as a top-down process, the state has historically played
a key role in defining and carrying on ethnic–racial projects (slavery–racial
democracy-multiculturalism) in Latin America. In the case of Colombia, read-
ers should consider that the country’s ‘geography of race’ (see Wade 1993) — in
which the Pacific coast has historically been imagined as Black, the lowlands in
the Amazon as Indigenous, and the country’s main urban centers as White —
has had a profound impact in the ways the state is present/absent in such re-
gions. Likewise, while we are cautious not to reify the urban/rural dichotomy
deployed by the Colombian multicultural state to define ‘authentic Blacks’, we
call attention to the structural violence (sanctioned or tolerated by the state)
that turns Colombia’s ‘Blackest’ city into an anti-Black space.
Thus, in trying to locate the work of race in producing Cali’s spatial order,
we cannot dissociate the city’s racial animus to the state-coordinated ethnic–
racial policies that affect Black lives in the rural/urban continuum. As we hope
to make clear below, there are several ways through which the state is in-
volved in the systemic racism found in Cali: it facilitates processes of territorial
d isposition (Cali is the main urban center for the 2 million and counting inter-
nally displaced Black population due to the paramilitary-state-guerrilla war),
it designs urban planning and housing policies that further segregate the Black
population in the economically depressed and environmentally hostile areas of
the city, and it fails in providing access to basic citizenship rights; all the while
the deprived population is subjected to hyper-surveillance and incarceration

by racially biased law-enforcement policies. Regardless of intentionality, these
racialized practices can be regarded as ‘state-produced vulnerabilities to pre-
mature death’ (Gilmore 2007, 247) because the state creates conditions that
precipitate these living-in-death conditions. Here we regard ‘premature death’ as
a category that reveals much more than a medical terminology. It is the axis
of power where race, class and gender-based vulnerabilities overlap in defin-
ing one’s life span. These life-shortening policies – expressed in unemployed/
oversupplying Black population, lack of access to housing and health care, and
astonishing premature death by homicide – produce spaces as much as they are
spatially produced. Before situating Cali within these spatio-necropolitical dynam-
ics, we begin by analyzing the work of race in producing the city’s spatial order.
We do so not because other factors are not equally important in predicting
social suffering but rather because a contextualized focus on racism and its
outcomes is a much-needed approach to challenge Cali’s (and Latin American)
long-standing denial of race as a tool for maintaining urban inequalities.
Racial/Spatial Order
In ‘Demonic Ground’, geographer Katherine McKittrick argues that ‘Black
matters are spatial matters’ (2006, xii). If this assertion is correct, and given
the current challenges for Black urban life, it is reasonable to argue that urban
matters are also Black matters. Some scholars have been vocal in asserting the
centrality of race in understanding the urban question. They have argued that
the ‘polis’, understood as the imagined community of equals and the political-
juridical space for the exercise of the citizenry, is a racialized disposition.
Race, they argue, is not only inscribed in urban space — through residen-
tial segregation, police violence and unemployment, for instance; its resulting
spatio-social relations of domination also create conditions of possibility for
the city to come into being as a non-Black spatiality (Martinot and Sexton
2003; Rutland 2011; Alves 2018). This perspective is particularly relevant to
understand the current spatial ordering of Latin American cities in general
and Colombian cities in particular because they have hardly been theorized in
terms of racial segregation. Hegemonic explanations for space-based inequal-
ities are usually conditioned to class status, as the urban poor are quite often
conceived as a raceless, genderless subject (Scaparci et al. 1988; Caldeira 2000;
Davids 2011; Janoschka and Sequera 2016). Some scholars have maintained
that urban settings in the region are indeed racially divided. The pattern of
residential segregation, they contend, can be explained not only in terms of
class inequalities, but also in terms of state policies and individual choices that
directly or indirectly deny the ‘right to the city’ to Blacks and Indigenous
populations (Rolnik 1989; Vargas 2005; Hoffmann 2010; Ströbele-Gregor
2011; Garcia-Serrano 2013). This is particularly true of Colombian cities such
as Cali, Cartagena and Bogotá where some scholars and news commentators
have documented racial anxieties that associate Black migrants as criminals
and disease-bearing (Arboleda 2007; Deávila 2008; Zeiderman 2013). There
are widely documented cases of discrimination against Black tenants seen as
delinquents, or the refusal of taxi drivers to pick up Black passengers for fear
of being robbed.
The growing literature on racism, poverty and spatial segregation in Co-
lombia has focused on diagnosing patterns of discrimination with very few
considerations of how and why some racial groups profit from such dynam-
ics. Why, despite the lack of overt anti-Black racial policies, are Blacks the
poorest among the poor and light-skinned individuals? Why has Whiteness
been relatively neglected in sociological analyses of urban inequalities in Latin
American and Colombian cities? A possible answer lies in the difficulty of lo-
cating who is ‘White’ and who is ‘Black’ in Colombia’s racially mixed society.
Although Colombian society identifies Black bodies through processes of vi-
olent interpellation, Whiteness escapes categorization. In order to locate the
White subject within the system of racial domination in Latin America, one
has to study it in contextual/relational terms by taking into consideration the
Mestizaje paradigm. For instance, a White(ned) Mestizo may not be ‘quite white’
in another context and yet she/he profits from what some Latin American
scholars name as ‘pigmentocracy’, that is, a chromatic privilege for being light-
skinned in a society that places dark-skinned individuals at the bottom of the
social ladder (e.g., Bonilla-Silva 2009).3 Evidence of such chromatic privilege is
what emerges from research on skin color and social inequalities in Colombia,
Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Dominican Republic and Bolivia, by Project
on Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (PERLA). PERLA researchers have
identified a mismatch between individual self-identification in the national
census and their socioeconomic status measured by national household sur-
veys with interviewer classification. Disproportional inequalities in education
attainment and health conditions, two major challenges in 21st-century Latin
America, indicate that phenotypical ascriptions, rather than just racial ancestry,
influence access to citizenship rights. In a region in permanent denial of racism,
and with a supposed ambiguity in racial classification, color-based discrimi-
nation indicates the existence of racial pigmentocracy (Telles and Steele 2012;
Perreira and Telles 2014; Telles et al. 2015).
In this chapter, we argue that this pigmentocracy is spatially coded in Cali’s
uneven geographies of opportunities and social suffering. Our argument will
only make sense if the reader is willing to accept the fact that, insofar as racial
interpellation is concerned, the biological reality of racial mixture is irrelevant.
Within the context of Latin American mode of racial relations, no one is asked
about the percentage of ‘European’ or ‘African’ genes she/he has before others
discriminate against them or grant them certain privileges. While other cul-
tural/biological traits certainly have a place in the ways race is conceived, the
‘symbolic purchase’ of lighter skin color is a defining feature of racial privilege

in the city. The darker the skin color, harder the access to the city. According
to social scientist George Lipsitz, Whiteness is a diffused, at times invisible, and
hyper-aggressive system of power that confers structural advantages to light-
skinned individuals. Within the US, Lipsitz argues, Americans are encouraged
to ‘invest’ in Whiteness because it has a
cash-value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through

profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through
the unequal educational opportunity available to children of different
races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities
to relatives and friends of those who have profited most from present
and past racial discrimination, and especially through intergenerational
transfer of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to
succeeding generations.
(Lipsitz 2006, p. vii)
Although the US and Latin American racial formations follow different

t rajectories, Lipsitz’s analytical framework is particularly relevant for this ar-
ticle because the assertion that Whiteness is a ‘cash value’ holds particularly
true to the region’s obsession to erase Blackness, the celebration of Mestizaje
notwithstanding. Within this context, it is not so much that Blacks are erased
from the city, but ultimately their participation in it is only made possible
through a dialectical relation of celebration of Blackness as culture and its dis-
posability as marked bodies. The normalized devaluation of Black lives in Cali
(exploited in low-paid jobs, segregated in informal urban settings and killed at
alarming rates) is the other side of the chromatic privilege conferred to light-
skinned /White(ned) Caleños.
Black Exploitation/White Mestizo Accumulation

The week-long Petronio Festival (referenced at the opening of this article) seems
to be an exceptional moment in which the two cities, the predominantly Black
borough known as Aguablanca and the predominantly White Mestizo boroughs
located in the north–south axis, come together in the name of the m ulticultural
polis. The exceptional presence of Blacks on the stages cancels, however, the day-
to-day humiliation they endure in ordinary interaction – as domestic servants,
garbage collectors, street vendors and so on – with privileged White Mestizos.
Nothing can better illustrate the ordinariness of racial/gender subordination
than the racial/gendered economy of domestic work in Cali. Scholars Vicenta
Moreno Hurtado and Dermbay Mornan (2015, 103) have argued that the
kitchen of White Mestizo elites in Cali is ‘a stage of racial domination’, a place
where unskilled and illiterate Black domestic servants are exploited. Black
women’s exploitation enables the reproduction of the city’s racial order; their
work creates the possibility for White women to participate in the city’s econ-
omy outside the domestic sphere. However, Black women’s subaltern position
further marginalizes them into a permanent status as surplus labor.
In the city’s gendered division of work, domestic service, childcare, or street
vendors are ‘natural’ positions for Black women. Take for instance how Spain’s
Magazine Hola portrayed Black and White women in one of its issues ded-
icated to Santiago de Cali. On June 2011, Hola featured the family of Cali’s
socialite Sonia Zarzur with her two Black maids standing in the back with
uniforms. The disposition of four generations of the White upper-class family
(the photo portrayed Zarzur herself, her daughter, her grandmother and her
great-g randmother) with two Black servants in the background was neither
incidental nor fictional. First of all, the photo can be understood in relation to
an insidious regime of representation that feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins
has named as the ‘controlling image’ of Black women. As she argues, ‘portray-
ing [Black] women as stereotypical mammies, matriarch, welfare recipients,
and hot mommas has been essential to the political economy of domination
fostering Black women’s oppression’ (1999, 142). Second, this pathological
representation is a constitutive aspect of Cali as a city organized around racial
gendered injustices. The White family portrayed in the picture belongs to one
of the city’s traditional business families, and the two Black women are, in
fact, their domestic servants. If we consider the assertion that domestic work is
not just an occupation but a continuum of a racial/gendered domination that
one can trace from the plantation to the kitchen (Posso 2008; Hurtado and
Mornan 2015), the picture raises the following question: What do the four gen-
erations of White women portrayed in Hola reveal about the racialized gender
division of labor in the city and its spatial order?
In the aftermath of the publication of the picture of Black servants and
White Patronas (patroness or mistress), Black activists launched a social media
debate about racism in Colombia. Critics of the photo argued that it illus-
trated the city’s enduring colonial history: from the Spanish conqueror of Co-
lombian Andeans to its recent control of sugarcane crops, Colombian’s lands
are overly concentrated in the hands of traditional Spanish-heritage families
to which Blacks and the Indigenous populations are servants and employees.4
Those supporting the publication argued that the images were harmless and
that critics were oversensitive or ‘reading too much’ where there was no rac-
ism. In response to Hola’s picture, Revista Soho, a rival magazine, published on
its cover page a picture depicting young Black women standing nude. In the
news, Black women passed from being domestic servants to become readily
accessible sexually objects. In both depictions, they were reduced to their phys-
ical bodies, devoid of any characteristic but sexual/physical attributes. Even
in moments when it became too explicit to be ignored, the underlying be-
lief in Black inferiority still informed the counterarguments as the alternative
magazine’s response and Sonia Zarzur, the White socialite portrayed in the
magazine, illustrate. Apologizing for her ‘unintended’ racism, she contended
she just wanted to show that ‘in Cali we work with people of color’ (Semana
2011). Yet, her response could not be better placed if we are to understand not
only how the ‘possessive investment in Whiteness’ sustains relations of domina-
tion but also how job opportunities are inaccessible to Black women unless they
fulfill the expected position reserved to them. In the next section, we present a
descriptive analysis of socioeconomic data. What do they tell us about the city’s
spatial/racial order?
Mapping Social Inequalities in Cali

Home of 2.4 million people, Santiago de Cali is Colombia’s third largest city.
According to the 2005 Census, the city’s population is comprised of 73.3%
White/Mestizo, 26.2% Black and 0.5% Indigenous. Its dynamic service econ-
omy and agricultural industry make Cali one of the fastest-growing econ-
omies of the country. Cali recorded an average of 3.5% growth during the
past decade, and by 2010, it was responsible for 10.2% of the Colombian GDP
(Otero 2014). Thus, the city is considered one of the most promising centers for
the expansion of Colombian economy. A railway is under construction to link
the city to the port of Buenaventura, the largest in the country, and the city
has passed through a process of urban renewal through opening larger avenues,
building new shopping centers, cracking down on small businesses, pushing
out drug addicts, shutting down clandestine buses and introducing the bus
rapid transportation system.
Cali is also a city of hope to thousands of Blacks displaced from their
traditional territories by the military/mining corporations/guerrilla war.
According to the Colombian Ministry of Justice, Cali is the first destina-
tion of displaced populations in Colombia. In a single year (i.e., 2011), the
city received at least 85,000 individual victims of mega-development proj-
ects and the military/guerrilla war (Alcaldía 2012). While violence and social
exclusion in Cali are strongly related to the shifts in the Colombian economy
(a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Free Trade Agreement with
the US signed by ex-president Álvaro Uribe in 2006 is still needed) and to
the internally d isplaced population due to the state/paramilitary/guerrilla war
for strategic mineral resources in the Pacific basin (Escobar 2003; Cárdenas
2012; Ojeda 2013; Vergara-Figueroa 2013, 2017), these dynamics are only
part of the enduring colonial structure of racial domination in Colombian
society. The state is a key actor in the reproduction of the country’s unequal
racial order to which Cali’s pattern of exclusion is just an example. The city
government’s apparently neutral official policies such as drawing a highway
dividing the city into two or transferring a landfill site to a predominantly
Black neighborhood are examples of how the state enacts and facilitates racial
privilege and racial dispossession in Cali. Still, these government practices

are hardly the only ones affecting the lives of the Black urban poor, and there
are other spatially based inequalities that disproportionally shorten Black
lives. Given the hard-selling argument developed here − that is, that race is a
f undamental factor to predict one’s life chances in the city − we intentionally
leave ‘race’ aside for a while until we unpack the vulnerabilities among class,
age, educational and occupational status that negatively impacts the margin-
alized population of the city. It is the intersection of all these variables that
the reader should have in mind as we proceed to present the racial make-up
of Cali in the final section.
For administrative purposes, the territory of Cali is classified into 22
boroughs known in Spanish as Comunas. Social stratification in Cali, as in Co-
lombia as a whole, is based on a scale from 1 to 6, where 1 represents the
poorest and 6 represents the richest social groups. For the purpose of this ar-
ticle, we use the Colombian Census (DANE 2005) definition of Comuna, as
set of neighborhoods that are relatively homogeneous in socioeconomic fea-
tures. Because the data available for this analysis are based on the macro-scale
(the Comuna level), rather than on the smallest geographic unity for census
purpose (i.e., the b arrio level), it presents some important limitations. First, be-
cause it tends to overlook dissimilarities within each Comuna not only in terms
of socioeconomic strata but also in terms of racial composition. Second, data
on racial identity on census are based on self-identification; there are fair beliefs
among researchers of race relations in Latin America that census data pres-
ent serious discrepancies between the color and the self-proclaimed identity
of individuals (e.g., Telles et al. 2015). Although such limitations bring po-
tential misinterpretations, Comunas are relatively homogeneous spatial unities
as internal d issimilarities in the micro-scale are not as significant as are the
differences noted between Comunas/boroughs on the macro-scale, in terms of
socioeconomic and racial background.5
The maps (Figures 8.1 and 8.2) show the municipality of Santiago de Cali
with the five clusters represented by different gray tones to reflect the spa-
tial distribution of wealth/poverty and the incidence of violent deaths in the
2005–2010 period, respectively. While we will discuss the pattern of homicidal
violence below, it is worth noting here that the darker area in Figure 8.1 rep-
resents the wealthiest and safest sectors (strata 6), where homicides are lower in
comparison to the lighter areas of eastside Cali6. Comunas 2, 19, 17 and 22 in
the south–north axis configure a ‘corridor’ where residents with better life con-
ditions reside. There is also a correlation between wealth/poverty distribution
and access to the city’s facilities: the north–south axis houses the main sites of
tourist leisure, universities, malls, parks, hospitals, libraries, stadiums and cine-
mas. Besides being the safest side of the city, in these areas visitors find best air
quality due to a major presence of trees and enjoy the best quality of drinkable
water, a privilege in Cali’s infamous water system.
Figure 8.1 ousing discrimination in Colombia ‘Apartment for renting, but not
H
for Blacks’.
Source: El Espectador, July 8, 2015. Available atwww.elespectador.com/noticias/bogota/
oscuro-panorama-del-racismo-articulo-261845.
Figure 8.2 Picture of ‘The most powerful women of Cali’, by Hola Newspaper.
Source: Revista Hola, Available at:www.larepublica.pe/06-12-2011/foto-de-revista-hola-
causa-polemica-e-indignacion (Accessed December 6, 2011).
Figures 8.3 and 8.4 indicate that there is a spatial concentration of poverty
and homicidal violence in Comunas 1, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 20 (in the lowland
eastside) and Comuna 21 (known as Siloé in the highlands). According to the City
of Cali’s Department of Planning, the population of the city was distributed as
follows in terms of socioeconomic strata in 2010: 53.27% lived in strata 1 and 2,
37.69% lived in strata 3 to 4 and 9.05% lived in strata 5 and 6. If we stick with
Frecuencia homicidios
N
2005 6
2006
2007
2008 2
2009
5
2010 4
7
1
3 8
9
12
11
13
19 10 14
20
16
15 21
17
18
Convenciones
Riqueza extrema
Bajo 0,000000 - 0,192920
22 Medio Bajo 0,192921 - 0,385840
Medio 0,385841 - 0,578760
Medio Alto 0,578761 - 0,771680
Alto 0,771681 - 0,964600
Figure 8.3 Corridor of wealth.

Source: Cali en Cifras 2010. Departamento de Planeación Municipal/Observatorio Social.
the Colombian measure of access to economic opportunities, that is, the 1–6
strata classification (in a 1–6 range in which 1 is the poorest and 6 the wealthiest
population), it becomes clear that poverty and wealth are highly concentrated
and sharply divide the city into zones of exclusion and privilege. Given the high
proportion of Caleños living in socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods, it is
reasonable to argue that poverty in Cali seems to be the result of a convergence
of factors, among them class-based discrimination and spatial segregation. It is
N
2005 6
2006
2007
2008 2
2009
5
2010 4
7
1
3 8
9
12
11
13
19 10 14
20
16
15 21
17
18
Convenciones
Proporción de pobreza extrema
Bajo 0,005758 - 0,204640
22 Medio Bajo 0,204641 - 0,403480
Medio 0,403481 - 0,602320
Medio Alto 0,602321 - 0,801160
Alto 0,801160 - 1,000000
Figure 8.4 Poorer areas of the city.

also reasonable to argue that spatial polarization deepens poverty and poverty-
concentrated zones, and in turn, it feeds stereotypes of urban crime and vice that
further marginalize and disempower impoverished communities.
Unlike the north–south axis, the worst sector of the city in terms of living
conditions houses not only the highest homicide rates, but also poor air quality,
open sewage of disposable waters and unpaved roads making these areas partic-
ularly life-threatening. A case in point is that Cali’s main waste disposal plant
is located within Comuna 13 in the district of Aguablanca. The city government
has proposed to move the Basurero Navarro, as it is known, to surrounding
municipalities. However, it remains only a promise because no city wants to
receive Cali’s waste. Comuna 13 remains the landfill in which Caleños deposit
their trash, and the Basurero Navarro – which has been active for 25 years –
continues to be a source of both diseases and income to poor unemployed fam-
ilies working as recycling collectors. When compared with map 1, map 2 helps
us to locate the classic class divide in the urban space.
Educational researchers have found a direct relationship between schooling
practices and the reproduction of class division of labor in capitalist societies.
Working-class children receive working-class jobs not only because they embrace
a counter-school culture that praises hard-working masculinity, thus making
them ‘complicit’ to their own fate (Willis 1977, 4), but also because the school it-
self reproduces class subordination (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). While a com-
prehensive participation in such debate is beyond the scope of this article, one
cannot underestimate the role of education in reproducing class disadvantages
and privileges. Unequal access to educational opportunities places subordinated
groups in greater disadvantages in the highly competitive service-based econ-
omy of Santiago de Cali and feeds a vicious circle that reproduces the city’s class
structure. Contrary to many countries throughout Latin America, it was not
until 2012 that the Colombian government adopted a p rogram of free access
to education as part of its official policies. Although it is too early to measure
its impact on the city, official statistics reveal that the private sector is the main
gateway to formal education in the country and Cali in particular. In practice,
this means that only those who can afford to pay for private schools – from kin-
dergarten to college – would have access to this basic right.
The following map (Figure 8.5) shows teenage illiteracy in Cali from 2005
to 2010. The Comunas are classified according to illiteracy rates indicated in
the thematic map by four clusters ranging from low illiteracy to high illiteracy.
Consistent with the previous maps, it indicates the same geographical pattern of
low-income neighborhoods, frequency of homicides and illiteracy. That is, Comu-
nas with high levels of illiteracy (20, 15, 14, 3, 1), moderate illiteracy (21, 16, 13,
7, 18, 6, 4, 8, 12, 11), and low illiteracy (2, 5, 10, 17, 19, 22) are also those ranging
from worst to high living standards and higher to lower rates of homicides. While
teenage illiteracy is a clear challenge to the entire city, the affluent north–south
corridor (see previous map) is the area with the lowest rates. In Comuna 22, for
instance, 1.2% of youth are illiterate, compared with 5.1% in Comuna 14. The
same pattern of exclusion can be seen when access to primary education is considered.
The number of out-of-school children is higher in the same hyper-poverty areas
delineated in Figure 8.2, except in Comuna 22, an affluent district in south Cali.7
Comunas 15 and 14 present the highest rate of out-of-school children (i.e., 6.5%). If
we take into consideration the weight of formal education in Cali’s fast-growing
service economy, we should not underestimate that these statistics determine the
quality of life for the marginalized youth living in the outskirts of Cali.
Besides the highest levels of illiteracy, the neighborhoods with concentrated
poverty are also the ones with highest rates of unemployment and unskilled labor.
These zones of poverty participate in the city’s economy by providing cheap labor
2005
2006
2007 N
2008
6
2009 2
2010
4 5
7
1
3 8
9
12 21
19 11
13 14
20 10
16
15
18 17
Iletrados mayores 15 años censo 2005
Bajo 0.7 - 1.7

Medio Bajo 1.8 - 2.8
22
Medio Alto 2.9 - 3.9
Alto > = 4.0
Figure 8.5 Frequency of homicides.

as garbage collectors, bus drivers and domestic servants in the well-off parts of the
city. They comprise surplus that ultimately enables the elite to ‘choose’ those to be
overexploited, an ‘opportunity’ in the face of other uncertain sources of incomes,
such as street vendors. While 12% of the city’s population was unemployed in
2008, the unemployment rate was 22% among those living in the eastside of the
city (Comunas 1, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20). Gender disparities in unemployment can
be seen, as well. For instance, unemployment among women was 25.7%, whereas
only 19.5% of men were unemployed (Department of Planning 2009).
This leaves us with the following questions: what is the face of urban poverty
in Cali? What role does race play in structural urban inequality? When race is
isolated, all socioeconomic categories reveal the significance of racial discrimi-

nation in deepening social exclusion. Combining the 2005 Census and house-
hold survey data from strata 1 and 2, Cali’s Department of Planning estimates
that 41.4% of the city’s population and 73% of those residing in the eastside
Comunas of Aguablanca (the lowest stratum) are Black.8 Racism also affects occu-
pational status in the city. For instance, Blacks account for 25.7% of unemploy-
ment among the population in Comunas of eastside, and Black women represent
43.1% of single-parent households in these zones. The popular figure of the Black
woman selling el Chontaduro (a typical Colombian fruit) or Arepas (corn patties)
at traffic lights to make a living provides a lens to identify the face and gender
of poverty in the city. Subaltern positions like street vendors and maids are most
likely occupied by Black women and reproduced through an intergenerational
cycle of domination to which Hola Magazine’s portrayal of four generations of
White Patronas is just the other side. The precariousness of Black life vis-à-vis
the job market is made even more salient when we consider that at least 52.4%
of the city’s Black population work in the informal job market and 47.1% fall
into the category of self-occupation, which generally means precarious/cheap
labor at home or on the streets (Zuluaga 2013). Our hypothesis is that due to the
structural gap in educational opportunities, Blacks are most likely to be unskilled
workers and are thus more likely to live in poverty. Although studies have shown
that unemployment and salary differences prevail even among highly qualified
Black individuals, this hypothesis is particularly relevant for Cali, where only 6%
of Black youth and 13.4% of youth in general have access to college education,
and an estimated 55,000 youth are excluded from higher education every year.
In addition, illiteracy rates among Blacks are 24.6% higher than illiteracy rates
among Whites. Tables 8.1 and 8.2 show years of education achieved, average
income and the jobs performed by Black men and women in 2012.
Table 8.1 Years of education, per capita income and salaries by ethnic group, Cali, 2012
Ethnic/racial group Years of education Per capita income Salary
Total Male Female Total Male Female Total Male Female
Indigenous 6.1 5.8 6.3 235.922 229.513 242.403 607.932 590.693 636.203
Proportiona 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.5 1.6 1.4
Blacks 7.4 7.3 7.5 387.392 417.909 358.045 840.335 913.865 725.292
Proportionb 1.1 1.0 1.2 1.1 1.0 1.3
Without ethnic 7.7 7.5 7.9 428.422 423.513 433.073 930.771 939.055 918.971
identification
Total 7.6 7.4 7.8 413.998 411.340 416.531 909.064 920.162 893.043
Source: Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida/DANE 2012. In: Zuluaga, Blanca. 2013. “Sobre los grupos
étnico-raciales en Colombia”. Boletín Polis. no. 13. p. 7.
a Salary of individuals not belonging to ethnic groups on income of Indigenous.
b Salary of individuals not belonging to ethnic groups on income of Blacks.
Table 8.2 Occupations by ethnic group
Occupation Without ethnic Indigenous Afro-

identification descendents
Worker or employee of private company 39.0 21.7 31.3

Worker or government employee 4.5 3.4 6.0
Domestic worker 2.0 3.4 3.9
Freelancer 1.9 1.0 1.4
Self-employed 39.1 42.5 47.1
Employer 3.0 2.6 1.9
Worker of a farm, land or plot 3.3 10.8 3.3
Unpaid worker 2.2 6.7 1.6
Source: Encuesta Nacional de Calidad de Vida/DANE 2012. In: Zuluaga, Blanca. 2013. “Sobre
los grupos étnico-raciales en Colombia”. Boletín Polis. no. 13. p. 7.
As illustrated in the table, while Black women are overwhelmingly concen-

trated in subaltern positions as domestic servants or street vendors, Black men’s
main occupations are construction workers or street vendors. This data reveals that
both Black women and Black men’s economic positions in Cali are indispensable
to the reproduction of the city itself. The image of poor Black men and women
working as unskilled laborers may not be a complete narrative of Cali’s socioeco-
nomic structure, but it is an image that speaks volumes about the intersection of
class, gender and race in (re)producing spatial patterns of domination. This inter-
section is particularly visible in the realm of formal education where class, race and
age vulnerabilities interact: poor and predominantly Black youth are most likely to
reproduce their parents’ life path; lack of access to educational opportunities results
in low-paid jobs and vice versa; and denying access to education reflects family
income, intergenerational social mobility, quality of life and so on.
The ultimate expression of Cali’s social ineqality is the right to live. Like the
other vulnerabilities outlined above, violent death is strongly correlated with
space, socioeconomic background, educational opportunities, gender and age
in Santiago de Cali. Cali has a spatial pattern of deadly violence that is overly
concentrated in the poor east lowland and the hill sides of the city, and among
youth, as illustrated in Figures 8.1–8.3. The city’s current homicide rate is 81
out of 100,000 inhabitants, which places it as the most violent urban area in
the country – Bogota’s rate is 23/100,000 and twelfth in the world. Being
young, male, poor and living in hill sides of Siloé and/or in the east lowlands of
Aguablanca is a deadly combination. The map below provides a geographic and
spatial representation of violent deaths in the city. Like in the previous maps,
the corridor composed of Comunas 22, 17, 19, 2, 4 and 5 is the safest area of the
city, opposed to the deadly geography of Comunas 15, 14, 13, 21 and 6. In these
areas, homicide rates are as high as 95/100,000, whereas in the lighter areas of
the city, the rate is only 13/100,000 populations (Figure 8.6).
Número de Homicidios por Comunas

2010
2
5
4 7
1
3
8
9
12
19 13
11 14
20 10
21
16 15
17
18
[95,237]
22
[67.5,95]
[49,67.5]
[13,49]
Figure 8.6 Homicides by boroughs in 2010.

Source: Cali en Cifras 2007. Departamento de Planeación Municipal. Homicidios/Observa-
torio Social.
Although the city’s historically high rates of homicides are the result of com-
plex and multifactorial phenomena (the armed conflict and narcotraffic are just
two examples), the spatial dynamics of youth homicides is strikingly consistent
with and follows the same spatial patterns of access to educational opportunity
and general living conditions. State responsibility should not be overlooked in
this context. For instance, the state’s brutal police force harasses marginalized
youth, and the state itself creates territories of violence in which gang and para-
military groups compete for the control of such territories. It also creates the
conditions for persistent patterns of premature death among the young, poor,
Black population living in the outskirts of the city. Premature death has received
considerable attention from scholars concerned with patterns of mortality that
are not resulting from the natural processes of birth, aging and dying, but rather
result from cumulative and converging vulnerabilities along class, gender, age
and race (Batista 2003; Gilmore 2007). In Cali, researchers have identified a
persistent pattern of premature death that targets mainly young Black men who
are residents of the city’s hyperperiphery (Moncada 2010; Urrea et al. 2015).
Consistent with our analysis, their findings show that Comunas 7, 13,
14, 15 and 21 (the dark clusters in map 2) are the ones with the highest
proportions of premature deaths. Although the available data do not allow us
to locate the specific ‘hot-spot’ within the Comunas where homicide rates are
higher, it clearly demonstrates the overlapping between violent deaths and the
uneven distribution of opportunities. We can read from the map above that
vulnerability to premature death tends to overlap with other social vulnerabil-
ities: class, gender, place of living, educational opportunities and race. Let us
unpack this final category: While the city’s homicide rates are particularly high
among youth between the ages of 15 and 24, it is significantly higher among
the Black population living in Aguablanca, for instance, where 9% of Blacks
between the ages of 20 and 24 were killed in 2005 alone. Furthermore, Blacks
appear to be the main victims of premature death regardless of their age. Even
Black women experience the risk of premature death, although homicide rates
are historically low for women; the homicide rate for Black women is twice
that for White/Mestizo women. Between 2005 and 2010, of all deaths of Black
men in Cali, 49.5% died before 50 years of age. Among the White/Mestizo
population, this rate is 34.1%. Likewise, of all deaths of Black women in the
same period, 21.8% died before 50 years of age, whereas among White/Mestizo
women the rate was 14.7% in the same age range (Urrea et al. 2015, 165). At
first glance, the statistics suggest that Cali is a very violent city where no one is
safe and where the poor are most likely to be killed. However, it also shows that
the city is particularly deadly to the Black population. Even when sharing the
same place of residence with other ‘poor’ individuals, Blacks are significantly
more likely to have their lives shortened by premature death. Being male, poor
and Black is the most lethal condition in the city.
Black in the City

The data above clearly indicate that spatial segregation fuels urban inequal-
ities, and urban inequalities are deeply informed by class, gender and race.
In Santiago de Cali, a city supposedly free from racism, racial segregation
creates distinct social conditions for Blacks and Whites/Mestizos. The map be-
low uses data from the 2005 Colombian national census to identify the spatial
d istribution of the black population in the city. In the darker cluster, the Black
population density is above 50%, falling to up to 30% in the green intermedi-
ary area, and to below 10% in the yellow areas composed of Comunas 22, 17,
19 and 2. Taking into consideration that Blacks represent 26% of the city’s 2.4
million people, the map shows an unbalanced distribution of them, with a high
concentration in the eastside of the city. Indeed, the worst social indexes are
seen in Comunas 13, 14 and 15, where we also see higher proportions of Blacks.
Conversely, as the Black population decreases, living conditions increase dra-
matically, such as in Comunas 22, 17, 19 and 2, where we see the most advanced
neighborhoods. As seen in the previous maps, these areas are classified as eco-
nomic strata 5 and 6 (in the 1–6 strata/1 being the poorest ones). Figure 8.5
demonstrates that the gradual color shifting in the map from extreme poverty
to middle income and to affluent districts is consistent with the ‘chromatic
privilege’ we discussed earlier: the lighter and darker areas, with an intermedi-
ary mixing, illustrate the spatial/racial continuum between privilege and social
exclusion in the city.9 The lighter/yellow area in the south–north axis forms
a corridor that divides the city not only between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-
nots’ (maps 1 and 2), but also reveals a depressing concentration of poverty and
homicidal violence (map 4) among the predominantly Black (in the eastside)
and Indigenous (in west hill side) Comunas.
The spatial concentration of darker and lighter skinned populations in op-
posite sides of the city suggests that contrary to mainstream portrayal of Cali as
a society free of racism, the city is indeed racially segregated. Scholar Olivier
Barbary (2004) has argued that although Cali has a ‘racist racial order’, the
US ‘racial-ghetto’ approach is not useful in understanding the city’s pattern of
residential segregation, because there is a spatial continuum among different
racial groups within the poorest areas of Cali. Disaggregating micro-data from
the city’s household survey for 2000, Barbary argues that spatial segregation
in Cali occurs on the micro-scale, with Blacks forming racial enclaves within
the Comunas based on their economic conditions and cultural affinities. We
agree that the US ‘racial-ghetto’ approach may not be a compelling explana-
tion for Cali when we take into consideration the heterogeneous demographic
composition of the hyper-poverty Comunas, as rightfully noticed by this au-
thor. Race is not the only variable in the production of these territories of
exclusion, as there are poor Whites, and a large light-skinned Mestizo popula-
tion, living in similar conditions as Blacks. Still, although our secondary data
analysis does not authorize us to make bold claims, rather than denying Cali’s
‘racial apartheid’, we highlight that although racial lines may be blurred in
socially depressing territories, the areas of privilege are unmistakably White/
Mestizo. The fact that Blacks are spatially isolated even within the racially mixed
borough of Aguablanca – confirming the racial clusters noted by Barbary –
suggests not only that racial segregation in Cali is consistent with the gradual
chromatic privilege we discussed above, but, more importantly, that Blacks face
significant disparities even in relatively racially mixed urban spaces.
By overlapping maps 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, we can finally identify a consistent pat-

tern of social exclusion that seems to follow the Black population. Areas with
higher proportion of Blacks are also areas with worst performance in a broad
range of indicators. In a sprawling (yet predictable) contrast to the light-skin
corridor, 26% of the residents in the predominantly Black territory of eastside
(Aguablanca) have no access to health care, infantile mortality rate is 65% higher
in these areas, and most of its inhabitants are ‘internally displaced’ from the
guerrilla–paramilitary war in the Pacific base (Figure 8.7).
Racial segregation deepens socioeconomic disparities and prevents Blacks
from accessing the city. In striking difference with the predominantly White/
Mestizo Comunas (where the shopping centers, hospitals, cinemas, theaters and
universities are located)10, the east and hill side Comunas are poorly equipped
with urban infrastructure. The city of Cali has 166 beds for each 100,000
inhabitants, and 40% of them are located in Comuna 19, in the north–south
axis (Alcaldía, 2010). In Aguablanca, the only public hospital is known by local
residents as the ‘butchery’ for the constancy of patients dying from medical
errors or while waiting in the emergency room. The city’s main highways and
its public transportation system also favor the population in the south–north
axis. The all-too-common image of Black Caleños in overcrowded mini-buses
or depending on pirate taxis to get home after a long day of work is just another
example of state policies that promote spatial inequalities in the city.
Read together, the maps enable us to identify the intersection of factors
that reflect social and spatial inequalities in the city. Such patterns are not
unique to Cali − see, for instance, Peter Wade (1993) on Medellín/Colombia,
Raquel Rolnick (1989) and Edward Telles (1992) on Brazil and Francisco,
Garcia-Serrano (2013) on Ecuador − but Cali’s investment in its image as the
‘Blackest’ Latin American city after Salvador/Bahia makes it particularly rel-
evant to unveil its space-based enduring regime of racial domination. Hidden
from public discourses, race is inscribed in space through ordinary and taken-
for-granted daily actions, such as going to see a doctor, breathing fresh air, or
accessing public transportation. In Cali’s geographies of privilege and social
suffering, spatial matters are Black matters.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we call for a consideration of the role of racism in the making
of Santiago de Cali/Colombia. We argue that although it does not act inde-
pendently, race plays a central role in defining access to education, health, em-
ployment and the right to life itself. While our analysis recognizes a growing
literature on race and urban inequalities in Latin America, it also joins some
recent calls for further investigation on how ‘pigmentocracy’ comes into play
in societies where racial boundaries seem to be blurred. Racial ambiguities
may be indicative of ‘Latin American exceptionalism’, but the specific places
REPÚBLICA DE COLOMBIA
DEPARTAMENTO DEL VALLE DEL CAUCA
MUNICIPIO DE SANTIAGO DE CALI
DANE
N Población Afrodescendiente
W E
Comuna 06
EMCALI
Intituto Colombiano
Av.
Comuna 02
Rub
en
Av. Vasq
O
ro
zc
Comuna 05
o
M
DANE
icol
uez Cobo
ta
Comuna 04
Instituto Industrial 20 de Julio
ción
icas
Av. Esta
mér
a
ican
sA
SENA er
La
am
Pan
Av.
SIJIN
Av.
Ferrea
Linea
Secretaríaransito
T Comuna 07
Rìo
r
al Ma
Cal
Via
Comuna 01
i
Av. Belalcazar
EMCALI Estacion de Bombeo
Comuna 03
Comuna 08
r
ala
cunv
Av. 3 de Julio
Cir
Av.
Av.
Rube
EMCALI Centro Docente Saavedra Galindo
n Or
ozc
o Mic
Comuna 09 Sub Estacion Emcali EICE
olta
Comfandi
Comuna 12
AvilaCeddaduiC.
Secretaria de Salud Publica Municipal Centro de Estudios Inscat
Carcel Nacional de Villahermosa
rra
UNIVALLE
Colseguros
Av.Roosvelt
iste
B. Sin
lta
Mico
uin
Estacion de Gas Natural
co
Joaq
Oroz
Instituto Morfologico Forense Estacion de Bombeo Calipso EMCALI
Cruz Roja
Sultana del Valle
Av.
ben Comuna 13
EXITO . Ru
Av
Av
Comuna 14
Comuna 20
Av. Nuev
a Gran
Unidad Deportiva Olímpico
Comuna 11 Centro Capacitacion Don Bosco
ada
Centro Comercial Antonio Nariño
Comuna 19 Centro Educativo Las Americas
Comuna 10
ro
Borre
uin
Plaza Metropolis
Joaq
ro
uin Borre
Av.
Unidad Deportiva Gimnasio del Pueblo

eralejo
Cañav
Av. Joaq
Río
Centro Comercial Palmetto Plaza Uniroyal
SENA
Liceo Educativo del Sur
Comuna 21
Registro de Instrumentos Públicos
Comuna 16
Ecoparque La Bandera Av.
Guada Comuna 15
lupe
Plaza Mallorca
Av. Puente Padilla
Inst Educativa Ciudad Córdoba
eros
Av. Los Comun
Av. La Martina
Av. Los
Choros
r
Comuna 17
Academia Militar José María Cabal
Av.Simon Bolivar
Comuna 18
Río
Me
lén
Av.Pohcnaosa
de
z
Valle de Lili
Ciudadela Universitaria
Batallon Pichincha
CARULLA
Centro Comercial Bulevar del Lili

Lago
Av. del
jal
ca
as
.C
Av
Centro Comercial Hacienda Campestre

Av. Piedra Grande
ncas
rdin
Bla
Ja
ad
nas
ud
. Ci
Av
Pe
Av.
Av. La
Voragine
Universidad Santiago de Cali
Quebrada
Hipico Colombiano
Real
Av. Alferez
Av.Canas Gordas
Porcentaje de poblacion
Comuna 22
Av. La María
Afrodescendiente, segun
Seccion Urbana
Corporacion Deportiva
Av. del Banco

Ecoparque El Lago de Las Grazas
> 50%
30.1% - 50%
10.1% - 30%
Convento Carmelitas
<= 10%
Sin información
Límite de Comuna
Fuente: DANE, Censo General 2005;

Marco Geoestadistico Nacional, 2007
Espacializado en: Direccion de Geoestadistica
Fecha: Marzo de 2009
Figure 8.7 A fro-descendant population by boroughs.

Source: DANE, Colombian Department of Statistics and Planning, 2005.
Blacks occupy in cities like Santiago de Cali indicate that there is no room
for speculating about the power of race in demarking one’s position in the
city’s socio-spatial order. While we acknowledge the scholarship on race and
space in Latin America, there is still a need for new research inquiries on how
racial chromatic privilege becomes spatialized in supposedly raceless places.
Comparative research on Latin American urban designs and the US racial
ghetto and/or South African apartheid regime may also shed new light on the
burgeoning scholarship on the patterns of residential segregation in the region.
Finally, the article invites more inquiries on the Black urban condition under
the multicultural turn in Colombia and beyond. While the Colombian state
recognizes autonomy and grants land rights to ‘real’ Blacks living in traditional
territories, it denies access to citizenship rights to Blacks who have ‘gone urban’.
Can the right to difference, granted under the multicultural premise, include
the fast-growing Black urban population in major Colombian cities? What
would be necessary for Blacks to be recognized as subjects of rights in Colom-
bia’s racially divided cities? Cali’s geographical distribution of opportunities and
social suffering reveal that Blacks may well be integrated in the city, but their
integration is only made possible through a folkloric consumption of Blackness
or through a racial logic of disposability. While the city is celebrated in salsa
lyrics and, in the annual Petronio Álvarez festival, the near absence of Blacks
in spaces of privilege and their overconcentration in neighborhoods plagued by
unemployment, illiteracy and premature death indicate that Colombian’s mul-
ticulturalism continues to be an unfulfilled promise, Cali may continue to be
called ‘the branch of paradise’, but for Blacks, it is yet another hell.
Notes
1 He was born in 1914 in Buenaventura and died in December 1966 in Cali. The
first Festival Petronio Álvarez was celebrated in 1997, and it concentrates dif-
ferent rhythms of the Pacific (Chirimía, marimba libre, unreleased song, vocal
interpreter, marimba performer, interpreter of clarinet and violins). Retrieved from
http://dintev.univalle.edu.co/cvisaacs/index2.php?option=com_content&do_
pdf=1&id=353 (last accessed September 7, 2014).
2 Throughout this article, we use the category ‘Black’, as deployed by the Colom-
bian National Department of Statistics (DANE, 2005). According to DANE, the
Colombian population is phenotypically classified as White, Black, Mestizo and Mu-
latto. Culturally, the non-White population is classified into ethnic groups as ‘Afro’,
‘Raizal’, ‘Palanqueros’ and ‘Indigenous’. In all these categories, ‘White’ appears
as a universal referent from which these racialized/ethnic categories are defined.
Although ‘Black’ and ‘Afro’ are, respectively, defined in the Colombian Census in
terms of race and ethnicity, what makes racial/ethnic discrimination statistically
visible in the census is the skin color of those denied access to citizenship rights.
Thus, critics of the term ‘race’ should consider that we deploy ‘it’ as a phenotypical
mark, as society distributes privilege and suffering based on the color of skin rather
on the degrees of (African) descent.
3 We are not advocating for an essentialist view of ‘Blackness’ or ‘Whiteness’ but
rather asking for a contextual reading of White privilege taking into consideration
Latin American ‘racial ambiguity’.
4 Founded in 1536 by the Spaniard ‘Conqueror’ Sebastián de Belalcazar, the fertile

valley where the city is situated until the European invasion and important In-
digenous settlement. Belalcazar’s brutal assault massacred the Timbas’ population,
seized their lands and established Cali as a military and economic center decisive
to the Spaniard conqueror of the Colombian Andeans (Gómez 1985). Located in
the fertile valley between the Andean Cordilleras and the Pacific Coast, Cali soon
became an important producer of sugarcane and the economic and political center
of the Pacific basin. Although its economy has been diversified and Cali has become
an industrial center, the economy around the sugar plantation is still part of its
landscape. From home of ex-slaves to the current runaway Blacks escaping from the
guerrilla–paramilitary violence, ‘the blackest city in the nation’ is a paradigmatic
place for understanding Colombia’s racial relations if nothing for the celebratory
narratives that portrays it as a black-friendly city.
5 Scholar Harvy Vivas Pacheco identified the existence of homogeneous clusters in
the neighborhood level and yet a spatial correlation with the global pattern of seg-
regation in Santiago de Cali. Using global indexes of segregation to each Comuna,
Vivas Pacheco is able to identify a high spatial segmentation in the city, with
neighborhood-level clusters confirming/replicating, rather than contradicting the
m acro-scale segregation. He also contends that ‘the differences in quality [of life]
and access to opportunities that a city offers vary between different spatial unities,
yet, the spatial concentration of ethnic groups, the stigma and discrimination act as
explanatory factors in the deepening of spot of poverty and cumulative disadvan-
tages which are inter-generationally transmitted’ (Vivas 2006:2018).
6 Economic stratification in Cali is allocated from 1 to 6, being 1 the lowest strata and
6 the highest. According to the administrative bureau of municipal planning, 20,
20% of the population of Cali are in the first strata; 31, 92% in the second; 32, 45%
in the third; 6, 72% in the fourth; 7, 61% in the fifth; and 1, 10% in the sixth. See
Departamento Administrativo de Planeación Municipal; Alcaldía de Santiago de
Cali. ‘Distribución de dados de manzana por estrato’ www.cali.gov.co/descargar.
php?id=33101 (Accessed November 14, 2013).
7 A possible explanation for the inclusion of this Comuna among this group is the ex-
istence of poverty enclaves within the Comuna itself and the inclusion of a poor rural
district, surrounding fancy residential blocks of south Cali. As we have discussed
in the methodology note, data on dissimilarities within the neighborhood are not
available.
8 Indigenous are 4.1%, Mestizo 30.7% and White 23.8% (see Alcaldía, 2009).
9 Sociologist Edward Telles has identified a similar finding for Brazilian metropol-
itan cities where he found a pattern of segregation that followed the ‘skin-color
continuum’ of Brazilian society: high segregation between Blacks and Whites and
moderate segregation between Blacks and Browns. The ideology of whitening finds
correspondence with the spatial distribution of the population (1992:191–93).
10 Of all 32 universities in the city, 30 are located in the well-off neighborhoods that
comprise the ‘White corridor’ (see Alcaldía 2010, p. 36).
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9
The Impossible Black
Argentine Political Subject
Judith M. Anderson
Africans and Afro-descendants have a long yet hidden history of participa-

tion in the Argentine political sphere. The origins of their involvement can
be traced to the colonial era in which they played important roles in m ilitary
campaigns against foreign powers as well as in internal conflicts (Andrews
1979; Borucki 2015). More recently, their activism has helped shape policies
ranging from migration to representation on the national census. D espite
these contributions, the concept of a Black political subject in the nation
seems impossible for dominant Argentine society. This is due to the reality
that Blackness itself has, for the most part, been separated from phenotype in
the nation and Afro-Argentines have been rendered invisible through a care-
fully engineered nation-building project to transform Argentina into a White,
European and modern country.
There was a time, at the end of the 19th century, when the racially defined
Black Argentine political subject was not only plausible but also well docu-
mented. Afro-Argentines historically revealed their ideologies and political
leanings through the Black press (Lewis 1996; Platero 2004; Geler 2014). In the
20th century, the Black political subject was visible in Argentina, but not as a
phenotypically Black person of obvious African descent with features like dark
skin, kinky hair and a broad nose. Instead, through the P
eronist political party a
new class-defined meaning of Negro (Black) materialized. Many racially defined
Negros were absorbed into the politically identified Negros of Peronism. The
categories of race and class merged in a complicated manner through the Negros
of Peronism who were predominantly non-Whites of mixed descent which in-
cluded Indigenous and African ancestry. Thus, a new type of Black political
subject was born. Peronism did not remove Europe as a referent for Argentina
as a nation nor was it without its own facets of racism (Elena 2016). It did,
however, open the path for a more inclusive imagining of the Argentine nation.
212 Judith M. Anderson
My research examines how Africans and Afro-descendants construct

lackness in present-day Buenos Aires, Argentina. I work with politically con-
B
scious Africans and Afro-descendants who self-identify as Black. As a Black
female researcher from the US, my own identity at times facilitated the process,
but at other times created challenges during fieldwork (Anderson 2011). It al-
lowed me the benefit of gaining a more personalized understanding of how the
contours of Blackness are being defined by different actors in the public sphere.
In this piece, I trace the efforts to forge a unified Black identity for social and
political mobilization among a diverse group of individuals representing the
African Diaspora. Through their construction of a Black Argentine political
subject, we can better apprehend the intricate historical processes by which
racial and ethnic minority groups regain visibility.
Blacks in Argentina have increased their visibility by finding new models
of their activism. In recent decades, all Argentines have turned to the US as a
cultural and economic model. The majority possesses a high cultural literacy
of the US, including a basic familiarity with its history of race relations. On
a cultural level, Argentines are rather up to date on popular trends, ideas and
opinions of the imperialist nation. This is related to a level of economic depen-
dency, but also as participants in a global market where US media and other
cultural forms are prevalent. The historic presidential campaign of Barack
Obama helped satisfy Argentine curiosity on many fronts.
In Search of Obama: A View of US Racial Politics

from Argentina
In 2007, while conducting fieldwork on Blackness in Buenos Aires, A rgentina, I
was surprised by the level of admiration residents in Argentina from various ra-
cial and ethnic backgrounds had of US presidential candidate Barack Obama. In
working with individuals who self-identified in the racial category of Black, I ex-
pected they would be very vocal about the campaign. Both Blacks of foreign-born
origin and Afro-Argentines were understandably fascinated and inspired by him.
This was not without their critiques of Obama as the representative of a danger-
ous imperialism that threatened their livelihoods. What I found especially curious
was that among White Argentines his possible e lection was viewed as a sort of
long overdue reconciliatory act for all the ongoing, sustained racism manifested
in the US, especially against its own Black population. The US was a place where
racism against Black people happened and the nation’s people were finally going
to do something about. The level of irony in this analysis did not escape me.
Argentines have the popular reputation among Latin Americans as being
very racist, a reality of which most Argentines are keenly aware. One of the first
questions I was usually asked by White Argentines was what people in the US
and other nations thought of them. Specifically, they were concerned if they had
the reputation for being discriminatory and prejudiced. I always tried to politely
The Impossible Black Argentine Political Subject 213
soften my response, but the fact remained that both the person asking and I
already knew the answer to the question. Peculiarly, while most A rgentines
would readily shamefully admit the people of their nation discriminated heavily
against Paraguayans, Bolivians and even their own Indigenous populations, they
strongly refuted any claims of anti-Black racism. In the A rgentine imaginary,
racism against Blacks was not possible because there were no Blacks left in the
nation. Thus, Black people brought racial problems, which in itself was an in-
herently racist idea. This was in sharp opposition to the lived circumstances
Blacks have experienced throughout their history in the Americas. While
A rgentines of all racial backgrounds fell madly in love with the US first Black
president, Barack Obama, they in large ignored the constant micro-aggressions
and violent racist acts committed against Blacks in their own nation.
Of course, the most obvious setting in which a conversation on Obama
would develop was an event hosted at the US Embassy. The US is among the
few foreign nation-states that have involved themselves in the public politics of
race, which I define as the public efforts to mobilize individuals around Black
identity in Buenos Aires. The embassies of South Africa and Brazil also held
events welcoming local Africans and Afro-descendants. February 2007 was
the first time the US Embassy held Black History Month events. The audience
for the inaugural event was small due to difficulties in finding effective adver-
tising strategies to reach a widely dispersed population of Africans and Afro-
descendants. The event was nevertheless significant as it created a welcoming
space for the diverse and often divided members of the local community to
unite and directly address their concerns related to their racial positioning
in Argentine society. It was also essential for the Argentine attendees to see
that their nation was indeed home to many resident Blacks including a native
population of A fro-Argentines they believed no longer existed. The speakers
highlighted some of the achievements of famous male and female Black lead-
ers in the country. Obama’s presidential campaign indubitably inspired orga-
nizers to create subsequent opportunities for discussions on race relations and
A rgentina’s Black population.
In March 2007, the US Embassy in Argentina hosted a special conversation
on race in the US. The event was held on-site and organized by the same in-
dividuals involved in the Black History Month activities. Upon entering the
embassy, one of the first things visible was a large photo of Condoleezza Rice
placed to the right of President George W. Bush. Rice as a Black woman was
certainly not the image most Argentines had of people representing the US.
Dominant Argentine society did not view Blacks as possessing any economic
or political power, although Obama had the potential for changing that, at least
in relation to their understanding of the US.
In attendance was Karen, an Afro-Argentine woman in her fifties who worked
as an advisor to the president of the National Institute Against Xenophobia and
Racism (Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminacion, Xenofobia y el Racismo,
INADI) and came to represent the organization. Since we arrived early, we

sat together in the front row. The event organizers were unaware she would
be in attendance but were elated by her presence. Before the presentation be-
gan, Karen stood and formally introduced herself to the organizers and audi-
ence noting she was an Afro-Argentine descended from enslaved Africans in
A rgentina. There was a look of surprise and confusion on the faces of the White
Argentines in the room upon hearing a woman of obvious African descent and
medium brown skin tone claim Argentine identity. She was likely the first Afro-
Argentine any of them had knowingly had contact.
The guest leading the discussion was Dr. Jones, an older, medium toned
Black political science professor from a university in Texas with a heavy south-
ern accent. He gave his talk and interacted with the audience in real time
via digital video. Jones mentioned a previous trip to Argentina he made two
years prior at the invitation of the US Embassy. He visited three universities in
Buenos Aires to lecture on race relations in the US. Jones knew very little about
Argentina’s Black population but was interested in learning more. This time his
talk focused on multiculturalism and after the brief presentation he accepted
questions from the audience. The White Argentines present included a lawyer,
former public administrators, reporters and political scientists. Most of their
questions were focused on Obama and had a tone of awe and admiration tem-
pered by occasional critiques. While they questioned the political significance
of the US first Black president, Black residents of Buenos Aires were organizing
to fight injustice and making similar inquiries locally.
Among those local Black organizations was the African Diaspora Work-
ing Group (Figure 9.1) of which I was a member. The organization sponsored
a community event in which I helped generate discussion forums, including
Figure 9.1 A frican Diaspora Working Group (ADWG) meeting.

Source: Author photo.
some that addressed the state of Blacks in Argentina. At the event, the conver-
sation was predictably hijacked by White Argentines who spent the majority
of the discussion fawning over Obama and noting how vital it was for the US
to finally have a Black head of state. The underlying message in these types of
statements was that Argentina, unlike the US, did not have racial problems.
Alfredo, a light-skinned Afro-Argentine activist in his twenties pointed out
that Argentines were excited about Obama but would not support a Black pol-
itician in their own country. A middle-aged White Argentine woman quickly
interjected to note that a Black woman, Condoleezza Rice, had been one of
the most powerful women in the world for the previous eight years. Yet again
the focus had abruptly been shifted away from Argentina’s own racial problems.
The African Diaspora Working Group sent Sofia, a dark-skinned Afro-
Brazilian woman in her mid-thirties, and me to represent the organization
at one of INADI’s many workshops. We were the only phenotypically Black
people present. Attendees expressed many grievances and concerns over the
European Union’s most recent anti-immigrant legislation, but of course, some-
one felt the need to bring up Obama. An older White Argentine woman stated
she felt the relationship between the US and Latin America would not change if
he were elected president. In contrast, many locals present believed that because
Obama represented an oppressed minority in his country, he would be more
empathetic toward the concerns of minority populations worldwide.
African immigrants residing in Buenos Aires were understandably excited
and supportive of Obama, the son of a Kenyan man. The Nigerian Organi-
zation, one of best-organized Black groups in Buenos Aires, invited me to
attend one of their business meetings. The group was composed of men from
a few different countries mainly due to the fact that West African migrants in
A rgentina tended to be male. The Nigerian leaders of the group felt a dias-
poric kinship with me as a Liberian by birth, although they knew I identified
strongly as being from the US. I even helped them host one of their major
events that year. There were 15 men present at the meeting, and as various
topics were covered the conversation developed into a discussion of Obama.
He was in the foreground of their thoughts as they were busy organizing them-
selves politically in Argentina.
Afro-Argentines were just as preoccupied with Obama as members of other
groups in the nation. Although few of them were members of formalized Black
organizations, they were very much aware of Black politics locally and abroad.
During my interview with Diana, an Afro-Argentine in her late sixties, she
brought up the possibility of Obama winning the election. She stated she was
really rooting for him and his win would be very meaningful to people in
A rgentina. All of my Afro-Argentine research consultants were loyal ‘Obamis-
tas’ updating me on his campaign progress, supporting him from afar and even
praying for his political success. The irony was that their White compatriots
anxiously awaited the US first Black president, while simultaneously ignoring
their own Black political subjects.
Blackness in a White Nation

Organizing around Black identity is a fairly recent phenomenon in Argentina
with most of the political gains only beginning around 2005. The body of liter-
ature on Blackness and Afro-descendants in Argentina has grown significantly
since this time (Siegrist de Gentile and Ghirardi 2008; Maffia 2010; Bravo
2012; Guzmán and Geler 2013; Anderson 2014; Adamovsky 2016), but is still a
rather new area of scholarly investigation. In the past decade, there have been
increased efforts by a group of individuals from diverse ethnic and cultural
backgrounds to create a uniform Black identity in Argentina. The Argentine
state has yet to build sufficient infrastructure to deal with the diversity it has
always had. This can be understood as an essential and deliberate strategy in
solidifying the national myth of European homogeneity.
Argentina is the reputed European nation of Latin America, and the City of
Buenos Aires has historically been cast as the capital or epicenter of Whiteness
(Guano 2003). In spite of the country’s reputation, since the first arrival of Af-
ricans on the shores of Rio de la Plata, there has been a sustained presence of
people of African descent as well as the preservation of their cultural contribu-
tions (Lanuza 1942; Thompson 1984; Picotti 2001). Argentine society is very
divided by race, yet racism is believed to not exist as the native Black popula-
tion of Afro-Argentines has long ‘disappeared’ as a result of military service,
disease epidemics, whitening immigration policies and discursive elimination
that helped consolidate the nation-state (Svampa 1994; Coria 1997; Schávelzon
2003; Andrews 2016). According to racist logic, because there are no Black
people, anti-Black racism cannot exist in the country. Therefore, Black peo-
ple bring racial problems. This thinking persists among members of dominant
society despite the sustained presence of Afro-Argentine organizations and the
reality of the increased immigration of Africans as well as Afro-descendants
from Latin America and the Caribbean. Blackness has and continues to be a
crucial element of Argentine society. The way it has been defined in Argentina,
however, is unique and deserves further exploration.
Argentina is consistent with the rest of Latin America in that there is a high
degree of mixing between racial groups. What makes Argentines unique is
the particular way in which Mestizaje (racial mixing) is conceptualized and
how their racial categories, especially in relationship to Blackness, have been
defined. As Whitten and Torres note, Mestizaje is the powerful master symbol
of the region and the celebration of racial mixture was a major element in
most nation-building projects (1998). Mestizaje as a hegemonic project ulti-
mately has the goal of whitening the population both culturally and phenotyp-
ically. Although mixture is celebrated on the surface level, the ideal result is a
mixed people who are in terms of culture and physical appearance as White as
possible while still having token symbols of Indigenous and African cultures
to make them uniquely from the Americas (Wade 2013). This distinctiveness
makes them special and interesting, but not so ‘savage’ and ‘backward’ that they
cannot compete on a global scale. Geler calls attention to the fact that unlike
the rest of region, Mestizaje in Argentina does not result in Mestizos, but rather
a homogeneous European or White population (2016).
Several scholars have noted the variations of Blackness that exist in A rgentina;
one based on class and another based on phenotype (Frigerio 2010; Adamovsky
2012; Anderson 2015; Geler 2016). In the Argentine case, intermediate skin
color categories are not directly linked to phenotype or a racialized notion of
Blackness. This has led to the popularity of the term ‘Afro’ which allows those
who are not Black by phenotype to claim their African ancestry (Geler 2016).
Afro events are very popular in Buenos Aires and notably most of the attend-
ees are White, middle-class Argentines, many of whom claim some form
of non-Whiteness in their ancestry. It is imperative to keep in mind that all
A fro-descendants do not identify as Black even when they possess a Black phe-
notype. This is especially relevant in Argentina where this non-identification
has led to their loss of visibility. In Argentina, those of any known African an-
cestry could claim to be of mixed descent or, in some cases, even White based on
phenotype. Those individuals typically do because there has been no benefit his-
torically to identifying as Black. Although my research consultants are all people
who self-identify as Negro, being of African descent did not cancel out other
ancestry or make it insignificant. Many Africans and Afro-descendants who
might not typically identify themselves as Black have adopted this politicized
identity to mobilize for social justice. This was facilitated by a particular histor-
ical moment, which included the collaboration of the previous administration.
The election of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as president of Argentina in
2007 marked a notable multicultural turn in Argentine state’s intervention in
racial politics. Fernández de Kirchner was not without her much deserved mul-
tilayered critiques. Furthermore, her more diversity inclusive policies could be
interpreted as the kind of neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale 2006) that helped
keep Argentina at the pace of powerful, progressive nation-states on ethnic
and racial issues. The sincerity of the motives behind the legislation held lit-
tle importance due to the fact that, for the first time in modern history, the
rights of Afro-descendants were explicitly being protected and the president
was formally recognizing their presence as part of the nation. These changes
were directly connected to the organizing efforts of local Black activists who
helped shape and push through Fernández de Kirchner’s policies. Some of the
most meaningful gains for Africans and Afro-descendants were made under her
administration, which ended in 2015. Both informal and formalized activities
led by individual actors and groups paved the way for these changes.
Black Political Organizing in Buenos Aires

What appears as a resurgence of Black resistance in Argentina in reality has
deep historical roots. Afro-descendants in Argentina have long resisted hege-
monic notions of pure European origins. The group has an extensive history of
contesting invisibility through mutual aid societies, Black social organizations

and the A fro-Argentine (Molina 2001). The persistence of African-based cultural
practices that contribute to Argentine popular culture is also a testament to the
resilience of Blacks (Savigliano 1995; Páez Vilaró 2001; Rossi and Becco 2001).
The context of the latest efforts of Blacks to gain visibility occurred against
the backdrop of the city-sponsored Ferias de Colectividades (cultural fairs). In
these regularly scheduled events that date back at least two decades, various
immigrant populations have stands with traditional foods and artisanal goods
for sale. The concept was to give Argentines spaces to interact with people from
different ethnic and racial backgrounds as well as hopefully reduce tensions
among the city’s residents. These everyday interactions were to make groups
like immigrant Blacks seem less unusual. You could find one or two stands
run by Blacks at any of the major Ferias in the city of Buenos Aires with a few
Senegalese vendors typically located on the periphery of the sites as they did not
have funds to formally participate. I helped an Afro-Brazilian research consul-
tant work her food stand at one of the Ferias. Based on our interactions at the
well-attended fair and my previous experiences at such events, it was clear that
these types of events helped reinforce racial stereotypes rather than challenge
them as few genuine intercultural exchanges occurred in such environments.
Blacks in Buenos Aires were more effective in gaining visibility by forming
their own organizations and creating their own public events.
The most recent formalized efforts of Blacks to politically organize can trace
their origins to the early 1980s when a Pan-African group of individuals led
by Afro-Argentine activist Enrique Nadal formed for the recognition of Blacks
in the nation and to combat discrimination. The Pan-African nature of recent
Black groups has even deeper historical roots in the f raternities, A frican-based
associations and Black battalions of Rio de la Plata where ethnically diverse
freed and enslaved individuals organized to produce Black identity in the
region (Borucki 2015). In the past 20 years, several grassroots organizations
focusing on Africans and Afro-descendants have appeared. Most of them are
concentrated in the city of Buenos Aires, but there are significant activist
groups spread throughout Argentina’s northwest, which has historically been
home to large numbers of Afro-descendants who trace their origins to enslaved
populations of the colonial era. While Buenos Aires does not represent all of
A rgentina, it is home to the bulk of Black activist undertakings.
The Black leaders in the capital city are the most visible and establish models
for engagement with national and international organizations. Most of these
individuals in leadership positions are African and Afro-Latin American for-
eigners. Their experiences in their own homelands have helped them better
comprehend the challenges involved in politically organizing against racial
discrimination. Their interest in local Black politics is also derived from the
culture shock they experience dealing with Argentine racism in their everyday
lives. These individuals are more likely to possess a diasporic consciousness
and ways of identifying that ideologically align them with Blacks of different
origins. Although most of them are of foreign origin, they are at the forefront
of Black politics in Buenos Aires and influence national policies that a ffect lo-
cal Blacks and other groups that face discrimination. Regional pressure from
Blacks organizing in other Latin American nations has served as motivation
(Rivera-Rideau, Jones, and Paschel 2016) as well as Obama’s presidential
campaign marking potential shifts in US racial politics.
New Black organizations seem to appear on a regular basis as many in-
dividuals see creating a group as a means of accessing funds to help sustain
their livelihoods. Numerous very small groups with rather short histories of
existence and often unclear missions have been founded (Anderson 2012).
While people are quick to criticize, it is imperative to remember that Blacks
are disproportionately represented among the country’s most marginalized so-
cially and economically. The situation is even more dire in Argentina where
their very existence is denied, making it even more difficult for them to access
to resources. Systemic racism has kept Blacks out of networks that would give
them access to the social and economic capital needed for upward mobility.
Additionally, they have little recourse when they face racialized discrimination
and violence as there is a vehement denial of anti-Black racism in Argentina.
Buenos Aires surprisingly has a vibrant social events calendar in regard to
Black-themed activities. Organizations regularly hold conferences, meetings
and workshops. There are also several magazines, websites and blogs ded-
icated to issues relevant to local Blacks. In the entertainment realm, an art
exhibit, a regular radio program and a play focusing on the experiences of
Afro-descendant women have grown in popularity. INADI has helped sponsor
conferences, cultural fairs and other events to celebrate Black cultural con-
tributions. With the reality of these events and organizations, it is becoming
increasingly difficult to not see Blackness in the nation.
INADI has played a very visible role in local Black politics by provid-
ing funding for a variety of programming. The organization, which is un-
der the office of the Secretary of the Interior, was created in the mid-1990s
and is modeled on international human rights legislation created by the UN
and the Organization of American States. The organization had particularly
v ibrant programming related to Afro-descendants under the administration
of Fernández de Kirchner. Their events were usually well attended and in-
cluded audiences filled with many non-Afro-descendants. Numerous functions
were hosted in prominent, prestigious popular venues in the city of Buenos
A ires heightening their v isibility. Although INADI cannot directly influence
legislation, it has played a useful role in bolstering the visibility of Blacks due
to Africans and Afro-descendants working closely with the organization to
deploy their resources for successful programs. The hundreds of complaints
Blacks have filed with the organization as victims of discrimination provide
much-needed evidence confirming rampant anti-Black racism in the country.
In addition to receiving discrimination complaints, INADI conducts its own

investigation into the issue and then creates a formal report in which they make
recommendations. They have a very modest budget, but depending on the na-
ture of the discrimination, a program could be created to address the problem
as well. The complaints on record also increase the general public’s awareness
that such occurrences are not isolated racist incidents, but part of a much greater
problem. The challenge for local activists remains in how to translate INADI’s
primarily symbolic role of highlighting various forms of discrimination into
legal action that will result in new legislation to protect the rights of Blacks.
Possibly the most significant gain under the Fernández de Kirchner’s ad-
ministration was the return of a category for Blacks on the 2010 Census. This
began with Black activists helping secure funds for a pilot census in 2005 to
demonstrate to the state a need for the category. The study was sponsored by
the World Bank and the results showed less than four percent of those surveyed
considered themselves Afro-descendants (Stubbs and Reyes 2006). After an
aggressive campaign by local activists, the category of Afro-descendant was of-
ficially included on the 2010 Census marking the return of Blackness after over
a century of being absent with even lower numeric results than the test census
(Seghezzo 2009). Unfortunately, the findings can be interpreted as a reification
of the national myths of ‘no Blacks in Argentina’ and ‘the European nation’.
The 2010 Census marked the bicentennial which was a time of reflection on
the national identity although many people of African descent did not choose
to identify as such. The census was nevertheless an essential tool for Blacks to
argue for inclusion and representation.
Africans and Afro-descendant activists have presented new legislation to
the City of Buenos Aires and the Argentine state, some of which has been put
into place. In the City of Buenos Aires, July 25 is officially the Día de la Mujer
Afro-descendiente. This coincides with the International Afro-Latin American
and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Day. Participating in a global day of recognition
is an important way for local Blacks to demonstrate consciousness and solidar-
ity with those in the Diaspora outside the nation. On May 8, Argentina now
recognizes the Dia Nacional de los Afro-descendientes y de la Cultura Afro, which
was made a national law in 2013. That symbolic recognition has been buttressed
by petitions for direct efforts to combat racial discrimination. Included among
those efforts are the 2014 series of events and subsequent report Argentina Raíces
Afro: Visibilidad Reconocimiento y Derechos published by the national Ministry of
Justice and Human Rights. In 2016, a revision to antidiscrimination law, Ley
23.592, was presented with the support of several Black organizations. The
existing law against acts of discrimination was created in the late 1980s and was
in need of an update to reflect changes within society (Secretaría de Derechos
Humanos 1988). According to the changes, the antidiscrimination legislation
would now include broadening the criteria for discriminatory acts to include
those based on race, gender, sexuality, class and age (Ministerio Público Fiscal
2016). In the proposed revision, the burden of proof falls on the perpetrator of
the discriminatory act who must provide evidence demonstrating he did not
discriminate versus the previous version in which the victim had to provide
witnesses to the discriminatory act. It is notable that in the past few years, there
were a high volume of discrimination cases filed to INADI because of racism
against Senegalese immigrants.
In 2010, the administration of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, with the
support of local activists, made critical changes to the Ley de Migraciones 25.871.
Migration was framed within a broader human rights perspective guaranteeing
the protection of the basic human rights of migrants (Dirección Nacional de
Migraciones 2010). The most recent revisions in this legislation were made
under the current ultraconservative administration of billionaire President
Mauricio Macri in early 2017. His administration framed migrants, who are
victims of trafficking, political conflicts and other horrors, as the main per-
petrators of crime in Argentina (Clarín 2017). What is viewed by dominant
society as the Brown and Black hordes that dare pollute the pure Whiteness of
the nation represents a new version of the old trope of el Malón or the encroach-
ing non-White masses that threaten civilized city life of ‘White Argentina’
(Gordillo 2016). The revisions to the law make migrants more easily subject to
deportation under the ruse of Argentina being under attack by criminals sneak-
ing across its borders. Highly visible immigrants like the Senegalese and other
Blacks who are regularly targeted by police in racially motivated searches and
raids will be among those most harshly affected by these changes.
It is necessary to note within those efforts, as with most anti-racist social
justice activism, there are allies from a variety of backgrounds who have found
ways to strategically use their privilege and position to create a more equitable
society. They have wisely been cautious in the specific types of interventions
they offer, ensuring every effort to create true collaborations. Many of my re-
search consultants remain justifiably critical of those individuals. History has
provided little reason for Blacks in Argentina to confide or trust in non-Black
Argentines. These individuals have been critiqued for exhibiting paternalism
or elitism, but over the last decade they have slowly gained the trust of some
local Blacks with consistent support.
Some of the individuals who support local activism are non–Afro-
descendant scholar allies who continue to publish new findings that create a
more inclusive version of Argentine history and challenge popular myth and
rhetoric of a homogeneous White nation. These individuals are very much
scholar activists who strategize and collaborate with local communities on how
to tackle the problems facing present-day Blacks in the nation. At the helm
of these efforts are the scholars in the Grupo de Estudios Afro-Latino Americanos
(GEALA; Figure 9.2), many of whom are researchers under the National
Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). Near the end of 2016,
this well-respected research body came under the extreme scrutiny of the new
Grupo de Estudios Afro-Latino Americanos (GEALA) poster by Darío la Vega.

Figure 9.2
conservative administration that challenged the significance of scientific re-

search and wanted to greatly reduce the organization’s already miniscule bud-
get (Román 2017). This is particularly disconcerting considering some of the
most groundbreaking work on Blackness in Argentina is being produced by
CONICET scholars. With these types of critiques, the Argentine state found a
backhanded way to remind Blacks they do not belong in the nation and contin-
ues to resist every effort to write them back into history.
Vote for Obaca!

During the 2015 Argentine presidential campaign, a fictional candidate
emerged on the political scene, and his popularity would surpass that of some
of those actually in the race. Omar Obaca (Figure 9.3), a round faced, smiling,
joking, jovial Negro appeared in a series of fake online advertisements created
by the Internet channel FansWorld TV. The actor, Marcos Moreno Martínez,
presented a benign, friendly, nonthreatening Black man in politics. The White
Argentine creators of the character strangely believed he bore a striking simi-
larity to US President Barack Obama, although the only physical similarity was
perhaps his medium brown skin tone and short Black hair. Obaca was created
to be laughed at and was supposedly in on the joke, at least on a surface level.
Not surprisingly, fans created several Facebook accounts as well as a Twitter
account for Obaca. He had large billboards on the streets of Buenos Aires
neighborhoods and was profiled by popular news outlets including the two
major Argentine newspapers Clarín (Blanco 2015) and la Nación (Reina 2015)
as well as in an article in the popular Noticias magazine (Fraguela 2015). He
Figure 9.3 Obaca by FansWorld TV.
was interviewed by several entertainment programs in Buenos Aires on TV,

Internet and radio. His fame even reached the US as an article about Obaca
was published in The New York Times, which included a very brief interview
with the actor but mainly highlighted his creators and mentioned the contro-
versy he sparked with local Black activists (Bernas and Ghogomu 2015). In the
accompanying video, the White, middle-class, thirty-something creators be-
hind the character laugh at the idea that someone could use their color as part of
a political campaign. There is an obvious disconnect of color from race and, in
fact, no discussion of race at all among the creators or the use of the loaded term
Negro in their ads. Through an overlay of text on the video, the authors briefly
noted the great underrepresentation of Blacks in the last Argentine census.
In spite of all the media attention, very little is known about the actor Marcos
Moreno Martínez who played the popular character as no one seriously delved
into his existence and experiences as a Black man in Argentina. According to
The New York Times article, he is from a poor background and resides in Lujan,
a city in the province that is about a three hours ride on public transporta-
tion from the City of Buenos Aires. He worked multiple jobs to survive and
pursued his passion for acting in spite of the racially stereotyped roles he was
consistently offered. He did state that after playing Obaca, a fictional Black
presidential candidate, he made the decision to never return to the stereotyped
roles (Bernas and Ghogomu 2015).
Obaca was heavily critiqued by a local Black activist in an opinion piece
that appeared in the Página 12 newspaper as the character was described as a
‘Black buffoon’ (Pita 2015). Obaca’s jokes covered a range of topics mocking
politics, soccer, the failing economy, women’s bodies and relationships. Aside
from the obvious political jokes, Obaca was a multilayered racial joke as well.
In Argentina, calling anyone of obvious African descent Negro to their face is
usually considered rude and an insult. Euphemisms like morocho or moreno are
preferred instead, although these terms are also used for people who do not
have any obvious African descent (Anderson 2015). Throughout the ads, the
character used Negro with high frequency, even using it to strategically replace
words in common phrases like Votar en Negro rather than Votar en Blanco (cast a
protest vote). Most sayings that include the adjective Negro use it to connote
something as illegal, illegitimate, or simply to indicate something derogatory.
The jokes using Negro, in fact, highlight the inherent racism of these common
phrases in Argentina.
In reality, Obaca’s biggest joke is that a Black man could ever be president
of the White nation of Argentina. Obaca, for dominant Argentine society,
demonstrates the impossibility of a Black Argentine political subject. He is but
another reminder to resident Blacks that they are not part of the Argentine
nation. He also serves as a warning from the hegemon that Argentina will re-
main a European nation and resist any efforts, real or fictional, that challenge its
national myth. Obaca was introduced during Argentina’s last presidential cam-
paign and continues to be an Internet sensation, yet most Argentines remain
unaware of the presence and activism of their local Black population.
The ‘disappearance’ of Afro-Argentines during the late 1800s was codified
by their removal from the census and the national imaginary (Andrews 1979).
As noted, Blacks reappeared in official state records under the category of
‘Afro-descendant’ which was included in the 2010 census after the collab-
orative organized efforts of resident Africans, Afro-Latin Americans and
A fro-Argentines (Seghezzo 2009; Anderson 2015). Although they were grossly
underrepresented, they accounted for almost 150,000 individuals in the country
or less than one percent of the total population ( Jensen 2013). Understanding
of identity formation in the African Diaspora of Latin A merica is especially
important in light of substantial changes in national policies recognizing
A fro-descendants and Indigenous minority populations (Hooker 2008; Davis
et al. 2012; Paschel 2016). These individuals have sought formal r ecognition
and acknowledgment of their histories, contributions and continued presence
in the region.
****
While Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was president of Argentina, you could

walk through the main entrance of the famous Casa Rosada executive man-
sion and immediately see a series of large painted portraits of Indigenous and
Afro-descendant male and female historical leaders from across Latin America
and the Caribbean. As Argentina’s most famous historical building, it houses
the president’s offices where she greeted heads of state and other influential
leaders. Symbolically, the welcoming ‘hall of heroes’ portrait display sent the
message that people of all backgrounds could also be great leaders and perhaps
even president. I visited the Casa Rosada in July 2015 under the newly elected
President Mauricio Macri. Unlike previous visits, the building was completely
surrounded at all times by high metal fences erected around its perimeter.
There was also a noticeable increase in the number of police in riot gear guard-
ing the space and visitors now needed to schedule an appointment online to
enter. They also had to participate in a mandatory tour, which included the
official whitewashed version of Argentine history blended in with descriptions
of the elaborate furnishings and décor. Most importantly, for admittance all
visitors had to present state-issued identification in the form of a passport for
foreigners or national identification card for residents. Most of the tourists were
foreigners or non-Whites from the nation’s interior. We were coldly greeted
by the new administration as potential enemies of the state. It was clear that
foreigners and especially Negros were no longer welcome in the Casa Rosada or
the nation as a whole.
The changes in the Casa Rosada site visits reflect the overall attitude of
President Macri toward those that would threaten ‘White Argentina’. O baca
can be interpreted as part of this response to the visible surge in political par-
ticipation of Negros who were suddenly and very publicly demanding rights
and recognition. In the mind of dominant society, Negros had overstepped
their boundaries and forgotten their rightful place in the shadows of h istory.
Obaca was created to remind them of where they belong. He was perhaps part
of the backlash to diversity embracing policies of the F ernández de Kirch-
ner administration, Peronism via Kirchnerism and its Negros who insisted
on having a political voice. Before Obaca, Black activists were creating new
possibilities for themselves in Argentina with the support of the state as they
tracked Obama’s presidential campaign. In fact, Obama had Argentines of
all ethnic and class backgrounds openly talking about race in u nprecedented
ways and paved a path for real positive change in the nation. In this reworked
version of the country, perhaps they could have had their own Obama.
White Argentines responded to the political desires of Negros with Obaca
instead. The character was a product of the White Argentine imagination
and demonstrated the saliency of how Blackness is still imagined by them.
Obaca’s materialization points to the anxieties and tensions inherent in the
political imagination of Argentines who fear the intervention of Blacks in
Argentine politics.
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10
Current Representations
of ‘Black’ Citizens
Contentious Visibility within
the Multicultural Nation
Laura de la Rosa Solano
In September 2012, ‘The Answer is Colombia’ campaign was launched to pro-

mote global tourism to Colombia. One of the campaign’s postcards displays the
picture of a Black female dancer who is a member of the Ekobios, a well-known
carnival troupe from the city of Cartagena (Figure 10.1). This campaign and
photograph specifically present Colombia’s carnivals and festivities as one of the
country’s main selling points for potential visitors, and also speaks to the visible
place Black people now occupy in the national imagination after a long period of
exclusion from Colombia’s national identity. However, there is more to the fact
that Black people are associated with carnival through imagery. This chapter
explores how the Black cultural integration in Colombia involves perpetuating
and rearticulating stereotypes based on physical exoticism and projections of
infinite happiness and sensual body movements.
Past studies of Colombia’s Black populations have argued that these groups
were ‘invisible’ to the State and that racial categories are often ‘avoided’ in daily
interactions. This essay argues that in the aftermath of Colombia’s recognition
of multiculturalism, Black populations have now acquired a specific kind of
‘visibility’ that serves the purposes of global tourism. For Afro-Colombians,
visibility is often restricted to spaces related to music and dance, like the
carnival. To understand this phenomenon, I will first explain how the city of
Cartagena became a hub for international tourism. Then, I will address ‘invis-
ibility’ and ‘avoidance’, two notions that have been used in past studies about
Black Colombians. After discussing the history of carnival troupes that claim
Blackness in Cartagena, specifically the Ekobios troupe, I will show how the
tourism industry recurs to images that perpetuate racial stereotypes in their
representations of Afro-Colombians.
The festivities in Cartagena, as I will show, are not only spaces of cultural
encounters through symbols, dance and music but also political spaces in which
230 Laura de la Rosa Solano
Figure 10.1 The answer is Colombia postcard.
identities, and racial and class relations are contested, negotiated and recon-
figured. Furthermore, these celebrations create an opportunity for different
groups to raise harsh criticism to their own economic and political position in a
broader urban context that is highly shaped by the global tourism industry and
the interventions of the multicultural state.
Carnivals like Independence celebrations in Cartagena are symbolic spaces
that show how human groups represent themselves: images and performances
have been chosen by the groups as messages to the society. As a festive space,
these celebrations condense social tensions and underscore identities. As a result,
the carnivalesque space becomes a staging of social issues, according to Michel
Agier (2000, 29): ‘the fact is social, even political, as much as cultural and artistic:
what happens on the Carnival prepares and then extends into ordinary life’.
In Cartagena, festivities are characterized by both the restrictions and spaces
for an elite and the expressions avoiding these controls. The dominant troupes
promote expensive and exclusive celebrations, and on the other side, each carni-
val ‘Afro’ troupe highlights the affirmation of a Black identity in the city. These
Current Representations of ‘Black’ Citizens 231
groups use the holidays as a space of visibility and claims of an African ori-
gin. However, faced with the success of the ‘Afro’ troupes, tourism companies
promote their musical and dance expressions and create a multicultural market.
The identity claims of ‘Afro’ troupes are sometimes relativized and sometimes
accentuated.
Carnivals as political spaces have been analyzed from several perspectives.
Burke (1978) studies the European carnival as an ‘upside down world’ but says
that the removal of standards during the festive event is a way of emphasizing
restrictions. Carnival would be an area of community solidarity and a reaffir-
mation of power. For his part, Caro Baroja (1979) explains the medieval carni-
val as a relaxation of the moral pressure that Catholicism exerted on everyday
life. The role of these festivities would be to validate the daily norms. Bakthine
(1982) distinguishes official holidays from popular festivals. In the first ones,
we notice the social divisions, whereas in the seconds, the reversed roles and
excesses of food, drink, joy and dance are the order of the day. The carnival
as a popular festival would be the scene of a second life where freedom and
abundance would be unlimited in a limited time. Like Bakthine, Da Matta
(1997) compares military parades and carnival parades to highlight two d ifferent
ways of exalting Brazilian nationalism. For him, there is no d issolution of social
contradictions in the celebrating time.
Analyzing carnivals from a political viewpoint provides a whole perspective
on a social institution that is highly structured. Moreover, in the same celebra-
tion, there may exist different carnivals actions, such as mechanisms of wealth
redistribution, symbolic confrontation of two enemy group, differential social
hierarchies or the expression of an egalitarian society (de la Rosa 2017).
The City of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia:

From Enslaved Port to Tourist Hub
Official narratives claim that the Bay of Cartagena de Indias was ‘discovered’
in 1501 by the Spanish conquistador Rodrigo de Bastidas. However, because
several navigators visited the bay without settling there, it was not until 1533
that Pedro de Heredia, who was also Spanish, founded a city under orders from
Queen Juana of Castile (Lemaitre 1983, 11–57).
In 1600, Cartagena de Indias was an important center for commercial
exchange and one of Spain’s main Caribbean colonies (Lemaitre 1981, 54).
Several factors made Cartagena a key location for Spanish colonial economy,
such as its geographical situation – only 135 km from the Magdalena estuary –
which provided easy access to the continent, its maritime connection to the rest
of the Caribbean region and its deep water port (Lemaitre 1981, 56).
Between 1580 and 1640, a time when Cartagena was the American conti-
nent’s main enslaved port, the city’s social structure was built on a caste system
according to which an individual’s place in society depended on his or her skin
color. People with different phenotypes were organized by hierarchical norms

set by the Crown to determine which rights, obligations, clothes, behaviors,
punishments and access to places were granted to people according to their
physical characteristics (Ceballos 1995, 18–20; Gutiérrez 2000, 21–23, 55–58).
In this system, Whites were placed at the top of the pyramid and symbolized
‘development’, whereas African-enslaved people, who were deprived of free-
dom and oppressed, were kept at the bottom.
Later, commercial exchanges between Africa, Europe and America formed
the world’s main economic axis, and by the 18th century, Caribbean sugar plan-
tations demanded more and more enslaved people. As a result, C artagena’s work-
force all but disappeared as enslaves people were re-routed toward the islands,
and the port lost its long-time status as the region’s largest enslaved port. During
this time, the Spanish rulers’ abuses and excesses led to movements of rebellion.
In addition to the enslaved uprisings and marooning that began to take place,
the criollos, people of Spanish descent who were born in the A mericas, became
unsatisfied with their position in the caste system, which prohibited them from
enjoying the same rights as their White forefathers, even if they had studied in
Europe or possessed considerable wealth. For instance, criollos couldn’t access
political power, and the Spanish controlled their economic activities (Ocampo
1984, 31; Angulo 2001, 38). Members of lower castes, such as craftsmen and
Blacks – both free and enslaved – united with the criollos to lead the indepen-
dence struggles that would eventually put an end to two centuries of Spanish
colonial rule. By the end of the 18th century, inspired by the French Revolution
and other independence movements sweeping through the New Kingdom of
Granada (Angulo 2001, 32), the criollos’ desire for freedom was accompanied by
transformational rhetoric according to which colonies would become republics
where all would have equal rights and privileges (Angulo 2001, 35). Finally,
after several confrontations, Cartagena’s first Declaration of Independence was
pronounced on November 11, 1811. At that time, the Spanish were suspended
from their positions, and their privileges were abolished (Ocampo 1984, 35).
However, the dismantling of the colonial system did not lead to any sub-
stantial change in the city’s social structure. High expenses brought on by
the War of Independence left the city in ruins. The resources with which to
consolidate a new economic system were scarce, and the production of wealth
based on enslaved labor continued (Angulo 2001, 107). The criollo elite was not
interested in bringing in-depth transformations to the social order. Therefore,
despite the fact that Afro-descendants obtained seats in the city’s Parliament in
1812, the criollos tightened their grip on this institution, excluding certain social
strata from effective participation (Angulo 2001, 11). Despite Afro-descendants
(Negros, Mulatos and Pardos according to the terminology of the time) actively
participating in the armed militias and sitting on the constitutional council,
racial classifications and hierarchies outlived the end of colonization and were
perpetuated under the Republic (Cunin 2004, 154).
After a period of economic depression, and a drastic decrease in popula-

tion following the siege of Cartagena ordered by the Spanish General Morillo
during Independence Wars, the city began to recover economically in 1880
thanks to an increase in exports, also allowing the port to resume its activity
(Aguilera and Meissel 2009, 4). With the city’s economic renaissance during
the first decades of the 20th century, the differences between Cartagena’s in-
habitants, which had once been based on the colonial caste system, were re-
placed by economic discrimination.
Starting in 1930, exports diminished again as a consequence of the global
economic crisis, but the city experienced a new period of economic prosperity
in the 1950s. Fundamental developments for the promotion of tourism and the
city’s industrial growth occurred at this time. For instance, a road was built to
connect the Caribbean coast to the country’s interior, and an oil refinery was
constructed (Aguilera and Meissel 2009, 10). At the end of the 1960s, Cartagena
invested in tourist infrastructure, building several hotels and a h ighway to con-
nect the airport to the city’s new tourist center. Starting in 1973, Cartagena’s
demographic growth rate was higher than the sum of C olombia’s four larg-
est cities (Aguilera and Meissel 2009, 12). The city’s financial and economic
growth, especially in the tourism sector, has increased continually since the
1980s, partially as a result of the UNESCO declaring Cartagena, a World
Heritage site, in 1984. This led to the ‘conversion’ of the city’s historic cen-
ter to make it more attractive for tourism, mainly by restoring old building,
as well as opening luxury hotels and restaurants. In 2008, the city became a
cruise destination, and an estimated 60,000 tourists arrived by boat that year.
Today, hotels and restaurants provide 20.2% of Cartagena’s jobs (Aguilera and
Meissel 2009, 12).
It is also important to note that the implementation of multicultural poli-
cies in Colombia at the end of the 20th century meant a change in rapports of
domination and racism toward different groups of Blacks in Cartagena, who
have been there since the city’s foundation. The National Constitution of 1991
stipulates that Colombia is a ‘multiethnic and multicultural’ country. As such,
it must respect the identity and guarantee the rights of ethnic minorities. The
Colombian state, therefore, modified its position concerning Amerindian and
Afro-Colombian populations, who were until recently the victims of assimila-
tionist and integrationist policies that did not respect their ethno-cultural iden-
tity. In 1993, Law 70 was passed, recognizing the collective property of land
belonging to Afro-descendant people and guaranteeing their rights as e thnic
minorities.
In the 2005 Census, Cartagena de Indias had 892,545 inhabitants of whom
280,307 (31%) declared themselves as Blacks, Mulatos, Afro-descendants,
A fro-Colombians or Palenqueros (Negro, Mulato, Afrodescendiente, Afrocolombiano)
(DANE 2007). The city’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of 20% of the
population, whereas the remaining 80% live below the poverty line and, in
some cases, without access to public services (Abello 2004, 46). After inde-
pendence from Spanish crown, the social division by caste marked the process
of formation of social classes, phenomenon that the elite of the city has per-
petuated until today: the economic and political power of the city is generally
held by the White/Mestizo population, and the Black persons continue to be
marginalized (Baez y Calvo et al. 2000, 74).
The quality of life has not improved significantly. Indeed, two poles have
been consolidated: on the one hand, the modern Cartagena, industrial and
tourist and, on the other, the poor Cartagena whose population does not
have access to all utilities (Baez y Calvo et al. 2000, 74). Recent prosperity in
Cartagena has not benefited all the inhabitants of the city in the same way. The
polarization is obvious: a large percentage of the population declaring them-
selves Afro-descendants are poor, live in sectors where essential public services
are absent and receive a low level of education and precarious salaries (Aguilera
and Meissel 2009).
Afro-descendants in Cartagena have the lowest paid jobs. This situation
comes from two causes. First, Afro-Cartageneros do not have the same access
to education and health services as Whites because of the historical and struc-
tural discrimination. Second, contemporary racial discrimination means that
businesses prefer to hire people whose skin color is clearer and pay less Black
people for the same job (Romero 2007, 5–6). To the economic conditions must
be added daily discriminations, for example, some discotheques do not allow
access to Black customers. Despite the complaints and legal actions, discrimi-
nation continues. Finally, ‘we’re not trying anymore, you know, if you go out
dancing and having a good time with your friends, you go where you know
you can come in, you do not want to have troubles in your night’, explains one
of the members of the ‘Afro’ troupe Orgullosamente Getsemanicense.
Today, Cartagena’s Independence celebration is one of the city’s most popular
touristic events. The celebration takes place in November and is similar to a
carnival insofar as it is a public, exceptional, nonreligious and community-based
event, but also because it is a place where social dynamics are expressed, despite
the myth of ‘total permissiveness’. While the country’s elite gathers to partake
in their own festivities, organizing private parties in clubs or pageants in luxury
hotels, popular parades take place out on the street, where troupes assemble by
neighborhood, school, university, association or union to dance and sing down
one of the city’s main avenues.
The parades and public outdoor festivities last for five days. At least four
parades take place every day in different neighborhoods, culminating in the
most important one on November 11. The parades’ participants are mainly
dance troupes accompanied by musicians and costumed entertainers wearing
individual or group outfits. Men and women of all generations form troupes
to represent a specific neighborhood or institution during the parades. S everal
weeks of rehearsal are necessary to collect enough money to pay for the
costumes and the musicians. On average, each carnival troupe participates in

two parades over the course of four days. Troupes from other Colombian cities
and towns are also invited. Over the past few years, these ‘popular’ celebrations
have been centered on highlighting Cartagena’s Black population. Before ana-
lyzing the relationship between the carnival troupes and the tourist industry, I
will explain the key notions of invisibility and avoidance within the framework
of past studies on Black populations in Colombia.
Invisibility and Avoidance of Black Populations in Colombia

Today, people who live in Cartagena still associate skin color with certain types
of employment and behavioral characteristics. People with White skin think
of themselves as the symbols of progress, economic success, good manners and
power (Wade 1993). Simultaneously, they consider Blacks as ‘inferior’, ‘savage’
and ‘ignorant’, which would explain why they are employed in more physically
demanding professions, like cleaning staff, drivers or traveling salesmen.
A lthough these forms of social discriminations are obvious, there are no violent
confrontations which seem to indicate this system of exclusion has been inter-
nalized and accepted (Cunin 2004). A common example is when Black people
are prohibited from entering clubs (Abello 2004). By practicing this type of
exclusion, the elite signals that not all the city’s spaces are accessible to everyone
and that individuals should remain in the places historically assigned to them.
In this context, French researcher Elisabeth Cunin suggests using the term
‘avoidance’ to replace ‘invisibility’, a term favored by Colombian researchers.
Her work on racial relations in Cartagena shows the city’s inhabitants try to
elude being categorized as Black. Although the term Moreno is preferred to
Negro, which is perceived as a negative category, Cunin’s work is telling of
the desire to escape from racial categories altogether. Colombian anthropol-
ogist Nina de Friedemann (1992) uses the term ‘invisible’ to describe the way
A fro-descendant populations have been unable to benefit from public policies or
attention from the State. Jaime Arocha (2000, 354) explains these populations’
invisibility for institutions results from different historical processes, beginning
with the Christian baptism that occurred in African-enslaved ports to erase
the enslaved person’s name, followed by the imposition of the owner’s surname
after manumission, the social value given to racial mixing after the abolition of
slavery, among others. Both of these authors use the term ‘invisibility’ to refer to
the inexistence of Afro-descendant populations in Colombian legislation before
1991. Arocha and Friedeman have spoken out against the racial discrimination
these communities have faced on a daily basis. However, Cunin (2004, 89)
introduces ‘avoidance’ as an analyses category:
by replacing the concept of invisibility, which is generally used in con-

temporary research, with the notion of avoidance, I want to show that
Black populations’ status isn’t the result of an exterior assignation that has
been passively accepted, but that it is the result of true agency put forth by
agents who become invisible to satisfy dominant social norms.
Although it brings the concept of invisibility into everyday spaces, the notion of
avoidance was used to describe the way in which Cartagena’s Black population –
not to be confused with that of Colombia – assumed its identity in accordance
with the city’s established social norms, where Blacks don’t confront Whites
and where ‘escaping from the gaze of others can avoid people getting pegged as
Black, but escaping from this gaze also means not drawing attention to oneself,
fulfilling expectations, and being considered normal’ (Cunin 2004, 63).
Far from putting forth such avoidance strategies, Cartagena’s present-day
Independence celebrations and self-claimed ‘Afro’ carnival troupes are cur-
rently displaying clear intentions of assuming and valuing an African heri-
tage. As will be discussed further, this process hinges on many ambiguities
and interactions between tradition, nature, innovation, rhythms, bodies and
ancestral knowledge.
Ekobios: When Reclaiming Heritage Perpetuates Stereotypes

A photograph of the Ekobios group is in the catalog of postcards The answer
is Colombia campaign used to promote the country. A Black dancer smiles
and opens her arms in the foreground, whereas behind her, other dancers are
visible, with their faces are completely painted and decorated with sequin.
They are wearing a black bra with gold sequins and red and yellow necklaces,
earrings and diadems. At the bottom of the photograph, there is a question: In
which country can you enjoy more than 700 festivities and celebrations every year? On
the back of the postcard, you can read The answer is Colombia! Other questions
on other postcards, such as Which country of South America has over 100 beautiful
beaches on the two largest oceans of the world? or Do you know where to find the largest
collection of gold in the world, have the same answer. They were distributed in
the airports of the country for passengers arriving by international flights in
December 2012 and January 2013, as part of a campaign aiming to impose the
country brand ‘CO’ on international tourism markets. Launched in September
2012, this campaign comes from public and private entities and succeeds two
others that were also fairly criticized: Colombia is passion and Colombia, the risk is
wanting to stay. It focuses especially on the production and distribution of posters
and video commercials in Colombia and abroad.
In the aforementioned promotional postcard, the Ekobios dancers are
recognizable by the costumes from one of their performances. As one of
Cartagena’s ‘Afro’ carnival troupes, Ekobios lays claim to an African heritage
as well as a contemporary relationship with Africa, unlike other ‘traditional’
carnival troupes that emphasize Colombia and Cartagena’s mixed heritage.
Cartagena’s first ‘Afro’ carnival troupe, Calenda Getsemaní, was founded in 1980
by Black dancer and choreographer Delia Zapata Olivella (see de la Rosa 2013).
The Ekobios troupe was one of the first to use brightly colored materials and
to integrate non-Colombian rhythms into their performances, although today,
both of these elements are considered to be characteristic of ‘Afro’ troupes. The
troupe’s director, Dixon Pérez González, was a member of Calenda Getsemaní
until 1997, when he decided to continue bringing value to Afro-Colombian
heritage through innovation with his own troupe. Therefore, in 1998, E kobios
performed their ‘African Dance’ piece wearing costumes made of artificial
leopard pelts. Although several troupes were also doing this, the design for the
skirts, the hats made of natural fibers and the troupe captain’s accessories that
were decorated with feathers and multicolored beads were all new. Choreogra-
phy and costumes became a source of innovation that created and projected the
image of a stylish and stylized Africa, but the troupe’s novelty was also based
on inviting foreign choreographers and using new costume materials such as
feathers, sequins, shiny fabrics and gold embroidery, which started to crop up
on the streets of Cartagena.
The troupe’s success was such that Mr. Pérez received a prize from the Black
Colombia Cultural Foundation (Fundación Cultural Colombia Negra) in 2004.
In addition, Cartagena’s City Hall awarded him the city’s medal for his work
to promote Afro-descendant cultures4. Today, the troupe runs a real business,
performing at the weddings of Colombia’s most important political figures,
and also in luxury hotels and cruise ships during tourist season each year. Best
known for their ‘African Fantasy’ piece, they also perform a large repertoire of
Colombian dances as well as their own creations. Ekobios’ success has inspired
others to form troupes with similar styles. The choice of Ekobios on postcard and
some videos5 among all groups involved in the ‘more than “700” celebrations’
of the country demonstrates the success of the image created by the group.
Between body painting, bright colours, bright cloths and the creation of acces-
sories, innovative rhythms and choreography, Ekobios is somehow a successful
brand. The image of its dancers also appears on book covers of photographs
based on Colombian festivities and in tourist brochures. But this choice also
leads us to the promotion of festivals, dances and music as tourism products and
to ‘the sensual dancer’ as one of the icons of the Independence celebrations.
‘Culture’ is conceived as one of Colombia’s tourist assets and among its compo-
nents, the festivities are specially highlighted. In 2013, Proexport, the institution
responsible for tourism, investment and exports within the Ministry of Trade,
Industry and Tourism, and one of the promoters of the ‘CO’ brand, put together
the options available to foreign tourists and classified them into seven types of
activities, namely, Sun and beach, Water sports and cruises, Nature, Adventure,
History and Culture, Health and well-being and finally Affairs.6 On the Internet
page of Proexport, the History and Culture tab is subdivided into Festivities
and Celebrations, Archaeological Tourism, Religious Tourism, Handcrafts,
Bicentennial of the Independence of the Country and Magic V illages. In the first
category, you can read: In Colombia we always have a reason to celebrate, eat, drink
and dance and further Colombians are happy by nature. On the right side, a timetable
mentioning the main festivities of the country is exposed. A year after the launch
of the campaign, an article making the assessment ends with, We are the answer
to environment, investment, exports, industries, talent, tourism, sports, and overall, smiles.
These terms, repeated by agencies and web pages promoting tourism, reflected
a kind of tourism in search of emotion, entertainment and fun. The Colombian
becomes a welcoming person, smiling, joyful and radiant ‘by nature’.
The interest of promoting public festivals as a touristic product was spread all
over Colombia, besides the proportion between number of visitors and of festi-
vals has increased since the registration of the Barranquilla carnival on the list
of intangible heritage of humanity in 2003. Nowadays, three other celebrations
have been added: the carnival of Black and White in Pasto, processions of the
Holy Week in Popayán and festivities of Saint Francis of Assisi in Quibdó. This
international recognition encouraged several municipalities to promote festivals,
music competitions, fairs and processions as a local ‘heritage’, regional or national
in order to attract an audience hungry of both ‘traditions’ and entertainment. The
promotion of Cartagena festivities in November has long relied on the valuation
of the national beauty contest but over the past few years, the Independence cel-
ebrations have been highlighted. Mr. Campo proposed in his development plan
the presentation of these festivals at the Culture Committee in order to subscribe
them on the Representative List of Intangible Heritage of the Ministry of Culture.
With this objective, meetings with institutions of Barranquilla carnival were held,
and a commission representing the festivities travelled to Barranquilla in June and
to Bogotá in October 2012 to make festivities known from the Colombians. In
the capital, members of ‘Afro’ troupes were present alongside lanceros, host charac-
ters of festivities, an orchestra of porros and cumbia, cumbia dancers, members of the
Cabildo dance of Getsemaní as well as ex-queens of the Independence and actors
disguised as Pedro Romero and Spanish admiral Blas de Lezo, they performed in
a university, in a square of the historic center and in the city hall.
The touristic exploitation of Cartagena has for a long time promoted the
sun, the beaches and the city walls. Therefore, Spanish colonial heritage was
naturally highlighted. Thanks to the consolidation of tourism as a national
economic sector in the sixties, Cartagena has been promoted as destination of
fun (Cunin and Rinaudo 2008). In the eighties, the infrastructures of the hotel
industry of the city were strengthened, the State built a presidential home, and
a large Congress center was constructed where the public market of the city
was located (Pardo 2011), making Cartagena not only as entertainment but also
a business and conventions destination. Nowadays, many festivals, congresses,
seminars of various disciplines and of the most diverse interests are organized,
and the VIe ‘Cumbre de las Américas’, a meeting of 34 heads of governments
of the continent, was held there in April 2012. Next to the pictures of pleasure
under the sun and comfort for business, stand the Black references to make the
city an ideal place, both colonial and exotic, safe and quiet (Cunin and Rinaudo
2008, 142). Today, its nightlife and ‘local’ dances are promoted, the dancers of
Ekobios welcome cruise ship passengers arriving to Cartagena, wedding cele-
brations are brightened by the staging of the ‘Afro’ troupes and dancing groups
of cumbia and mapalé perform in the squares and the walls of the historical cen-
ter. These colorful dances reinforce the exotic image of the city.
I must, therefore, return to Ekobios’ photograph used by the countries
brand. The Ekobios innovations in choreographies, rhythms and clothes arouse
a particular interest of the journalists to physical traits of group members. The
beauty begins to be mentioned as a characteristic of ‘Afro’ troupes, and in 1997,
the caption of a photograph describes a ‘beautiful morena representing African
culture and the Cartagena Group Ekobios’ and in 2006, you can read ‘the sump-
tuous African clothing and spectacular body of Ekobios’ women passed down
the Caribbean folklore to the people’.
The dancer illustrates the ‘natural’ joy of the Colombians and a sensual and
inviting otherness. Beautiful bodies, youth, sensuality and rhythmic move-
ments are greeted almost every year by the journalists of El Universal during
Independence parades and during the performance of ‘Afro’ troupes especially.
Where, as it has been exposed, nudity and sensuality are the references the
directors of the troupes chose to highlight the African continent. I found for
example this caption of a photograph (Figure 10.2) where African heritages
are reduced to physical features and body movements: ‘Only one celebration.
During these days, even the sun, the sea and the beach seem to take the bar of
the vibrating rhythm experienced by the city in honor of cumbiamberos grand-
parents who have left to their descendants muscle rate, synchrony and skin of
Ivory Coast where the sweat flows and shows a tribute to sensuality’. It is not
Figure 10.2 Couple of dancers. Photo from El Universal.

so much about male dancers, equally smiling, dynamic and athletic, in news-
papers, web pages and tourist brochure campaigns. As the matter of fact, the
recognition and recent promotion of an ‘exotic Africanness’ does not only con-
cern women, men bodies are also objectified in State institutions campaigns.
In addition, in the domain of publicity the association between Black men,
questionable intellectual capacity and sexually powerful body is increasingly
used (Viveros 2000 and, recently, deodorants or toiletries advertisings).
The beautiful dancer is added to the other Black female image of the city: the
palenquera (Figures10.3 and 10.4). Pictures of women carrying a basket filled with
fruit or homemade cakes sold in Cartagena beaches flood the souvenir shops where
Figure 10.3 Palenqueras. Photo from the website Noticartagena.
Figure 10.4 palenquera woman in a postcard celebrating the Colombian Inde-

A
pendence Day. Fonturcol.
there are also statues representing them. Voluptuous and dressed with large c olorful
skirts, wearing necklaces and conspicuous earrings and native from Palenque—
not of Cartagena—, palenqueras represent domesticated otherness, ‘pure ethnicity’
that does not question the racial hierarchy (Cunin 2004, 153–156). The consolida-
tion of this image is directly related to the growth of tourism; One of the effects
of tourism development in Cartagena was to forge the image of Black people
presented as a scenic workforce that is part of the decor (Cunin and Rinaudo
2008, 144). Even today, photographs of fishermen, drivers and vendors promoting
the city represent almost exclusively ‘Black people’. The ‘sensual dancer’ of the
Independence celebrations and groups that perform on the walls and squares of
the city are part of this logic. As the entertainment is offered, the development of
the city touristic scene responds to the quest of a safe exoticism, which blends the
fantasies associated with Afro-Caribbean and tropical world in a reassuring sur-
roundings of a Spanish colonial town (Cunin and Rinaudo 2008, 141).
Figure 10.5 lack man dressed as a slave, Cartagena Tourism Corporation stand
B
at the 31st Anato show.
Source: El Universal in March of 2012. *But the original images were part of a tourist ad cam-
paign by the Colombian Association of Travel Agencies and Tourism, 31 Congress.
This conception of the Black population as a decorative element at the disposal

of tourists was completely assumed at the 31st Colombian Association of Travel
and Tourism Agencies Anato show, when the Cartagena Tourism Corporation
presented at its stand a man disguised as a slave to promote the city (Figure 10.5).
Visitors could have their picture taken with the shirtless comedian, wearing a
silver thong and false chains around his neck, hands and feet, (and printed and
delivered immediately). Other ‘living statues’ were the Indian Catalina and a
palenquera (Figure 10.6). The newspaper El Universal published in its online edition
a photograph of two girls alongside the men playing a slave accompanied by the
caption: the Black slave, living statue and great attraction in Bogotá. This image il-
lustrated the article that summarized the successful participation in the exhibition.
The association Pedro Romero was alarmed by the choice of this photo-
graph on a social network: ‘We regret that someone has to make a living out of
this job. It is a violation of his dignity and the one of all Blacks of Cartagena and
Colombia’, and asked the corporation, financed by public and private resources,
public apologies. Several associations and politicians also denounced the fact
that the director of the Corporation finally apologized, but merely explaining
that he was not aware of the representation.
Figure 10.6 wo women dressed as the India Catalina and the palenquera, Cartagena
T
Tourism Corporation stand at the 31st Anato show.
Source: El Universal in March of 2012. *But the original images were part of a tourist ad cam-
paign by the Colombian Association of Travel Agencies and Tourism, 31 Congress.
Although Ekobios’ main interest is to bring value to the African heritage

of Cartagena’s Black population, their perception of Africa has become con-
sistently more abstract and fantasized, as their dancers’ costumes explicitly
emphasize their physical attributes. Other ‘Afro’ carnival troupes have sought
to dissociate representations of Africa from ideas of nudity and sensuality by
accentuating religiousness and ancestral wisdom through their performances,
as well as Cartagena’s important Black historical figures. Despite this, when it
comes to promoting Cartagena’s local celebrations, both the State and tourist
businesses choose to rely on the Ekobios troupe.
This carnival groups has succeeded commercially. The particular sound of
its songs, its magnificent staging, references to Africa and even its assertive
character attract a Colombian and international public in search of exoticism,
as explained by the Brazilian anthropologist de Carvalho (2002, 6):
Afro’s Culture works as a powerful fetish among White consumers, with

the promise of a joyful conviviality, a direct interpersonal contact, rich
and without barriers, a non-economic relationship and a Dionysian expe-
rience. Moreover, it promotes sensualist or anti-intellectual utopia.
This shows that the will to promote the ‘Afro’ culture is at the beginning of
the creations and initiatives of some blocks from the carnival. This is a p rocess
similar to the valuing of ‘Afro’ culture in several European and American
cities (in the broad sense). The origins of dissenting expressions of rebellious
nature such as batucadas and capoeira, what are these? Types of music? These
are carnival groups, reggae music, the rituals of candomblé and Santeria and
even hip-hop grow and gain recognition and a public. Their particularity is to
have assimilated the requirements of market logic and inflected their militant
claims toward more consensual discourse, like Carvalho (2002, 5) describes:
‘the so-called “Afro” is now the necessary counterpart of Western ethnocen-
trism, which created a strange “being” we very much appreciate, his place is
already established as intimate and safe. The exoticism of the Afro culture is
not threatening; it is added to the rational plan already established and com-
pletes it’.
‘The African heritage’ is now exalted, claimed and, at least during the
festivities, it is an intrinsic part of Cartagena. Being Black and especially
A fro-descendant begins to have positive connotations there. However, Africa
remains elusive and ambiguous, and this evolution does not question the social
hierarchy. Black peoples place in Cartagena contemporary Independence cel-
ebrations is related with an African heritage and Black Independence heroes.
Different troupes of the city, the civil authorities and the media recognize and
use African and ‘Afro’ representations. It is not about avoiding racial or eth-
nic categories during celebrations, nor it is not a matter of becoming invisible
either. Today, Afro-Colombianity is completely assumed. For the rest of the
population of Cartagena, although Black people, as Afro-descendants, dance,
play music and show exotic bodies, they also have a place in society. However,
this place remains ‘racial’ or ‘folk’, meaning that it continues to perpetuate the
racial stereotype of Black people. Thus, Blacks who parade under the applause
of the audience are also victims of everyday racism.
The Ekobios carnival troupe is regularly invited to perform throughout
Colombia – even at the weddings of political personalities — and regularly
appears on Caribbean cruise ships for months at a time. It has built its success
on elaborate musical and dance performances, innovative rhythms, choreog-
raphies and costumes and also by making its dissident character an attractive
feature for the tourist entertainment market. Today, Cartagena highlights its
Black population in order to make itself more attractive for tourists seeking an
exotic destination. When certain representations of carnival troupes are used to
promote the city for tourism, Black populations are no longer invisible for the
State, nor are racial categories being avoided. Instead, they construct stereo-
typed visibility through representations of welcoming, friendly, dancing and
singing Blacks. At a national level, the image of Blacks remains just as prob-
lematic, as it is overtly associated with physical activity combined with constant
and exaggerated enthusiasm.
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Medellín, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas.
Cunin, Élisabeth, and Rinaudo, Christian. (2008). Visites guidées et marketing de la

différence à Cartagena de Indias (Colombie). Espaces et sociétés, 135: 137–56. www.
cairn.info/revue-espaces-et-societes-2008-4-page-137.htm
Cunin, Elisabeth (2004) Métissage et multiculturalisme en Colombie (Carthagène) : le “noir”
entre apparences et appartenances. Paris: L’Harmattan.
DaMatta, Roberto. (1997). Carnavais, Malandros e Herôis, para uma sociologia do dilema
Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco.
Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística-DANE. (2007) Censo General,
2005 – Información Básica. Colombia: DANE.
de la Rosa Solano, Laura. (2017). Las Acciones Carnavalescas: Una propuesta met-
odológica para abordar la fiesta a partir de dos ejemplos caribeños. Revista Brasileira
do Caribe, 18, (34): 30–50. http://www.periodicoseletronicos.ufma.br/index.php/
rbrascaribe/article/view/7501 ISSN 1984–6169.
de la Rosa Solano, Laura. (2013). Entre Africanidades y Africanismos: fiestas públicas
en Cartagena D Indias, Colombia. Mosaico Revista do Mestrado em Historia. Pontif-
ica Universidad Catôlica de Goias. 6: 5–16. http://revistas.ucg.br/index.php/mosaico/
issue/current.
Dixon, Kwane and John, Burdick. (2012) Comparative Perspectives on Afro-Latin America.
Friedemann, Nina S. and Jaime, Arocha. (1986) De sol a sol. In Génesis, transformación y
presencia de los Negros en Colombia. Bogotá: Planeta.
Gutiérrez, Edgar. (2000) Fiestas: Once de Noviembre en Cartagena de Indias. Manifestaciones
Artísticas. Cultura Popular 1910–1930. Medellin: Editorial Lealon.
Lemaitre, Eduardo. (1983) Breve historia de Cartagena 1501–1901. Bogotá: Italgraf, S.A.
Ocampo López, Javier. (1984) El proceso político, militar y social de la Independencia.
In Manual de Histoira de Colombia, edited by Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, 17–129. Bogotá:
Procultura.
Romero, Julio. (2007) ¿Discriminación laboral o capital humano? Determinantes del ingreso
laboral de los afros cartageneros. Cartagena: Banco de la República.
Viveros, Mara. (2000). Dionisios negros, sexualidad, corporalidad y orden racial
en Colombia. In ¿Mestizo yo? Diferencia, identidad e inconsciente,edited by Mario
Bernando Figuero Muñoz and Eduardo San Miguel Pio, 95–130. Bogotá: Universi-
dad Nacional de Colombia. Facultad de Ciencias Humanas. Grupo de Psicoanálisis.
Web Pages
o Ekobios: http://ekobios.awardspace.com/index.htm consulted January 17th 2015
o Culture: The Answer is Colombia. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeibiKelZZg&list=
UU0v1zbyzGSysH6kXYs6IG1Q or www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztycGhLhlHc
o « Campaña Nacional de Promoción Turística » www.colombia.co/turismo/campa-
na-nacional-de-promocion-turistica.html. Consulted April 4th 2013.
o « En Colombia, siempre tenemos un motivo para celebrar, comer, beber y bailar » and
« Los colombianos somos alegres por naturaleza » In www.colombia.travel/es/turista;-
internacional/actividad/historia-y-tradicion/ferias-y-fiestas consulted May 28th 2014.
o « Somos la respuesta en medio ambiente, inversiones, exportación, industrias,
innovación, talento, turismo, deporte y más que todo, en sonrisas » In www.colombia.
co/talento/primer-aniversario-ratificando-que-somos-la-respuesta.html.
o «Cartagena promueve sus fiestas en Barranquilla » In www.eluniversal.com.co/cart-

agena/cultural/cartagena-promueve-sus-fiestas-en-barranquilla-82148 publicated
Juin 29th 2012 and consulted October 31th 2012.
o « Lamentamos que alguien tenga que ganarse la vida haciendo este trabajo. Es un atro-
pello contra su dignidad y la de todos los negros de Cartagena y C
olombia!» In www.
facebook.com/photo.php?f bid=333578180028041&set=a.301521709900355.86131.
100001275843365&type=1&permPage=1 Publicated and Consulted March 3th 2012.
o « Esclavo no fue nuestra campaña » In www.eluniversal.com.co/cartagena/local/foto-
polemica-%E2%80%9Cesclavo-no-fue-nuestra-campana%E2%80%9D-67538 Publi-
cated and Consulted March 5th 2012.
o « Comparsas y disfraces en la Batalla de Flores » www.eluniversal.com.co/cartagena/
sociales/comparsas-y-disfraces-en-la-batalla-de-flores-97624. Publicated and Con-
sulted November 9th 2012.
o http://noticartagena.com.co/las-palenqueras/ Consulted March 19th 2018.
o http://fontur.com.co/ Consulted March 19th 2018.
Part Iv
Comparative Perspectives
11
The Contours and Contexts
of Afro-Latin American
Women’s Activism
Kia Lilly Caldwell
Afro-Latin Americans have gained greater visibility in their home countries

and internationally in recent decades. Afro-Latin American women have also
received greater recognition and have often been at the forefront of political
and social activism in their home communities, as well as at the national and
regional levels. This essay examines some of the factors driving Afro-Latin
American women’s activism and political mobilization during the late 20 and
early 21st centuries. It also explores similarities and differences in Afro-Latin
American women’s experiences and forms of mobilization.
This essay primarily focuses on Afro-Latin women’s political thought and
activism in Colombia and Brazil. Both countries merit special mention be-
cause they have the largest African-descendant populations in Latin America.
Black women’s organizations and activism are also well established in both
countries, with Black women’s activism in Brazil being the strongest in the
Latin A merican region. Official census data from 2005 estimates the Afro-
Colombian population to be 10.5%of the total population. However, this es-
timate likely represents a severe undercount. According to data from Brazil’s
2010 Census, people of African descent comprise close to 51% of the popula-
tion. Brazil has the largest African-descendant population in Latin America and
the second largest African-descendant population in the world, with Nigeria
having the largest.
Although anti-racist critique, resistance and mobilization in Latin America
have not always been well documented, they have existed and increasingly
have been the focus of scholarly research in recent years.1 Placing Afro-Latin
American resistance and activism in a broader historical context is essential
to challenging the myth that Afro-Latin communities have been passive or
lacked political or racial consciousness until recently. While Kwame Dixon has
noted that Black social movements in Latin America have many characteristics
250 Kia Lilly Caldwell
associated with new social movements, he has also called attention to the his-
torical, centuries-long struggle of Black communities in the region, observing:
Black-based movements are not entirely new, as black slave and maroon
societies have historically challenged systems of domination. However,
black social movements in the Americas are advancing an ideological
reframing of Afro-Latin identity and collective rights, emphasizing the
myriad ways in which race and gender, as well as other crucial factors,
shape, determine, and affect the life chances of Afrodiasporic populations
(2008, 187)
Afro-Latin American women have played a vital role in ensuring the survival
of their communities, as well as in resisting slavery, racism, sexism and other
forms of domination. However, even when Afro-Latin American women have
been active as participants and leaders in Afro-Latin community struggles and
resistance, as well as in larger women’s movements in the region, they have
often been unacknowledged and invisible. Moreover, their experiences and
contributions have rarely been documented by many Latin American or Latin
Americanist scholars.2 As a result, much work remains to be done to recognize
and honor the historical and contemporary activism of Afro-Latin American
women. This essay seeks to contribute to this effort.
Whitening and Racial Democracy

Ideologies of whitening and racial democracy have played a critical role in shap-
ing racial dynamics and the experiences of Afro-Latin communities during the
20th and early 21st centuries. In countries such as Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and
Colombia, the whitening ideology has been used to promote the d isappearance
of Black populations through race mixing (Mestizaje or Mestiçagem). Whitening
has also centered on Indigenous populations in nations where they have been
a sizeable group. Afro-Brazilian scholar and activist Abdias do Nascimento
referred to whitening as a form of spiritual and physical genocide that was
committed against Brazil’s Black population (Nascimento 1979). It should also
be noted that Black and Indigenous women’s bodies have been the de facto
means through which whitening and race mixing have been promoted and
accomplished, although this is rarely recognized in official national discourses
(Caldwell 2007). The sexual and symbolic violence inherent in forced sexual
encounters between European men and African and Indigenous women during
the colonial slave era and after have also been glossed over in many conceptu-
alizations of whitening and racial democracy.3
Despite the deeply problematic notions of anti-Blackness that have un-
dergirded whitening beliefs and practices in Latin America, many countries
in the region have been viewed as racial democracies, both domestically and
The Contours and Contexts 251
internationally. Racial democracy ideologies purport that Latin American

countries are not plagued by racism or racial inequalities, largely due to the fact
that they have large mixed-race (Mestizo or Mestiço) populations. Afro-Latin
American activists have struggled to challenge these ideas and, in so doing,
often have been accused of fomenting racism and racial divisions. It is also
important to recognize that racial democracy discourses have taken various
forms in Latin American countries, due to historical, cultural and political
dynamics. As a result, anti-racist struggles in the region share many similarities;
however, they are not all the same. Understanding the broader ideological con-
text regarding race in the region is also important for understanding the issues
and struggles that Afro-Latin American women have focused on.
Afro-Colombian Women’s Activism in the Context

of Violence and Displacement
Colombia has the second largest African-descendant population in Latin
America and the largest African-descendant population in Spanish-speaking
Latin America. In 1998, Colombia’s National Planning Department esti-
mated that between 4% and 26% of the population was Afro-Colombian
or Black (Wade 2012). According to data from the 2005 National Census,
10.5% of the national population is Afro-Colombian (Wade 2012). It should
be noted, however, that official data on race and ethnicity are remarkably
unreliable in many Latin American countries and tend to severely under-
estimate the size of the African-descendant population. In addition, de-
spite Colombia’s sizable African-descendant population, it has often been
invisible in research, as well as with respect to the country’s domestic and
international image.
Scholars have called attention to Colombia’s highly racialized geography,
which has caused some areas of the country to be identified with specific eth-
nic and racial groups (Escobar 2008; Wade 2012). The Pacific and Caribbean
coasts of the country are most closely associated with Black communities. The
Pacific coastal region is about 80% Black and is often considered the most ‘Black
region’ of Colombia (Wade 2012). The Caribbean coastal region has significant
numbers of Afro-Colombians and Mestizos with both African and Indigenous
heritage (Wade 2012). As Wade notes, geography matters because regions with
larger Afro-Colombian and Indigenous populations are often ‘marginalized in
terms of socioeconomic development and political power … At the same time,
the status of particular regions as the country’s ‘black’ territories opens avenues
for political mobilization and racial-ethnic identification around issues that af-
fect those areas’ (2012, 136–137).
In recent decades, the experiences of Afro-Colombian communities have
been marked by intense violence and displacement. The impact of conflicts
involving the army, guerillas and paramilitaries has been especially acute for
Afro-Colombian communities located in the Pacific region, although the vi-

olence affects large portions of the country. The drug trade has been used by
different actors involved in this conflict, including the state, and has given
it a ‘self-propelling character’ (Wade 2012). The decades-long violence in
Colombia has led to massive displacement, which has made large tracts of land
available for industrial production, especially of palm oil, as well as industrial
shrimp farming and mining (Escobar 2008).
Afro-Colombians and other residents of rural communities have been
targeted for violence in order to force them off their land. Afro-Colombians
have often lived in these areas for centuries, with their presence dating back to
when their enslaved ancestors were forcibly taken to Colombia beginning in
the early 1500s. Although Colombia’s 1991 Constitution and Law 70, which
was passed in 1993, granted Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast
title to their lands, these communities’ attempts to maintain control and pos-
session of collectively held land have been undermined by successive waves of
violence and displacement since the late 1990s. This broader context of intense
violence and displacement has shaped the experiences of Afro-Colombian
communities and Afro-Colombian women for the past two decades.
Law 70 followed Transitory Article 55 and granted new ‘ethnic’ rights to
Afro-Colombians. As Kiran Asher has noted, Law 70 focused on three main
issues:
ethnic and cultural rights, collective land ownership, and socioeco-

nomic development. Legally recognizing black communities as an ethnic
group, the law requires the creation of mechanisms to protect their
cultural identity and ethnic rights, including rights to culturally appro-
priate development and education – that is, to ‘ethno-development’ and
‘ethno-education’
(2009, 50–51)
Law 70 also called for collective land rights for rural lands of the Pacific coast
and other parts of the country where Afro-Colombians employed ‘traditional
land use’ (Asher 2009, 51). In addition, the Law addressed the need to improve
socioeconomic opportunities for Afro-Colombians.
Asher’s (2009) study highlights Black women’s autonomous organizing in
the post-Law 70 period. Asher notes the ways in which Black women utilized
mobilization related to Transitory Article 55 and Law 70 to organize around
gender-related issues and concerns. She also points to the important work of
women’s cooperatives in the Pacific, including CoopMujeres, Ser Mujer and
FundeMujer. By the mid-1990s, these cooperatives had strong membership bases,
with FundeMujer being comprised of 25 women’s groups and a total of 800
members (Asher 2009, 133). While these cooperatives were mainly concerned
with income generation, there was an increasing focus on ethno-cultural dy-
namics in the post-Law 70 period.
During the early 1990s, Black women’s Encuentros (meetings) were held in
the Pacific Region and the Red de Mujeres Negras (Black Women’s Network)
was formed during an Encuentro that took place in Guapi, Colombia, in 1992.
Soon thereafter, local and regional offshoots of the Black Women’s Network
were formed in cities, such as Guapi, Buenaventura and Bahía Solano
(Asher 2009, 136). Tensions between gender-focused and ethnically-focused
organizing also began to arise, as members of the Afro-Colombian community
fought to ensure the rights guaranteed in the 1991 Constitution and Law 70.
During the post-Law 70 period, traditional gender roles shaped perceptions of
women’s proper ‘place’ in larger community struggles. As Asher notes,
On the one hand, women were lauded for fostering a distinct Black
identity through their many quotidian tasks, such as growing and
preparing specific foods, performing particular rituals, engaging in spe-
cial health-care and healing practices. On the other hand, their essential
positions in maintaining Black family and community life served to jus-
tify or obscure their more ‘domestic’ roles in current ethnic struggles.
[2009, 138]
Asher’s (2009) work provides a rare analysis of Black women’s feelings of being
invisible and undervalued in relation to larger Black struggles and organiza-
tions such as the Proceso de Communidades Negras (Process of Black Communi-
ties, PCN), which was formed in the early 1990s.4 By the mid-2000s, it was
a network of 120 Black peasant organizations that focused on assisting Black
communities in interpreting and applying Law 70 (Dixon 2008).5
Increasing levels of state violence and displacement have had a dispropor-
tionate impact on Afro-Colombian communities. Acción Social, a unit of the
Colombian federal government, and the research nongovernmental organiza-
tion (NGO) Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (Consultoría para
los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento, CODHES) provided figures for the
number of displaced persons for 2011 that ranged from 3,875,987 to 5,281,360
(Oslender 2016, 14). While, according to government figures, 10% of all dis-
placed persons are Afro-Colombians, NGOs have reported the number to be
anywhere from 22.5% to 37% (Oslender 2016). It is also common for scholars to
state that approximately 6 million Colombians have been internally displaced,
with Afro-Colombians comprising one-third of this total (Oslender 2016). A
bulletin by the CODHES reported that 15,495 people were displaced within
Colombia in 2015, with the Pacific region experiencing massive displacement
during the final trimester of that year. During 2015, 68.7% of displaced indi-
viduals were from the Chocó, whereas 12.7% were from Cauca and 15.6% from
Antioquia (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento 2016).
All of these areas have large Afro-Colombian populations. Massive numbers of
Afro-Colombians and Indigenous people have been displaced into cities such as
Buenaventura, Tumaco and Quibdó, as well as cities in the interior (Wade 2012).
Ulrich Oslender has argued that the ‘banality of violence’ has characterized
government responses to massive forced displacement in Colombia. Oslen-
der’s (2016) work critiques how the normalization of violence makes ‘“forced
displacement” appear as a mundane, banal social fact’ (2016, 11). In addition,
Oslender highlights the ways in which ‘attitudinal thoughtlessness’ shapes state
responses to displacement, especially with respect to how the number of dis-
placed persons is counted as well as the invisibility of ethnicity in official statistics
on displacement (2016, 11). Ultimately, these bureaucratic practices downplay
the effect of racialized state violence and displacement on Afro-Colombians.
Afro-Colombian women have played a central role in organizing their commu-
nities, both in their home territories and in the locations to which they have been
displaced. The 2011 PBS documentary, The War We Are Living, vividly depicts the
violence experienced by Afro-Colombians in the Cauca region and the struggle to
maintain control of their land in the face of pressure from external economic inter-
ests, particularly from those in the mining sector seeking control of lands rich with
gold and other precious metals. During the film, Clemencia Carabali, a leading
Afro-Colombian activist, comments on the fact that women have assumed a lead-
ership role in their communities because men are often targeted more openly and
women may fall under the ‘radar’ of the authorities. Activists such as Clemencia
Carabali and Francia Marquez have endured extreme hardship and threats of vio-
lence and murder to continue living and mobilizing in their communities.
Afro-Colombian feminist scholar Betty Ruth Lozano has argued that Black
women’s forms of resistance have been more invisible and unknown than
those of White women and Black men. According to Lozano, ‘Many of these
practices of resistance and insurgence have been realized in the realm of the
domestic-communitarian through the knowledge and use of diverse herbs and
other natural properties’ (2016, 26). Lozano has also highlighted the signifi-
cance of the land and territory for Afro-Colombian communities and women’s
special role in maintaining place-based notions of identity. In her work, Lozano
uses the combined term Mujeresnegras, or Blackwomen, to express the intersec-
tionality and inseparability of race and gender for Afro-Colombian women. As
she argues, ‘It is because of this understanding that woman and negra (Black)
cannot be separated in real life that I have decided to always write mujernegra.
There is not an experience of subordination as a woman that is greater than that
of racial oppression, as a mujernegra I live an experience of oppression that is not
possible to compartmentalize…’ (2016, 37–38).
The issue of political self-representation has been a key motivator for Black
women’s activism in Colombia as well as in many other Latin American coun-
tries. By seeking self-representation, Afro-Colombian women have reflected
the intersectional notion of Mujernegra described by Lozano above. In a 1997–98
annual bulletin, members of the Red Matamba y Guasá of Colombia stated:
It is important to clarify that the meeting spaces [of the network] are
generated and constructed by us, with our own initiatives. We have been
struggling for recognition of women in our region and to overcome

[the obstacles to recognition]… Beginning from these principles today
we are ready to identify ourselves as women and come together as a gen-
der, to recognize our similarities and differences. We do not want to be
represented ‘by’ anyone. We want to be considered protagonists of our
lives and of our world.
[Cited in Asher 2014, 204]
As noted earlier, Afro-Colombian women critiqued gender dynamics in Black

organizations during the 1990s. Many of these same critiques continued to be
made almost 20 years later. In a pronouncement written during a 2013 event
leading up to the 20th anniversary of Law 70, Black women denounced ‘the an-
drocentric and patriarchal character of the Afro-Colombian, black, palenquero 6,
and raizal7 communities that exacerbates even more the situation of margin-
ality and violence in which women live’ (quoted in Lozano 2016, 41). This
pronouncement highlighted the necessity to address the subordination of Black
women and girls as part of the larger struggle against racism. It also addressed
the sexual abuse of girls and women, limits on women’s political participation,
as well as practices such as forced marriage, physical and psychological violence,
and economic repression of women (Lozano 2016, 41–42).
Afro-Colombian women have called national and international attention to
issues of racialized violence and displacement through mobilizations, such as the
2015 Marcha de Mujeres Negras por nuestros Territorios y por la Vida (Black Women’s
March for Territories and Life). During the March, rural Afro-Colombian
women marched from the state of Cauca to the capital of Bogotá over a one-
week period in late November and early December 2015. The marchers occu-
pied the Ministry of the Interior and made demands regarding collective land
titles, illegal mining on their lands and death threats and assassinations against
Black leaders. Francia Marquez, an activist from La Toma, which is located in
Cauca, emerged as a leader in Afro-Colombian struggles at the national and
international levels during the March (Laó-Montes 2016).
While high rates of violence inflicted by the state and paramilitaries reg-
ularly occur in rural Afro-Colombian communities, particularly in the Pa-
cific region, they are also occurring in predominantly urban spaces. This is
true of the city of Buenaventura, which plays a critical role in the Colombian
economy as the country’s main port. More than 90% of the population of
Buenaventura is Black, and there is also a large displaced population. For at least
a decade, the city has experienced extremely high murder rates, with an ‘eth-
nocide’ of young Afro-Colombians taking place in recent years. Figures from
CODHES show that 382 murders occurred in 2007, which amounts to 112
murders per 100,000 residents, a figure that is almost four times the national
average (Wade 2012). Rates of feminicide (murders of women) have also been
extremely high in Buenaventura. As Agustín Laó-Montes has noted, in Co-
lombia, the phenomenon of feminicide is ‘symptomatic of entangled forms of
violence (social, criminal, political, family) that are compounded by a long-

term conflict between guerilla armies, the army, and paramilitaries’ (2016, 11).
Afro-Colombian feminists have linked the daily violence and murders in
Buenaventura to practices of capitalist accumulation and state violence. In
April 2016, an international forum on feminicide took place in Buenaventura
and was organized by three Afro-Colombian feminist organizations – Otras
Negras & Feministas, Colectivo Sentipensar and Casa Cultural Chontaduro 8 (Laó-
Montes 2016). This forum highlighted the impact of racism, patriarchal violence
and capitalist forms of accumulation and dispossession on Afro-Colombian
communities and women in particular. During May and June 2017, peaceful
strikes and protests by Afro-Colombians in Buenventura led to state violence.
The protestors were calling attention to the high poverty and unemployment
rates in a city that generates tremendous amount of wealth for the country. The
violent repression of the protests in Buenaventura drew international coverage
and attention.9 In addition, despite the signing of the Colombian Peace accords
in November 2016, extreme violence and displacement continue to shape the
experiences of Afro-Colombian communities. Afro-Colombian women’s ac-
tivism has been critical to ensuring the survival of their communities, as well
as highlighting the particular forms of gendered and racialized discrimination,
inequality and violence that women face.
Reimagining Black Feminist Struggle in Brazil

There are striking similarities between the 2015 March of Black Women in
Colombia and the Marcha das Mulheres Negras contra o Racismo, a Violéncia e pelo
Bem Viver (March of Black Women against Racism, Violence and for the Good
Life), which was organized by Black Brazilian women (Láo-Montes 2016). This
national march took place in Brasília, the national capital, on November 16,
2015, just a few weeks prior to the March in Colombia. In addition, close to
the date of the 2015 March of Black Women in Brazil, parallel Black women’s
marches took place in Colombia, Uruguay and the US (Laó-Montes 2016).
The title of the March in Brazil included a focus on violence and the ‘good
life’ (Bem Viver), underscoring critical issues of survival and well-being in
A fro-Brazilian communities as well as their impact on Afro-Brazilian women.
While the notion of Bem Viver has a longer history in Indigenous and Black
communities in the Andean region, it became part of the discourse of Black
Brazilian women during preparations for their 2015 March (Alvarez 2016b). As
Laó-Montes notes:
The interweaving of struggles against racism and patriarchal violence

and their call for Bem Viver (the Good Life) links the discourse of Afro-
Brazilian feminism to the decolonial feminist language and project of In-
digenous and Black feminisms across the region. In these feminisms there
is a vision for an ecological horizon beyond capitalist modernity that is

expressed in multiple languages…Latin American feminisms are affirmed
by and connected to a variety of Afro-feminisms across the globe.
[2016, 9–10]
The 2015 March of Black Women was the first nationwide political demon-
stration organized solely by Black Brazilian women. It marked the emergence
of new forms of political activism and solidarity that linked the struggles
against racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, among other issues.
A lthough Black Brazilian women were major participants and organizers of
previous national marches, such as the 1996 Marcha Zumbi dos Palmares Contra o
Racismo, Pela Cidadania e a Vida (Zumbi dos Palmares March against Racism,
for Citizenship and Life),10 the 2015 March highlighted Black women’s au-
tonomous organizing and strength as a political force. The 2015 March of
Black Women drew between 5,000 and 20,000 participants and resulted from
a nationwide organizational process that began in late 2011 (Alvarez 2016b).
Importantly, preparations for the 2015 March included all regions of the
country, and the March was organized by Black women from the Brazilian
northeast and Amazon region. Both regions have traditionally been less visible
at the national level than the Brazilian Southeast, where long-standing Black
women’s NGOs such as Criola (Rio de Janeiro) and Geledés (São Paulo) are
located. Odara – Instituto da Mulher Negra (Odara – Black Women’s Institute),
which is located in Salvador, Bahia, and the Red de Mulheres Negras do Norte
e Nordeste (Network of Black Women of the North and Northeast) played a
leading role in organizing the March, marking a shift toward expanded re-
gional representation within the Black women’s movement. Pre-March events
also took place throughout Brazil during 2014 and 2015 and sought to reach
Black women of diverse backgrounds (Alvarez 2016b). The March’s slogan Vem
Marchar Com a Gente (Come March with Us) was a welcoming invitation for
Black women to connect with and march in solidarity with one another.11
A broad cross section of Black women participated in the 2015 March, in-
cluding LGBT women, Quilombolas (residents of Quilombo, or maroon, com-
munities) and Mães de Santo (mothers of saints).12 Representation from these
subpopulations of Black women highlighted the importance of sexuality, land
struggles and religion for many Black Brazilian women. This was an important
change because these issues have not always been emphasized by the broader
Black women’s movement. In addition, the emergence and visibility of m ultiple
forms of Black female identity and subjectivity has been an important means
of moving beyond universalist and monolithic notions of Black women, some-
thing which the late Luiza Bairros noted in an 2011 interview (Alvarez 2016a).
Both the groups that organized the march and the subpopulations of Black
women who participated in it suggest that new constituencies and voices are
being included in the Black women’s movement and the movement is expanding
beyond the southern- and southeastern-based NGOs that have often been at
the forefront. These shifts in the composition of the movement and its forms of
organizing are critical to the movement’s growth and long-term survival. As
I have noted elsewhere, in the mid- to late-1990s, there were intense discus-
sions about the future of the Black women’s movement in Brazil and options
for d ifferent forms of organizing (Caldwell 2007). The 2015 March of Black
Women highlights the Black women’s movement’s evolution and maturation as
an impactful and effective political, social and cultural intervention.
Black Brazilian feminist Claudia Cardoso has noted that there are several
Black women’s movements in Brazil, rather than simply one movement. As
Cardoso argues, ‘The Black women’s movement is plural and intrinsically
d iverse … The category Black women’s movement does, however, contain a po-
litical identity that has been solidly constructed by these women, through their
reference to a historical past of shared struggle’, as well as through challenging
racism, sexism and heterosexism (2016, 13). The term ‘Black women’s move-
ment’ has typically been used to refer to mobilization by Black women activ-
ists and Black women’s organizations. However, Cardoso’s observation is apt
because multiple forms of organizing and mobilization have been undertaken
by Black Brazilian women and they occur at local, state, regional, national and
transnational levels.
In Brazil, the Black women’s movement has been instrumental in challeng-
ing racism and sexism at national and state levels. However, Black women’s
activism in local communities has also been extremely important and impact-
ful. Keisha-Khan Perry’s (2013) work has called attention to the significance
of Black women’s resistance to urbanization policies that seek to displace Black
communities in cities such as Salvador, Bahia. Although these struggles take
place in urban areas, they share a number of important similarities to the land
grabs taking place in rural areas of Colombia and other areas of the Americas.
These types of issue-based struggles have also been largely overlooked by schol-
ars of social movements. As Perry argues, ‘Scholars of black social movements
do not read these issue-based struggles as part of the black movement, because
they have been able to understand political movements only as cultural or iden-
tity movements for recognition’ (2013, 24). In addition, Black women’s roles
as leaders of these movements has often been ignored and seen as being less
important than other forms of gender-based activism.
Afro-Brazilian women’s autonomous political organizing in Brazil can
be traced back to the late 1980s when Black women’s collectives and NGOs
began to be formed. Afro-Brazilian women were active in women’s and Black
movement organizations during the 1970s and 1980s as civil society mobiliza-
tion against the military dictatorship (1964–1975) intensified. Black Brazilian
women faced sexism in the Black movement and racism in the women’s move-
ment, which led to the development of separate political spaces where they
could focus on their needs and interests, as well as engage in discussions and
actions that addressed both racism and sexism simultaneously (Caldwell 2007;
Cardoso 2016). One of the first Black women’s organizations, Nzinga/Coletivo
de Mulheres Negras (Nzinga/Collective of Black Women), was founded in Rio
de Janeiro in 1983. The Coletivo de Mulheres Negras de São Paulo (Black Women’s
Collective of São Paulo) was formed in early 1984 in response to Black women’s
exclusion from the newly formed State Council on the Feminine Condition
(Conselho Estadual da Condição Feminina). The Collective played a key role
in gathering Black women activists in the state of São Paulo by organizing
the First State Encounter of Black Women I (Encontro Estadual de Mulheres
Negras) in 1984.
Between 1986 and 1989, Black women’s collectives and groups were formed
in the states of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Maranhão, Espirito Santo, Rio de
Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul (Roland 2000). Maria Mulher was founded
in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, in 1987, and Geledés was founded in
São Paulo during 1988. These are two of the oldest and longest-lasting Black
women’s NGOs in Brazil. As Edna Roland (2000) has noted, during the 1990s,
several Black women’s organizations were formed throughout Brazil, including
the Coletivo de Mulheres Negras do Distrito Federal (Black Women’s Collective of
the Federal District), Coletivo de Mulheres Negras de Salvador (Black Women’s
Collective of Salvador), Criola (Creole/Black Woman), Associação Cultural de
Mulheres Negras (Black Women’s Cultural Association), Quilombolas (Female
Quilombo Residents/Maroons), Eleeko-Instituto da Mulher Negra (Eleeko-Black
Women’s Institute), Associação de Mulheres Negras Obirin Dudu (Obirin Dudu
Black Women’s Association) and Fala Preta! (Speak Black Woman!). These or-
ganizations were established in the federal district of Brasília as well as in the
states of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul between 1990
and 1997 (Roland 2000).
Black women’s organizations have focused on important issues that affect
Black women and Black communities at multiple levels, from the psycholog-
ical to the structural, including self-esteem, personal identity, intimate rela-
tionships, employment, violence, and sexual and reproductive health. These
organizations have ranged in size and type from small informal groups to larger
NGOs that have paid staff and might receive funding from local, state and fed-
eral agencies, as well as international donors.
Through collective organizing, activists in the Black women’s movement
have sought to challenge Black women’s political invisibility and lack of ade-
quate representation in the political sphere. Black Brazilian women have also
been involved in feminist and anti-racist policy advocacy at the international
level. During the early 1990s, activists in the Black women’s movement began
to call for social movement organizations, policy makers, unions and political
parties to acknowledge the relationship among gender, race and class in the
development of policies and initiatives to address social inequality and dis-
crimination (Caldwell 2007, 2017). This was an especially important time in
Brazilian history because the country was returning to democratic rule and
civil society organizations were working to reshape and reform Brazilian po-
litical culture.
Activists in Brazil’s Black women’s movement participated in the 1994 UN
International Conference on Population and Development and brought atten-
tion to the reproductive rights of Black women. In preparation for the confer-
ence, a National Seminar on Black Women’s Reproductive Rights and Policies
was organized by the NGO Geledés. This historic event was held in August 1993
and included participants from the Black women’s movement, the Black move-
ment, the women’s movement, research centers and the health sector. D iscussions
during the seminar resulted in the subsequent publication of the Declaracão da
Itapecerica da Serra das Mulheres Negras (Itapecerica da Serra Declaration of Bra-
zilian Black Women), a policy document that outlines key issues and proposals
related to Black women’s health and reproductive rights. This unprecedented
document gave voice to Black women’s long-silenced aspirations for reproduc-
tive autonomy and culturally competent health care (Caldwell 2007, 2009).
During the 1990s, Black women health activists called attention to the ways
in which Brazil’s alarmingly high rate of female sterilization reflected ongoing
racial, gender and class inequalities, as well as Black women’s lack of reproductive
autonomy. Activists in the Black women’s movement have argued that the pro-
motion of nonreversible birth control methods, such as female sterilization, has
a greater impact on impoverished women, many of whom are Afro-Brazilian.
Many activists have raised concerns that female sterilization is not always consen-
sual and reflects practices of population control. Activists have also highlighted
the higher incidence of sterilization in the Brazilian northeast, a region in which
Afro-Brazilians constitute the majority of the population (Roland 2000).
Black women’s advocacy in the area of reproductive rights was taken up as a po-
litical issue by Benedita da Silva when she served in the Brazilian Congress. da Silva
was the first Black woman to serve as a federal deputy (1987–1995), subsequently
becoming the first Black woman to serve in the Brazilian Senate (1995–1998).13
As a politician, da Silva was an outspoken advocate for racial, gender and eco-
nomic justice. As a federal deputy, Benedita da Silva was instrumental in pushing
for a parliamentary investigation of the practice of female sterilization in 1991.
This investigation was led by Benedita da Silva and Senator Eduardo Suplicy
and resulted in the passage of the Law of Family Planning in 1996, which placed
restrictions on the practice of sterilization (Caldwell 2017).
In addition to focusing on female sterilization, activists in the Black women’s
movement have developed community-based programs and government policy
initiatives focused on other health issues that disproportionately affect Black
women, men and children, including maternal mortality, sickle cell anemia and
HIV/AIDS14 (Caldwell 2017; Santos 2012). It should also be noted that Black
women began to focus on racial and gender health inequities many years before
researchers or the government did. Health, especially reproductive health, has
been one of the central organizing themes of the Black women’s movement in
Brazil. For several decades, Black women activists have highlighted the essen-
tial role health plays in ensuring the survival and well-being of Afro-Brazilian
communities (Caldwell 2009, 2017). As longtime health activist and Black
feminist Edna Roland argued during the Global Forum of ECO 1992:
Whoever has lived historically the experience of being merchandise knows

the control over the body is an essential part of our liberation and self-
determination….However, we are not only our bodies, but also our rela-
tionships with the community of the past and the community of the future.
[Cited in Correa 1993, 7]
Following their participation in the 1994 UN World Conference on P opulation,

activists in the Black women’s movement grew more familiar with the policy
advocacy process through their participation in the 1995 UN World Conference
on Women, which was held in Beijing, China. As a result of Black women’s
involvement in the preparatory process for the 1995 UN World Conference on
Women, the issue of race was included in the Declaration of Brazilian women
that was prepared by the Brazilian women’s movement as well as in the official
document prepared by the Brazilian government. The Declaration of Brazilian
women stands as one of the first official acknowledgments of the impact of rac-
ism on women’s experiences by members of the Brazilian women’s movement.
The inclusion of race in this document demonstrates the impact that Black
women’s collective organizing began to have on the larger women’s movement
in Brazil during the 1990s (Roland 2000).
Although Black women activists struggled to gain legitimacy in relation to
the women’s movement and Black movement during the 1980s, by the mid-
1990s, the Black women’s movement was increasingly recognized as an import-
ant political actor. Today, Black women’s organizations are the strongest sector
of the larger Black movement in Brazil.15 Black women’s activism during the
1980s and 1990s laid the groundwork for Black women to play a leading role
in the preparatory process for the Third World Conference against Racism,
Xenophobia, and Related Forms of Intolerance, which was held in Durban,
South Africa, in 2001. By 2000, dozens of Black women’s organizations existed
in various states throughout Brazil. Members of these organizations highlighted
the intersection of race and gender and the specificities of Black women’s expe-
riences during events that were organized by Black movement entities during
the preparatory process for the Durban conference. By this time, a number of
activists in the Black women’s movement had become familiar with the policy
advocacy process as a result of their participation in previous UN conferences.
These prior experiences enabled Black women to be at the forefront of organiz-
ing the Black movement at the national level as part of the preparatory process
for Durban.16
Black Brazilian women played a leading role in region wide organizing for
the Durban conference, most notably during the regional conference of the
Americas that took place in Santiago, Chile, during December 2000. They
made up the majority of the Brazilian delegation to the Santiago conference,
including a busload of young women. Black women’s organizations, such as
Geledés, were also instrumental in training advocates and facilitating commu-
nication before and during the Durban conference (Caldwell 2017). Longtime
Black feminist Edna Roland was also chosen to be the special rapporteur during
the Durban conference. In this role, Roland served in the second-highest posi-
tion during the conference, thus giving greater visibility to Black women from
Brazil and the larger Latin American region.
The preparatory process for the 2001 Durban Conference was a signif-
icant moment in the consolidation of the Black women’s movement at the
national level. One of the most important and lasting outcomes of the con-
ference preparatory process was the formation of a national network of Black
women’s organizations, the Articulação de Organizações de Mulheres Negras
Brasileiras (Articulation of Black Brazilian Women’s Organizations) in 2000.
This national network served as an important vehicle for Black women’s pol-
icy advocacy prior to and during the Durban conference. It has continued to
serve as an important collective voice for Black women at the national level for
over 15 years.
Black women activists were at the forefront of important political and policy
shifts during the 2000s and early 2010s. The election of Luíz Inácio (‘Lula’) da
Silva as Brazil’s president in 2002 led to an increased focus at the federal level
on issues of race, racial inequality and socioeconomic inequality. Lula created
the Secretaria Especial para a Promoção de Políticas da Mulher (Special Secretariat
for Women’s Policies, SPM) and the Secretaria Especial de Promoção de Políticas da
Igualdade Racial (Secretariat for Racial Equality Policies, SEPPIR) soon after
taking office in 2003.17 Both SPM and SEPPIR eventually became permanent
cabinet-level federal ministries. Black women activists worked with both secre-
tariats to advance the struggles for racial and gender equality. Prominent Black
women activists were also chosen to lead SEPPIR, including Matilde Ribeiro,
who served as the first minister over SEPPIR from 2003 to 2008, and the late
Luiza Bairros who served from 2011 to 2014.18
The creation of SPM and SEPPIR marked greater recognition of the impor-
tance of state action to advance racial and gender equality. The establishment
of SEPPIR was especially significant because it marked a sharp break with the
Brazilian government’s historical denial that racism or racial inequality existed
in the country. However, the constitution of SPM and SEPPIR as entities that
either focused on race or gender also highlighted the need for government units
and public policies that address both race and gender from an intersectional
perspective in order to fully address the needs and experiences of Black women
(Caldwell 2017).
The 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor, and

the recent rightward shift in Brazilian politics highlight the increasing chal-
lenges faced by Black women activists and other progressive sectors of civil
society. Following the Brazilian Senate’s decision to begin impeachment pro-
ceedings against Rousseff in May 2016, Vice President Michel Temer became
acting president and assumed the role permanently in August 2016. Upon be-
coming acting president, Temer implemented a series of reactionary policy
decisions that reversed recent gains with respect to gender and racial equity at
the federal level. Of special relevance for Afro-Brazilian women, Temer dis-
mantled the Ministry for Women, Human Rights and Racial Equality, which
Rousseff created as a way to consolidate, and ultimately weaken, SEPPIR and
SPM in 2015. Given this new and increasingly hostile political context, Black
women’s political critiques and engagement will be needed more than ever.
Black Feminisms in Latin America

Similar to women of other African Diaspora communities, Afro-Latin American
women have often had a complicated and difficult relationship with mainstream
feminist movements. Unacknowledged, yet pernicious, racism within Latin
American countries historically has shaped the experiences of women in the re-
gion and created divisions between White, Afro-Latin and Indigenous women.
Although a detailed discussion of the history and philosophies shaping Afro-Latin
American feminism is beyond the scope of this essay, it is useful and important
to highlight some of the key issues and ideas shaping feminist praxis for African-
descendant women in Latin America.19
While many Afro-Latin American women activists have embraced femi-
nism, they have also developed important critiques of mainstream or ‘hege-
monic’ feminism (Cardoso 2016). Many of these critiques resonate with those
of women of African Diaspora communities in the US, England and other lo-
cations (Caldwell 2001). Race and gendered forms of racism have been central
themes in Black feminisms throughout the Diaspora. The centrality of race and
racism in African Diaspora feminisms is striking, particularly because Black
women often live in national contexts that have vastly different racial ideol-
ogies. However, despite the existence of different racial ideologies across the
Diaspora, White supremacist and anti-Black discourses and practices have pro-
foundly shaped the experiences of African Diaspora communities. In addition,
in Latin America, ideologies of racial democracy and Mestizaje (race mixing)
have often posed a serious challenge to Black women’s efforts to highlight how
racism and racial inequalities distinguish their life experiences and trajectories
from those of White women.
Afro-Latin American women’s writings and conceptualizations of feminism
have rarely received sufficient attention from scholars in Latin America, the
US or Europe. As a result, many of their theoretical and political contributions
have gone virtually unnoticed in academic scholarship. In addition, Black fem-

inists in the US are often unacquainted with the work of leading Afro-Latin
A merican feminists.20 As Christen Smith has noted, ‘The work of Black women
theorists like Epsy Campbell (Costa Rica), Andreia Beatriz dos Santos (Brazil),
Francia Marquez (Colombia), and Victoria Santa Cruz (Peru), who theorize
profoundly about gender, politics, and liberation, is relatively unknown outside
of their home countries’ (2016, 74).
Afro-Brazilian feminist Lelia Gonzalez put forth a conceptualization of
‘Afro-Latin feminism’ during the 1980s that continues to have relevance to-
day (Gonzalez 1988a). Gonzalez’s notion of Amerfricanidade also highlighted
the specificities of Afro-Latin American women’s experiences (1988b). More
recently, Afro-Brazilian feminist Sueli Carneiro has argued for the need to
Enegrecer or ‘Blacken’ feminism (Carneiro 2011).21 Jurema Werneck, another
leading Afro-Brazilian feminist, has highlighted the importance of African
culture and worldview in shaping Black women’s feminist thought and praxis
(Werneck 2007). All of the aforementioned activists and intellectuals have
played a central role in conceptualizing Black feminism in the Brazilian con-
text, and their work has often been influential in other areas of Latin America.
Moreover, in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, the writings of Black
feminists have been critical intellectual interventions that have documented
the experiences of Black women and called attention to the intersection of race
and gender in their lives.
Betty Ruth Lozano has used the concept Patriarcado Negro-colonial (Black-
colonial patriarchy) to describe gender relations in Afro-Colombian
communities that have resulted from a history of colonialism and slavery
(2016, 42). For Lozano, networks such as the Red de Mujeres Negras del Pacífico
(Network of Black Women of the Pacific) have developed a Negro Decolonial
(Black decolonial) feminism that seeks to ‘construct new paradigms from an-
cestral cosmovisions without essentializing them, but instead questioning them
when necessary and being in defense of life as a whole’ (2016, 43). Decolonial
feminism has been central to Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements, in-
cluding feminist ones, particularly in the Andean region. The land, territory
and nature play a central role in decolonial and decolonial feminist visions of
Buen Vivir/Bem Viver (the good life). By calling attention to the present-day
manifestations of historically rooted processes of coloniality, decolonial think-
ing seeks to challenge the impact of neoliberal globalization and capitalist
modernity on Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities (Escobar 2008).
As Agustín Laó-Montes and Mirangela Buggs have argued,
Decolonial feminisms analyze modernity from a world historical per-

spective and understand power as a complex matrix that integrates
class exploitation and capital accumulation with ethnoracial, cultural-
epistemic, and gender-sexual domination…. These frameworks are
useful for…addressing the African diaspora as translocation political and

cultural spaces. In this way, feminisms could be translocal, diasporic, and
decolonial.
[2014, 390–1]
Concluding Thoughts
New forms of activism and new areas of focus have shaped recent political mobi-
lization by Afro-Latin American women. Sexual politics have also taken center
stage for a new generation of Afro-Latin American feminists. In Colombia,
sexual identities and sexual diversity have become more central in the Afro-
descendant ‘political landscape’ as well as among the Afro-descendant LGBTQ
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer) community (Láo-Montes
2016, 10). The collective Somos Identidad (We are Identity), which was largely
founded by Afro-Colombian lesbians in the city of Calí, has taken a leading
role in politicizing LGBTQ identities. In addition, the Grupo Latinoamericano
de Estudio, Formacíon y Acción Feminista (Latin American Group for Feminist
Action, Study, and Formation) has played a central role in organizing Afro-Latin
American and Caribbean lesbian feminist activists with a focus on decolonial
feminism (Láo-Montes 2016). This organization is also based in Colombia.
During June 2011, a gathering called the ‘Afrodiasporic Feminist Conspiracy’
was launched in Cali and included Black women from throughout Colombia.
This event utilized the notion of ‘“Afrodiasporic Feminism” as a category of
analysis and as the foundation for an agenda of mobilization’ (Figueroa and
Hurtado 2016). In their analysis of this event, Figueroa and Hurtado (2016)
note that it drew heavily on the thought and writings of Afro-Latin American
feminists, such as Lélia Gonzalez and Sonia Santos, as well as US Black and
women of color feminists, including Angela Davis, Chandra Mohanty, Patricia
Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
The politicization of Black women’ bodies, especially hair, has also been
central to recent organizing by Afro-Latin American women. Marches affirm-
ing the beauty of Black women’s natural hair were held in Brazil in 2015 and
2016. They were called Marchas de Orgulho Crespo, which translates as Marches
of Kinky (Hair) Pride. By using the term Crespo, the activists who organized
the marches reappropriated a term that has historically been used to define
Black Brazilian women’s hair as bad, wrong and not beautiful. Hair braid-
ing and the promotion of African-centered esthetic practices were also used
as part of the mobilization for the 2015 March of Black Women in Brazil
(Alvarez 2016b). Organizers of pre-March activities used hair braiding as a way
to reach other Black women and do consciousness raising about issues of race
and gender. The 2015 March in Colombia was also known as La Marcha de los
Turbantes (the March of the Turbans). This alternative name for the March ex-
pressed the ‘aesthetic dimension of the rising political cultures of Black women
in the country, which includes hair and dressing styles as [a] sort of political
performance’ (Láo-Montes 2016, 9). Given the various forms of discrimination
and othering that are often practiced against Black women’s bodies, hair has
long been an important means of resisting racialized sexism and affirming the
beauty and value of Black womanhood (Caldwell 2007). It is thus not surpris-
ing that hair has assumed a central role in Afro-Latin American women’s recent
mobilizations.
Throughout Latin America, a new generation of Black women activists is
using technology and cultural forms, such as hip-hop, as a means of challenging
racism, sexism and economic inequality. Black feminist bloggers in countries such
as Cuba, Colombia and Brazil play an important role in creating a Black feminist
public sphere that brings visibility to Black women’s experiences and concerns.22
In Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, among other places, Black women have used hip-
hop to challenge racism, sexism, capitalism and heteronormativity. Groups such
as Las Krudas, which began in Cuba and is now US-based, exemplify the use of
hip-hop to articulate Black feminist visions of justice and equality.
Formation of the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la
Diaspora (Network of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Women and
Women of the Diaspora) in 1992 marked a new phase of region-wide orga-
nizing among Afro-Latin women.23 The Red was formed during the Primero
Encuentro de Mujeres Negras (First Encounter of Black Women), a region-wide
gathering that was held in the Dominican Republic. Over the past 25 years,
the Red has played an important role in facilitating communication and
mobilization among women in the region. The inclusion of the term ‘Diaspora’
in the name of the Red also highlights the importance of including the voices
and experiences of US-based Latinas in region-wide efforts. During the First
Encounter of Black Women that was held in 1992, activists chose July 25 as
the Día Internacional de la Mujer Afrolatinoamericana y Afrocaribeñas (International
Day of the Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean Woman), giving further
visibility to Black women in the region. Black women in Brazil have made July
a month-long celebration of Black womanhood, now known as Julho das Pretas
(Black Woman’s July). This celebration was initiated in northeastern Brazil,
which has a large African-descendant population in the 2000s, and was made
into a nationwide series of events during mobilizations for the 2015 March of
Black Women (Alvarez 2016b).
The brilliance, creativity and resilience of Afro-Latin American women can
be clearly seen in the various forms of resistance and activism they have engaged
in, both in recent decades and for centuries. Afro-Latin American women have
worked to ensure the survival and well-being of their c ommunities, while si-
multaneously addressing issues of particular concern to them. As can be seen
from this overview of Afro-Latin American women’s activism, many issues
have been addressed, yet many challenges still remain – A Luta Continua/la
Lucha Continua (the struggle continues).
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Fátima Oliveira, a medical

doctor and leading Black Brazilian feminist activist and researcher.
Notes
1 See Alberto (2011) for an example of historical research on Afro-Brazilian activism
in the 20th century.
2 Volume 14 of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism is a two-part
special issue that focuses on African descendant feminisms in Latin America. It
also contains several essays written by Afro-Latin American women scholars and
activists. The recent anthology, Afrocubanas, edited by Daisy Rubiera Castillo and
Inés María Martiatu Terry, is also an important contribution to literature on Afro-
Cuban women’s experiences.
3 Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 book Casa-Grande e Senzala solidified
Brazil’s national and international image as a racial democracy. This book also ide-
alized sexual exploitation and sexual violence experienced by African-descendant
women during the colonial slave era. See Caldwell (2007) for a detailed discussion
of the implications of Freyre’s work for Afro-Brazilian women.
4 Escobar’s (2008) work also highlights the ways in which gender-related issues have
been subordinated to the ‘ethnic struggle’ in organizations such as the PCN. Female
leaders such as Libia Grueso have had prominent leadership roles in the PCN.
5 Other organizations and networks such as the Asociación de Afrocolombianos Desplazados
(Association of Displaced Afro-Colombians) and the Conferencia Nacional de Orga-
nizaciones Afrocolombianas (National Conference of Afro-Colombian Organizations)
have also played an important role in organizing and advocating for the Afro-
Colombian community at the national and international level.
6 Palenqueros are the descendants of maroons in Colombia.
7 Raizals are recognized as an Afro-Colombian ethnic group under the 1991
Colombian Constitution. They speak an English Creole and live in the A rchipelago
of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, off the Colombian Caribbean
Coast. They have Afro-Caribbean and, in some cases, British ancestry.
8 Laó-Montes (2016) offers a detailed discussion of La Casa Cultural El Chontaduro’s
activities.
9 See, for example, Kovalik (2016).
10 The Zumbi march commemorated the 300th anniversary of the death of Zumbi,
the renowned leader of the Quilombo of Palmares, the largest maroon community
in Brazil and in the Americas. Zumbi was killed on November 20, 1695, a date that
is recognized as the National Day of Black Consciousness in Brazil. The Zumbi
march took place in Brasília on November 20, 1996.
11 The March’s manifesto was printed in its entirety in English as March against
R acism and Violence and in Favor of Living Well (Bem viver) Brasília 2015 (2016).
12 Mães de Santo (mothers of saint) are important and influential female leaders in the
Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé.
13 Benedita da Silva served as the Vice Governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro from
1999 to 2002 and assumed the governership from 2002 to 2003 when then-
Governor Antonio Garotinho ran for the presidency.
14 As I have argued elsewhere (Caldwell 2016, 2017), it has been difficult to assess the
impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the Black population in Brazil, due to the
lack of data by race/color.
15 This assertion is based on personal observations and conversations with other scholars
of Black Brazilian women’s activism. However, Black women’s activism has often been
downplayed due to the tendency to focus on male leadership in anti-racist movements.
16 Carneiro (2002) discusses Black women’s activism related to the Durban conference.
17 For more detailed analyses of SEPPIR, see Caldwell (2017), Paschel (2016) and Silva
(2012).
18 See Johnson (2015) for an analysis of the representation of Black Brazilians in
national politics, including members of recent presidential cabinets.
19 See essays in the special issue of Meridians, volume 14, numbers 1 and 2, for recent
analyses of Afro-Latin American feminism.
20 See Alvarez and Caldwell (2016), Caldwell (2016) and Smith (2016) for a fuller
discussion of these issues.
21 Carneiro’s paper Enegrecer o Feminismo was originally presented at the 2001 Durban
Conference. It was published on the Geledés website in 2011.
22 The Black feminist blog http://blogueirasnegras.org is active in Brazil. The blog Negra
Cubana Tenia que Ser by Afro-Cuban blogger Sandra Torres, now based in Germany,
addresses issues of concern to global Black feminism (see Láo-Montes 2016).
23 Information about the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la
D iaspora is available at http://www.mujeresafro.org.
References
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———. 2016b. “‘Vem Marchar com a Gente’/Come March with Us.” Meridians:
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12
Race and the Law
in Latin America
Tanya Katerí Hernández
After years of struggle for visibility, recognition and equality in Latin America,
Afro-descendants have garnered a number of antidiscrimination law enact-
ments. These legal gains range from multicultural constitutional recognition,
collective land titles, affirmative action programs and criminal sanction on
discrimination. Most pervasive across the region has been the deployment of
antidiscrimination criminal law legal sanctions. Consequently, it is a worth-
while endeavor to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the criminal law
model for addressing Afro-Latin American discrimination by focusing on a
number of case examples from various countries. In order to understand the
Latin American focus on criminal law for addressing racial discrimination, it is
first important to describe the constitutional law backdrop against which social
justice activists have had to contend.
Constitutional Equality Law

Most countries in the region have traditionally relied upon broadly worded
constitutional equality provisions as the confirmation that racial inequality has
been adequately addressed. An example of the generally worded constitutional
provisions that all Latin American countries have with some variation can be
seen in Nicaragua’s equality provision, which states:
All people are equal before the law and have the right to equal protection.
There will be no discrimination on account of birth, nationality, political
belief, race, sex, language, opinion, economic status or social position.
Yet, the constitutional equality provisions are rarely applied to the context of
racial discrimination. In fact, there is a region-wide phenomenon of denying
272 Tanya Katerí Hernández
the existence of racial discrimination because of the assertion that ‘the serious
incidence of racism and racial discrimination’ more accurately exists in the
US (Dulitzky 2005, 39). This observation is based on an analysis of official
nation-state report responses to human rights violation claims before the UN
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Despite evidence
that racial discrimination permeates every realm in the region including so-
cial, political, education, labor, culture and public health sectors, government
responses downplay its significance as inconsequential compared to the legal
violence of the US context.
Country-specific studies note that racial discrimination claims are treated as
lacking merit because of the belief that Latin America is not a region with ‘real rac-
ism’. For instance, in the Brazilian context, Antonio Guimarães found that judges
frequently dismiss claims based on the notion that Brazilian culture is immune
from racial bias (Guimarães 1998). For instance, Guimarães quotes one represen-
tative case in which the judge explicitly stated, ‘We do not have the rigorous
and cruel racism observed in other countries, where non-“whites” are segregated,
separated and do not have the same rights. That is racism’ (Guimarães 1998, 35).
While not all judges are so explicit about how a particular comparison to the
US confines the recognition of racism in Latin America, other country-specific
studies have observed a similar refusal to acknowledge the existence of racism in
the enforcement of equality laws. For instance, in the Justice Studies Center of the
Americas examination of Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Peru, it was
found that each of the countries suffered from a limited legal response to the issues
of racial discrimination (Judicial Studies Center of the Americas 2004). Similarly,
Carlos de la Torre’s inquiry into the Ecuadorian legal system discovered that the
Ecuadorian government had a constrained view of racism as solely a problem of
isolated verbal expressions of infrequent individual bigotry (de la Torre 2005).
Even within seeming court victories that recognize that racial d iscrimination
exists, there can be embedded a problematic understanding of racism. For in-
stance, in Jorge González Jácome’s analysis of Colombian Constitutional Court
case findings of discrimination, he concludes that the Court confines its un-
derstanding of racism to the acts of individuals with overtly manifested intent
to discriminate in ways that problematically shields from consideration the op-
eration of pervasive structural discrimination ( Jácome 2006). The focus on
individual intent is yet another articulation of the vision of discrimination as
exceptional in Latin American spaces. Most problematic, although, has been
the tendency to operationalize constitutional equality principles with enabling
legislation located in the criminal law.
Criminal Law Equality Enforcement

The vast majority of countries in Latin America have focused upon criminal law
as the vehicle for addressing racial discrimination. César Rodríguez Garavito
Race and the Law in Latin America 273
and Carlos Andrés Baquero Díaz note that all Latin American countries except
for Paraguay have passed laws to criminally punish acts of racial discrimination
(Garavito and Díaz 2015, 68). Given the long histories of ignoring the exis-
tence of racism and discrimination in Latin America, it is understandable that
the strongest state sanction that criminal law provides would be sought as the
symbol of the state’s new commitment to recognizing societal discrimination.
Consequently, criminal law sanctions are often the default antidiscrimination
approach because of their strong normative message that the State condemns
racism (Cottrol 2013, 290).
As a result, the few criminal prosecutions that have been brought since
the social justice movement advocacy in the 1990s for recognition of racial
d iscrimination have been noteworthy. Peru criminally convicted an individual
for racial discrimination against an Afro-Peruvian for the first time in 2015
(Sentencia No. 479–2015-2JPL-PJ-CSJJU). Similarly, Ecuador issued its first
prison sentence for racial discrimination against an Afro-Ecuadorian only in
2016 (Proceso No. 17124-2014-0585).
Unfortunately, other motivations for the public focus on criminal law con-
flict with fully addressing the sources of racial inequality. For instance, further
entrenching the focus on criminal law provisions has been the notion that
Latin American nation-states have been innocent of racial wrongdoing. Given
the absence of state-mandated Jim Crow segregation in the region, the legal
stance toward racism has been to view it as an aberration rather than a systemic
part of a national culture (Hernández 2013, 104). As a result, the legal response
has been to treat racism as the work of isolated individuals, who are presum-
ably abnormal in their prejudices. In short, racists are criminals rather than
representatives of long-standing racist cultural norms. Garavito and Díaz con-
clude that the use of criminal law individualizes racism and fails to challenge
the structural causes of racial inequality (Garavito and Díaz 2015, 92).
This also helps to explain why the large majority of hate speech laws in Latin
America are part of the criminal codes in the region. Unfortunately, limiting
the idea of racism to biased words uttered by those labeled as aberrant racists
overlooks the structural and institutional aspects of discrimination that operate
in the absence of racist commentary. Carlos de la Torre notes with respect to
the plight of Afro-Ecuadorians that ‘[r]educing racism to the hostile words and
actions of ignorant, ethnocentric, and parochial individuals, a view that was
dominant in American sociology until recently, does not take into account
power relations’ (2005).
Some countries in Latin America maintain a singular criminal approach to
discrimination (Hernández 2013). For example, in the Dominican Republic,
the 1997 Ley contra la Violencia Intrafamiliar (Law against Interfamily Violence)
makes it a crime to inflict unequal or humiliating treatment based on race or
ethnicity. Persons found guilty of the crime of discrimination can be impris-
oned for a year and one month and a fine of two to three times the minimum
wage (Ley No. 24–97). In Nicaragua, the Criminal Code penalizes the
obstruction of a constitutional right because of race or ethnicity (Ley No. 641).
The penalty is six months to one year of imprisonment. If the racially motivated
obstruction of a constitutional right is found to have been publicly p romoted,
an additional fine can be imposed. The Criminal Code also authorizes the
augmentation of a penalty for other crimes when they are racially motivated
(Crim. Code Art 36.5).
Even though criminal sanctions suggest a strong normative commitment
to the eradication of discrimination, it may, as a practical matter, have had
the ironic effect of making the legal system less capable of dealing with the
problems of inequality and discrimination. Criminal cases require stronger ev-
idence and a higher burden of proof than civil cases. For instance, in an analysis
of Peruvian grievances regarding the experience of filing a criminal complaint
of discrimination, it was found that the evidentiary standard for discrimination
cases was high and that it is often difficult for a victim to prove that he/she
has experienced discrimination (Defensoría del Pueblo, República Del Perú
2007, 119). An illustrative case described in the report is that of an individual
who lodged a complaint against the police department alleging discrimination
for the inappropriate issuance of a traffic ticket because of his race. The public
prosecutor indicated that this complaint did not merit a criminal investigation
or action because the evidence presented was not enough: the complainant had
submitted an affidavit and that of a family member who witnessed the inci-
dent. It is difficult to fathom what more the complainant could have submitted
to support his allegations. The demand for more is thus emblematic of the
Latin American resistance to considering racial discrimination a viable crimi-
nal complaint.
In addition to the reluctance of prosecutors to proceed with racial discrimi-
nation cases, judges are reluctant to impose criminal sanctions. Latin American
criminal justice systems are overloaded with traditional crimes of violence and
property crimes. In a system plagued with such problems and systemic ineffi-
ciencies, the crimes of racism and racial discrimination have and are likely to
continue to be a low priority.
Moreover, entrusting the enforcement of the criminal law to public
authorities risk having the law undermined by the complacent inaction of
public officials who may harbor the same racial bias as the agents of dis-
crimination. Indeed, commentators have noted that Latin American po-
lice officers are often the perpetrators of racial violence against persons of
A frican descent because they see their role as protecting society from ‘mar-
ginal elements’ by any means necessary without regard to the rule of law
(Pinheiro 1999, 1–16). This is a particular danger in Latin America, where
police officers are consistently found to discourage Afro-descendants from
filing racial discrimination complaints (Brinks 2008, 49–54; Mitchell and
Wood 1999, 1001–20).
Seth Racusen notes that a civil framework can provide broader theories
of discrimination and less burdensome evidentiary standards (Racusen 2002,
87–8; Racusen 2004). In addition, the civil context carries less risk of selective
enforcement whereby vulnerable populations are disproportionately targeted
for prosecution. This is because, unlike in criminal prosecutions, the state need
not be the primary enforcer of the legislation.
The contrast between the civil and criminal contexts is best exemplified
by the Brazilian case of Tiririca, in which the same fact pattern of hate speech
yielded success for the plaintiffs in the civil court but not in the criminal court.
Francisco Everado Oliveira Silva, whose stage name is Tiririca, is a Brazilian
Congressman and former entertainer who released a song with the Sony Music
company entitled Veja os Cabelos Dela (‘Look at Her Hair’) in 1996. The song
was in essence a long tirade against the inherent distasteful animal smell of
Black women and the ugliness of their natural hair. The lyrics stated in signif-
icant part,
When she passes she calls my attention, but her hair, there’s no way no.
Her catinga [African] (body odor) almost caused me to faint. Look, I
cannot stand her odor. Look, look, look at her hair! It looks like a scour-
ing pad for cleaning pans. I already told her to wash herself. But she in-
sisted and didn’t want to listen to me. This smelly negra (Black woman) …
Stinking animal that smells worse than a skunk.
The Black feminist nongovernmental rganization (NGO) Criola, in conjunc-

tion with the NGO Centro de Articulação de Populações Marginalizadas, and a
number of other social justice organizations filed lawsuits against the singer
and Sony Music company in both criminal and civil courts. In the criminal
court action, the plaintiff filed a complaint of racism. The plaintiff lost because
the judge found that there was no criminal intent to offend Black women. The
criminal law standard was too high to overcome given the infrequency with
which individuals overtly state their intent to discriminate before nonparty
witnesses. As a result, the song remained in circulation for commercial sale.
In contrast, the civil court action was successful. The civil public action was
filed pursuant to Article 3 of the Constitution, which states that the national ob-
jective is ‘to promote the well-being of all without prejudice as to origin, race,
sex, color, age, and any other form of discrimination’. The case sought to protect
the diffuse and collective rights of Black women to be free of d iscrimination.
Diffuse rights are a category of legal rights that provide g uarantees to a group
of individuals who have common legal interests despite being dispersed within
the political community (Lei No. 7.347, de 24 Julho 1985). Free of the criminal
context, which requires a finding of intent to discriminate, the civil court held
that the defendant’s authorship of the lyrics was discriminatory itself because the
words inherently provoke feelings of humiliation in Black women (T. J. R. J.,
Embargos Infringentes No. 2005.005.00060). The court took note that because
the singer, Tiririca, was also a popular entertainer for children (who was often
nationally televised in a clown costume), the insulting and injurious content of
the song was also prejudicial to the formation of Black youth.
As compensation for the moral damages of collective emotional harm to
dignity, in 2008, the court ordered payment of 300,000 reais in addition to
Attorney’s fees and costs. In 2012, the court revised the monetary judgment
to include sums retroactive to the date the case was filed in 1997, thereby raising
the judgment to 1.2 million reais. In civil law legal systems like Brazil’s, moral
damages are nonpecuniary damages that compensate for the injury of emo-
tional distress from harm to one’s honor or reputation (Litvinoff 1977; Vargas
2004). Often, moral damages are not available for every sort of tort action, but
only for those that create dignitary harm. The monetary payment for the dam-
age to the collective equality interest of Black women was paid to the Federal
Ministry of Justice’s Fund for the Defense of Diffuse Rights, for the creation of
educational antiracism youth programs disseminated through radio, television,
film and printed materials for elementary schools in the state.
What the Tiririca case demonstrates is that in the civil context, the absence
of the imprisonment feature enables a judge to consider more nuanced perspec-
tives about racial equality when deciding whether the discrimination that has
been historically prevalent in Latin America but invisible as ‘culture’ should be
actionable. A civil framework can provide broader theories of discrimination
and less burdensome evidentiary standards (Racusen 2002). In addition, the
civil context carries less risk of selective enforcement whereby vulnerable pop-
ulations are disproportionately targeted for prosecution. This is because, unlike
in criminal prosecutions, the state need not be the primary enforcer of the leg-
islation. Yet, because of the prevalent notion that criminal laws against discrim-
ination show how serious the state is about racism, the development of civil
law measures across the region has been slow and their reach has been modest.
The few criminal law racial discrimination cases that have been successful
have had extreme factual allegations that even the most reticent of courts would
find hard to ignore. For instance, in Ecuador, where Afro-Ecuadorians are of-
ten ignored and viewed as not inherently Ecuadorian, only the most extreme
of racial discrimination actions will be understood as appropriate for crimi-
nal enforcement. It was not until July 5, 2016, that Ecuador imposed its first
prison sentence for the crime of racial discrimination. In Michael Arce Mendez
v. Fernando Encalada Parrales, a prison sentence of five months, and twenty-four
days was issued for the racial hate which an armed forces lieutenant committed
against a former cadet at a military school (Proceso No. 17124-2014-0585).
Mr. Arce Méndez, who dreamed of becoming Ecuador’s first Afro-Ecuadorian
General, started military school in October, 2011, after successfully completing
admissions examinations. Mr. Arce Méndez and other witnesses described the
unfair, cruel treatment he received under his instructor, Lt. Encalada Parrales.
Lt. Encalada Parrales told Mr. Arce Méndez that no ‘Black’ person would be-
come a military official and then proceeded to harass him until he would resign
from the school. The harassment took the form of not allowing cadet Méndez
to sleep, forcing him to jog while other cadets were sleeping, not allowing him
to eat with the other cadets, not giving him enough time to eat, forcing him to
eat on the floor, in addition to many other physical forms of harassment while
he was called a ‘lazy Black’ and other derogatory race-related terms. Cadet
Méndez eventually resigned from the school and made a claim with the Public
Defender’s Office.
Given the outrageous conduct of a public figure like Lt. Encalada Parrales,
it is understandable why the court did not hesitate to make a finding of racial
discrimination worthy of imposing a criminal sentence along with payment of
psychological treatment, damages and litigation costs. Not only was the v ictim’s
physical well-being under assault, a psychological examination also found that
cadet Méndez had suffered psychologically with a lingering post-traumatic
d isorder. Other victims of racial discrimination who have been denied oppor-
tunities because of their race but absent the physical violence have not been
successful in deploying the criminal law to vindicate their equality rights.
Absent physical violence, the racial discrimination allegations must be close
to extraordinarily outrageous to be warranted justiciable. For instance, in P eru’s
first successful prosecution for racial discrimination, the Afro-Peruvian vic-
tim was targeted with outright fraud. In the 2015 case of Azucena Asuncion
Algendones v. Luis Alberto Perez Peralta, Azucena Asuncion Algendones, secretary
at the Municipal Water and Sewer Services Company of Huancayo, which is
known as Sedam Huancato S.A., was engaging in her regular conduct of busi-
ness when coworker Judith Perez Huaynate alluded to Algendones as a Negra
Cocodrilo (Black crocodile) while also making insulting gestures toward her.
When A lgendones asked that Huaynate apologize to her, Huaynate stated that
her comment was more of an insult to a crocodile than to Algendones (Sentencia
No. 479–2015-2JPL-PJ-CSJJU). Algendones alerted both her general manager,
Luis Perez Peralta, and subsequently Humans Resources manager, Augusto
Santisteban Garcia, about the occurrence with coworker Huaynate. Despite
these supervisors noting that Huaynate had committed a racist act against
A lgendones, not only was Huaynate not punished but the supervisors also dis-
missed the case, thus failing to resolve the issue. Sedam officials then attempted
to punish A lgendones for reporting this racist occurrence by framing her for
multiple thefts within the company and subsequently firing her in 2013. This
was done after Algendones had contacted government authorities about the
2012 incident, which had led to an investigation of the facilities.
In turn, Algendones filed charges against officials Peralta and Garcia pur-
suant to Peruvian racial discrimination statutes. She did this by reporting this
incident to the Alert Against Racism website, a government site that investi-
gates instances of racial discrimination, to which she was given legal assistance
by the Center for Development of Black Peruvian Women. On November 13,

2015, the controlling federal court in Junin state ruled in Algendones’s favor
and in turn sentenced Peralta and Garcia to serve three years in prison as well as
pay fines of $1,500. In addition, both officials were barred from holding public
office for two years.
Similarly, the few successful applications of amparo relief are inadequate for
making the legal system responsive to cases of racial inequality, given the rar-
ity with which courts across the region are willing to explore allegations of
racial discrimination. The judicial remedy of amparo (and its alternative name
of tutela) is a judicial proceeding that enables petitioners to protect their con-
stitutional and human rights with a panoply of equitable remedies (including
injunctions, declaratory judgments and mandamus orders).1 One example of a
successful use of amparo to advance racial equality occurred in the seminal case
of Liliana Cuellar Sinisterra, a Colombian citizen of African descent, who was
in Cartagena on a business trip from the Houston office of Deloitte and Touche
(Tutela T-1250871, Sentencia T-131/06). On July 2, 2005, Ms. Sinisterra was
denied entry to a disco allegedly for the color of her skin. The plaintiff used
Colombia’s tutela (amparo equivalent) to file a complaint against the d iscotheque
that had denied her admission while admitting Whites. With the tutela, she
filed a claim pursuant to the Constitution’s Article 13 guarantee of equality,
human dignity and honor. After losing in the Cartagena municipal court, Ms.
Sinisterra appealed to the Colombian Constitutional Court, and the court
exercised its discretion in favor of accepting a review of the tutela decision. The
Constitutional Court of Colombia vindicated her claim of a right to be free
of racial discrimination in admission to places of public accommodation and
enjoined the disco from denying anyone entry for illegal reasons.
While the result was a success for Ms. Sinisterra herself, there is a question
as to whether the court’s legal reasoning is the appropriate approach for enforc-
ing racial equality. Specifically, legal scholar Jorge González Jácome criticizes
the decision for focusing on a search for a demonstrated discriminatory intent
( Jácome 2006, 319). Such a focus overlooks the fact that a defendant’s failure to
verbally manifest discriminatory intent does not mitigate a defendant’s harm-
ful actions of racial exclusion. Jácome suggests that the court should have in-
stead focused upon the question of whether discriminatory effects result from a
defendant’s actions. Doing so would make the Colombian racial problem more
visible and thus more amenable to redress.
Jácome further notes that violations of constitutional inequality would
be best addressed by results-based remedies like affirmative action. The
question is whether overtly race-conscious legal remedies like affirmative
action will themselves be interpreted as a violation of the color-blind norm
of formal equality. The Brazilian context offers an intriguing constitu-
tional approach after many years of Afro-Brazilian activism ( Johnson III &
Heringer 2015).
Legal Rulings on Affirmative Action

On April 26, 2012, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court ruled university
a ffirmative action to be constitutionally valid at the Federal University of
Brasilia (S.T.F., ADPF 186). The landmark unanimous decision declared af-
firmative action policies essential for the State to fulfill its obligation of ensur-
ing equality of opportunity for every citizen as mandated by Article 3 of the
Brazilian Constitution that states that
the fundamental objectives of the Federative Republic of Brazil are to

build a free, just and supportive society; [and] to promote the well-being
of all, without prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other
forms of discrimination.
The Brazilian Supreme Court’s endorsement of race-based affirmative action

was rooted in the understanding of the state as having a duty to guarantee the
‘conditions of equality’ for groups that have historically lived on the margins
of society, enabling them to fully exercise their human rights and fundamental
rights. In the published decision, Justice Lewandowski noted that affirmative
action is consistent with the Brazilian Constitution’s concern with distribu-
tive justice and substantive equality rather than simply formal equality. For
instance, he specifically stated
It’s not enough not to discriminate. It is necessary to facilitate. The stance

should be, above all, affirmative. It is necessary that this is the position
taken by our legislators. Neutrality has shown itself in these years, (to be)
a great failure
(S.T.F., ADPF 186)
In addition, the other nine members of the Supreme Court panel further elab-
orated the justifications for the decision with the votes they orally issued from
the bench. For instance, Justice Celso de Mello noted that affirmative action
is consistent not only with the Brazilian Constitution but also with interna-
tional human rights treaties. In particular, he stated ‘The challenge is not only
a mere formal proclamation recognizing the commitment to respect the basic
rights of the human being, but the concrete realization in terms of material
achievement of the burden taken’ (STF Internacional [Federal Supreme Court
of Brazil news portal] April 26, 2012). Similarly, Justice Cezar Peluso observed
that affirmative action corresponds to the concern with human dignity. Thus,
with this decision, Brazil implements a human rights justification for the im-
portance of affirmative action. Moreover, Justice Luiz Fux even went so far as
to state that the constitutional provision articulating the government objective
‘to build a free, just and supportive society’ requires the reparation of past
damages suffered by Afro-Brazilians. For Justice Fux, affirmative action fulfills

that constitutional obligation.
Thereafter, in August 2012, Brazil systematized affirmative action in all
public federal universities with the Law of Social Quotas. The law requires
public federal universities to reserve half of all new admission spots for public
high school graduates. Within that 50% quota, one-half of the spots are set
aside for those students whose household family income falls below 1.5% of the
minimum wage per family member. The law also mandates that within that
50% set aside, spots be reserved for Afro-descendants and persons of I ndigenous
ancestry, proportional to their relative populations within each state (both for
the 25% set aside for low-income students and the 25% for household incomes
above the limits). One week later, the Court also affirmed the constitutional-
ity of the University for All Program (ProUni), which provides scholarships
for A fro-descendant students from low-income families to attend private
universities (SEPPIR 2012).
Whether other Latin American courts follow suit with such a wholesale
constitutional approval of race-based affirmative action remains to be seen. Yet,
Brazil is a stellar example of a legal analysis rooted in a broad-based democratic
concern with social inclusion which stands in contrast to the implementation of
multicultural constitutions for the benefit of Afro-descendants.
Multicultural Constitutions
The advent of multicultural constitutions since the 1980s has rightfully cele-
brated Indigenous and Afro-descended contributions to the nation-state that
were historically ignored and/or not fully valued (Rahier 2014, 105). However,
Tianna Paschel notes that the existing scholarship on Latin America tends to
collapse policies of collective rights and race-based affirmative action into a
singular ‘multicultural turn’ rather than distinguishing between the two var-
ied developments (Paschel 2016, 20). Disaggregating the two helps to illumi-
nate the extent to which collective land rights have not been fully realized for
A fro-descendants as compared to Indigenous groups.
Juliet Hooker’s work has suggested that not all multicultural constitutions
similarly situate Afro-descended communities. She aptly notes that because
Latin American states have primarily envisioned multicultural rights as per-
taining to Indigenous peoples, who are viewed as deserving ‘ethnic’ group
members, Afro-descendants have often been excluded as distinct ‘racial’ sub-
jects without an ethnic identity needing constitutional protection (Hooker
2009, 80–82). For instance, Hooker lists Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru
as those jurisdictions where Afro-descendants have obtained some multicultural
constitutional rights but not to the same extent as Indigenous communities. In
this vein, the legal advances made at the behest of Afro-Columbian activists
warrant particular attention (Dixon 2008).
The dichotomy drawn between deserving ‘ethnic’ Indigenous persons and

the undeserving ‘racial’ Afro-descendants overlooks both the racialization of
Indigenous peoples as well as the cultural identities of Afro-descended commu-
nities. For this reason, Colombia stands out as a jurisdiction that has included
Afro-descendants while also exemplifying the limitations of a nation equat-
ing multicultural rights with ethnic group status (Ng’weno 2007a). Colombia
thus makes an illustrative contrast to countries like Mexico and Venezuela that
completely exclude Afro-descendants from their multicultural rights land-
scape. Colombia also compares with those countries that have accorded Afro-
descendants the same collective rights to land and culture, such as Guatemala,
Honduras, and Nicaragua.
The Colombian Constitution states that it ‘recognizes and protects the eth-
nic and cultural diversity of the Colombian nation’. Transitory Article 55 of the
1991 Constitution mandated that laws recognizing the Afro-descendant right
to collective property be enacted. The constitutional provisions have thus been
augmented by specific legislation. In order to implement Article 55s mandate,
in 1993 Ley 70 (Law 70) was enacted to protect the rights of Afro-Colombians
to traditional landholdings. The law provides for the election of community
representatives to represent community concerns over land and other issues in
a system of prior consultation. Article 7 of Ley 70 provides that collective titles
are inalienable, protected from seizure and exempt from statutes of limitations.
However, this law is limited to the Pacific Coast area and other specifically ar-
ticulated zones. Other areas explicitly not within the law’s land provisions are
urban areas, Indigenous territories, national park areas and areas reserved for
national security and defense. What this effectively means is that the vast num-
bers of urban Afro-descendants outside the Pacific Coast are excluded because
they are not viewed as having firmly rooted ties to specific parcels of land
as Indigenous communities have with collective land titles (Ng’weno 2007b).
Ley 70 then only addresses the needs of one segment of the Afro-Colombian
populace.
And even those Afro-Colombians who are eligible to apply for a Ley 70 land
title have only garnered modest results. This is because the claims are often
delayed by land studies. Furthermore, Ley 70 requires that only lands deemed
to be Tierras Baldías (state-owned vacant land) can be passed on to collective
ownership. Because Afro-Colombians are regionally and ethnically diverse,
they do not all live on such land. (Indeed, some Afro-Colombians are not
even primarily Spanish speakers. The Raizales are an English C reole–speaking
A fro-Caribbean ethnic group within Colombia.) Moreover, the land title
process is particularly demanding in that it requires the production of his-
torical, demographic, economic and cartographic studies of the community
claiming collective ownership.
Jaime Arocha observes that many Afro-Colombians have been dissuaded
from pursuing the land title process by the violence of paramilitary groups and
the Colombian Army (Arocha 1998, 70–89). Similarly, Kiran Asher describes
how Afro-Colombian community organizers seeking collective ownership
have seen themselves labeled as guerrillas or terrorists and then targeted for vio-
lence by a government interested in controlling resource-rich Afro-Colombian
areas for corporate development (Asher 2009). In addition, right-wing paramil-
itary squads long enmeshed in drug trafficking are similarly involved in seizing
the land (Rosero 2002, 547–559). Indeed, at least one study found that 33% of
all Afro-Colombians have been expelled from their own land by armed groups
(Hernández 2013, 117). Of the people displaced from their land because of the
ongoing civil war, the largest percentage has been Afro-Colombian (Hernández
2013, 117). Moreover, an Afro-Colombian is 84% more likely to be displaced
than a Mestizo. Of the Afro-Colombian population with registered collective
property titles in 2007 alone, 79% had been forcibly dispossessed from their
lands (Garavito, Sierra and Adarve 2008, 34–35). So significant has been the
displacement of Afro-Colombians (and Indigenous communities as well) that
in 1999, the UN officially put the Colombian government on notice to address
it as a form of racial discrimination (CERD 1999). Thereafter, Colombia’s
Constitutional Court evaluated the government’s policy for dealing with the
plight of the many dispossessed and held that the policy was inadequate and un-
constitutional in its violation of the fundamental rights of Colombian citizens
(Sentencia T-025/04). Since that court order, the government has been obli-
gated to design policies to prevent the forced removal of landowners, in addition
to ameliorating the poor living conditions of the dispossessed. U nfortunately,
the government’s deliberations regarding the needs of the dispossessed have not
focused upon the particular impact on Afro-Colombians as a targeted group
(Miranda 2006, 42–47).
More generally, the promise of multicultural constitutions will need to
confront the long embedded history of racially exclusionary politics in Latin
America. For example, César Augusto Rodríguez Garavito describes how
in the Colombian context, even though the implementing legislation for the
‘multicultural protection’ of the Constitution requires that government au-
thorities consult Afro-descended communities before making decisions that
affect their communal lands, Afro-Colombians confront barriers to the con-
sultation process because the government must first officially recognize a
pre-established community council of Afro-descendants before those Afro-
descendants are entitled to be consulted (Garvito 2011, 263–305). The official
recognition process has thus been perceived as overly bureaucratic and restric-
tive ( Rodríguez 2008). This also happens to parallel bureaucratic barriers to
the titling of A fro-Brazilian Quilombo lands (lands settled by runaway slaves)
which has been described as ‘the biggest failure of Brail’s ethno-racial policies’
(Paschel 2016, 206). Nevertheless, in her review of multicultural constitutions,
Donna Lee Van Cott notes that after so many years of marginalization, even the
symbolic constitutional recognition of the importance of Afro-descendants is
indeed some measure of progress (Cott 2000). In fact, the Colombian govern-
ment has been more willing to focus upon Afro-Colombians as a group with
respect to educational reform.
African History Curriculum Legislative Mandates

In 1998, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe issued a presidential decree man-
dating that schools teach Afro-Colombian history and culture (Decree No.
1122 1998). Article 160 of Ley 115 provides that the board of each education
district must include a member representing the local Afro-Colombian com-
munity, if such a local community exists. The hope is that with the greater
educational exposure to the contributions of Afro-Colombians to Colom-
bian society, true racial equality will become desirable to the entire populace.
However, it is estimated that less than 10% of Colombia’s public schools have
adopted the legally mandated curriculum (Paschel 2016, 190).
Similarly, Brazil also instituted a mandate obligating its public and private
schools to teach African and Afro-Brazilian history (Lei No. 10.639/2003).
However, even after the passage of years since the enactment of the curriculum
mandate, the implementation of the law has fallen far short of what racial justice
activists had hoped for. For instance, in Brazil, many educators have resisted the
mandate within their discretion of which materials and themes to cover in their
courses each year (Medeiros and Almeida 2007). In addition, municipal govern-
ing authorities have impeded the implementation of the law (Da Costa 2014).
Conclusion
What this review of Afro-Latin legislative attention to matters of race in Latin
America demonstrates is both the significant achievements of Afro-Latin social
justice activism, along with the need for continued political will to imple-
ment and ensure actual racial equality for the populace. In instances where
government officials have supported legislative efforts, true transformation has
been possible. For instance, when the city of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, had
a Mayor who fully supported the implementation of Brazil’s law mandating
the instruction of African and Afro-Brazilian history (Lei No. 10.639/2003),
instructors were provided with concrete training and materials from 2007 to
2009 that revitalized their teaching and inspired a sense of a direct investment
in the national project of racial equality (Da Costa 2014, 157). The law directly
mattered but not in isolation. When the mayoral administration changed in
2009, the support for the necessary teacher training sessions ceased. It is thus
not insignificant that Brazil’s Law of Social Quotas contains a mandate for re-
view of its continued existence in 2022. Continued change in Brazil and across
Latin America will necessitate not only legislative action but also perseverance
in political engagement.
Note
1 An injunction is a judicial remedy which guards against future injuries with an
order requiring a person to refrain from a particular act or activity. A declaratory
judgment is a judgment which articulates and establishes legal rights and the opin-
ion of the court on a question of law without ordering further legal enforcement. A
mandamus order is a command from a court compelling performance of a ministe-
rial act that the law recognizes as an absolute duty (Gifis 1984).
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13
The Labyrinth of Ethnic–Racial
Inequality
A Picture of Latin America According to the
Recent Census Rounds
Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto
Introduction
It is internationally recognized that one of Latin America’s most dramatic
hallmarks is the deep level of socioeconomic chasm (Haggard and Kaufman
2008; Gootenberg 2010; Birdsall, Lustig, and McLeod 2012). World Bank data
on income distribution1 clearly express this situation: 11 of the 23 nations with
the highest Gini Index on the planet are Latin American countries, whereas
the other 12 are in sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike the latter, Latin America is
not exactly a region of very poor countries. In 2015, the average per capita
gross domestic product (GDP)2 of Latin America turned around USD 15,500,
whereas the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa was about USD 3,700. As such, Latin
America may be characterized as a middle-income region with a very uneven
distribution of wealth (World Bank n.d.).
Although inequality in Latin America has declined in the 2000s, social
disparity still remains the most relevant challenge scholars and policy makers
confront in the region nowadays. Inequality has increasingly been accepted as
a crucial obstacle to economic progress and the advancement of human devel-
opment (Sen 1981, 2000; Atkinson 1983), and understanding the causes b ehind
inequality has been a focus of Latin American socioeconomic thought in the
past decades. Scholars have adopted different viewpoints on the key factors
related to the social chasm existing in the region. Some have highlighted
problems of imperfect market allocation of productive factors or uneven en-
dowments of human capital among individuals (de Barros and Camargo 1993;
De Ferranti et al. 2004; Márquez 2007; Ñopo 2012). Others have prioritized
h istorical and structural dimensions of inequality and the core-periphery model
of international relations between Latin America and the developed capitalist
world (Furtado 1969; Gunder Frank 1974; Germani 1980). However, if it is
The Labyrinth of Ethnic–Racial Inequality 289
true that this controversy nurtured great debates (and even bitter ideological
and political conflicts), both paradigms shared a baffling consensus around the
putative small influence of ethnicity and race in Latin America’s dynamism.
Thus, this common agreement – both positive and normative – has neglected
the very h istory of the region, marked by the subjugation and enslavement
of Indigenous people and Africans, or the explanatory power of ethnic and
racial relations in understanding social inequality. This lacuna in part could
be also attributed to the absence of data on the social and economic condi-
tions of ethnic and racial groups in Latin America. The latest census rounds –
the 2000 round (covering the period 1995–2004) and mainly the 2010 round
(2005–2014) – became, in several cases for the first time, an important source of
demographic information about ethnic or racial identification in Latin America
(Loveman 2014; Telles and PERLA 2014; Paixão 2016, 2017). Hence, it has
become possible to obtain a deeper knowledge not only on the ethnic–racial
composition of Latin American population but also on the standards of living
and social inequality by race and ethnicity.
In this chapter, we focus on ethnic and racial inequality in the Latin
A merican labor market and conduct a cross-national research using public data
samples of the last census rounds. More precisely, we examine 10 countries
which included ethnic–racial questions in their surveys and made the data
available through the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International
(IPUMS-I) project. As Márquez (2007, 71) observed,
a country labor market plays a major role in social inclusion in that

country. As labor represents the primary (if not only) source of income
for the vast majority of the country’s population, unemployment, bad
jobs, or low wages mean material deprivation for workers and their fami-
lies. Furthermore, employment in the formal sector is a condition for ac-
cess to social insurance and social security, which links workers with the
tax and social service systems, and the workplace provides a social space
for participating in social and political organizations, including unions.
In addition to the economic dimension, labor market is important to under-

stand the dynamic of the social structure as characterized by authors such as
Weber (2009) in his reflection on social prestige. Through the analysis of the
labor market, it is possible to achieve a synthetic and enriched understanding
of an important dimension of the ethnic–racial inequality in Latin America’s
societies and to shed light upon the relation between racial and ethnic relations
and social disparities in the region.
This chapter contains five sections. Section ‘Explaining the Extreme Level of
Social Inequality in Latin America: Elements of Theory and History’ p rovides
a reflection on historical and theoretical aspects of ethnic and racial inequality
290 Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto
in Latin America. Section ‘Methodology’ illustrates the methodology of our

study. In Section ‘Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the Latin America’s Labor
Market,’ we discuss ethnic and racial inequality in the labor market of ten
Latin American countries. Finally, in Section ‘Final Remarks,’ we advance
some ideas and suggestions for future studies on this topic.
Explaining the Extreme Level of Social Inequality in Latin

America: Elements of Theory and History
Latin American countries, similar to the US, are multiethnic and multiracial
societies, historically shaped by the presence of descendants of several pop-
ulation groups, usually classified as Native Indigenous people, Africans and
Europeans. Both in the US and in Latin America, the ethnic and racial makeup
was originally produced by a colonial history – between the 16th and the
19th centuries – characterized by the enslavement of Africans, the subjugation
(and in many cases also the enslavement) of Indigenous people, and the eco-
nomic and political conquest, exploration and domination, under the rule of
some White European colonizers. From the earliest days, Latin America was
framed by deep social inequality connected to social and ethnic–racial lines
(Van den Berghe 1967; Hoetink 1973; Harris [1964] 1974; Hasenbalg 1979;
Andrews 2007, 2016; Fernandes [1974] 2000).
Historically, most Latin American societies produced intermediate rungs
composed of Mestizo population. Spanish and Portuguese settlers usually
traveled to this region as single men or, if married, in a dominant position
within a patriarchal society. Conquest, rape and sexual violence against In-
digenous and African women were commonplace, leading to a gradual, but
widespread, formation of strata of mixed people combining different grades of
skin color (Socolow 2000). When freed, the offspring resulted by the imposed
intercourse tended to assume specific social roles in slave or servile societies –
activities and positions that were best performed by free individuals, like, for
instance, police, soldiers, small merchants, foremen or low ranks of the church
(Harris [1964] 1974; Skidmore 1993). These findings may help us to under-
stand not only the general huge number of denominations to classify Mestizos
in Latin American colonial societies (Stephens 1999) but also to assess how
this system was connected to the social pyramids that were structured after
the Independence. Hence, in Latin America’s societies, Mestizos occupied in-
termediate positions, between the White elite and the Indigenous and Black
people, and were socially designated by different racial denominations. On the
contrary, US White society did not consistently recognize a specific social place
for Mestizos. Intermediate positions were occupied by poor White men and
their White families, whereas mixed-race people, together with Indigenous
and Black people, were discriminated and relegated to the lowest social strata
(Harris [1964] 1974; Skidmore 1993).
By the time of the Latin American Wars of Independence, in the first half of
the 19th century – fundamentally at the same time of the Bourgeois Revolution
in Europe – Latin American criolla elite had acquired sufficient self-interest
and self-confidence to break up the links with the metropolis. This estrange-
ment did not represent, however, a definitive rupture with the social frame
inherited during the colonial past (Furtado 1969; Gunder Frank 1974; Fernandes
[1974] 2000). In the first decades after the independence, the subjugation of
Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants per-
dured in Latin America. In Chile, the mismatch between Independence and
Abolition lasted 13 years (Independence, 1810; Abolition, 1823). In Mexico,
nineteen (1810, 1829); in Argentina, thirty-seven (1816, 1853); and in Colombia,
forty (1810, 1850). In Brazil (1822, 1888), it lasted almost seven decades!3
After the Independence Wars and until the 1930s, Latin American econ-
omies remained basically raw material exporting economies within the in-
ternational division of labor (Furtado 1969; Gunder Frank 1974; Fernandes
[1974] 2000). This phase was also characterized by the pervasive influence of
eugenics among Latin American elites. According to this prescientific theory,
underdevelopment and backwardness could be explained by the mixed genes
of Latin American people and by the ‘bad influence’ brought by Indigenous
and A frican ancestry on the ‘genetic quality’ of the population (Skidmore
1974, 1990; Graham 1990; Stepan 1991; Banton 1998; Wade 2017). It was not
by chance that Latin A merican elites considered the economic and political
modernization processes a synonym of Whitening. European immigration
concentrated essentially in four countries: Argentina, Brazil (mainly the
southern region), Cuba and Uruguay, which received more than 90% of the
European immigrants (Andrews 2007; Hernández 2013). The massive White
immigration helped to shape a new racial and socioeconomic structure in
those countries. Yet, the Whitening ideology spread out throughout the re-
gion. Even in countries, which had not received a massive European immi-
gration, such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru and V enezuela, the majority of the
White or White-complexioned population tended to hold the most forward
activities and positions, whereas the Indigenous population, Afro-descendants
and dark-complexioned people were forced onto the edges of society, in the
most backward positions (Wright 1990; Wade 1993; De la Fuente 2001; An-
drews 2007, 2016; Sue 2013; Alberto and Elena 2016; Elena 2016).
In the mid-1930s, after the Great Depression, Latin American elites – at
least in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico – promoted, through different path-
ways, a new modernization process based on the intervention of the State in
the national economy and on the industrialization (Furtado 1969; Fernandes
[1974] 2000). Concurrently, new interpretations centered in an alternative form
of national imagination – using Benedict Anderson’s definition (2006) – arose
around the idea of Mestizaje in different Latin America’s countries, like the
racial democracy in Brazil, La Raza Cosmica in Mexico and Café-Con-Leche in
Venezuela. Although eugenics was never totally absent in the Latin American
idea of Mestizaje (Graham 1990; Stepan 1991; Banton 1998; Wade 2017), the new
narrative was more complex, valuing ethnic–racial and cultural miscegenation
in itself (Telles 2006; Wade 2010). The Whitening-oriented m iscegenation
was considered a positive trait of Latin American societies and encouraged, at
least on some occasions, a radical nationalistic and anti-imperialistic rhetoric
as it happened in countries like Argentina (Peronism); Brazil (Varguism); and
Colombia (Gaetenism), Mexico (Priism) and Peru (Aprism) (Guimarães 1999,
2002; Sader et al. 2006; Elena 2016). Because of the influence of the Cold War
and internal resistances of conservative forces, Latin American nations gener-
ally promoted development projects that prioritized capital accumulation rather
than income distribution or universalization of social rights (Furtado 1969;
Fernandes 1974 [2000]). Cuba could be pointed out as the sole exception, but
as observed by De la Fuente (2001), not even this country addressed important
hurdles of the inherited racial hierarchies. During the Cold War, the modern-
ization process – mainly under the rule of military dictatorships or civilian
authoritarian regimes – and the Mestizaje narrative connected in a very perverse
way in Latin America. Although the official discourse of Mestizaje denied the
very existence of prejudice and discrimination against Indigenous people and
A fro-descendants, in everyday life several mechanisms of discrimination con-
solidated the association between social and ethnic–racial lines. In countries
like the Dominican Republic or Argentina, national rhetoric called into ques-
tion the mere existence of these groups (Candelario 2007; Elena 2016). Hence,
Latin American model of development resulted in the freezing of traditional
social hierarchies and the deepening of ethnic and racial inequality (Andrews
2007; Telles 2014; Paixão 2014; Telles and PERLA 2014).
A new scenario came to the fore in the 1980s. First, the debt crisis and
subsequent higher inflation (in some cases, hyperinflation) collapsed the de-
velopmentist model especially in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,
Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, which had advanced importation-substitution
industrialization policies. State-led industrialization was replaced by neoliberal
policies based on privatization, public-spending cuts, opening up of the domes-
tic market to international competition and deregulation of financial and labor
markets. High inflation was controlled, but several countries had to face new
constraints, such as low levels of economic growth, loss of job quality and rise
(or freezing) of social inequalities (Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Gootenberg
2010; O’ Toole 2013). Second, after nearly two decades of military dictator-
ship, a new wave of democratization swept through the region. Authoritarian
regimes were no longer able to guarantee high levels of growth or to manage
the distributive conflict associated with the economic slump. Meanwhile, the
end of the Cold War had reduced the internal and international pressures to
repress social discontent. Hence, the sum of contradictions inherited from the
previous period led to the mobilization of civil society groups eagerly awaiting
political participation and income distribution. All over Latin America, the
transition to democracy also triggered the design of new Constitutions that
acknowledged collective rights like freedom of association, and cultural recog-
nition (Gargarela 2013).
Despite the limits and contradictions of the democratization process, new
social players – mainly historically discriminated groups like Indigenous
people and Afro-descendants – entered the stage (Safa 2005; Hooker 2009;
Madrid 2012; Birdsall et al. 2012). These took a leading role in the 2001 World
Conference against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, which eventually
rendered new national commitments toward the recognition of diversity and the
fight against traditional forms of ethnic and racial discrimination (Telles 2014).
At the same time, the campaign for statistical visibility was another important
struggle for the Black and Indigenous movements in Latin America. They suc-
cessfully advocated for the inclusion of racial and ethnic questions in almost
all national censuses and promoted studies and research in social and ethnic/
racial inequality (Loveman 2014; Campbell 2013, 2014; Paixão 2016, 2017).
In the long run, if it is true that the new legal frameworks opened unprece-
dented spaces for political participation, the picture was ambiguous b ecause
these achievements were associated by some authors with a neoliberal agenda
(Hale 2006; Hooker 2009).
In the 2000s, leftist governments emerged in countries like Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. They implemented signif-
icant social policies – mainly based on cash transfer programs and, partially, on
principles of solidarity economy (El Buen Vivir) – which helped to reduce social
inequality (Pearson 2003; Chatterton 2005; Azzellini 2009; Cunha et al. 2010;
Caruana and Srnec 2013; CEPAL 2014; Ruíz and Lemaître 2015). In some cases,
these policies contributed to reducing ethnic–racial inequality and encouraging
political participation of Indigenous people and Afro-descendants. In Brazil,
for example, the positive results of Lula administration in reducing social and
racial inequality and pushing forward affirmative action policies in higher edu-
cation are well documented (Paixão and Carvano 2008; Paixão et al. 2011). The
very fact that Hugo Chavéz was a dark-complexioned man and Evo Morales
an Indigenous leader reveals a connection between the new Latin America’s
leftism and ethnic and racial mobilization. Another example is the fact that in
Argentina neoperonism sought the support of Cabecitas Negras (Black little heads).
The oft-used term is usually associated with working class people, who could
generally be identified as Mestizos or people with m edium-dark complexion
(Alberto and Elena 2016). On the other hand, the relation between the new
leftist governments and the ethnic and racial movements in Latin America
was not immune to incongruences. In Ecuador, for instance, the relation-
ship between Rafael Correa administration and important Indigenous groups
was stormy. In Brazil, the reduction of racial asymmetries did not prevent
the growth of Black and Brown homicide victimization (Paixão et al. 2011).
Furthermore, the success of the new leftist governments in Latin America was
due to the reduction of income inequality. But these policies were strongly
based on fast China’s economic growth and the high price of commodities
(Gootenberg 2010; O’Toole 2013; CEPAL 2014). Thus, these governments lost
ground when this economic cycle declined, and leftist experiences reverted in
several countries through elections (Argentina in 2015); bloodless coups d’état
(Paraguay in 2002, Honduras in 2009, and Brazil in 2016); or violent conflicts
(Ecuador in 2015, and especially Venezuela following Chávez’s death in 2013).
These trends threaten the achievements of the last years and open a period of
uncertainty for social and racial equity in Latin America.
Methodology
In this chapter, we use the most up-to-date census data of ten Latin A merican
countries extracted from the IPUMS-I website4: Brazil (2010), Colombia
(2005), Costa Rica (2011), Cuba (2002), Ecuador (2010), El Salvador (2007),
Mexico (2015), Nicaragua (2005), Panama (2010) and Uruguay (2011).5
Questions on ethnicity and race have progressively been incorporated in Latin
America’s census questionnaires in the census rounds of 1995–2004 and 2005–2014.
The history of the ethnic and racial questions in the national censuses of the
region reveals that it was traditionally more acceptable to the national statisti-
cal offices the inclusion of Indigenous people. In the 1995–2004 census round,
for instance, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Mexico, Panama, P araguay, Peru and
Venezuela included questions for the identification of Indigenous people, but not
for Afro-descendants. In the 2005–2014 census round, the situation changed,
and almost all those countries incorporated the identification of Black popu-
lation.6 In Cuba, the question on skin color just included the identification of
Afro-descendants, but not of Indigenous people (Paixão 2016, 2017). Only ten
Latin American censuses containing self-identification data on Afro-descendants
and Indigenous people have been released on IPUMS-I website.7 In the case of
Argentina, the 2010 Census available on IPUMS-I was drawn from the short
(basic) form census questionnaire, whereas the question on A frican-descendant
and Indigenous ancestry is only present in the long form.
The terms used in this study are the original expressions contained in the
national census questionnaires. As far as possible, we also maintained the
A fro-descendant groups separated, following the original classificatory terms
used in each census. We use, for example, Preto (Black) and Pardo (Brown) to
separately describe the Afro-descendant population of Brazil, or Negro/Afrode-
scendiente (Black/Afro-descendant) and Mulato (Mulatto) to designate the Afro-
descendant population of Costa Rica8(Table 13.1). Two reasons lead us to carry
on the analysis of Afro-descendant groups separately. First, taking into consid-
eration prior research on a pigmentocratic pattern of discrimination against Afro-
Latinos (Nogueira [1955] 1998; Hoetink 1973; Telles 2014), our objective is to
investigate if Mestizos with lighter complexion achieve, on average, better social

positions than individuals with darker complexion. Second, with the exception
of Brazil and Cuba, the other countries had included the self-identification of
Afro-descendants just recently in their census questionnaires. The ethnic/racial
question introduced in 1993 Colombia Census was reformulated in the 2005
edition. The same occurred in Costa Rica (question included in the 2000 edi-
tion and reformulated in the 2010 census) and Ecuador (2001 to 2011). And the
self-identification of the Afro-descendant population was included for the very
first time in the censuses of Nicaragua (2005), El Salvador (2007), Panama (2010)
and Mexico (2015). Taking into consideration the relative novelty of the theme,
and the almost absolute absence of research on race/ethnic inequality using these
data, we decided that it would be at least hasty to simply assume that the socio-
economic conditions of these groups could be equated without further analysis.
Our investigation is limited by two factors. The first is purely statistical:
the small sample of Afro-descendants in Nicaragua’s population (less than 1%)
prevented us from obtaining valid statistical information in the case of several
indicators or analyzing the Black groups (Garífunas and Creoles) separately.
Second, even in countries in which the presence of Afro-descendants is more
expressive, such as Colombia and Panama, it was not statistically recommend-
able to d ifferentiate each group, because some categories had a very low num-
ber of cases.9 In these cases, we adopted the terms Afrocolombiano (for Colombia)
and Negro (for Panama) to group the Afro-descendant population of these
countries10 (Table 13.1).
Overall, when we discuss regional patterns of economic and social conditions
of the Black population in Latin America, we use the term Afro-descendant
or Afro-Latino to include all the groups that are usually associated with an
A frican origin – because of cultural or ancestral affiliation or because of physical
traits (Cruces, Domench, and Pinto 2012; Ozemela, Bailey, and Barrow 2012;
Campbell 2013, 2014). Although our study focuses on the population of
A frican descent, when available, information on the Indigenous population is
also reported. These are gathered together under the generic denomination of
‘Indigenous people’, despite the specificities of language, ethnicity and origin
in each country. We have taken this decision due to the complexity of the In-
digenous category and problems of statistical variance.11 In Colombia, Mexico,
Nicaragua and Panama, the questions on ethnicity or race did not investigate
if the individuals considered themselves White or Mestizo. We labeled all indi-
viduals who did not declare to belong to any ethnic–racial group as No Étnico.
Throughout the chapter, we use both terms ‘ethnic’ (grounded in cultural or
linguistic affiliation) and ‘racial’ (based on physical characteristics). The reason
is that National Statistical Offices across Latin America adopted one or the
other approach or both of them, when they designed their surveys. It is also
important to notice that the terminology used in the national census has sev-
eral implications on the process of self-identification and on the measurement
Table 13.1 A fro-Latino identification by country, 2002–2015
Country Year of Questiona Afro-descendant categoriesa Categories used in the study

the census
Brazil 2010 A sua cor ou raça é? PretaParda Pretos

Pardos
Colombia 2005 ¿De acuerdo con su CULTURA, PUEBLO Raizal del Archipiélago de San Andrés y Afrocolombianos
o RASGOS FÍSICOS… es o se reconoce Providencia
como? Palanquero de San Basilio
Negro (a), Mulato (a) o Afrodescendiente
Costa Rica 2011 ¿Se considera? Negro(a) o afrodescendiente Mulato (a) Negros/Afrodescendientes
Mulatos
Cuba 2002 ¿Cuál es el color de piel? Negro Mestizo o mulato Negros Mestizos/Mulatos
Ecuador 2010 ¿Cómo se identifica según su cultura y Afroecuatoriano/a Afrodescendiente NegrosMulatos
costumbres? Negro/a Mulato/a
El Salvador 2007 ¿Es usted? Negro (de raza) Negros
Mexico 2015 De acuerdo con su cultura, historia y Sí Sí, en parte Afromexicanos Afro-Indígenas
tradiciones, ¿ se considera negra(o), es decir,
afromexicana(o) o afrodescendiente?b
Nicaragua 2005 ¿A cuál de los siguientes pueblos indígenas o GarífunaCreole (Kriol) Negros
etnias pertenece?
Panama 2010 ¿Se considera usted? Negro(a) colonial Negro(a) antillano(a) Negros
Negro(a) Otro [negro]
Uruguay 2011 ¿Cree tener ascendencia?; Cuál considera la Afro o Negra Negros
principal?c
Source: National Statistical Offices, Census Questionnaires.

a We use the original text contained in the questionnaire (in Spanish or in Portuguese).
b The 2015 Intercensal Survey of Mexico also contained a question on Indigenous ancestry (De acuerdo con su cultura, ¿se considera indígena? Sí / Sí, en parte). The
category Afro-Indígenas contains the respondents who answered affirmatively to both questions. The group Afromexicanos includes the interviewees who responded
‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, partly’ to the question on Black ancestry, but ‘No’ or ‘I do not know’ to the question on Indigenous descent.
c In Uruguay, the ethnic–racial question was built in two stages. First, the interviewer asked whether the interviewee had any ethnic or racial ancestry. Second, if the
respondent responded ‘Yes’ to more than one ancestry, it was asked which of the ones signaled is considered primary.
of ethnic and racial inequality. Prior research revealed that ethnic and racial
questions are extremely influenced by the way in which the question and the
categories of answers are formulated (Telles and PERLA 2014; Paixão 2017).
Because different classificatory systems capture racial and ethnic inequality
differently, we may be attentive to possible ambiguities and limits of using
national census data sets to measure and interpret racial and e thnic inequality.
Finally, we focus on selected characteristics of the labor force by race/ethnic-
ity: participation rate, educational attainment, unemployment, informality and
occupational profile. With the exception of Brazil, Mexico and Panama, the
national censuses we studied did not investigate earnings, so we could not in-
clude an analysis of income in our research.
Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the Latin America’s Labor Market
Labor Force Participation Rate

The economically active population (EAP), or labor force, is usually defined as
the sum of people employed and unemployed (actively seeking a job). The labor
force participation rate is calculated by expressing the labor force as a percent-
age of the total working-age population. In this case, we adopted the cohort of
people aged 15 to 64 years.
In general accordance with the size of the population of each country,
Brazil was the country with the highest number of Afro-descendants (about
7.5 m illion Blacks and 36.9 million Browns) in the labor force. Next, Cuba
had about 516 thousand Blacks and 1 million Mestizos and Mulattos (summing
up more than 1.5 million Afro-Cubans). Colombia occupied the third position
with more than 1.2 million Afro-descendant workers. In Mexico, 305 thou-
sand Afromexicanos and 501 thousand Afro-Indígenas were in the EAP. Ecuador
had 304 thousand Blacks and about 112 thousand Mulattos in the EAP, whereas
Panama had 152 thousand Blacks in the labor force. The number of Afro-
Latinos in the labor force was around 20 thousand Negros and 120 thousand
Mulatos in Costa Rica, 74 thousand in Uruguay, 5.9 thousand in Nicaragua
and 2.5 thousand in El Salvador (Table 13.2).
In Mexico, there was the highest number of Indigenous people in the labor
force (9.3 million), followed by Ecuador (395 thousand), Brazil (284 thousand),
Colombia (283 thousand) and Panama (96 thousand). The census of Nicaragua
registered 61 thousand Indigenous workers, whereas they were 41 thousand in
Uruguay and 34 thousand in Costa Rica. El Salvador had the smallest number
of Indigenous people in the labor force (4.8 thousand) (Table 13.2).
In percentage terms, Afro-descendants made up 49% (8% Blacks and 41%
Browns) of Brazilian labor force. In Cuba, they summed up 36% of total labor
force (12% Blacks and 24% Mulattos and mixed-race). Blacks were 11% of EAP
in Panama and 9% in Colombia. In Costa Rica, Afro-descendants represented
8.2% of the national labor force (12% Blacks and 7% M ulattos). In Ecuador,
Table 13.2 L abor force by gender, ethnic–racial group, and country, 2002–2015
Country Year Race/ethnicity Labor force
Male Female Total

a
Brazil 2010 Pretos 4,414,882 3,077,461 7,492,344
Pardos 21,251,885 15,655,664 36,907,549
Indígenas 164,013 119,597 283,609
Brancos 24,118,410 20,109,710 44,228,120
Total 50,462,526 39,458,550 89,921,075
Colombiab 2005 Afrocolombianos 820,430 435,954 1,256,385
Indígenas 206,293 76,341 282,634
No-étnicos 7,458,280 4,389,987 11,848,267
Total 8,508,122 4,915,915 13,424,037
Costa Ricac 2011 Negros/Afrodescendientes 13,130 7,220 20,350
Mulatos 81,930 38,250 120,180
Indígenas 24,110 10,260 34,370
Blancos/Mestizos 907,230 508,310 1,415,540
Total 1,087,430 596,460 1,683,890
Cuba 2002 Negros 323,970 191,600 515,570
Mestizos/Mulatos 667,550 378,680 1,046,230
Blancos 1,811,760 970,060 2,781,820
Total 2,803,280 1,540,340 4,343,620
Ecuadord 2010 Negros 200,280 103,800 304,080
Mulatos 73,770 37,800 111,570
Indígenas 226,500 168,750 395,250
Montubios 314,070 91,400 405,470
Mestizos 2,547,330 1,583,720 4,131,050
Blancos 211,730 132,370 344,100
Total 3,590,110 2,125,200 5,715,310
El Salvadord 2007 Negros 1,690 840 2,530
Indígenas 2,800 2,070 4,870
Mestizos 970,640 641,430 1,612,070
Blancos 124,620 113,840 238,460
Total 1,107,350 763,570 1,870,920
Mexico 2015 Afromexicanos 199,722 104,912 304,634
Afro-Indígenas 327,422 173,902 501,324
Indígenas 6,382,488 2,957,998 9,340,486
No-étnicos 22,294,056 12,560,558 34,854,614
Total 29,203,688 15,797,370 45,001,058
Country Year Race/ethnicity Labor force
Male Female Total
Nicaraguae 2005 Negros 3,620 2,300 5,920

Indígenas 42,260 19,310 61,570
No-étnicos 1,020,970 494,780 1,515,750
Total 1,108,940 532,160 1,641,100
Panama 2010 Negros 90,900 61,150 152,410
Indígenas 76,270 20,020 96,290
No-étnicos 697,860 411,260 1,109,120
Total 865,030 492,790 1,357,820
Uruguay f 2011 Negros 42,880 31,090 73,970
Indígenas 21,070 19,460 40,530
Blancos 739,070 615,570 1,354,640
Total 827,890 687,680 1,515,570
Source: Authors’ calculation using IPUMS-I.

Notes: Labor force aged 15 to 64 years.
a The ‘total’ category includes those classified as being Asian (Amarelo).
b The ‘total’ category includes Rom and Unknown.
c The ‘total’ category includes those classified as Asian (Chino), Other, Unknown and None.
d The ‘total’ category includes those classified as Others.
e The total includes the categories: Mestizo from the Caribbean Coast; Other; Doesn’t know; Unknown .
f The ‘total’ category includes Asian (Asiática o Amarilla), Other and Unknown.
the participation of Blacks was 5%, whereas Mulattos were 2% of the national
labor force. In Uruguay, 4.8% of the labor force was Black. In Mexico, Afro-
descendants corresponded to 1.8% of the EAP (0.7% A fromexicanos, and 1.1%
Afro-Indígenas). Finally, in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Black participation in the
labor force was smaller than 1%. In Mexico, the Indigenous participation rate
was 20.8%. In all other countries, it was smaller than 10%. In Ecuador and Pan-
ama, Indigenous participation was around 7%, followed by Nicaragua (3.7%)
and Uruguay (2.7%). In Colombia and Costa Rica, Indigenous participation
was 2%, whereas in Brazil and El Salvador was less than 1%.
In all the selected countries, the female participation rate was significantly
lower than male rate. The biggest difference between men and women par-
ticipation occurred in Nicaragua (42 percent point – pp) and the smallest in
Uruguay (17 pp). These data reflect aspects of the ongoing patriarchal system,
in which a male breadwinner model is still active across Latin America. It is
worthwhile to mention the national nuances when we analyze the data by
race and ethnicity. In this case, the biggest gender gap was observed among
Ecuadorian Montubios (56.5 pp), Panamanian Indígenas (51.8 pp) and Ecuadorian
Mulattos (39.4 pp). The smallest differences were in Uruguay (both Whites and
Indigenous less than 18 pp) and among Brazilian groups (gender gap around 18
pp for Indigenous, Black and White population). Nonetheless, in every ethnic

and racial group, we found a gender gap in the labor force participation rate,
reflecting conservative social arrangements across Latin America.
Educational Attainment of the Labor Force

Table 13.3 shows educational attainment of the labor force by ethnicity or race.12
We observe that Cuba was the country with the lowest percentage of workers
having little or no formal schooling (less than primary completed, 3.2%), even
when we break down data by race and ethnicity. In contrast, almost one in ev-
ery three Afro-Brazilian workers had less than primary completed and almost
a quarter of Afro-Colombian workers had less than primary.
Among workers having secondary or university education, Cuba was again
the best-performing country, with a significant percentage (55.4%) of well-
educated workers. Next, in Panama, 52.9% of the labor force had completed
secondary education or a higher degree. On the other hand, Uruguay had
the lowest rate of workers with at least secondary level completed (36.3%).
The high level of repetition and school drop among high school students as
well as the pronounced deterioration of school performance can partly explain
Uruguay’s worst performance (Santín and Sicilia 2015).
When we break down data by race and ethnicity, we can identify a g eneral
pattern across the selected countries. By and large, White and White Mestizo
workers had higher educational performance, whereas Indigenous workers
had the worst. In Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay, the rate of Afro-
descendant workers with less than the primary completed was higher than White
or White Mestizo. In Costa Rica, the low level of education was more expressive
among Mulatos than Negros, whereas the latter had an educational performance
similar to Whites and Mestizos. In Cuba, there was hardly any difference be-
tween Black and White workers or between Mulatto and White labor force. In
Mexico, the percentage of Afro-Indígenas with less than the primary completed
was higher than Afro-Mexican rate. The performance of the latter was similar
to the nonethnic group. Finally, in Panama, less than primary education was a
condition more frequent among the nonethnic group than among Negros.
Among workers with at least a secondary degree, Afro-descendants were
clearly a smaller group, in comparison with White or White Mestizo workers.
These disparities are incontestably visible in Ecuador (the difference between
Blancos and Negros was equal to 26.4 pp and between Blancos and Mulatos to 20.3
pp), in Brazil (Brancos/Pretos 17.3 pp; and Brancos/Pardos 16.7 pp) and in Uruguay
(Blancos/Negros, 21.1 pp). In Colombia, the difference between the nonethnic
group and Afro-Colombians was 8.5 pp. In Costa Rica, the proportion of
Mulatto workers with at least the secondary level completed was 13.3 pp in-
ferior to the rate of the White labor force. But Negros had a higher level of
education than White workers (5 pp). In Cuba, racial inequality was 1.4 pp for
Blacks and 3.1 pp for Mestizos/Mulatos. Although it was lower than in the other
Table 13.3 L abor force by educational attainment, ethnic–racial group, and country, 2002–2015
Country Year Race/ethnicity Educational attainment
Less than primary Primary Secondary University

completed completed completed completed
Brazila 2010 Pretos 33.1 31.8 29.2 5.8

Pardos 32.3 32.1 29.1 6.5
Indígenas 45.9 29.6 19.9 4.6
Brancos 20.9 26.8 34.2 18.1
Total 26.7 29.4 31.6 12.3
Colombiab 2005 Afrocolombianos 24.5 36.8 29.7 8.6
Indígenas 47.6 32.1 14.9 3.8
No-étnicos 18.3 34.8 32.9 13.9
Total 19.5 34.9 32.2 13.2
Costa Ricac 2011 Negros/Afrodescendientes 11.4 39.5 23.9 25.3
Mulatos 16.2 53.0 18.1 12.8
Indígenas 24.5 46.7 15.3 13.5
Blancos/Mestizos 10.4 45.4 19.7 24.5
Total 11.3 45.9 19.5 23.3
Cuba 2002 Negros 3.3 41.0 42.3 12.6
Mestizos/Mulatos 3.5 42.4 41.6 11.6
Blancos 3.0 40.0 41.3 15.0
Total 3.2 40.7 41.5 13.9
Ecuadord 2010 Negros 20.8 45.2 25.2 4.6
Mulatos 16.9 43.6 30.8 5.2
Indígenas 34.0 47.2 13.5 2.0
Montubios 24.9 48.2 19.3 4.3
Mestizos 11.6 37.5 35.5 13.0
Blancos 9.8 30.9 38.7 17.5
Total 14.6 39.0 32.4 11.3
Mexico 2015 Afromexicanos 8.6 43.7 26.6 21.0
Afro-Indígenas 12.7 49.2 24.0 14.0
Indígenas 17.1 52.8 19.9 10.0
No-étnicos 8.2 47.0 25.9 18.6
Total 10.1 48.2 24.7 16.8
Panama 2010 Negros 3.7 32.3 42.2 21.6
Indígenas 35.8 45.6 14.9 3.4
No-étnicos 6.9 38.5 34.6 19.8
Total 8.6 38.3 34.0 18.9
Uruguaye 2011 Negros 11.3 71.8 15.4 1.5
Indígenas 7.5 65.2 24.0 3.3
Blancos 4.6 57.4 29.7 8.3
Total 5.1 58.6 28.6 7.7

Notes: Labor force aged 15 to 64 years. Details may not sum to 100% because of rounding.
b The ‘total’ category includes Rom and Unknown.
e The ‘total’ category Asian (Asiática o Amarilla), Others and Unknown.
countries, it was still higher than the asymmetries among Cuban less-educated
workers. Finally, in Mexico and Panama, the rate of Afromexicanos (but not
Afro-Indígenas) and Negros with at least the secondary level of education was
higher than the rate of the nonethnic group.
Across Latin America, Indigenous educational performance was almost with-
out exception the worst. Only in Uruguay, Negros workers had more disadvan-
tages than all the other ethnic/racial groups. Comparing educational attainment
of Black and Mulatto workers, we observe that in Brazil and Cuba, there was no
significant difference. In Costa Rica and Mexico, Negros and Afromexicanos had
a better performance than Mulattos and Afro-Indígenas, respectively. Conversely,
in Ecuador, Mulattos were in a better educational p osition than Blacks. Thus,
we cannot confirm the pigmentocratic hypothesis of a bigger disadvantage for
people of darker complexion, at least based on the self-identification responses
contained in the national censuses of Brazil, Cuba and Costa Rica. Last but
not least, it is important to review the cases of Mexico, Costa Rica and Pan-
ama. A fro-Mexicans and Afro-Panamanians had better achievements than the
nonethnic group. Likewise, the educational performance of Costa Rican Negros
was better than Blancos/Mestizos. Further research is needed to explain the atyp-
ical racial/ethnic distribution of education in those countries. Among many
potential factors, we advance the hypothesis that the format and terminology
used in the race/ethnicity question, in Panama and Mexico strongly based on
cultural dimensions, could at least partly explain this unexpected outcome.
Unemployment Rate
Table 13.4 shows the unemployment rate by race and sex in seven of our selected
countries.13 Brazil and Costa Rica had the higher unemployment rate (around
11%). On the contrary, Cuba had the lowest index (3%). When we break down by
race and ethnicity, Brazil and Costa Rica still maintained the higher proportion of
unemployment. In the first country, the rate was equal to 13% for Pretos, 14% for
Pardos and 27% for Indigenous workers. In Costa Rica, the unemployment index
corresponded to 14% for Negros, 13% for Mulattos and 16% for Indigenous workers.
With the exception of Mexico, in all other countries, the unemployment
rate of Afro-descendants was higher than White, White Mestizo or noneth-
nic groups. Brazil had the biggest asymmetries between Afro-descendants and
Whites. The unemployment rate of Preto workers was 48% higher than White
workers’ rate, whereas the difference between Pardos and Whites was 61%.
Ecuador also showed great asymmetries, being the unemployment of Blacks
and Mulattos about 32% higher than Whites (and 58% of Mulattos). The dif-
ference between Afro-descendants and the dominant group was around 31% in
Colombia, 25% in Uruguay and 23% in Panama. In Costa Rica, the hiatus was
about 22% for Negros and 11% for Mulattos.
Examining female unemployment, we observe two different patterns. In the
first scenario, the unemployment rate of women was higher than men. That is
Table 13.4 Unemployment rate by gender, ethnic–racial group, and country,
2002–2015
Country Year Race/ethnicity Unemployment rate
Male Female Total
Brazil a 2010 Pretos 9.7 16.7 12.6

Pardos 11.0 17.4 13.7
Indígenas 24.3 30.5 26.9
Brancos 6.7 10.6 8.5
Total 8.9 13.9 11.1
Colombiab 2005 Afrocolombianos 8.5 8.2 8.4
Indígenas 5.5 4.9 5.3
No-étnicos 6.5 6.4 6.5
Total 6.6 6.6 6.6
Costa Ricac 2011 Negros/Afrodescendientes 13.6 14.4 13.9
Mulatos 12.4 13.0 12.6
Indígenas 16.1 14.5 15.6
Blancos/Mestizos 11.7 10.9 11.4
Total 12.1 11.4 11.8
Cuba 2002 Negros 3.9 1.6 3.0
Mestizos/Mulatos 4.2 1.8 3.4
Blancos 3.6 1.5 2.9
Total 3.8 1.6 3.0
Ecuadord 2010 Negros 7.8 10.6 8.8
Mulatos 7.1 12.0 8.7
Montubios 4.8 7.8 5.5
Mestizos 4.9 6.4 5.5
Blancos 5.8 7.9 6.6
Total 5.1 6.6 5.7
Mexico 2015 Afromexicanos 4.1 2.0 3.4
Afro-Indígenas 4.4 2.1 3.6
Total 4.8 2.7 4.1
Panama 2010 Negros 7.3 10.5 8.6
Total 6.3 8.9 7.3
Uruguaye 2011 Negros 4.5 12.7 7.9
Blancos 4.4 8.6 6.3
Total 4.4 9.0 6.5
Notes: Labor force aged 15 to 64 years.

b The ‘total’ category includes those classified as Rom and Unknown.
e The ‘total’ category includes those classified as being Asian (Asiática o Amarilla), Other and Unknown.
the case of Brazil, Ecuador, Panama and Uruguay. In Brazil, the ratio between
Black women and White men was around 150% and between Brown women
and White men was about 160%. In Uruguay, the difference between Black
women and White men was about 189%. In Ecuador, the asymmetries between
Afro-descendant women and the dominant groups (Mestizo and White) were
also very high (for example, the difference between Black women and Mestizo
men was 115%). In Panama, the ratio between Black women and White men
was slightly lower (however, quite sharp): 76%. The second scenario displays a
lower (or equal) unemployment rate for women in comparison to men. That is
the situation of Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba and Mexico. These data are com-
prehensible in the light of the gender gap we observed in the participation rate.
In these countries, women’s participation in the labor market was almost half
of men. In general, the unemployment rate of Afro-descendant women was
higher than White men index. The difference was around 27% in Colombia.
In Costa Rica, it was 23% for Blacks and 11% for Mulattos. Cuba and Mexico
were the only countries in which the unemployment rate of Afro-descendant
women was lower than White or nonethnic men.
To summarize, in the 2000s, unemployment has decreased in Latin A merica,
pushed down by the rise of international commodity prices and the overall
positive economic performance of the region. Even so, women (especially
Indigenous and Afro-descendant women) still maintained a lower level of oc-
cupation all over Latin America.
Labor Informality
As it has already been broadly discussed in prior research, labor informality is
widespread all over Latin America (Furtado 1969; Germani 1980). According
to the International Labour Organization – ILO (2014), besides the economic
growth and the reduction of informal employment in Latin America in the
2000s, informality still represented 47.7% of total nonagricultural occupation
in that region in 2012. In this chapter, we developed a methodology to assess the
level of informality according to information available in the national census
questionnaires. We adopt a definition of informality that covers employee,
self-employed and employer without social security protection plus domestic
employees and unpaid family workers. Taking this method into account, the
informality rate was calculated as the number of informal workers by the to-
tal number of employed persons. Unfortunately, due to the lack of statistical
robustness (El Salvador and Nicaragua) or to the absence of the necessary in-
formation in the national census questionnaires (Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay and
again El Salvador), it was only possible to compute the informality rate for five
countries of our sample.
According to Table 13.5, Colombia had the highest number of informal
workers. Ecuador also recorded a very high level of informality, followed by
Brazil, Panama and Costa Rica. In Colombia, three in four Black workers
Table 13.5 Informality rate by ethnic–racial group and country, 2005–2011
Country Year Race/ethnicity Informality rate
Brazila 2010 Pretos 44.9

Pardos 47.7
Indígenas 58.0
Brancos 35.3
Total 41.1
Colombiab 2005 Afrocolombianos 75.5
Indígenas 87.7
No-étnicos 69.7
Total 70.7
Costa Ricac 2011 Negros/Afrodescendientes 26.9
Mulatos 29.6
Indígenas 43.2
Blancos/Mestizos 24.4
Total 25.4
Ecuadord 2010 Negros 65.9
Mulatos 66.0
Indígenas 80.5
Montubios 70.1
Mestizos 58.1
Blancos 56.4
Total 61.1
Panama 2010 Negros 28.8
Indígenas 60.8
No-étnicos 37.3
Total 38.0

Notes: Employed persons aged 15 to 64 years. The informality rate covers employee, self-employed
and employer without social security protection plus domestic employees and unpaid family
workers.
b The ‘total’ category includes those classified as Rom and Unknown.
were informal, and in Ecuador, six of every ten Afro-descendant workers (both
A fro-Ecuadorians and Mulattos). In Brazil, the informality rate was 45% among
Pretos and 48% among Pardos. In Costa Rica, the number of informal workers
was lower (27% among Negros and 30% among Mulattos were informally oc-
cupied). Similarly, in Panama, the informality rate of Black workers was 29%.
In all these countries (with the exception of Panama), the informality rate of
Afro-descendant workers was superior to the rate of White workers. Brazil and
Ecuador had the biggest differences between Afro-descendant workers and the
dominant group. Indigenous people had the highest level of informality in all
the selected Latin American countries. The rate was 88% in Colombia, 81% in
Ecuador, 61% in Panama, 58% in Brazil and 43% in Costa Rica.
Occupational Profile
In this section, we focus on the distribution of the labor force by occupation, as
coded by ILO in the International Standard Classification of Occupations and
harmonized by IPUMS-I. The breakdown is important, not just economically
but also sociologically, because it refers to an important social and cultural
dimension of the labor market: the prestige of occupations (Weber 2009). As
Table 13.6 shows, there are nine major groups: (A) legislators, senior officials
and managers, (B) professionals, (C) technicians and associate professionals, (D)
clerks, (E) service workers and shop and market sales, (F) skilled agricultural
and fishery workers, (G) crafts and related trades workers, (H) plant and ma-
chine operators and assemblers and (I) elementary occupations. We briefly fo-
cus on the most (A, B and C) and the least (I) prestigious occupations. Again,
problems of high variance of some samples and the lack of information on
occupational categories prevented us from calculating occupational distribu-
tion for all the countries. In this section, we just discuss the cases of Brazil,
Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama.
White workers were occupied more than Afro-descendants and Indigenous
people in the three most prestigious occupations: Brazil (Brancos 26.5%, Pretos
13.5%, Pardos 14.3%, Indígenas 15%), and Ecuador (Blancos 22.6%, Negros 7.2%,
Mulatos 8.1%, Indígenas 3.6%, Mestizos 17.2%, Montubios 5.8%). In Cuba, the
rate of Whites (34.3%) in the three most prestigious occupations was higher
than Negros (31.9%) or Mulattos (30.3%). If we contrasted these data with
Brazil or Ecuador, it would reveal a lower level of ethnic and racial inequality
in Cuba. Costa Rica and Mexico were two exceptions: Negros (29.1%) and
Afromexicanos (22.1%) were more often occupied in prestigious professions than
Blancos/Mestizos (28.3%) and No-étnicos (19.3%), respectively. However, these
last groups maintained better performance than Mulatos and Indigenous in Costa
Rica, and Afro-Indígenas and Indígenas in Mexico. These data are coherent with
the educational profile that was previously discussed.
At the other extreme, the ethnic–racial disparity was more conspicuous. For
example, in Brazil, 27.2% of Pretos, 24.7% of Pardos and 23.7% of I ndigenous
workers were occupied in elementary occupations. But only 15.4% of Brancos
were employed in the same positions. Something similar occurred in Ecuador:
Negros, 27.8%; Mulatos, 23%; and Blancos only 15.4%. In Costa Rica, the
a symmetries between Whites and Mulattos (7.5 pp) were again more salient
than between Whites and Blacks (0.8 pp).
In Cuba, ethnic–racial inequality in the labor market appeared to be lower
than in other Latin American countries. Even so, the percentage of Blacks
(13.3%) and Mulattos (12.8%) employed in the least prestigious positions was
Table 13.6 Employed persons by occupation, ethnic–racial group and country, 2002–2015
Country Year Race/ethnicity Occupationsa
A B C D E F G H I
Brazilb 2010 Pretos 1.9 6.0 5.6 5.9 16.7 7.2 14.1 7.7 27.2
Pardos 2.4 6.6 5.3 6.2 17.1 9.5 12.4 8.2 24.7
Indígenas 1.5 8.5 5.0 3.3 11.4 27.0 8.5 5.0 23.7
Brancos 5.5 13.3 7.7 8.2 16.6 6.3 10.4 8.4 15.4
Total 3.9 10.0 6.6 7.2 16.8 7.7 11.5 8.2 20.1
Costa Ricac 2011 Negros / 1.3 16.9 10.9 9.5 21.7 3.3 9.8 6.3 20.3
Afrodescendientes
Mulatos 0.7 7.6 8.6 7.2 21.4 3.3 14.6 9.7 27.0
Indígenas 1.0 9.7 6.4 4.7 18.4 12.7 9.3 5.4 32.6
Blancos/Mestizos 1.7 15.8 10.8 8.7 19.7 3.6 11.1 9.1 19.5
Total 1.6 14.9 10.5 8.4 20.0 3.7 11.4 9.0 20.5
Cuba 2002 Negros 8.6 8.9 14.4 4.3 13.3 9.6 16.7 6.5 13.3
Mestizos/Mulatos 8.6 8.3 13.4 5.2 13.4 14.8 14.1 6.7 12.8
Blancos 10.6 10.1 13.6 6.0 13.2 13.3 12.0 8.4 10.7
Total 9.9 9.6 13.6 5.6 13.3 13.2 13.0 7.8 11.5
Ecuadord 2010 Negros 0.9 3.9 2.4 4.9 20.3 7.4 14.7 6.8 27.8
Mulatos 1.2 3.9 3.0 5.8 22.7 5.8 16.7 7.8 23.0
Indígenas 0.5 2.3 0.8 2.5 12.1 38.5 11.5 3.1 21.1
Montubios 1.1 3.2 1.5 3.3 13.4 11.8 9.5 5.8 41.1
Blancos 5.9 10.6 6.1 8.6 22.0 4.8 11.0 7.3 15.4
Mestizos 2.8 9.8 4.6 7.6 19.1 8.5 14.1 8.0 18.3
Total 2.5 8.4 4.1 6.8 18.5 10.5 13.4 7.4 20.5
Mexico 2015 Afromexicanos 3.5 11.0 7.6 7.3 21.7 7.3 14.3 10.5 15.6
Afro-Indígenas 2.2 6.9 6.3 5.4 23.2 10.7 15.3 10.1 18.6
Indígenas 1.6 4.8 5.2 4.6 19.5 17.1 17.0 9.5 19.8
No-étnicos 3.1 9.5 6.7 7.0 22.1 6.6 15.9 12.4 15.4
Total 2.8 8.5 6.4 6.5 21.6 8.8 16.1 11.7 16.4
Panama 2010 Negros 6.1 13.9 10.1 10.5 19.0 1.9 12.9 7.9 16.9
Indígenas 1.6 3.6 2.4 2.4 13.2 28.3 9.8 1.9 35.6
No-étnicos 6.7 11.4 8.5 7.7 18.5 5.7 12.7 7.1 20.9
Total 6.2 11.2 8.2 7.7 18.2 6.9 12.5 6.8 21.5
Notes: E mployed persons aged 15 to 64 years. Occupations do not sum to 100% because we did not include residual categories
(Other occupations, unspecified or n.e.c., Response suppressed, Unknown) and the Armed Forces. The latter is not
counted in the classification of occupations of Costa Rica, Cuba and Panama.
a The occupational categories correspond to as follows: (A) legislators, senior officials and managers; (B) professionals;
(C) technicians and associate professionals; (D) clerks; (E) service workers and shop and market sales; (F) skilled agricultural
and fishery workers; (G) crafts and related trades workers; (H) plant and machine operators and assemblers; and (I) elemen-
tary occupations.
b The ‘total’ category includes those classified as being Asian (Amarelo).
slighter higher than the White rate (10.7%). In Mexico, the proportion of
A fro-Mexican and nonethnic workers employed in elementary occupations
was almost the same (about 15%), whereas Afro-Indígenas and Indígenas share
was higher (about 19%). In Panama, elementary occupations were more com-
mon among Indigenous workers (35.6%) than the nonethnic groups (20.9%)
or A fro-Panamanians (16.9%). Based on the current level of development of
the studies in the field of race disparities in Latin America, we are inclined to
conclude that Panama census data need further investigation. Actually, Brown
and Campbell (2014) have already suggested that the design of the ethnic–racial
questions might have produced some sort of tendentious results.
Duncan Dissimilarity Index

One of the most useful tools for studying ethnic–racial inequality in the labor
market is the Duncan Dissimilarity Index, which is a measure that helps to
identify levels of occupational or residential segregation. The original concep-
tual definition of the Index and its formula has been described in a seminal ar-
ticle by Duncan and Duncan (1955). Since the second half of the 1970s, several
critics and alternative measures have arisen. But Massey and Denton (1988)
have shown that those proposals tend to be strongly correlated with the origi-
nal Duncan Index. So, we apply the original formula as proposed in the 1950s.
Comparing men and women, the basic formula is:
n
I= 1
2 ∑ M −F i i
i =1
mi f
Mi = and Fi = i
m f
where
Mi = number of men in occupation i, a single occupation (i ranges from 1 to
n, where n is the total number of occupations)
M = total number of men employed in all occupations
Wi = number of women in occupation i
W = total number of women employed in all occupations
This formula can be used to compute occupational standing by race or eth-
nicity, replacing, for example, men for Whites and women for Afro-descendants.
The absence of occupational segregation would correspond to a Duncan Index
of 0, higher values would imply that racial–ethnic asymmetries between groups
exist.
As in the previous section, we need information on the occupational pro-
file of the labor force to obtain the Duncan Index, so it was only possible to
compute the index in six countries: Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico
Table 13.7 Duncan Dissimilarity Index of selected ethnic–racial groups and country,
2002–2015
Country Year Race/ethnicity Dissimilarity Index
Brazil 2010 Brancos/Pretos 0.162

Brancos/Pardos 0.147
Brancos/Indígenas 0.279
Costa Rica 2011 Blancos-Mestizos/ 0.048
Negros-Afrodescendientes
Blancos-Mestizos/Mulatos 0.132
Blancos-Mestizos/Indígenas 0.222
Cuba 2002 Blancos/Negros 0.094
Blancos/Mestizos-Mulatos 0.062
Ecuador 2010 Blancos/Negros 0.200
Blancos/Mulatos 0.164
Blancos/Indígenas 0.396
Blancos/Montubios 0.332
Blancos/Mestizos 0.099
Mexico 2015 No-étnicos/Afromexicanos 0.039
No-étnicos/Afro-Indígenas 0.084
No-étnicos/Indígenas 0.158
Panama 2010 No-étnicos/Negros 0.084
No-étnicos/Indígenas 0.375

Note: Employed persons aged 15 to 64 years.
and Panama. Table 13.7 contains the results of the Duncan Dissimilarity Index
by race/ethnicity. In all the countries, the biggest differences are noted between
White and Indigenous people, being the highest dissimilarity value in Ecuador
(0.396) and the lowest in Mexico (0.158).
The comparison of White and Afro-descendant workers shows that the high-
est index was again in Ecuador: Blancos/Negros (0.200) and Blancos/Mulatos (0.164).
Brazil had the second highest index: Brancos/Pretos (0.162) and Brancos/Pardos
(0.147). As expected, these data are absolutely coherent with the occupational
profile of those countries. In Costa Rica, Blancos-Mestizos/Negros-Afrodescendientes
Dissimilarity Index (0.048) was lower than Blancos-Mestizos/Mulatos (0.132). In
Mexico, as it was somehow expected, the No-étnicos/Afromexicanos Dissimilarity
Index (0.039) was lower than No-étnicos/Afro-Indígenas (0.084). In Cuba, Blancos/
Negros Duncan Index (0.094) was higher than Blancos/Mestizo-Mulatos (0.062).
Even when we measure ethnic–racial inequality using the Duncan Index,
Cuban labor market presents a lower level of asymmetries than Brazil and Ecuador.
However, comparing the Afro-descendant workers in Latin America, the lowest
values of the Duncan Indexes were in Costa Rica and Mexico. In Panama, the
No-étnicos/Negros Dissimilarity Index was also low (0.084).
Final Remarks
Because of its economic, social, political and symbolic importance within mod-
ern societies, in this chapter, we conducted a cross-national study on ethnic–
racial inequality in Latin America’s labor market. Unfortunately, the absence of
historical statistics on race and ethnicity has limited the ability to provide more
robust analyses of the inequality trends in the majority of the countries. Even
if in the recent period we can point out some fresh contributions on racial/
ethnical disparities in Latin America, comparative studies are still sparse, espe-
cially when we consider the latest census rounds. So, we knew that our effort
was not only pioneer and innovative, but full of risk and incertitude.
Overall, Afro-descendant workers have a worse performance than Whites in
the Latin American labor market. In Colombia, Uruguay, Brazil and Ecuador,
ethnic–racial disparities are high in all the indicators. For instance, the last
two countries have the highest Duncan Dissimilarity Index between Afro-
descendants and White workers. When compared to these countries, Cuba
shows a more egalitarian system – even if Afro-Cubans workers are in a slightly
worse position than Whites. Hence, we observe that if it is true that com-
prehensive and universal social policies are important to address ethnic–racial
inequality, these mechanisms alone do not suffice to overcome problems like
inherited racial hierarchies, discrimination and racism. Nor produce a more ef-
fective scenario of racial equality. Costa Rica also shows a lower level of ethnic–
racial asymmetries. In that country, Negros are in a better position than Mulatos
in educational attainment, informality, occupation and dissimilarity, but not in
the unemployment rate. Mexico and Panama are more complex cases. National
census data showed that Afro-Mexicans and Afro-Panamanian achieved equal
or better results in the labor market than the dominant groups. Apparently, these
findings contradict previous studies that displayed a pigmentocratic p attern in
Latin American ethnic and racial inequality (Telles and PERLA 2014). It is fea-
sible to suppose that these results are due to a certain ambiguity of the national
census questions on race and ethnicity as both countries stressed the cultural or
historical dimension of African-descendant self-identification. So, in Mexico, the
main reference of the Afro-descendant belonging was related to the culture, his-
tory and traditions. In Panama, the selection of categories for African-descendants
was Negro(a) colonial, Negro(a) antillano(a), Negro(a), Otro [negro]. In both cases,
those appeared very academic categories, possibly distant from everyday life
experience. Also – unlike Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba and Ecuador – Mexico and
Panama did not include intermediate categories (like Mulatto or mixed-race)
that could possibly reflect self-identity of many ordinary people. On the other
hand, we must recognize the fact that specific Afro-descendant groups in Latin
America experience better conditions in one or more socioeconomic indicators.
The English-speaking Afro-descendant population on the Caribbean Coast of
Central America, for instance, has higher educational attainments than the rest
of the population14 – and thus still do not imply that there is no discrimination
or racism against them. We cannot discard that this is not the case of Mexico
and Panama. Further analysis is required to identify whether any of these factors
(or others) can explain the cases of both countries.
As was expected, we also found that the position of women in the labor market
was worse than men. Data on both participation and unemployment rate by sex
and race/ethnicity confirmed the patriarchal structure of Latin American societ-
ies. Our analysis of the Indigenous people revealed that this group usually has the
worst indexes of unemployment and informality, which can partially be explained
by the lower educational level and by a larger concentration in rural areas.
Latin America is one of the most uneven regions of the world, but not exactly
a poor one. In other words, although far from the most developed countries, it
produces sufficient wealth that could be used to address many social dilemmas,
like poverty, illiteracy or violence. If social chasms persist, that is a question of
policy options, grounded on political economic decisions of distribution of in-
come, wealth and social prestige. Two main approaches on inequality – market
imperfections and class asymmetries – are identically blind or neutral in ethnic
and racial terms. Conversely, we tried to reconnect the thread of long and short
Latin American history. In spite of the transformations of social and ethnic–
racial dynamics from the 16th century to our days, ethnic and racial lines still
shape the social structure of the region. The modern narrative that created a
new Latin American imagination – grounded on the idea of Mestizaje – in the
end merely restrengthened the ideological idea of race (and ethnicity, somehow
grounded on the same principle). For instance, it does not make sense to think
on racial democracy or cosmic race without considering that both concepts express,
consecrate and reify the very social existence of races separating individuals. On
the other hand, when we highlight the importance of ethnic–racial relations in
Latin America, we do not intend to deny the relevance of structural problems,
as market imperfections or center-periphery unfair international relations. We
are not assuming that all disparities we identified can necessarily be explained
by ethnic–racial discrimination. We have good reasons to presume that factors
such as years of schooling and previous experience may explicate a great por-
tion of the inequality in the labor market. We diverge on the colorblind per-
spective adopted by the mainstream socioeconomic thought. Structural racism
drove Indigenous people and Afro-descendants to the lowest positions of Latin
America’s society along its history. And it is very coherent with other structural
dilemmas that still grip Latin America in the 21st century.
Notes
1 The information is available on the website of the World Bank: http://databank.
worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators&pre
view=on (Accessed April 15, 2017).
2 Purchasing Power Parity, current international $.
3 US independence from England happened in 1776, whereas the end of the slav-
ery system was only in 1865. That is 89 years later, representing a larger delay in
comparison to Brazil (66 years). Anyway, it is worthy of note that the northeastern
and mid-Atlantic states abolished slavery long before. The first states to outlaw
slavery were Vermont, in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1780. A gradual emancipation
of slavery was introduced in New York in 1779; Pennsylvania in 1780; Connecticut
and Rhode Island in 1784 and New Jersey in 1804 (Sellman 1999; Harmer 2001).
4 There are two important advantages of using IPUMS-I: (i) the accessibility of in-
ternational data and (ii) the possibility to use harmonized data for cross-national
investigations.
5 IPUMS-I is a project of the University of Minnesota dedicated to collect and dis-
tribute harmonized census data from around the world free of charge. Actually,
its data bank contains 82 countries, 277 censuses and 614 million persons’ re-
cords. Source data for IPUMS-I are generously provided by participating National
Statistical Offices. More information is available at https://international.ipums.org/
international/ (Accessed April 15, 2017)
6 In Peru, the 2017 Census included a question on Afro-descendants for the first time.
Thus, with the exception of the Dominican Republic (for Afro-Dominicans and
Indigenous people), Chile (for Afro-descendants) and Cuba (for Indigenous people),
it is expected that all Latin America’s census questionnaires will contain the identi-
fication of Blacks and Indigenous people by 2025.
7 The population data of the following countries are available only through REDA-
TAM system, on the National Statistics Office’s websites: Argentina (2010 – long
questionnaire), Bolivia (2012), Honduras (2013), Panama (2010) and Venezuela
(2011). Microdata of Cuba (2012), Guatemala (2002) and Paraguay (2012) are not
available online.
8 We used the same methodology for Afro-Cuban and Afro-Ecuadorans. Actually,
in Ecuador, we grouped the category Afroecuatoriano/Afrodescendiente and Negro
due to concerns of statistical density. The Afroecuatoriano/Afrodescendiente group
corresponded to 4.3% and the Negro to 1% of the total population of Ecuador.
The Mexican case was especially complex due to the questions elaborated by
the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. In question 7, the interviewer asks
whether the person consider himself or herself as Black, that is, Afro-descent or
Afro-Mexican, in accordance with his/her culture, history and tradition. The
respondents may answer ‘Yes’, ‘Partially yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Do not know’. In question
10, the interviewer asks whether, in accordance with his/her own culture, the
person consider himself or herself as Indigenous. The question is posed even to the
persons who declared to consider themselves as Blacks. So, according to the 2015
Intercensal Survey, the respondents could declare to be both Black and Indige-
nous. This situation is unique in Latin America and was particularly complex to
handle. We decided to group them in two categories: Afromexicanos, including the
individuals who declared to consider themselves just as Blacks, and not Indigenous
and Afro-Indígenas, including the individuals who declared to consider themselves
as Blacks and as Indigenous.
9 In Colombia, the Raizal del Archipiélago de San Andrés y Providencia group represented
just 0.1% of the total population and in the case of the Palenquero de San Basilio
group, the percentage was even lower (0.02%). In Panama, the Negro colonial group
corresponded to 1.3% of the total population, the Negro antillano group to 1.9% and
the Otro Negro group to 0.4%.
10 This terminology is quite common in the literature (Urrea et al. 2007; Paschel
2013; Campbell 2013, 2014).
11 In this study, distributions with a coefficient of variation exceeding 15% were con-
sidered of high variance and were dismissed.
12 Due to the small number of cases in the Afro-descendant and Indigenous samples
of El Salvador and Nicaragua (coefficient of variation > 20), it was not possible to
provide data on educational level by race and ethnicity for both countries.
13 Again, it was not possible to provide the unemployment rate by race and sex of
Nicaragua and El Salvador due to the high variance of the results we obtained.
14 In the case of Nicaragua, Gordon (1998) found the higher level of schooling rate
was linked to the religious profile (protestants), familiar patterns and even an easier
access to companies controlled by English-speaking owners.
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14
The Millennium Development
Goals/Sustainable Development
Goals and Afro-Descendants
in the Americas
An (Un)intended Trap
Paula Lezama
Introduction
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) constitute a set of global targets
to be accomplished by 2015. They included reducing the percentage of persons
living in extreme poverty by half,1 primary education access for all, reduction
of child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters,
increasing the number of people with access to potable water by two times,
among others. These targets were approved by all of the UN member states in
the year 2000, with 2015 as the deadline for their accomplishment (Figure 14.1).
According to former Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon, the com-
mitment to eradicate poverty established by the MDGs, ‘…has produced the
most successful anti-poverty movement in history’ (The Millennium Devel-
opment Goals Report 2015, 3). However, given the top-down approach of
their conceptualization, design and implementation, critics argued they lack
legitimacy (Antrobus 2006). Conversely, other critical arguments were that as
a planning tool, they were not effective and their lack of accountability hin-
ders further their ability to affect structural change (Saith 2006; Fukuda-Parr
et al. 2014).
Both supporters and critics of the MDGs admitted that inequalities have
been pervasive and that progress continues to elude women, children and ethnic
and racial minorities. However, they had major disagreements as to the causes,
as well as to the possible solutions for these shortcomings. Supporters resolved
to move from the MDGs to the sustainable development goals (SDGs) in order
to tighten these gaps. According to the SDGs Fund, the new set of SDGs are
based on the interest of creating a ‘new’ people-centered development agenda.2
This new agenda expands the list of goals from eight to seventeen and expands
the list of indicators that monitor progress (Figure 14.2).
The Millennium Development 319
Figure 14.1 M illennium development goals.

Source: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
Figure 14.2 Sustainable development goals.

Source: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.
Not surprisingly, for critics, because the underlying weaknesses of the

MDGs were not really addressed, the SDGs are more of the same.
By 2015, it was clear that the MDGs were not going to be met. There were
still 800 million people living in extreme poverty around the globe, suffering
from hunger and related deprivations such as infant and maternal mortality, no
access to schools/education, drinking water or health care (United Nations 2015).
In Latin America, there were 168 million people below the poverty threshold,
from which 78 million were in conditions of extreme poverty in 2014 [Eco-
nomic Comission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 2016]. Just
320 Paula Lezama
as progress was uneven, the remaining gaps present a very unequal distribu-
tion of losses. Women’s empowerment remains unattained within Latin America
and the Caribbean (LAC). In fact, there was an actual regression on this issue.
According to the ECLAC, ‘…the ratio of women to men in poor households
increased from 108 women for every 100 men in 1997 to 117 women for every
100 men in 2012’ (2016, 8). Rural versus urban gaps and racial and ethnic based
disparities remained entrenched within countries. Looking closely at who has
been left behind at the intersections of these dimensions, it is possible to observe
that racial and ethnic membership are salient indicators of both the urban and
rural poor. In addition, women and children of African Descent and Indigenous
communities were and continue to be the most disenfranchised segments.
One of the most salient MDGs structural failures was its silence regarding
pervasive racial and ethnic-based social, political and economic inequalities.
Said inequalities were regarded as an unspoken truth waiting to be fixed by the
uninterrupted implementation of a one-size-fits-all anti-poverty policy. In this
regard, Telles argued,
the international community has defined the MDGs as targets for human
development to be met by 2015. It is imperative that these goals be met
for all racial and ethnic groups. Afro-Descendants and Indigenous pop-
ulations will not achieve the MDGs, unless specific attention is paid to
these groups.
(2007, 4)
This chapter argues that it is logical to expect the global development agenda may
once again fail with regard to the life chances of Afro-Descendants, Indigenous
peoples and other minorities due to the following: first, the systematic exclusion
of the language and commitments undertaken by member states in the context of
the World Conference Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related
Intolerance held in Durban in 2001 and previous international meetings address-
ing racial and ethnic discrimination; and second, the artificial equalizing of pov-
erty to both, development and inequality in the MDGs as well as the SDGs. It is
also argued that due to these deficiencies, the global development agenda (SDGs)
can be configured as an indirect obstacle in the fight for racial equality. The latter
is especially problematic in the case of LAC. By masking the stark reality of racial
and ethnic disparities within the language of poverty reduction and economic
growth, the global development agenda (MDGs/SDGs) has constructed itself
as a tool in the reification of the myth of racial democracies, where race-based
exclusion is commonly reduced to class-based disparities.3
This essay first discusses the above interrelated arguments building on ex-
isting literature. The following section then situates the deep-rooted exclusion
of Afro-Descendants in LAC within this larger framework. Finally, some con-
cluding remarks are offered.
The Global Development Agenda: Millennium Development

Goals/Sustainable Development Goals and Other Tales
Contextually, it is pertinent to mention that although we recognize the fun-
damental theoretical discussions revolving around the conceptual basis of ‘de-
velopment’ and its foundational assumptions, from which the MDGs/SDGs
are part; said discussion is outside the scope of this analysis; hence, it will focus
on the specificities within.4 From their establishment, the MDGs were heavily
criticized for their limited conception and design; for instance, in terms of the
conceptual basis, the MDGs language drew from a variety of international
meetings and agendas. However, the Durban declaration and its plan for action
were left out of the MDGs blueprint.
The Millennium Declaration and subsequent MDGs used all the 1990s in-
ternational conferences as background, except the Durban World Conference
of 2001. For example, the MDGs used the 1990 World Summit for Children
in New York, the Jomtien Conference on Education in 1990, the 1992 Earth
Conference in Rio, The Cairo Conference on Population and Development
in 1994, the World Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1994, the 1995 Fourth
World Conference on Women in Beijing, the 1996 World Food Summit in
Rome and the 1996 Conference on Human Settlements in Istanbul, as refer-
ences (Fukuda-Parr et al. 2014). However, World Conference against Racial
Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance (Durban 2001) was not
included. Considering that Durban occurred in 2001, after the Millennium
Declaration as well as the MDGs report, it could be argued its exclusion was
a matter of timing. Nonetheless, there were two preceding UN conferences
dealing with racism and racial discrimination in 1978 and 1983, well before
Durban that were not considered either. Moreover, prior to the year 2000,
other international instruments addressing these issues were already in place, as
was the Durban preparatory platform. Finally, the stark reality of racial and eth-
nic minorities across the globe, including those in the developed world, should
have evidenced the critical role of the inclusion of racial- and ethnic-based
discrimination within the MDGs/SDGs design. By silencing previous interna-
tional agreements, the MDGs created a false starting line concerning racial and
ethnic discrimination and its pervasive impacts.
The MDGs received additional criticism in terms of their lacking concep-
tual clarity and empirical methodologies. Nayyar argues that the conception
of the MDGs left the process of achieving them unclear and that its focus in
terms of averages and aggregates obscured more than it revealed about the liv-
ing conditions of the dispossessed (2013). Saith claims that the MDGs’ limited
conceptual coherence allowed for further methodological deficiency (2006).
Moreover, both authors argued that target setting at the global level created
distortions at the local level by imposing adverse incentives on national govern-
ments and local agencies. Due to the great emphasis placed on foreign aid as the
322 Paula Lezama
primary funding source, there were plenty of incentives to either underreport

or overreport outcomes. In Saith’s words, ‘Institutionalizing targets in bureau-
cracies and governmental regimes usually invites misuse and manipulation of
statistics and the misrepresentation of outcomes’ (2006, 1174).
For instance, the MDGs introduced the poverty line (PL) of US$1.25 a day
as the monetary threshold under which people will be considered poor. In fact,
the number of people living with less than US$1.25 a day decreased by more
than half by 2015, going from 43% in 1990 to 14% in 2015. However, it is abun-
dantly clear that a PL that is based on the income of the poorest 15 countries
cannot reflect either global poverty or specific country deprivation patterns.
Furthermore, if China is removed from the distribution, then the number of
poor people has remained unaffected since 1990 (Greenstein et al. 2014). Herein
lies one of the major criticisms to the PL-based MDGs, which nonetheless was
reprocessed in the SDGs, and according to Vandemoortele, these ‘statistics on
steroids’ lead to ‘policy-based evidence making, instead of evidence-based pol-
icy making’ (2011, 13). This is a clear example of the misuse of statistics to satisfy
a behind-the-door political agenda, especially given the fact that the inclusion
of the PL was a political imposition and not a technical one.
Fukuda-Parr (2014) argues that the MDGs as a global development agenda
morphed into policies that had important effects on governance and knowledge
production. As such, they have had both intended and unintended consequences.
As a global governance tool, the MDGs became the normative standard by which
governments should aspire to and monitor their progress. As a knowledge tool,
given the scientific aura surrounding numeric goals, the MDGs appear accessible,
understandable and most of all reachable. Along these lines, an intended conse-
quence was the wide acceptance, which facilitated the mobilization of resources
at all levels of the governance process. On the other hand, negative unintended
consequences included (a) given the power of numbers, poverty, development
and inequality were redefined within a very narrow scope and (b) distortion
of priorities, as they do not take into account diverse starting points in national
contexts. Hence, national and local realities got displaced and misinterpreted.
In sum, their methodological weakness was their very strength in terms of
easily accessible meaning given to a concept by a numerical index. However, by
equalizing the more comprehensive development agenda of the early 1990s to
poverty reduction, the MDGs essentially moved away from their comprehen-
sive human rights-based understanding of well-being, toward a more simplistic
and unrealistic interpretation of global, national and local level issues. A global
agenda – despite being heavily criticized for its conceptual and methodological
inconsistency – became the route map for poverty reduction and global de-
velopment. In Fukuda-Parr’s words, ‘A simple list of numerical targets cannot
articulate an agenda for a complex process such as sustainable, inclusive devel-
opment. Nor is such a process neutral’ (2014, 115).
Once installed, as a top-down approach, the MDGs became an imposition of
priorities, aid and conditionalities delivered by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, the International Monetary

Fund, the UN and later the US government. Three basic neoliberal propo-
sitions were woven together, thanks to the conceptual myopia of equalizing
development to poverty reduction and the need to not disturb the global status
quo, which ‘donors’ were committed to uphold. Sustained economic growth,
adequate governance and foreign aid were identified as the magic bullets to
accomplish these goals because of their affinity to a donor-based view of devel-
opment. The basis of this argument was simple: donors committed to give 0.7%
of their gross national product as ‘aid’ with some conditions, including high
interest rate loans, structural adjustment measures and improved governance.
This in turn – it was argued – will boost national economic growth, which will
‘trickle down’ to benefit the bottom income quantiles, reducing poverty. These
are well-known neoliberal prescription policies (Vandemoortele 2011).
These arguments, although unsustainable, are part of the political game of
the main international power that continues to uphold and implement them.
Conceptually, development does not equal poverty reduction, and poverty is
not eradicated by merely raising each country’s gross domestic product. From
a human development perspective, human progress is the aim of development.
Equality of access to economic, social and political opportunities, freedom
from discrimination as well as the enforcing of human rights standards are
required to alleviate the plight of deprivation (Sen 2000; Nussbaum 2012). Em-
pirically, there is robust evidence that economic growth does not necessarily
‘trickle down’. In fact, some authors affirm that given the staggering and rising
levels of inequality across the globe, the benefits of said economic progress have
not trickled down but have trickled up (Dabla-Norris et al. 2015; Pitketty 2014;
Stiglitz 2013).
As a ‘false’ starting point, the pre-2015 international donor alignment mor-
phed the MDGs into a poverty-reduction agenda, with a flawed underlying
premise that poverty reduction equaled development. The post-2015 agenda
continues to posit that poverty remains the greatest challenge of our time,
but this is no longer valid. The significant rise in disparities that has occurred
within most countries over the past three to four decades says otherwise. Even
the UN in different reports agrees with this argument.
According to the UN Development Program:
Great and persistent inequality in the midst of plenty is a paradox of our

times. Over the last few decades, innovation has exploded from our in-
creasingly digital age, poverty-rates have declined in every region of the
world, and emerging market countries have experienced unprecedented
growth. Global income inequality stands at very high levels, whereby the
richest eight percent of the world’s population earn half of the world’s
total income, while the remaining 92 percent of people are left with the
other half.
(2013, xi)
324 Paula Lezama
Hence, the key global challenge now is extreme inequality fueled by en-
trenched power imbalances at the global, national and local levels. More im-
portantly, just as development does not equal poverty reduction, inequality
and poverty entail two entirely different conceptualizations. According to the
basic economic principles textbook, whereas poverty refers to scarcity or in-
sufficiency, inequality refers to power and stratification. They are related, but
not equivalent.
The Post-2015 Development Agenda: More of the Same

If the MDGs were silent with respect to inequalities, especially those due to
racial and ethnic status, the SDGs also paid insufficient attention to them. The
mistaken belief that development is equivalent to poverty reduction remained
unaffected, but now poverty and inequality were equalized too.
Goal 10 is stated as follows:
Goal 10 calls for reducing inequalities in income as well as those based

on age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or
other status within a country. The Goal also addresses inequalities among
countries, including those related to representation, migration and devel-
opment assistance.5
However, there is only one specific target within its scope, and it is a target
relevant for poverty reduction as opposed to inequality. The aim of target
10.1 is to progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40%
of the population at a rate higher than the national average by 2030. This
formulation continues with the anti-poverty mantra because of its exclusive
focus on the income of the bottom 40%. To really address deep-rooted in-
equalities, a target must focus on the entire distributional spectrum. Besides,
it does not address the reasons behind the simultaneous rise of economic
growth and inequalities, which are caused by power imbalances. Thus, this
goal can be perfectly achieved without affecting inequalities across dimen-
sions. Indeed, this is precisely what has been happening in the past decades.
Despite rising or sustained economic growth and people crossing the UN’
monetary threshold of poverty, inequality continues to rise or remains rela-
tively unaffected.
The following maps represent the distribution of global population by
income.6 Figure 14.3 represents the concentration of low-income popula-
tion; Figure 14.4 represents the concentration of middle-income population;
Figure 14.5 represents the upper-middle-income population where LAC are
located with the higher participation; and Figure 14.6 represents the concen-
tration of high-income population. It comes as no surprise that Europe and the
US continue to be the major centers of global wealth.
U.S.
3%
High
Armenia
89%
NO DATA 10% 30 50 >70
Note: This map shows the proportion or people within a country that were low income in 2011. It is one of five maps showing the shares
of population in each county that live at different income levels. The income groups are as follows: The poor who live on $2 or less daily,
low income on $2.01–10, middle income on $10.01–20, upper-middle income on $20.01–50, and high income on more than $50; figures
expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices.
Figure 14.3 Percentage of country population that is low income.

High
Slovakia
59%
U.S.
7%
NO DATA 5% 10 20 ≥30
Note: This map shows the proportion of people within a country that were middle income in 2011. It is one of five maps showing the
shares of population in each county that live at different income levels. The income groups are as follows: The poor who live on $2 or
less daily, low income on $2.01–10, middle income on $10.01–20, upper-middle income on $20.01–50, and high income on more than
$50; figures expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices.
Figure 14.4 Percentage of country population that is middle income.

High
Slovenia
71%
U.S.
32%
NO DATA 5% 10 20 ≥30
Note: This map shows the proportion of people within a country that were upper-middle income in 2011. It is one of five maps showing
the shares of population in each county that live at different income levels. The income groups are as follows: The poor who live on $2 or
less daily, low income on $2.01–10, middle income on $10.01–20. upper-middle income on $20.01–50, and high income on more than
$50; figures expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices.
Figure 14.5 Percentage of country population that is upper-middle income.

High
Norway
77%
U.S.
56%
NO DATA 5% 10 30 ≥50
Note: This map shows the proportion of people within a country that were high income in 2011. It is one of five maps showing the shares
of population in each county that live at different income levels. The income groups are as follows: The poor who live on $2 or less daily,
low income on $2.01–10, middle income on $10.01–20, upper-middle income on $20.01–50, and high income on more than $50; figures
expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices.
Figure 14.6 Percentage of country population that is high income.

The relevance of these images to the discussion of MDGs/SDGs and

their silence regarding inequality in general, and racial and ethnic dispar-
ities in particular, is simple. The distribution of global wealth refutes the
argument that mere income rising reduces poverty and inequalities simul-
taneously. In doing so, these figures also refute the lewd equalizing of de-
velopment to poverty reduction, and what Saith called the ‘ghettoization of
development’, meaning the allocation of underdevelopment and its symp-
toms as an exclusive matter of the Third World (Saith 2006, 1184). If high
income indeed is what is needed to eradicate poverty, upper- and high-
income countries would not have poor nor social tensions due to persistent
disparities that would have faded significantly. Interestingly enough, those
poor or low-income populations would not be primarily from non-White
populations as is the case in the US.
Figure 14.7 represents the income and wealth gaps by race/ethnicity in the
US, which is the country with the highest concentration of upper-middle and
high-income population. Gaps continue to be explained by racial and ethnic
membership in the US, one of the most powerful nations and one that has
continuously shied away from international commitments in regard to racial
equality.
In the case of the US, it is argued that not only have racial tensions intensi-
fied but also they have mutated to comply with legal frameworks that suppos-
edly support racial equality. For instance, Alexander argues that:
Figure 14.7 acial and ethnic wealth gaps have grown since the Great Depression
R
median net worth of households in dollars, 2013.
330 Paula Lezama
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use

race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social
contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal
justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in
all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to
discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal
to discriminate against African Americans.
(2016, 2)
Against this backdrop, one could argue that from total silence to minor at-
tention, the MDGs/SDGs international agenda continues to feed the myth of
poverty and related deprivations as a monetary issue with economic growth
as its sole deterrent. Why is this problematic for Afro-descendants and other
minority populations in LAC? Because this line of reasoning continues to
actualize and reproduce the myth of ‘racial democracies’ in the region. Essen-
tially, racial and ethnic disparities are deemed inconsequential while class dis-
parities expressed in terms of income earnings harness all the attention. This
muddying of racial- and ethnic-based discrimination and exclusion diverts
attention from this population in terms of differential public policies needed
to address the causes of historical and structural racism. This narrow global
‘development’ agenda, with its unpromising attention to the causes of the
continuing marginalization of racial and ethnic minorities, has configured
itself as an (un)intended trap in the advancement of racial and ethnic equality
for Afro-Descendants in LAC.
A Note on the Sustainable Development Goals

and the Poverty Target
The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)7 could have been a great addition
to the SDGs set of indicators to track progress. After much discussion and de-
spite several countries pressuring for its inclusion, the MPI was overlooked by
the SDGs working group (Alkire 2016). Now, it is possible to see that a tool
such as this could improve the design and implementation of targeted policies
aimed at supporting the most vulnerable and disadvantaged segment of the
population at the local, national and global levels. However, this is not the case
for Afro-descendants. The use of a comprehensive measurement tool to track
progress is of no use for this population if the target does not include disag-
gregation by racial/ethnic membership. In fact, none of the poverty indicators
in the SDGs includes disaggregation by race or ethnicity. Box 14.1 shows an
excerpt from the Report of the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable
Development Indicators, Annex III.8
Thus, in this case, neither the poverty nor the inequality-reduction targets
address the underline causes and obvious consequences of structural racism and
discrimination. Vandemoortele argues that the MDGs were hijacked by power
and politics as they were ‘permeated with the idolatry of literalism and sanitized
to fit the conventional development paradigm’ (2011, 1). No wonder the interna-
tional agenda of the MDGs/SDGs was rapidly included in most LACs countries.
The income-based exclusion has been an argument highly priced by LAC elites.
More recently, the 56th Session of the Commission for Social Development,
which is the advisory body of the UN in charge of the policy recommendation
and tracking of the social development aspect of the global development agenda,
convened from January 29th to February 7, 2018. According to their report, the
meeting concluded with the adoption of measures including the implementation of
social protection systems to lift the most vulnerable populations out of poverty. The
UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said, ‘At the global level, we
have experienced impressive reductions in extreme poverty. Significant progress
has also been made in improving access to schooling and healthcare, promoting
the empowerment of women, youth, persons with disabilities, older persons and
Indigenous populations’ (United Nations n.d.). However, this statement does not
correspond entirely to the reality of the SDGs and neither to the work carried out
during the sessions. Indigenous communities progress in relation to the SDGs is
not being tracked, just as the Afro-Descendants is not tracked either. Furthermore,
none of their thematic areas mentions ethnic and racial minorities (see list below).
332 Paula Lezama
Review of relevant UN plans and programs of action pertaining to the sit-

uation of social groups:
1 World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons;

2 Standard Rules on the Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with
Disabilities;
3 World Programme of Action for Youth;
4 Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, 2002;
5 Family issues, policies and program (United Nations n.d.).
The next section calls attention to the living conditions of Afro-Descendants

vis-à-vis the rest of the population in their respective territories from the avail-
able data. Although data are scarce or missing, information available does sup-
port the argument that the omission (minor attention to) of racial and ethnic
disparities plus monetary-based poverty-reduction policies supports the reifica-
tion of the myth of racial democracies in the region.
Afro-Descendants in Latin America vis-à-vis the Millennium

Development Goals/Sustainable Development Goals
The ECLAC published a report in 2016 where it is clearly indicated that
pervasive structural inequalities in the region are a major obstacle to reach
the 2030 SDGs. The report refers to gender, racial and ethnic disparities and
inequalities related to the life cycle and geographical location as the major
obstacles keeping social and economic development in the region lagging be-
hind. Furthermore, the intersectionality of these structural dimensions of in-
equality that placed Afro-Descendant and Indigenous women at the bottom
is recognized (Economic Comission for Latin American and the Caribbean,
ECLAC 2016, 10).
Given the historical marginalization of peoples of African-Descendants, it
is very difficult to quantify their presence in the region. Statistical invisibility
is one of the first issues to be confronted when trying to locate them as a sub-
population group. From the nineteen countries that carried out censuses in
the1990–2000 round, which coincided with the launch of the MDGs, only
nine included information about Afro-Descendants: Brazil, Costa Rica, Co-
lombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Ac-
cording to ECLAC, by the year 2000, there were approximately 84.853.814
million people of African descent in the region or around 32.80% of the total
regional population (Antón et al. 2009).
Nonetheless, from what is known, Figure 14.8 presents the poverty rates for
selected countries by race/ethnicity membership in 2014.
According to Figure 14.8, the poverty rate for Afro-Brazilians was 22% in
2014, a reduction of 22.8% from 2006, when it was 44.8%. These numbers were
Figure 14.8 overty rates of Afro-Descendants versus non–Afro/non–indigenous

P
population in selected countries, 2014.
Source: Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean, ECLAC (2016, 28).
58.5% and 42% for Afro-Ecuadorians. Although comparability is not guaran-

teed, both estimates were done by ECLAC using household surveys; there-
fore, we can still identify some trends. Poverty rates were decreasing during
the decade of the MDGs for the entire population. However, the unequal
distribution of progress was maintained, that is, for Afro-descendants in both
countries which still make up a larger percentage of the poor population.
This represents the problematic issue of one-size-fits-all anti-poverty mea-
sures. They treat poverty as a homogenous phenomenon and work through
the trickle-down approach. In this process, the people at the bottom will al-
ways be reached later and slower, if at all. The fact that those with darker-skin
complexions appear at the bottom is a fortuitous condition superficially ex-
plained by the class-based argument, thus substantiating the ‘myths of racial
harmony’.9
Figure 14.9 further supports the argument that income not necessar-
ily trickles down, but in fact more often than not, it trickles up. White
Brazilians are the only group whose income is consistently growing. Even
when poverty is reduced at the country level, racial disparities remained
deep-rooted.
In the case of Colombia, the country with the second largest Afro-descendant
population in the southern cone, access to comparable statistical data for this
population is ‘mission impossible’. Despite the dispersion and scarcity of in-
formation, the trend in terms of distribution of progress can be corroborated
334 Paula Lezama
Figure 14.9 razil’s income distribution – market, disposable and consumable

B
income – by racial/ethnic membership, 2008–2009.
Source: Pereira (2016, 8).
Table 14.1 Percentages of Colombian poor and indigent population for 2003, by
urban–rural areasa
National population Population under PL Population under PL
Urban (%) Rural (%) Urban (%) Rural (%)
Afro-Colombians 43.0 76.8 16.7 46.9

Indigenous/gypsies 52.6 81.0 22.0 44.2
Mestizos/Whites 36.6 72.6 13.6 39.2
National total 37.3 73.2 13.9 40.1
Source: Urrea Giraldo and Viáfara López (2007, 60): Based on the 2003 Quality of Life National
Survey.
Note: PL = poverty line.
as well. Table 14.1 presents the head count ratio of people under the PL and
extreme poverty line by race/ethnic membership in 2003.
There was no official information on poverty and extreme poverty for eth-
nic minorities in Colombia available for 2015. Moreover, the technical bulletin
by the Administrative Department of Statistics reports Poverty Indexes for

2014–2015 desegregated by geographical area, gender, age, educational level
and labor market characteristics of the household head, except by ethnic/
racial membership. We took the information by region/cities with the largest
Afro-Descendant population as proxy, to infer the living conditions of the
Afro-Descendant population by the MDGs deadline/SDGs starting point.
The highlighted portions of Table 14.2 are the areas with a significant Afro-
descendant population.
Two things must be noted here. First, poverty averages usually hide more
than they reveal about people’s living conditions. Second, even such an im-
perfect measurement tool can still reflect the deficiencies of the trickle-down
approach to poverty reduction, which even more problematic as a tool in the
fight for racial equality. For instance, the Department of Choco (mainly rural),
which has been historically the largest Afro-descendant territory, has the high-
est poverty rates and Gini coefficient in relation to the both the national and
the rural-national averages. It is interesting to note that a department like La
Guajira, with a high concentration of Indigenous communities, is way behind
as well. Therefore, given the correlation between poverty and other dimen-
sions of deprivation, it is rational to expect that these indicators, if estimated for
ethnic and racial minorities, will present a very somber reality of continuing
marginalization and exclusion.
Moving on to the targets of nutrition and food security targets, Figure 14.10
represents the end condition for this target, which was to reduce the people
experiencing hunger by half between 1990 and 2015.
According to these data, Latin America achieved the target and the Carib-
bean nations made significant progress. Now, contrasting this information with
Figure 14.11, it is not surprising to see that poor and indigent people present
higher rates of global malnutrition. Figure 14.11 represents the incidence of
global and chronic malnutrition by poverty and extreme poverty rates.
No data for Afro-descendants was available. Nonetheless, it still can be
deduced that if the majority of poor people in countries such as Brazil or
Ecuador are from racial and ethnic minorities, given the relation between
poverty and malnutrition, these segments of the population are the people
experiencing the most food insecurity. It is logical to conclude that the peo-
ple left behind in the achievement of the hunger target in Latin America
are those of African and Indigenous descent. This conclusion applies to the
Caribbean as well.
In the case of Colombia, chronic and global malnutrition were reduced from
26.1% to 13.2% and 8.6% to 3.4% between 1990 and 2010, respectively. How-
ever, census data for 2005 showed that while 6.1% of nonethnic people skip
one of three daily meals due to lack of resources, that percentage was 14.3% for
Afro-Colombians and 17% for Indigenous peoples. These disparities are further
exacerbated by geographical location (Table 14.3).
Table 14.2 Poverty, extreme poverty and Gini coefficient for selected departments and cities with largest Afro-descendant population,
Colombia, 2014–2015
Department/city Poverty Extreme poverty (indigence) Gini coefficient Percent of

auto-population
2014 2015 Difference 2014 2015 Difference 2014 2015 Difference
Choco 65.9 62.8 2.1 39.1 37.1 2 0.598 0.598 0 74

Quibdo 46.2 50.2 4.0 14.5 17.8 3.3 0.503 0.528 003 95.3
San Andres y Providencia 9.5 7.3 2.2 1.4 1.0 0.4 0.436 0.401 0.035 57
Bolivar 39.9 39.3 0.7 10.1 8.3 1.8 0.512 0.489 0.023 27
Cartagena 26.6 26.2 −0.4 4.3 4.0 −0.3 0.483 0.467 0.016 36.5
La Guajira 53.3 53 0.3 24.8 24.3 0.5 0.549 0.551 −0.002 13
Riohacha 42.4 41.0 1.4 12.4 12.7 0.3 0.517 0.522 0.005 28.3
Valle del Cauca 22.7 22.1 0.6 5.2 5.2 0.0 0.488 0.479 0.009 27
Cali 19.1 16.5 −2.6 3.3 3.4 0.1 0.487 0.478 0.009 26.2
Atlantico 28.6 25.7 2.9 3.9 2.7 1.2 0.445 0.440 0.005 11
Barranquilla 25.5 22.0 −3.5 3.6 2.4 −1.2 0.445 0.439 0.005 13.2
Antioquia 24.3 23.7 0.6 7.7 7.3 0.5 0.555 0.521 0.034 10
Medillin 14.7 14.3 −0.4 2.8 3.3 0.5 0.525 0.489 0.037 6.5
Urban-National 26.4 24.1 2.3 5.1 4.9 0.2 0.514 0.498 0.016 9.95
Rural-National 41.4 40.3 1.1 18 18 0 0.463 0.454 0.009 11.82
Total National 28.5 27.8 0.7 8.1 7.9 0.2 0.538 0.522 0.016 10.6
Source: DANE (2015): http//:www.dane.gov.co; Census 2005 Data.

Figure 14.10 Proportion of undernourished people, 1990–1992 and 2014–2016.
Source: United Nations (2015, 21).
338 Paula Lezama
Figure 14.11 elation between poverty and global and chronic malnutrition for
R
children under five years old, mid-1990s. Nine countries, national
averages.
Source: Naciones Unidas (2005, 75): Light grey = indigent, Grey = poor non-indigent,
Dark grey = non-poor; left global malnutrition; right chronic malnutrition.
Table 14.3 Incidence of food insufficiency by race/ethnicity, Colombian Census

2005
Territory Indigenous Afro-descendants Nonethnic Total
National 17 14.3 6.1 7.2

Choco 44.4 20.4 5.2 20.5
Bolivar 16.3 16.4 9.8 11.5
Source: Selected data.
Accordingly, Indigenous and Afro-Descendants in Colombia are affected

by food insufficiency at a higher rate than the nonethnic population (White/
Mestizo) in the country. Looking at the educational target, according to the
UN MDGs report based on a survey of 63 developing countries between 2008
and 2012, 21.9% of school-aged children in the poorest quintile were out of
school compared to 5.5% in the richest quintile. These disparities remained
across time as well. Another survey for 73 developing countries identified that
34.4% of adolescents from the poorest quartiles did not finish primary educa-
tion, compared to 6.5 from richest quintile (UN 2015, 26). Table 14.4 presents
illiteracy rates by race/ethnicity for selected countries.
Keeping in mind the implications of educational attainment for labor mar-
ket insertion, future earnings and democratic participation, it is extremely
Table 14.4 I lliteracy rates for people over 15 years, by ethnic groups, gender and age
groups in percentages
Country/date Age groups Afro-descendants Indigenous White

(years)
Male Female Male Female Male Female
Brazil (2006) 15–24 4.5 2.2 6.2 2.7 1.7 1.1

25–44 12.1 8.4 13.4 11.0 4.5 3.2
45–59 22.2 22.1 15.5 17.3 7.7 7.6
60 or more 41.5 45.0 35.6 36.7 16.8 20.9
Total 15.1 14.1 14.0 13.5 6.3 6.6
Ecuador (2006) 15–24 5.0 2.9 2.0 4.1 1.6 1.6
25–44 7.6 6.8 8.6 24.5 3.2 3.5
45–59 14.7 17.7 26.8 59.5 7.8 11.2
60 or more 37.3 37.9 57.7 86.3 20.3 27.4
Total 11.8 11.3 18.5 35.9 6.1 8.2
Nicaragua (2001) Total 23.0 38.3 20.3 27.6 20.1 19.9
Peru (2001) Total 6.0 8.3 8.2 28.5 4.5 11.6
Source: Antón et al. (2009, 68): translation by the author.

a Nicaragua and Peru samples were insufficient to desegregate by age groups.
b In Brazil, the category Mestizo does not apply to the White group.
important to understand that disparities in education not only reproduce pat-

terns of wealth inequality but reproduce patterns of structural racism and dis-
crimination in other dimensions of human welfare. Therefore, it is important
that differential policies attend this disenfranchised population and that global
agendas such as the SDGs integrate these concerns explicitly.
Figure 14.12 presents the unemployment rate controlled by average school
attainment, gender and group age for ethnic/racial populations in Brazil and
Uruguay, 2014.
From these data, it is critical to see how Afro-descendants have consistently
lower educational attainment across ages in both countries. It is also critical
to notice how Afro-Brazilian women between 15 and 29 years had similar
educational attainment to that of non–Afro-descendants/non–I ndigenous
men, but their unemployment rate is twice as high, 19.4 versus 9.9, respec-
tively. Such an intersectionality of race, gender and age is another aspect of
inequalities that the language of the global development agenda has chosen to
obscure. Consequently, it is reasonable to expect that Afro-descendants and
Indigenous communities in LAC will be far behind the ‘privileged’ popula-
tion that will reach the SDGs by 2030, just as they did with the MDGs. This
situational analysis allows us to argue that given the structural failures the
MDGs presented and that these were reproduced in the SDGs, these well-
regarded policy and mobilization tools offer very little to the cause of racial
and ethnic equality.
340 Paula Lezama
Figure 14.12 nemployment rate and average school attainment by group age,
U
gender and ethnic/racial membership, 2014.
Source: Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean, ECLAC (2016, 35).
Concluding Remarks
I have argued that despite advancement related to the accomplishment of the
MDGs, its color-blind approach precluded them from proportionally procur-
ing the advancement of racial and ethnic minorities. Furthermore, because
color-blindness is being carried over to the SDGs, the MDGs failures of un-
even development and pervasive inequalities in relation to these population
segments are expected to persist. These global development agendas not only
have left out most of the language and compromises agreed upon at Durban
(2001) but also have left out other international agreements directed toward
addressing structural racism and discrimination of racial and ethnic minorities.
Vandemoortele argues that ‘the SDGs’ failure to address inequality and dispar-
ities is not due to a technical mistake but driven by a political narrative that
dodges, if not contests, the fact that extreme inequality is a defining challenge
of our time’ (Email Communication to author, January 24, 2017).
Given the highly politically charged environment surrounding the MDGs/
SDGs, it is no wonder why they still embody the old donor-centric view that
development is something that happens in the South. In Saith’s words, ‘The entire
MDGs scaffolding…tends to ghettoize the problem of development and locates it
firmly in the Third World’ (2006, 1184). Conveniently, this perspective sweeps
under the rug the highly contentious discussion of rising inequalities and exclusion
in the donor countries. This exclusive directionality from the First to the Third
World closes the door for any critical assessment of poverty, but most importantly,
of inequalities around world, while simultaneously camouflaging the reproduction
of racial inequality. This unidirectional imposed view of development, poverty
and inequality, from the north to the south, had additional (negative) unintended
consequences in LAC. Such a narrow understanding of poverty and inequality re-

produces the myth of racial democracies, diluting thus the years of civil society and
Black/Indigenous social movement efforts to confront and positively affect change
in these societies where structural racism persists.
The unintended consequences of global agendas of diverting attention from
other important dimensions of human progress and the reduction of develop-
ment/inequality to monetary poverty and its solution to economic growth not
only obscure the multidimensional complexity of deprivation and its inter-
sectionalities but also serve the purpose of recycling the class-based disparities
arguments while obscuring race- and ethnic-based inequalities. Essentially, this
approach supports the myth of racial democracies and its pervasive influences.
Race- and ethnic-based exclusion and discrimination must be explicitly ac-
knowledged and directly addressed in the global development agendas scaffold-
ing in order for true progress to occur.
Notes
1 UN reports poverty metric of US$1.25 per day.
2 http://www.sdgfund.org/mdgs-sdgs.
3 The myth of racial democracies is based on the widely held belief that LAC soci-
eties are free from racial tensions due to harmonious coexistence of different racial
groups. The conceptual content of the myth argues that class and not race is the
reason for the systematical exclusion of Afro-descendants and Indigenous commu-
nities. Accordingly, it is their social class and poor status what causes their exclusion
and not their race and ethnic membership (Telles, 2004). A myth, which powerful
influence is not diminished by the years of research and social activism, directs to-
ward dismantling its fallacies.
4 For an in-depth discussion of these issues, see Emmanuel (1974); Escobar (1995) and
Sachs (2010).
5 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg10.
6 http://www.pewglobal.org/interactives/global-population-by-income/.
7 The MPI developed between 2007 and 2011 by Sabina Alkire and James Foster
at the Oxford Poverty Initiative. These includes three dimensions and ten indica-
tors that can be desegregate by different control variables. The health dimension
includes indicators on nutrition and child mortality. The education dimension in-
cludes years of schooling and children enrolled in school. Finally, the living stan-
dard dimension includes cooking fuel, sanitation, water, electricity, floor and assets.
8 https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/Off icial%20Revised%20List%20of %20
global%20SDG%20indicators.pdf.
9 Marixa Lasso. Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of
Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).
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Conclusion
Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America is the most comprehensive volume

on Black politics in Latin America and the Caribbean to date. It has provided
deep regional coverage and a comparative lens to examine the problems and
prospects of Afro-descendants in the region. It has underscored many of the
key historical and contemporary challenges that Afro-Latin Americans have
faced in their struggle for recognition, equality and power. The main goals
of this volume have been to show that despite widespread racial inequality,
Black poverty and racial discrimination, Afro-descendants are fighting back by
creating new opportunity structures. As the volume has demonstrated, there
are numerous Black organizations, social movements and leaders protesting,
pressuring and criticizing key institutions of power. Various branches of gov-
ernment have overtly or covertly oppressed Black people or neglected their
core interests. As a result, Blacks have run for office, worked to change laws,
demanded and increased political representation and rejected portrayals of their
communities and countries as examples of racial paradise.
The first section examined how the combination of European colonization,
contact and conquest of the Indigenous people and the subsequent enslave-
ment of Africans led to racially stratified societies and polities in which Whites
and lighter-skinned Latin Americans became the political, economic and
cultural elites of the region. Bernd Reiter argued that centuries of White male
hegemonic rule have impoverished and oppressed Black and Native communi-
ties so thoroughly that dramatic measures are necessary. According to Reiter,
Caribbean and Latin American national governments must move beyond the
stale rhetoric of Liberal Democracy and recognize the racist crimes that have
been committed, pay reparations to those surviving communities and allow
them political autonomy so they will not continue to be victims of new or old
forms of exploitation.
Conclusion 345
The chapters by Darién J. Davis and Elisa Larkin Nascimento pointed out
that the Black experience was not only about oppression but defined by various
forms of agency and resistance. Afro-Latin Americans have fought militarily
against slavery, European colonial powers and proactively to defend themselves.
Oftentimes migrating from their birthplace to seek better opportunities within
their countries or in new countries. They have formed temporary and long-
lasting alliances with leaders, political parties, social movements and govern-
ments that promised them the possibility of a better quality of life and more
resources. Nascimento recounts that the struggles of Blacks in Latin America
have often drawn explicitly on their African cultural heritage and serve as inspi-
rations for Blacks throughout the Americas. In the first half of the 20th century,
the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey had a pres-
ence in various Caribbean, Central American and South American countries
and was a harbinger of later efforts by Afro-Latin American leaders and orga-
nizations to participate in global Pan-African movements and affairs. The long
trajectory of transnational Black identity of Afro-Latin Americans has been on
full display as women and men have organized regional and subregional meet-
ings in recent decades to organize resistance to marginalization and to fight for
greater representation, resources and an end to state-sanctioned violence.
Our second section focused on the Caribbean with emphasis on Cuba, the
Dominican Republic and Haiti. Outside the African continent, the Carib-
bean is a region in which African descendants represent the highest percentage
of national populations. It is a region of mainly island nations, which have
been especially vulnerable to outside interventions with devastating impacts
and consequences. Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti have all suffered
from decades of US intervention, and this interference has inevitably shaped
their domestic politics and national identities. In Cuba, for example, the US
government maintains an embargo on most goods and services even though
President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro recently reactivated diplo-
matic relations between the two countries. Danielle Pilar Clealand argued that
despite Cuban achievements in health, education and other areas, the govern-
ment severely restricts the freedom of Afro-Cubans to organize, mobilize and
express their political interests.
Jean-Germain Gros made a strong case that Haiti should be considered
part of Latin America and Afro-Latin America. The country has experienced
extended periods of authoritarian rule historically and been unsuccessful in
combining democracy and prosperity for the masses of Haitians. Gros makes
a powerful case that the divisions between the elites and the masses, elabo-
rated along the axis of color, have made creating a stable democracy impossible
thus far. Moreover, the complicated relations of colorism between light-skin
and dark-skin Haitians parallel much of Latin America. A key characteristic
of Haiti is the recognition and celebration of the country’s African heritage.
In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism remains very strong, and formal
and informal discrimination against Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans

is widespread. This reality also represents major obstacles to human rights
and democratic citizenship. April J. Mayes focused on a group of Haitian-
Dominican Black women who are leading the struggle in favor of Haitian
migrants’ rights and citizenship for their children born in the Dominican Re-
public. Government efforts to deny human rights to Dominican-Haitian im-
migrants and citizenship to their descendants born in the country have been
a source of negative tensions for many decades. Mayes highlighted how Black
feminists have used an intersectional theoretical approach to build broad na-
tional and international alliances in favor of human rights.
In section three, Carlos de la Torre and Jhon Antón Sanchez provide the
most detailed, comprehensive and state-of-the-art analysis to date of Afro-
Ecuadorian Politics in modern Ecuadorian politics. They showed how the
Citizens Revolution led by President Rafael Correa led to progressive reforms
favoring poorer Ecuadorians. They also demonstrated how leading Black
politicians and activists both supported and opposed Correa’s multicultural
policies and inclusive approach to politics. However, activists who opposed
Correa could suffer the wrath of a president who regularly used state power to
intimidate opponents.
The two chapters on Colombia explored the complex social terrain and
racialization in Colombia. Laura de la Rosa Solano examined how the tour-
ist industry in Cartagena commodifies Colombia’s mixed racial and cultural
heritage. Black Colombians are presented as happy sharers of Africa. Solano
demonstrated that while Blacks are no longer invisible, the state continues to
present them as a happy singing, dancing and friendly people. Stereotypes of
physical exoticism and sensuality are perpetuated.
Jaime Amparo Alves and Aurora Vergara-Figueroa focused on structural
poverty and inequality of Blacks in the major city of Cali, Colombia. Their
statistics and data paint a bleak picture of widespread Black suffering rarely
acknowledged by government and political figures. Alves and Vergara-Figueroa
characterized Cali and Colombia as pigmentocracies in which racial/color
mixture is acknowledged, but Whites and light-skinned Colombians are at
the top of the social pyramid whereas Blacks and dark-skinned Colombians
predominate at the bottom. The authors emphasized that celebrations of Black
culture in music, dance and food are not enough to rescue Afro-Colombians
from unemployment, illiteracy and structural violence.
In Argentina, Judith M. Anderson highlighted efforts of the small but vo-
cal Afro-Argentine population to call attention to their plight as a neglected
minority in the region’s Whitest country. Africans and Afro-descendants in
Buenos Aires have tried several models of activism to increase and unify their
numbers. They have developed relationships with political parties, labor unions
and other influential institutions. President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
(2007–2015) introduced a more multicultural perspective in Argentine politics.
Conclusion 347
However, many citizens still argued that there was no contemporary anti-Black
racism as the Black population had disappeared many years ago.
In our final section, Kia Lilly Caldwell argued that Black women are
increasingly important political actors in Latin America. Always active in
anti-racism efforts, Afro-Latin American women have created their own
organizations and movements in recent years. Caldwell pays special attention
to Black feminists in Colombia and Brazil, the countries with the largest
A fro-descendant populations. In Colombia, decades of civil war, violence
and displacement have led Black women to leadership in organizing, uni-
fying and resettling Blacks in new areas. In Colombia and Brazil, Black
women have founded many organizations and organized impressive social
movements to call attention to the interrelated nature of poverty, racism,
sexism, violence, homophobia, religious intolerance and other issues. The
victories of Black women in Brazilian politics led to new policies in the areas
of health care, affirmative action and economic justice. Black women also
assumed leadership in 1995 UN World Conference on Women as well as the
2001 Third World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related
Forms of Intolerence.
Tanya Katerí Hernández provided an important overview and analysis of
how Afro-Latin Americans have fought for legislation to protect them from
racial discrimination and to create greater opportunities for individual and
group advancement. While most Latin American countries have constitutional
clauses affirming equality, Hernandez reminds us that rarely have the courts
prosecuted anti-Black racial discrimination. As a result, activists have turned
to criminal law to challenge racial discrimination. However, successful pros-
ecution of racial discrimination cases has been rare as the political, judicial,
cultural and social contexts have required unrealistic and extremely difficult
burdens of proof. Nevertheless, important legal advances have been made in
the area of affirmative action, especially in Brazil and Colombia. In addition,
Brazil and Colombia have become pioneers in requiring the teaching of Black
history and culture.
For decades, Afro-Latin American activists and scholars have demanded that
their governments include race, color and/or ethnicity in their censuses and
reports. They assumed that these variables would likely help them understand
and solve significant social, economic and political problems. Marcelo Paixão
and Irene Rossetto are among the scholars taking advantage of new census in-
formation. In their important labor market study, they show through statistical
analysis that Afro-descendants usually have the lowest levels of education, the
highest levels of unemployment and the highest number of informal workers.
In a region notorious for levels of inequality, Browns and Blacks are usually
in the worst socioeconomic situation. Cuba is the most egalitarian country in
Latin America, although Afro-Cubans have less success and face more discrim-
ination than White Cubans.
In the last chapter, Paula Lezama concludes that Millennium development

goals (MDGs) approved by the UN in 2000, however well meaning, unfortu-
nately perpetuate some of the problematic aspects of earlier global development
efforts. While the international community correctly desires to dramatically
reduce poverty and improve living conditions, the MDGs goals were not met
by the 2015 target year. The UN revised its plan as the sustainable development
goals (SDGs). Lezama argued that global development goals continue to ignore
or remain silent on racial and ethnic discrimination even though other UN
institutions such as the 2001 Durban Conference addressed the essential role
of racism in perpetuating poverty and inequality. Moreover, Lezama argued
that the current approach will only strengthen the myth of racial democracy,
thereby committing the grave error of reducing race-based exclusion and dis-
crimination to class-based disparities.
This volume benefitted from the contributions of leading scholars of Latin
American history, politics, economics, law, society and culture. Our hope is
that Afro-Latin Americans will be recognized as human beings who are in-
tegral parts of their societies, polities and cultures. Most political science texts
tend to ignore or minimize race, color and ethnicity. We call for new studies
of Latin America, Afro-Latin America and racial politics in Latin America that
center the experience of Africans and Afro-descendants. Our contributors are
leading these efforts. We believe that focusing on the Black political experience
will give us new and deeper insight into Latin American politics.
Collectively, these essays address from various angles some of the core issues
and challenges facing Afro-descendants across the region. There are countries
and themes not covered, and we are of course cognizant of this gap. Given the
complexity and scope of Black Latin America, one volume is not able to cover
the broad range of issues facing the Afro-descendants in the region. We be-
lieve, however, that our contributors have enriched the current debates on the
meaning and significance of racial and Black politics and their corresponding
relationship to the struggle for racial justice in Latin America.
Index
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate notes section.
Acosta, Alberto 176 Afro-Latin American political engagement:

Adenauer, Konrad 56 Afro-descendants see Afro-descendants;
Administrative Department of Statistics 335 colonial dynamics 20–2; contemporary
ADWG see African Diaspora Working 20; description of 18–19; forced
Group (ADWG) migrations 18; modern dynamics
affirmative action, legal rulings on 279–80 22–9; securing rights, visibility and
African Diaspora of Latin America 224 intersectional activism 29–33; tools and
African Diaspora Working Group methods 19
(ADWG) 214, 215 Afro-Latin@ Festival 78
African history curriculum legislative AfroLatin@ Project 78
mandates 283 Afro-Politics and Civil Society in Salvador da
African Human Rights Charter 71 Bahia (Dixon) 5
Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Against the Land Grab (Perry) 3
Institute (IPEAFRO) 75, 76 Agier, Michel 230
Afrocentricity: the Theory of Social Change Alarcón, Fabián 169
(Asante) 75 Alberto, Paulina 267n1
Afro-Colombian community 281–3 Alert Against Racism website 277
Afro-Colombian Educational Credits Alexander, Michelle 329
Program 32 Alkire, Sabina 341n7
Afro-descendants: cultural production Alves, Jaime 11
of 21; migrations 33–7; multicultural American Slave Codes 21
rights of 280–1; political activity amparo relief 278
21; politics of 18; region-wide Anderson, Benedict 291
recognition of 19 Anderson, Judith 11
Afrodescendientes 156 The Answer is Colombia 229, 230, 236
Afro-Ecuadorian politics: Correa, Rafael Anti-Slavery Society of London 145
171–8; invisibility and Mestizaje 164–8; Aponte Commission 89–91, 97, 98, 105
neoliberal multiculturalism 168–71; Arce, Michael 177
overview of 163–4 Argentina: African-descendant migrations
Afro-Ecuadorians and the Struggle for Human in 33–7; US racial politics from 212–15
Rights (Dixon) 4 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 118, 126–30
350 Index
Arocha, Jaime 235, 281–2 Bosch, Juan 135

Article 55 of Constitution 281 Bosico,Violeta 146
Article 160 of Ley 115 283 Bourgeois Revolution in Europe 291
Article 7 of Ley 70 281 Brawley, Benjamin 69
Article 3 of Brazilian Constitution 279 Brazil: affirmative action 279–80;
Article 3 of Constitution 275 African-descendant migrations in 3,
Asante, Molefi K. 65, 75 33–7; constitutional laws 32; curriculum
Asher, Kiran 252, 282 mandate 283; Law of Social Quotas 280,
Association of Black Ecuadorians 283; parallel dynamics in 25; political
(ASONE) 167 national organizations 28; slave life
Azucena Asuncion Algendones v. Luis Alberto expectancy in 47
Perez Peralta 277 Brazilian Supreme Court 279
Brown G., Humberto 308
Bacoua, Fedo 35 Bucaram, Abdalá 166, 171
Bairros, Luiza 257 Bucaram, Assad 167
Balaguer, Joaquín 131, 133, 134, 145 Buenos Aires, Black political organizing in
Barbary, Olivier 203 217–22
Basurero Navarro 196, 197 Buggs, Mirangela 264
Belique, Ana 153, 154, 156 Burke, Peter 231
Bennett, Michèle 125 Burkina Faso 76
Beverly, John 157n4 Bush, George W. 213
Bigio, Gilbert 117
Bioho, Benkos 66 Cabecitas Negras 293
Bitter Sugar 145 Cabezas, Paola 176
Black and native communities, in Caicedo, Marcia 176
Americas: liberal democracy and Calderón, Juan Carlos 178
majority rule 51–2; overview of 44–5; Caldwell, Kia 3, 153
recognition, reparations and territory Cali, Colombia: Black exploitation
55–9; rethinking democracy through 190–2; Black/Indigenous identities
community 52–5; slavery, importance 185–8; Black population in 11,
of 45–7; slave societies 47–51; White 202–5; economic stratification in
privilege 58 207n6; Petronio Álvarez festival
Black Argentine political subject: Blackness 183; racially democratic horizontal
in White nation 216–17; in Buenos community 184; racial/spatial order
Aires 217–22; Obaca, Omar 222–5; 188–90; social inequalities in 192–202;
overview of 211–12; US racial politics White Mestizo Accumulation 184, 190–2
212–15 Camejo, Pedro 23
Black civil organizations 31 Campbell B., Epsy 308
Black Colombia Cultural Foundation 237 Candelario, Ginetta 141, 143
Black exploitation 190–2 Candombe associations 23
Black feminisms: in Dominican Republic Cape-Verde community organizations 36
150–5; in Latin America 263–5; White Carabali, Clemencia 254
nation, Black Labor 140–3 Caravalho, José Jorge 243
Black Feminist Formations in the Dominican Carbonell, Walterio 95
Republic in La Sentencia (Mayes) 10 Cárdenas, Mateo 183
Black Politics, in Latin America: Afro- Cardoso, Claudia 258
Civil Society groups 7–8; comparative Carneiro, Sueli 78, 264, 268n16
perspectives 12; direct attention to 2; Caro Baroja, Julio 231
factors 2; historical perspectives 8–9; Cartagena de Indias, Colombia 231–5, 238
racialization, definition of 1; systematic Cartagena Tourism Corporation 241, 242
study of 3 Casagrande, Joseph 168
Black women’s movement 258 Castillo, Daisy Rubiera 267n2
Bolsa Familia in Brazil 129 Castro, Raul 90–2, 107
Index 351
CCDH see Centro Cultural Coolidge, Calvin 69

Dominico-Haitiano (CCDH) Corporation for Afro-Ecuadorian
Cédras, Raoul 126 Development (CODAE). 169, 174
Centro Cultural Dominico-Haitiano Correa, Rafael 11, 164, 293; autocratic
(CCDH) 151 redistributive multiculturalism 171–8
Centro de Articulação de Populações Correcting Intellectual Malpractice: Haiti and
Marginalizadas 275 Latin America (Gros) 10
Cevallos, Dennis 171 Cott, Donna Lee Van 282–3
Chalá, José 175–6 Council for Afro-Ecuadorian Unity
Chavez, Hugo 128, 172, 293 (CONUAE) 175
Chile, African-descendant migrations in Council for Migration Policy 37
33–7 Covin, David 6
Christophe, Henry 137n1 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 29
Clarín 222 Criminal Code 274
Claude, Jean 144 criminal law equality enforcement 272–8
Clealand, Danielle 5, 9 Criola 275
CODAE see Corporation for Crow, Jim 24
Afro-Ecuadorian Development Cuba: Black activism and revolution 4,
(CODAE) 5, 9–10, 95–9; Black consciousness,
Collins, Patricia Hill 191 voices of 102–7; discrimination 99–102;
Colombia: Afro-descendants’ multicultural ideological platform 91; politics 90;
rights 281; Cali see Cali, Colombia; prerevolutionary past 89; race and
constitutional laws 32; National revolution 91–5; races in 89
Planning Department 251 Cuban revolution 92
Colombian Constitution 281 Cuero, Roberto 176
Colombian Constitutional Court 272, Cunin, Elisabeth 235–6
278, 282 Curiel, Ochy 151
Colombian Ministry of Justice 192
Colombia’s Black populations: Carnival DaMatta, Roberto 231
analysis 231; Cartagena de Indias da Silva, Benedita 260, 267n13
231–5; Ekobios 231, 236–44; invisibility da Silva, Luiz Inacio Lula 33, 128
and avoidance of 235–6; overview of Davis, Darién J. 8
229–30 de Belalcazar, Sebastián 207n4
Comunas 193, 194, 197, 199, 202, 207n7 Declaration of Rights 69
Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities declaratory judgment 284n1
of Ecuador (CONAIE) 166 de Dios Mosquera, Juan 17
Congresses on Black Culture in the de Friedemann, Nina 235
Americas 29 de Henríquez, Salomé Ureña 150
CONICET see National Scientific de Kirchner, Cristina Fernández 217, 219,
and Technical Research Council 221, 224
(CONICET) de la Fuente, Alejandro 292
Consejo, Anónimo 105 de la Hoz, Pedro 98, 99
Consejo Estatal de Azúcar (CEA) 144 de la Rosa, Laura 11
constitutional equality law 271–2 de la Torre, Carlos 10, 272, 273
Consultancy for Human Rights and Delgado, Agustín 177
Displacement see Consultoría para los Deloria,Vine 52, 53
Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento de Mello, Celso 279
(CODHES) Denton, Nancy A. 308
Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el de Porres Velásquez, Juan Martin 21–2
Desplazamiento (CODHES) 253 Desde la Ceiba 97
CONUAE see Council for Dessalines, Jean Jacques 137n1
Afro-Ecuadorian Unity (CONUAE) DFI see direct foreign investment (DFI)
Conyers, John Jr. 58 Díaz, Carlos Andrés Baquero 273
352 Index
diffuse rights 275 Fernández, Leonel 135, 146

direct foreign investment (DFI) 132 Fifth Pan-African Congress 71
Dixon, Kwame 4, 5, 249–50 Fignolé, Daniel 126–7
Dolis, Sirana 151 Firmin, Anténor 68
Dominican anti-Haitianism, politics of FNP see Fuerza Nacional Progresista (FNP)
143–50 Foner, Eric 48, 57
Dominican Constitution (2010) 139 Foster, James 341n7
Dominican-Haitian Cultural Center Fraser, Nancy 149
see Centro Cultural Dominico-Haitiano Freyre, Gilberto 186, 267
(CCDH) Fuerza Nacional Progresista (FNP) 145
Dominican law 157n5 Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko 322
Dominican Liberation Party see Partido de Fux, Luiz 279
la Liberación Dominicana (PLD)
Dominican Republic (DR) 130–5; Garavito, César Augusto Rodríguez
Black feminist formations in 150–5; 272–3, 282
Dominican anti-Haitianism politics Garcia-Serrano, Frederico 204
143–50 Garvey, Marcus 28, 68, 69
Dominican Revolutionary Party see Partido GEALA see Grupo de Estudios Afro-Latino
Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) Americanos (GEALA)
Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD) General Law on Migration 147, 148
133, 134 Germany, recognition, reparations and
DR see Dominican Republic (DR) territory 55–9
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt Gil, Gilberto 34
69–72, 76 González, Dixon Pérez 237
Duncan, Beverly 308 Gonzalez, Lelia 264
Duncan Dissimilarity Index 308–10 Gordon, Edmund 313n14
Duncan, Otis Dudley 308 Gorender, Jacob 44, 47
Durban Conference 31, 78, 262 Gros, Jean-Germain 10
Dutty, Boukman 67 Grupo de Estudios Afro-Latino Americanos
Duvalier, François 117–18, 125–6 (GEALA) 221, 222
Duvalier, Jean-Claude 117, 124, 126 Guerrero,Vicente 21
Guillén, Nicolás 26
EAP see economically active Guimarães, Antonio 272
population (EAP) Gutiérrez, Lucio 171
ECLAC see Economic Comission for Guzmán, Castaños 147
Latin American and the Caribbean
(ECLAC) Haiti: Aristide, Jean-Bertand 126–30;
economically active population (EAP) 297 authoritarian rule 123–6; ‘the
Economic Comission for Latin Black Republic’ 141; color and
American and the Caribbean class intersection in 112; color in
(ECLAC) 320, 332 Haitian politics 120–3; compacting
Ecuadorian legal system 272 of democracy 123–6; democracy,
Ekobios 229, 231, 236–44 agonizing transition to 117–20; and
El Universal 239, 242 Dominican Republic 130–5; historical
El Universo 178 and comparative perspectives 113–17;
Encyclopedia Africana (Du Bois) 70 rulers and technology 111; traditional
Escobar, Arturo 267n4 light-skinned elite 113
Escobar, Juan Montaño 171 Haitian-Brazilian community 34
Haitian migrants 139, 140
Farmer, Paul 111 Halloway, Joseph 21
Farquhar, Percival 25 Hanchard, Michael 3, 4
Fatiman, Cécile 67 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act 33
Fernández, Antonio Guzman 145 Hassaurek, Friederich 165
Index 353
Heredia, Pedro de 231 Kelley, Hugh 142

Hernández, Tanya 12 Kenyatta, Jomo 71
Herrera, Luis Muñoz 168
Hip Hop Symposium 108 Labyrinth, of ethnic-racial inequality
Hola 191, 194, 199 12; cross-national study 310; Duncan
Hooker, Juliet 5, 280 Dissimilarity Index 308–9; educational
House Foreign Relations Committee 76 attainment, of labor force 300–2; labor
human development bonus 172 force participation rate 297–300;
Hurtado, Jaime 167, 177 labor informality 304–6; methodology
Hurtado, Lenin 177 294–7; occupational profile 306–8;
Hurtado,Vicenta Moreno 190 overview of 288–9; theory and history,
elements of 290–4; unemployment rate
IADB see Inter-American Development 302–4
Bank (IADB) LAC see Latin America and the
Identidad organized workshops 150 Caribbean (LAC)
ILO see International Labour Organization Lafontant, Roger 126
(ILO) Lame, Manuel Quintín 52–3
The Impossible Black Argentine Politics Subject la Nación 222
(Anderson) 11 Laó-Montes, Agustín 255–7, 264, 267n8
INADI see Instituto Nacional contra La Sentencia 139, 148, 153, 154, 157n5
la Discriminacion, Xenofobia y el Lasso, Marixa 341n9
Racismo (INADI) Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
Independent Party of Color 105 320, 330, 331, 341n3
India Catalina 242 Latin American Black Movement 166
Indian Reorganization Act 53 La Vocation de l’Elite (Price-Mars) 69
Instituto Nacional contra la law 70 233, 252, 255
Discriminacion, Xenofobia y el Law against Interfamily Violence (1997) 273
Racismo (INADI) 219–21 Law of Family Planning 260
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Law of Social Quotas 280, 283
International (IPUMS-I) project 289, League of Nations Mandate Commission 71
294, 312n4, 312n5 les causes de nos malheurs (Paul) 114
Inter-American Court of Human Rights Ley de Naturalización 148
146, 148 Lezama, Paula 12
Inter-American Development Bank Lipsitz, George 190
(IADB) 169 Loury, Glenn 51
Interculturalidad 157n3 Lozano, Betty Ruth 254, 264
International Conference on Population Luís, Don 142
and Development (1994) 260 Luperón, Gregorio 141
International Decade of African
Descendants 78 McKittrick, Katherine 188
International Labour Organization (ILO) Macri, Mauricio 225
304, 306 Maduro, Nicolas 128
IPUMS-I project see Integrated Public Magalhães, José de 72
Use Microdata Series International Mahuad, Jamil 166, 169, 171
(IPUMS-I) project Malê Revolt of 1835 21
Iroquois Confederacy 52 mandamus order 284n1
Mariatequi, Javier 22
Jácome, Jorge González 272, 278 Marley, Bob 33
James, C. L. R. 71, 73 Maroon communities 17, 21, 53, 54
JCE see Junta Central Electoral (JCE) Marquez, Francia 254, 255
Johnson, Ollie 3, 4, 268n18 Márquez, Gustavo 289
Joseph, Jean 139, 149, 152–4 Marsteintredet, Leiv 146, 147
Junta Central Electoral (JCE) 147, 157n5 Martelly, Michel 123
354 Index
Martínez, Marcos Moreno 222, 223 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

Martínez, Samuel 144, 152, 153 330–2, 341n7
Marx, Anthony 46 Mundo Afro 17
Marxist Popular Democratic Movement
(MPD) 167 NAACP see National Association for
Massey, Douglas S. 308 the Advancement of Colored People
Mayes, April 10 (NAACP)
MDGs see Millennium Development Nadal, Enrique 218
Goals (MDGs) Nascimento, Abdias do 65, 72–6, 250
Medina, Danilo 146 Nascimento, Elisa 8, 9
Mendoza Bustos,Vanessa Alexandra 38 National Association for the Advancement
Meridians: Feminism, Race,Transnationalism of Colored People (NAACP) 69–70
267n2 National Coalition for Haitian Refugees
Mestizaje 77, 163–8, 184, 189, 216–17 145
Mestizo nationalism 49, 51 National Constitution 233
Mestizo population 290 National Department of Statistics (DANE)
Michael Arce Mendez v. Fernando Encalada 206n2
Parrales 276–7 National Immigration Council 34–5
migration laws 149, 157n2 National Institute Against Xenophobia and
Miguel, King 66 Racism see Instituto Nacional contra
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) la Discriminacion, Xenofobia y el
12, 318–19; Afro-Descendants, in Latin Racismo (INADI)
America 332–40; global development National Planning Department 251
agenda 321–4; post-2015 development National Progressive Force see Fuerza
agenda 324–30; structural failures 320 Nacional Progresista (FNP)
Ministry of Culture 32 National Revolutionary Police (PNR) 102
Ministry of Trade, Industry and Tourism 237 National Scientific and Technical Research
Mintz, Sidney 22 Council (CONICET) 221
Mitchell-Walthour, Gladys 5 National Statistical Offices 295
MNU see Movimento Negro Nayyar, Deepak 321
Unificado (MNU) The Negro in Art and Literature in the United
Mohammed, Amina 331 States (Brawley) 69
Montevideo conference 17 Negros of Peronism 211
Moore, Carlos 74, 76 neoliberal multiculturalism 168–71
moral damages 276 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Morales, Evo 172, 293 Age of Colorblindness (Alexander) 34
Mornan, Dermbay 190 New World slavery 47
Moron, Jenny 157n5 The New York Times 223
Moura, Clóvis 66 NGOs see nongovernmental
Movement of Dominican-Haitian organizations (NGOs)
Women see Movimiento de Mujeres Nicaragua: Criminal Code 274; equality
Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA) provisions 271
Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) 6 Nigerian Organization 215
Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana Nkrumah, Kwame 71
(MUDHA) 151, 152 Non-Aligned Movement 74
Moyano, Elena María 297 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
MPD see Marxist Popular Democratic 32, 78, 170, 175
Movement (MPD) Noticias magazine 222
MPI see Multidimensional Poverty Novo, Martínez 174
Index (MPI)
MUDHA see Movimiento de Mujeres OAU see Organization of African
Dominico-Haitiana (MUDHA) Unity (OAU)
multicultural constitutions 280–3 Obaca, Omar 222–5
Index 355
Obama, Barack 105–6, 212–15, 222, 225 Politique de Doublure 120

Ocles, Alexandra 175, 178 post-2015 development agenda 324–30
O Escravismo Colonial (Gorender) 47 PRD see Partido Revolucionario
Olivella, Delia Zapata 237 Dominicano (PRD)
Olivella, Manuel Zapata 66 Preciado, Antonio 167, 175
Open Letter to Dakar 73 prescientific theory 291
Organization of African Unity (OAU) 72, 73 Présence Africaine 73
Orgullosamente Getsemanicense 234 Price-Mars, Jean 69, 70
Ortiz, Adalberto 167 Price, Richard 22
Oslender, Ulrich 254 Priestley, Amilcar 78
Our Rightful Share (Helg) 105 Proceso de Communidades Negras (PCN) 253
Process of Black Communities see Proceso
Pacheco, Harvy Vivas 207n5 de Communidades Negras (PCN)
Pacto por la Democracia 135 Project on Race and Ethnicity in Latin
Padmore, George 71, 72 America (PERLA) 189
Página 12 newspaper 223 Proyecto AfroLatin@ 78
Paixão, Marcelo 12 PRSC see Partido Reformista Social
Palenque communities 53–5 Cristiano (PRSC)
palenqueras 240–1
Palmares Foundation 32, 66 Quality of Life National Survey (2012) 185
Pan-African Conference 70, 71 Quilombo communities 53, 54
Pan-Africanism: description of 64; events Quinones, Tato 97
(1900–80) 68–75; ideological contours Quiñónez, David 175
of 65; intellectual underpinnings of Quiñónez, Julio César 176
67–8; intensification of 75–9; panorama Quiñónez, Luis 175
of resistance 65–7
Partido Autóctone Negro 68 race-based affirmative action 279–80
Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD) racial profiling 101, 102
135, 139, 146 Racusen, Seth 275
Partido Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC) Rawls, John 59
133, 145 Reiter, Bernd 8, 9
Partido Revolucionario Dominicano (PRD) Revista Soho 191
145, 146 Reyes, Jenny Morón 148, 149, 152
Paschel, Tianna 280 Ribeiro, Matilde 262
Paul, Edmond 114 Roca, Blas 26
PCN see Proceso de Communidades Rodríguez, Romero Jorge 17, 18
Negras (PCN) Roland, Edna 259, 261, 262
Peluso, Cezar 279 Rolnick, Raquel 204
Peña Gómez, Francisco 133. 134, 145–6 Romero, Pedro 242
PERLA see Project on Race and Ethnicity Rosario, Roberto 147
in Latin America (PERLA) Rossetto, Irene 12
Perry, Keisha-Khan 3, 155, 258 Rousseff, Dilma 81, 263
Pétion, Alexandre 113, 137n1
Petronio Álvarez festival 183, 190, 206n1 Saith, Ashwani 322
Pichón: A Memoir: Race and Revolution in Sánchez, Jhon Antón 10
Castro’s Cuba (Moore) 35 Santi, Marlon 175
Pierre, Sonia 140, 151 Sawyer, Mark 4
PLD see Partido de la Liberación SDGs see sustainable development
Dominicana (PLD) goals (SDGs)
PNR see National Revolutionary Secretaria Especial de Promoção de Políticas da
Police (PNR) Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR) 262
The Politics of Blackness Secretaria Especial para a Promoção de Políticas
(Mitchell-Walthour) 5 da Mulher (SPM) 262
356 Index
Secretariat for Racial Equality Policies see Tocqueville, Alexis de 51

Secretaria Especial de Promoção de Políticas Todos Somos Cubanos 106
da Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR) Torres, Arlene 216
Secretariat for the Peoples and Citizen’s Torres-Saillant, Silvio 141
Participation (SEPPAC) 175 Transitory Article 55 252
Sendero Luminoso (guerrilla group) 29 Trotter, William Monroe 69
Senghor, Leopold Sédar 73 Trujillo, Rafael 131, 143, 144
SEPPAC see Secretariat for the Peoples and tutela 278
Citizen’s Participation (SEPPAC)
SEPPIR see Secretaria Especial de Promoção UN Committee on the Elimination of
de Políticas da Igualdade Racial (SEPPIR) Racial Discrimination 272
Seventh Pan-African Congress 76–7 UN Conference (2001) 30
Shoaff, Jennifer 149–50 UN Development Program 323
Simmons, Kimberly 150 UNEAC see Union of Cuban Writers and
Sinisterra’s case 278 Artists (UNEAC)
Sixth Pan-African Congress 73 UN Entity for Gender Equality and the
Smith, Christen 264 Empowerment of Women 78–9
Social Christian Reformist Party see Partido UNIA see Universal Negro Improvement
Reformista Social Cristiano (PRSC) Association (UNIA)
Society of Mutual Help Cape-Verdean Unified Black Movement in Brazil, 1978–2002
Union 36 (Covin) 6
Solis, Doris 175 Union of Cuban Writers and Artists
Sorcery of Color 65 (UNEAC) 97
Soulouque, Faustin 113 United Nations Human Development
South America, Black Politics in 10–11 Indicators 130
spatio-necropolitical dynamics 188 Universal Negro Improvement Association
Special Period 93–6, 102 (UNIA) 28, 68; First Convention of
Special Secretariat for Women’s Policies Peoples of the African World 69
see Secretaria Especial para a Promoção de Universidad Para Todos 92
Políticas da Mulher (SPM) UN World Conference 261
SPM see Secretaria Especial para a Promoção Up-ward mobility 23
de Políticas da Mulher (SPM) Uribe, Álvaro 283
Sugar and Modern Slavery 145 US Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Suplicy, Eduardo 260 Abandoned Land 48
sustainable development goals (SDGs) 12, US racial politics from Argentina 212–15
318–19; global development agenda
321–4; post-2015 development agenda Valiente, Juan 20
324–30; and poverty target 330–2 Vargas, João Costa 186
Vasconcelos, José de 186
Task Force report 7 Veloso, Caetano 34
Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN): ‘First Vergara-Figueroa, Aurora 11
Congress of the Black Brazilian’ 28 Viveros, Mara 184
Telles, Edward 46, 204, 207n9, 320
Temer, Michel 263 Wade, Peter 204, 251
TEN see Teatro Experimental do Wallace, John 24
Negro (TEN) Walsh, Catherine 77, 98
Terry, Inés María Martiatu 267n2 The War We Are Living 254
Testimonios 157n4 Washington, Booker T. 69
Theorizing Race in the Americas, Douglass, Weber, Max 289
Sarminento, Du Bois and Vasconcelos Werneck, Jurema 264
(Hooker) 5 White Mestizo Accumulation 184,
Third World Conference Against Racism 77 190–2, 202
Thomas, Samuel 57 Whitten, Norman E. 216
Tiririca case 275–6 Williams, Eric 114
Index 357
Williams, Sylvester 70 Yean and Bosico v. the Dominican Republic

women’s activism, in Afro-Latin America: 146
Black feminisms 12, 263–5; factors Yean, Dilcia 146
249; violence and displacement 251–6;
whitening and racial democracy 250–1 Zarzur, Sonia 191, 192
Wooding, Bridget 157n5 Zurita, Christian 178

Kwame Dixon - Ollie A Johnson III - Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America-Routledge (2018)

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Kwame Dixon - Ollie A Johnson III - Comparative Racial Politics in Latin America-Routledge (2018)

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Comparative Racial Politics

Kwame Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University,

‘Located at the cutting edge of the current wave of research on black-

‘This volume ably brings together established and emergent scholars

Edited by Kwame Dixon and

ISBN: 978-1-138-72702-1 (hbk)

List of Figures viii

1 Beyond Representation: Rethinking Rights, Alliances

2 Recognition, Reparations and Political Autonomy of

3 Pan-Africanism and Latin America 64

4 Black Activism and the State in Cuba 89

5 Correcting Intellectual Malpractice: Haiti and Latin America 111

6 Black Feminist Formations in the Dominican Republic

7 Afro-Ecuadorian Politics 163

8 En la Sucursal del Cielo (In the Branch of Paradise):

9 The Impossible Black Argentine Political Subject 211

10 Current Representations of ‘Black’ Citizens: Contentious

11 The Contours and Contexts of Afro-Latin American

12 Race and the Law in Latin America 271

13 The Labyrinth of Ethnic–Racial Inequality: A Picture of

14 The Millennium Development Goals/Sustainable

4.1 Experiences with discrimination 100

14.3 Percentage of country population that is low income 325

7.1 Afro-Ecuadorians elected to Congress, 1979–2006 168

14.3 Incidence of food insufficiency by race/ethnicity, Colombian

Jaime Amparo Alves teaches Anthropology at the College of Staten Island of

Judith M. Anderson is a Cultural Anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of

Kia Lilly Caldwell is a Professor of African, African-American and Diaspora

Danielle Pilar Clealand is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International

Darién J. Davis is Chair of the History Department at Middlebury College

Kwame Dixon is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard Uni-

Jean-Germain Gros is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy Ad-

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at

Elisa Larkin Nascimento holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of

April J. Mayes is an Associate Professor of History at Pomona College and

Marcelo Paixão is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bernd Reiter is a Professor of Political Science at the University of South Flor-

Carlos de la Torre is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky.

Aurora Vergara-Figueroa teaches Sociology at Universidad Icesi. She is the

was decided to place it in the category of Comparative Race/Political Science/

Kwame Dixon and Ollie A. Johnson III

This volume aims to counter the hegemonic logic of erasure by repositioning

Recent and New Research on Racial Politics in Latin America

Populismos: Una Inmersión Rápida (2017); Marcelo Paixão, Quinientos años de

illustrated by the new wave of innovative scholarship. Recent works include

David Covin’s Unified Black Movement in Brazil, 1978 to 2002 (2006) is an

a to understand State sanctioned racialized violence (Alves);

What Is Black Politics in Latin America?

rights, space and belonging in the dominant society. By challenging racialized,

Overview of the Volume

Part 1: Historical Perspectives

conspired to restrict the rights of Afro-descendants in multiple ways. He points

Part 2: The Caribbean

contradictions of socialist Cuba. She carefully examines the strategies employed

Part 3: South America

Part 4: Comparative Perspectives

gradual change in visibility of individuals of African descent in national ­political

Afro-Latin Politics in the Colonial and Modern Eras: Obstacles

Unlike Haiti, however, most of the independence leaders in the ­Spanish-

America-Congress of Industrial Organization for assistance and to other local

1910, where he established a small newspaper and commissioned the building

While some Afro-descendants gained visibility, national attention and

The Contemporary Era: New Ways of Securing Rights,

gradual change in visibility of individuals of African descent in national political

Unlike Haiti, however, most of the independence leaders in the Spanish-

d elegate, Abdias Nascimento’s participation at the Congress was hamstrung not

Structural Discrimina on Atudinal Discrimina on

Figure 4.1 Experiences with discrimination.

Figure 4.2 Group consciousness and awareness.

Figure 4.3 Black organizing.

confronted the government on various occasions to act on behalf of Afro-

Post–Duvalier Haiti was definitely not insipid. Traffic at Toussaint Louverture

Workers-Peasants Movement (Mouvement Ouvriers-Paysans). He was in power