DESPITE PERVASIVE LITANIES ABOUT Latin America’s colorblind “racial democracy,” blatant discrimination continues to plague descendants of the ten million African slaves who were brought to toil on the plantations and mines of the New World. Such dis- crimination is compounded by a nearly universal denial of black heritage and identity, even in countries with large black populations, that has effectively rendered blacks invisible. To conclude our series marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus, we set out to examine these “invisible” peoples, who number somewhere between 35 and 95 million. We found that, outside the halls of academia, black history has been hidden, distorted or ignored. A few facts: Both Bolivar’ s and San Martin’s armies which wrested independence from Spain were mostly black. In the 1850s the city of Buenos Aires was one-third black. The self-liberation of the slaves began in 1502, when Africans first joined with Native Americans to rebel against their European oppres- sors. Few years went by without major black uprisings from then until emancipation over 300 years later. And runaway slaves, known as maroons, formed communities that boasted tens of thousands of inhabitants and lasted for more than a century. H ISTORY WEIGHS HEAVILY ON THE BLACK peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. Colo- nial society classified people by an intricate system of graduated differences in skin color and other somatic features, correlated with degrees of affinity with Euro- pean culture. Even today, “lightening” remains key to social advancement, while “darkening” is blamed for everything from poverty and underdevelopment to the whole sorry history of the region. Only in Haiti have African heritage and black identity been embraced by the nation as a whole. Even there, a mulatto elite has emerged, as has a black ghetto in Port-au-Prince. Some of the worst racist legacies of colonial society were perpetuated by nineteenth-century progressives who sought to overcome them. Though rigid and hierarchical, the colonial caste system did allow for the affirmation of identity and a certain respect for diversity. Following the social revolution that the wars of independence wrought, this system was replaced by one which enshrined as the embodiment of equality and freedom the “mestizo race”-made up of “mixed white and American Indian,” as The New York Times put it recently-thus denying black people’s existence, despite their significant numeri- cal and cultural weight. Ethnic, racial and cultural diversity came to be viewed as subversive, a challenge to the official nation defined by its supposed homogeneity: one mestizo people speaking a single tongue and believing in a single god. The Latin American Left, a creature of nationalism and anti-impe- rialism, has done little to challenge this basic tenet of iden- tity. To varying degrees, the multi-faceted black struggle for liberation, ongoing since 1502, was subsumed in “class” struggle, while racism, previously an openly ac- knowledged characteristic of society, became a taboo subject, denied along with the people who suffered its effects. YET A VIBRANT SENSE OF BLACK SELFHOOD persevered, particularly where maroons had seized their freedom and asserted their culture and territory: various parts of Brazil, the interior of Suriname and the Guianas, the Yungas of Bolivia, the northwest coast of Ecuador, the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and Cauca Valley of Colombia, the Llanos and northern coastal crescent of Venezuela, the Mosquitia of Honduras and Nicaragua, the Atlantic coast of Central America, the mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica’s Blue Mountains and Red Hills, and the Oriente of eastern Cuba, to name just the most prominent. There, hidden from view, people built sophisticated and adaptable black cultures, drawing on the entwined processes of tradition, history and identity. Black political movements are gathering strength in a number of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Ven- ezuela and Ecuador. Some of these challenge discrimina- tory practices through the courts and seek greater black participation in the electoral arena. Others champion “blackness” and black heritage, reclaiming black history and insisting on respect for the black contribution to national culture. Still others seek territorial autonomy for the indomitable maroon communities which survive to this day. Like much of the reality of oppressed peoples, the Black Americas have been obscured in a cloud of dis- torted history, outdated notions of culture and nation- hood, denial and self-denial. Our attempt to trace some of the broad contours of America’s past and present in this and the previous issues of our quincentenary series was prompted by the failure of traditional political paradigms to challenge the blindness of the official world. The effort led us to imagine alternative ways of seeing the region and its history-from the conquest as “Inventing America,” to imperialism as the “Conquest of Nature,” to Native Ameri- can peoples as “The First Nations,” and now black peoples as “The Black Americas.” Seeing the world through new eyes, we hope, will prompt new efforts to change it.
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