In the mid fifteenth century, sailors under the command of the Portuguese entrepreneur Prince Henry the Navigator began purchasing human chattel at ports in West Africa and shipping them to Portugal for sale throughout Europe. As Prince Henry’s sailors color-coded their chattel, Africans previously known on the Iberian Peninsula as Jelof, Biafara, Bran, Berbesí, Mandinga, Baõl, Fula, and all their greater diversity, became resignified as “black.” This glossing of the diverse people of a continent by a single color term—negro—coincided, perhaps ironically, with the beginning of large-scale conversions of Africans to Christianity in the region of the Congo and by the emergence of “racially mixed” people in the coastal towns of West Africa.[1]
Fifty years later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus, the first profit-seeking European slaver in the Americas, claimed to have reached the gateway to Asian markets. He had witnessed the expansion in the Portuguese- sponsored African slave trade, and learned from it. In his Diario of 1492-93, he wrote: “Todo deve ser cosa provechosa.” (“Everything should be profitable.”)[2] And so the Admiral named all the inhabitants of the Americas by one term—indios (“Indians”)—marking them as socially and morally deficient and establishing European hegemony over all of their lands and labor.[3] One wonders why in 2001 Western vocabularies have so few terms for diverse native peoples. The answer is found in the enduring hegemony of the West in which the great differences among the original people of the Americas remain muted or negated. “Indians” they were named; “Indians” they became; and “Indians” they are. It is this hegemonic model that polarizes “blacks” and “Indians” in Latin America that we seek to contest.
Since 1492, indigenous American legacies and destinies have intertwined with representations and identities of blackness and whiteness. Concepts of “race” came to reflect, by the sixteenth century, underlying postulates of West European mercantile dominance. Indigenous peoples and populations of African descent, positioned by Europeans at the bottom of both class and ethnic hierarchies, acquired the stigmatic, opposing labels indio and negro as the embodiments of opposite versions of themselves. They became the racial antipodes of the Americas. These terms were applied initially by Columbus—Bearer of Christ and Admiral of the Ocean Sea—as part of his claim to have reached India by sailing west in the Atlantic and on into the Caribbean to “Japan” (Cipango, the Island of Cuba). He tried to open the portals of wealth through the acquisition of gold, pearls and spices. He initiated commercial slavery in the Americas, and tried to show wealthy and powerful Europeans how indios could be easily outwitted for the wealth of their land, and how their bodies could be turned into substantial profit.
The native inhabitants of the “Precolumbian Americas” could not escape the stigmatic systems of representation bound to the paradigm that constructed them as indios. Spain organized its colonies by sharply dividing the “Republic of Spaniards” from the “Republic of Indians.” And, while negros abounded, as slave and as free, they existed in a liminal social state—a position “betwixt and between” the established republics of Spanish and Indian. They were granted no collective social position, no “republic,” but they constructed their own.
As the formal division between Spaniards and “Indians” became ever more rigid in the Spanish colonies, the traffic in black slaves increased exponentially, and the movements toward self-liberation accelerated. While blackness had no formal construct other than in the laws of slavery or the realities of self-liberated communities, the quality of being black, whether free or slave, became fused to the socially constructed qualities of whiteness and “Indianness.”
The West European concept of “race” in English, raza in Spanish, emerged around 1500 from what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “obscure roots.”[4] At this time the idea of distinct imagined systems of biocultural “beings”—white, black, Indian— justified a vast colonial system of white supremacy and black and indigenous subservience. At the bottom of class-status relationships, flowing downward from the wealthy and fair skinned to the poor, were those people generally represented in Latin America as negro, on one side, and indio, on the other. Far from being opposites, blackness and indigenousness have been inextricably entangled through history.
Key markers in the Iberian paradigm of dominance look like this:
Here, according to social constructions implanted in the Americas by the Iberian colonizers, white genes mingling with Indian genes produced a “half-breed” race of mestizos, while white genes “mixing” with those of black Africans produced mulatos. Both of these mixtures were governed by the racist construct of “hybridity” wherein the higher status in racialist rank (white, español) gave superior genetic stock to the lower (indio and negro) to serve thereby as a “civilizing” cultural factor.[5] In the long succession of Latin American colonial, republican, and nation-state ideologies, this system of ethnic polarities has been mediated by this hegemonic hybridization—mestizaje—even to the point of bringing into being a so-called “cosmic race” through the biological and cultural transformation of negros into mulattos and indios into mestizos.[6]
Black and Indian mixes, by contrast, produced a socially constructed racial category called zambo, or “black indian,” a cultural status that permeated colonial accounts of dangerous people—a danger said to emerge from the lack of genetic mediation of whiteness. The quality of zambo had no place in the Euro-American colonial hybridity theories that mixed civilized with savage to create a pliable mestizo “race” of New World-born Creoles. Historically, it has been a powerful category for self-ascription for those who resisted colonial rule, founded free villages, and raided—and traded with—the plantations, towns and settlements that dotted the profit-making colonies.
We raise the question as to whether we might learn something new by paying more attention to indigenous concepts of blackness. Both of the authors do research in indigenous communities in Ecuador, Corr in the Andes and Whitten in Upper Amazonia. There we encounter many concepts of blackness (lo negro) very different from the dominant, hegemonic constructs. What could we learn if we looked closely at the indigenous festivals, figures of speech, myths, stories and shamanic texts in places where blackness came to be a prominent feature in ethnic life? We begin our search in Venezuela.
There is a story told by contemporary Carib-speaking Yekuana of Amazonian Venezuela.[7] It does not follow the nationalist ideology of mestizaje characteristic of Venezuela. Rather, it offers cultural images of “blackness” as positive social constructions of representation and identity. In the story, black people are associated with the black currasow, Kurunkumo. They are represented as slaves to the Fañuru, the evil Spaniards, and as soldiers in the Spanish army as well as the army of liberation.
“With the Fañuru came a people called Kurumankomo, the black people. They were servants of the others. Their father was a black man, named Mekuru. He was Kahiuru’s servant. They were good, poor people too. The Fañuru made them work. They didn’t give them any money. Lots of them ran off to the jungle and mixed with the Iaranavi [the “good Spaniards,” with whom the Yekuana had trade relations]. That’s how the Murunmatto, the mestizos [mulattos], were born. They have our color. They are our friends.”[8] This tale telling by the indigenous Carib-speaking Yekuana resonates well with stories of the only black people to have emerged from this area in historic times.
Themes similar to those in Yekuana myth and cosmology about the forces of evil and good in contemporary life can be found in the stories told by the Noanam and Emberá of the Darién region of Panama and in the Pacific lowlands of western Colombia and Ecuador. Here we find what Stephanie Kane calls a “scale of sentient beings” that includes people or beings called libres (free) and cimarrones (self-liberated). Libre and cimarrón are two key Emberá and Noanam categories for the merger of human and spirit power. They are terms that embody the historical association of blackness with self-liberation. They are affirmative social constructions that deny an identity rooted in slavery.[9]
Cimarrón comes from the Spanish language of the Americas, with Arawak language roots.10 It emerged in the Caribbean and mainland South America around 1500, first to refer to wild cattle, and then, shortly thereafter, to refer to runaway indigenous and black slaves taking refuge in the haiti—the forested hilly regions of the large Caribbean islands and the interiors of Central and South America. The Taíno designation for such a refuge zone—haiti—became the name of the western side of the island of Hispaniola—Haiti—when the people who lived there successfully revolted against French colonialism in 1804.
Eventually, the concept cimarrón became attached almost exclusively to runaway black people. The imagery of cimarronaje among the Noanam and Emberá is that of mysterious, free, dangerous, spiritual, but also corporeal beings—their footprints can still be seen—completely familiar with the deep forest and committed to free life beyond the confines or reaches of white authority. These cimarrones may be other Emberá or Noanam, or blacks or zambos.
We find, in many indigenous stories, legends and celebrations, not a contrast between black and indigenous people, but rather a continuity of representation from indigenous to black. The late Nina S. de Friedemann found that contemporary legends of the black artisans of Güelmambí, southwestern Colombia—who still produce gold and guanín filigree—tell of how they took over the artistic work of native people when the latter died out.[11] In Ecuador, historian P. Rafael Savoia traces a migration of self-liberated mixed black-indigenous (zambo) people from Esmeraldas to Bahía de Caráquez, where they continued the maritime trade for which the indigenous people of the area were famous, after the virtual demise of the native Manabí following the European conquest.
Representations of blackness in Pacific and Amazonian mythologies are also enacted in Andean indigenous performances. In Quito, Ecuador, we continue to find that indigenous performances reveal alternative representations of “race.” A celebration called the Yumbada offers a striking imagery that challenges the notion of “el mestizaje.” El mestizaje, “the blending,” or “the hybridizing,” or “the cross breeding,” refers here to the racialized embodiment of mixed peoples that signals an imagined community of lesser national beings for the white elites.
During the Yumbada the prominent dramatic types are those of the white prioste (festival sponsor) offering the fiesta to the Catholic Church, the indigenous Yumbo from the forested Andean slopes and the black molecaña (sugar-cane grinder) from the low, hot rainforest of coastal Esmeraldas province. The central performers refer to themselves as Quito Runa. Runa is the Quichua word for “fully human being.”[12]
In Salasaca, Andean Ecuador, indigenous festivals transform the figure of the black from one epoch to the next. The polar meanings of blackness in much indigenous mythology—of oppressed slaves and strong soldiers—emerge in two different Salasacan festivals: the soldier image of the festival of Caporales, celebrated in February, and the slave into self-liberation imagery of pre-lenten Carnival. The fiesta of Caporales is associated with the Catholic feast days of the Three Kings and the baby Jesus. In this representation the blacks represent soldiers who guard the treasures brought by the Kings for the sacred infant. Images of different black peoples from both Spanish Catholic and Salasacan historical experiences are fused. The historical experiences include recent economic transformations such as the 1970s oil boom that sparked a migration of coastal Afro-Ecuadorians through the Andes to the Amazonian regions.
Each portrayal of a black person enacts a representation of negro or zambo from the coastal provinces of Manabí or Esmeraldas. The portrayal is often that of a soldier in the army of Eloy Alfaro Delgado during the time of the great Liberal Revolution of the late nineteenth century—the alfarada, as it is sometimes called, of 1894-95—that caused a national social transformation. Eloy Alfaro is considered in Salasaca, as elsewhere in Ecuador, to be a liberator of black and indigenous people. Each negro, as the dancers are called, is paired with a doña, “woman of esteem,” who is portrayed by a strong young man or boy dressed as a Salasacan woman. The negros, dressed in soldiers’ uniforms and carrying swords, dance with the doñas while moving their swords up and down in their scabbards. They shout: “¡hoyaaá! ¡como zambo! ¡como yana! ¡como negro!” (like black!)
The negro in such performances fuses the imagery of black and indigenous liberation. According to oral history, Salasacans collaborated with the black coastal soldiers to disguise President Eloy Alfaro as an indigenous woman so that he could safely travel northward through the Sierra to arrive in Quito—where, despite these efforts, he was assassinated. Many Salasacan people share a consciousness of the common struggle of Afro-Ecuadorian and indigenous people against white and mestizo oppression. The protector role may extend into the afterlife, as well, as the negro soldiers from the festival of Caporales accompany the sponsors through or around purgatory, which is on the processional trail. They use their swords to hold back the trickster devils—diabloguna—who try to capture their souls at certain crossroads.
The portrayal of the liberation of blacks from slavery in indigenous historical consciousness is dramatized in other Andean cultural enactments. In Oruro, Bolivia, during Carnival, indigenous actors represent blackness through the Morenada (from moreno, a dark, or black person), a performance that preserves the memory of African slaves brought to work in the mines of the highlands. One drama of the Morenada enacts a rebellion against the caporal, the black slavemaster.[13]
Throughout Andean Ecuador the image of blackness in the context of indigenous festivity and indigenous artistic portrayal fuses images of different black personages across many centuries. One of the best known and most publicized of these is the Mama Negra (Black Mother) festival held in the city of Latacunga in November. Among other events celebrated by Mama Negra is the liberation of black slave miners in Cotopaxi by indigenous people from that province. Other images of blackness in Ecuadorian Andean festivity include the Black Kings or Magi coming from “Abyssinia” to view the Christ child and to guard his treasures. The sixteenth-century Spanish image of the Moors is also represented, as are nineteenth-century black troops of the wars of liberation.
Blackness emerges in the Canelos Quichua imagery of Amazonian Ecuador in stories of the Wayalumba Supai.[14] Wayalumba Supai lives in a natural entanglement of spiny ferns deep in the Amazonian rain forest. He emerges from this entanglement with a different kind of drum, which he beats to attract children to him. Wayalumba is self-liberated. By his drumming and by his dancing he emerges as another force, called zambo, or negro. The spirit (supai in Quichua) is of the various epochs of cultural time and dimensions of cultural space. He may come forth in beginning times and places, times of revolution of Eloy Alfaro, times of the grandparents, or present times.
His imagery is of the forest—spiritual, dangerous and libidinous—but he resides near indigenous settlements. He is very similar to the conceptualization of the cimarrón in Emberá-Noanam and Chachi cosmology. Wayalumba is of the forest, yet he is intricately connected to the history and legacies of the Spanish conquest, to the people of today and to the emergence, within history and destiny, of blackness as associated with self-liberation.
Blackness is a social construction, a set of images built up—in Europe and the Americas—of historically transmitted symbols that recognize and represent people of African descent from the 1450s to the present.[15] People so represented, in specific contexts, are signaled as contrasting with people who are recognized and represented differently. Living human beings decide who and what is “black” and who and what belongs to a “group.” Race relations are symbolically constructed within cultural contexts. Symbolic constructions generate images, patterns of thought and emotion that influence the way people see themselves and others.[16]
Confusion exists in the social sciences and the humanities about all of this, and scholars frequently conflate “identity” with “representation.” Identity refers to the ways in which a person, or an aggregate of people, achieve self-perception. Representation is the way by which people are signified by others. Signification often involves a word that names the object of representation. Writing about racialized cultural diversity, Jean Muteba Rahier says, “There is no such thing as a world ‘out there’ that would exist independently of the discourses of representation. Representations constitute, in part, the world in which we live.”[17] Or as Karl Marx once put it, “…As people express their lives, so they are.”[18]
We find it highly significant that indigenous people do not represent “slavery” as the embodiment of blackness. Rather, blackness is fused with imageries of self-liberation. In reading texts from the Yekuana, Emberá, Noanam, Chachi, Quito Runa, Salasaca Quichua, Canelos Quichua, or from those who fled to and mixed with indigenous people such as the Saramaka, Garífuna, Miskitu, or black esmeraldeños, we find that “race” is not represented as a biological given, but as a malleable carrier of historical and cosmological meanings.[19] Nor do indigenous people, in their own languages, identify as “indios.” They contest the pejorative and stereotypic representation, even as they may use it to dramatic effect in the enactment of their myriad system of identity politics. Real people create new modernities; to listen to them and to understand their messages requires considerable reflection. The reflexive effort begins with a reading of the texts and listening to the voices of those who survived their socially constructed banishment to the racialized antipodes of society.
In Esmeraldas, western Ecuador—which is part of the Pacific lowlands of Panama, Colombia and Ecuador—the internationally known black author, Nelson Estupiñán Bass, offers us a powerful statement of identity. There can be no doubt about the affirmation of the identity of blackness in his poem—negro soy, negro voy (black I am, black I go)—it is first person, publicly personal, declarative, poetic, and moving:
Negro, negro, renegrido, (Black, black, blackened)
negro, hermano del carbón, (black, brother of charcoal,)
negro de negros nacido, (black of blacks born,)
negro ayer, mañana y hoy. (black yesterday, today and tomorrow,)
Algunos creen insultarme (Some believe they insult me)
gritándome mi color (mocking my color)
más yo mismo lo pregono (but I myself proclaim it)
con orgullo frente al sol: (with pride in the face of the sun:)
Negro he sido, negro soy, (Black I have been, black I am,)
negro vengo, negro voy, (black I come, black I go,)
negro bien negro nací (black real black I was born,)
negro negro he de vivir, (black black I must live,)
y como negro morir. (and as black must die.)[20]
As Michael Taussig once put it: “From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation.”[21] In South America it is from the indigenous and Afro-Latin American people that hegemonic representations are being overturned.[22]
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Norman Whitten teaches anthropology and directs the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of many books and articles about Afro-Latin American and Indigenous people of South America. Rachel Corr is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Honors College, Florida Atlantic University. Portions of this article are excerpted from Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, edited by Jean Muteba Rahier, Copyright ©1999 by Jean Muteba Rahier; reproduced by permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc, Westport, CT.
NOTES
1. See “Reconnaissance of Africa,” Oxford Atlas of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 34-35; Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially pp. 1-26; Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 1996 (No. 53), pp. 251-258; Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Américas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
2. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492-94, transcribed and translated into English with notes by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), pp. 134, 135.
3. John Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, eds., Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, pp. 169-198.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 1646.
5. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 2nd ed.
6. José Vasconcelos and A.L. Carballo, Antología de Pensamiento Político, Social y Económico de América Látina (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, edición Justina Sarabia, 1989).
7. European conquerors used the term “Carib” to label people as cannibals (caníbales, canimas, and caribes) to justify rape, enslavement, and war. We use the term to refer to the language group that is wide-flung in South America around the periphery of Greater Amazonia, from the Orinoco River Region of Venezuela to the Xingú River Region of Brazil. For information on the use of the label cannibal, see Michael Palencia-Roth, “The Cannibal Law of 1503,” in Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis, eds., Early Images of the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1993) pp. 21-63. For literature on the Carib and Arawak people of the Caribbean see Peter Hulme and Neil L. Whitehead, eds., Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
8. Marc de Civrieux, WATUNNA: An Orinoco Creation Cycle, edited and translated by David M. Guss (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980), p. 156. The Yekuana are also known by the Arawak word Maquiritare (Makiritare). Both words mean “river people” or “canoe people.” See also David M. Guss, To Weave and Sing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). The Arawak were the people, known as Taíno, first encountered by Columbus in the Bahamas on the 12th of October 1492.
9. Stephanie C. Kane, The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), especially p. 107.
10. Richard Price and Sally Price, “Collective Fictions: Performance in Saramaka Folktales,” in Dorothea Scott Whitten and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds., Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1993), page 283; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer, and Dicey Taylor, eds., Taíno: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean (New York: The Monacellia Press, El Museo del Barrio, 1997).
11. Nina S. de Friedemann, “Gold Mining and Descent: Güelmambí, Nariño,” in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, Vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 182-199; Nina S. de Friedemann, Minería, Descendencia y Orfebrería Artesanal Litoral Pacífico (Colombia) (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional, 1974).
12. Frank Salomon, “Killing the Yumbo: A Ritual Drama of Northern Quito,” in Norman E. Whitten, Jr., ed., Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) pp. 166-167.
13. June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 131-132.
14. Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 84-87.
15. For an understanding of cultural imagery consult Dorothea Scott Whitten and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds., Imagery and Creativity: Ethnoaesthetics and Art Worlds in the Americas. For an extended discussion of imagery of blackness in the Americas see Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and Arlene Torres, eds. (Vol. 1), Arlene Torres and Norman E. Whitten, Jr., eds. (Vol. 2), Blackness in Latin American and the Caribbean: Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics.
16. This argument is spelled out in much greater detail in Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and Rachel Corr, “Imagery of ‘Blackness’ in Indigenous Myth, Discourse, and Ritual,” in Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999), pp. 213-233; and in Norman E. Whitten, Jr, “Los Paradigmas Mentales de la Conquista y el Nacionalismo: La Formación de los Conceptos de las ‘Razas’ y las Transformaciones del Racismo,” in Emma Cervone and Fredy Rivera, eds., Ecuador Racista: Imágenes e Identidades (Quito: FLACSO, 1999), pp. 45-70. Also see David M. Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 59.
17. Jean Muteba Rahier, “Introduction,” in Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities, p. xiv.
18. Janet L. Dolgin, David S. Kemnitzer, and David M. Schneider, eds., Symbolic Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 3.
19. Terminology in the Americas is fascinating as regards racialization, self-liberation, and the dynamics of indigenous and Afro-Latin American people. A few examples are: The name “Seminole” derives from cimarrón, a concept that underscores freedom; the Miskitu—often known as zambos— got their name through their alliance with the British, from whom they obtained muskets which they used against the Spanish; the Garífuna (or “Black Carib”) came into historical being on St. Vincent Island in the Lesser Antilles through interbreeding between Arawak-speaking native peoples known as the “Island Carib” and black cimarrones and perhaps slaves. Garífuna (plural Garinagu), which these people call themselves, derives from “Kalinago,” the name by which Columbus came to know the “Carib” of Eastern Venezuela and Guyana.
20. Nelson Estupiñán Bass, “Canción del niño negro y del incendio,” Canto Negro por la Luz: Poemas para Negros y Blancos (Esmeraldas: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1954), p. 50, 53.
21. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 135.
22. See, e.g. Jean Muteba Rahier, ed., Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities.
