1

The Making of a Field

Afro-Latin American Studies

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews

This volume seeks to introduce readers to the dynamic and growing field
of Afro-Latin American studies. We define that field, first, as the study of
people of African ancestry in Latin America, and second, as the study of
the larger societies in which those people live. Under the first heading,
scholars study Black histories, cultures, strategies, and struggles in the
region. Under the second, they study blackness, and race more generally,
as a category of difference, as an engine of stratification and inequality,
and as a key variable in processes of national formation.
There are sound historical reasons for both approaches. Of the
10.7 million enslaved Africans who arrived in the New World between
1500 and 1870, almost two-thirds came to colonies controlled by Spain or
Portugal (Borucki, Eltis, and Wheat 2015, 440; see also Chapter 2). It was
in those territories that slavery lasted for the longest periods of time in the
Western Hemisphere, spanning over 350 years. Africans began arriving
at the islands of the Caribbean in the early sixteenth century, and slavery
was not finally abolished in those islands until 1886, when the last slaves
were emancipated in Cuba. Two years later, Brazil became the last country
in the Americas to abolish slavery; today it is home to the second-largest
Afrodescendant population in the world, exceeded in size only by Nigeria.
Close to a million Africans arrived in Cuba during the nineteenth century
and over two million in Brazil, a process that helps explain the profound
influence that African-based cultural practices have exercised in the for-
mation of national cultures in those two countries and around the region
more generally.
Yet it was not until quite recently that the scholarship on race, inequal-
ity, and racial stratification in Latin America had grown enough to

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 2 Afro-Latin American Studies

develop the sorts of questions and debates that sustain and constitute a
field of study. Writing in 1992, Thomas Skidmore, at that time the
leading scholar of Brazil in the United States, noted that one could
“count on the fingers of one hand the . . . authors who have done serious
research on post-abolition race relations.” Skidmore was talking specif-
ically about Brazil, but his observation could be applied to Spanish
America as well. Throughout Latin America, scholars interested in Afro-
descendant peoples had focused almost entirely on the period of slavery,
“as if the topic of race ceased to have any relevance . . . after slavery
ended” (Skidmore 1992, 8).
During most of the 1900s, the idea that race was not an important
dimension of Latin American societies was widespread in the region.
National ideologies of racial inclusion, discussed in depth in Paulina
L. Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s contribution to this volume
(Chapter 8), argued that Latin American societies had transcended their
colonial histories of state-mandated racial inequality to become, in the
1800s and 1900s, “racial democracies” governed by social norms of
racial harmony and equality. National politics in the region were driven
not by racial tensions and divisions, it was argued, but by conflicts and
negotiations among competing social classes. For most observers of the
region, the central questions of the twentieth century were how to achieve
self-sustaining economic growth and development, and how to allocate
power and resources among elites, middle classes, workers, and peasants.
As we write in 2017, that panorama has shifted dramatically. Formerly
considered “irrelevant,” race is now at the center of research on Latin
American societies (see, e.g., Wade 2009, 2010, 2017; Gotkowitz 2011;
Hernández 2013; Loveman 2014; Telles and PERLA 2014). This has been
especially the case with Afro-Latin American topics. As the chapters in this
volume abundantly show, over the last thirty years scholars have produced
a rich outpouring of research and writing on time frames ranging from the
period of colonial slavery to the present day. This shift occurred partly in
response to the realization, articulated by postcolonial scholars, that race is
central to historic and contemporary processes of coloniality (Quijano
2000; Mignolo 2005). Just as important, however, were the political and
social changes taking place in the region.
The field of Afro-Latin American studies has developed in tandem
with, and to a large degree in response to, a wave of racially defined
social, cultural, and political movements that, taking advantage of dem-
ocratization processes since the 1980s, have transformed how Latin
Americans think about their region, culture, and history. Building on

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 The Making of a Field 3

social sciences research that has documented persistent racial inequality

across time, these movements have challenged traditional discourses on
race and nation that depict the region as racially egalitarian and harmo-
nious. They have also demanded legislation and specific policies to
address discrimination and inequality, and their efforts have produced
results. Starting with the Nicaraguan constitutional reform of 1987,
which recognized the existence of minority communities on the Atlantic
coast, legal instruments that ban discrimination and acknowledge the
multiracial character of Latin American societies have proliferated.
In 1988 the Brazilian constitution banned discrimination and recognized
the rights of former runaway slave communities (quilombos) to their
ancestral lands. Other countries (e.g., Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Gua-
temala, Honduras) followed suit and now recognize collective rights for
the population of African descent, while others (Argentina, Colombia,
Cuba, Panama, Uruguay) explicitly condemn discrimination because of
race (see Chapters 5, 7, and 13). Activists also targeted the national
censuses and demanded the inclusion of ethno-racial categories to coun-
ter the traditional invisibility of these groups. While in the 1980s only
Cuba and Brazil collected information concerning individuals of African
descent, by the 2010s Afrodescendants were counted in seventeen of the
nineteen countries in the region (Loveman 2014).
International organizations and agencies have acknowledged the
importance and scope of these movements and taken concrete institu-
tional steps to address issues of racial justice in their activities. Examples
include the Rapporteurship on the Rights of Persons of African Descent
and against Racial Discrimination created by the Organization of Ameri-
can States in 2005, and the Gender and Diversity Division created by the
Inter-American Development Bank in 2007. The Division’s mission is to
“promote gender equality and support development with identity for
African descendants and indigenous peoples in the Latin America and
the Caribbean region” (IADB 2017). The United Nations Development
Program sponsors a project on the Afrodescendant Population of Latin
America and monitors racial discrimination in the region through its
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). In
2010 the US State Department created the Race, Ethnicity, and Social
Inclusion Unit, which coordinates US diplomacy on social inclusion and
racial equality issues in the Western Hemisphere. Three years later the
United Nations approved resolution 68/237, which proclaims 2015–24 as
the International Decade for People of African Descent. International
development agencies have also included metrics of racial inequality in

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 4 Afro-Latin American Studies

their development benchmarks, giving additional visibility and support

to race justice agendas.
All of these actors – activists, government officials, representatives and
employees of international agencies and organizations – have contributed
to the growth and development of Afro-Latin American studies as a field.
Their programs and demands have shaped how scholars study Afrodes-
cendants in the region. The chapters in this volume illustrate the richness
and disciplinary variety of this scholarly production.

   -  

Early studies of the history, behavior, and culture of Afrodescendants
in Latin America were very much attuned to the voluminous scientific
literature that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sought to
demonstrate and document the biological foundations of black inferior-
ity. The combination of anthropometric measurements feeding a variety
of indices of human worth, evolutionary theories, and the social Darwin-
ist belief that human history was centrally about the inevitable competi-
tion of racial groups, some of which were destined to perish and live
under the control of the fittest – all of these turned Latin America into an
area of special interest for “scientific” studies of race. The region’s high
degree of miscegenation or racial mixture was seen as a clear indicator of
racial degeneration and social decadence, a point emphasized by the
pioneering scientific racists Arthur de Gobineau and Louis Agassiz when
they (independently) visited Brazil in the 1860s (Skidmore 1974).
In an effort to better understand that degeneration and decadence, a
handful of Latin American scholars and writers – for example, Raimundo
Nina Rodrigues (1900) in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz (1906, 1916) and Israel
Castellanos (1916) in Cuba – carried out research on what they viewed as
black “pathologies,” gathering information on turn-of-the-century Afro-
Latin American religious life, criminality, and family structure. Much of
the information reported by those writers is still useful to scholars today,
but the racial attitudes embodied in their work, and widely diffused
among the region’s elites, left little room for black participation in
national life.
This was very much in keeping with the oligarchical political and social
structures in force in most of Latin America at that time – indeed,
scientific racism was a primary support of elite arguments that the racially
mixed masses were incapable of playing a responsible role in national life
(Figueras 1907; Ingenieros 1913; Valenilla Lanz 1919; Viana 1922).

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 The Making of a Field 5

During the 1910s and 1920s, however, workers’ movements and middle-
class reformist movements began to demand a greater role in national
politics; at the same time, nationalist pressures grew for the construction
of new national identities based not on ideas and models imported from
Europe, but on the actual historical and present-day experiences of Latin
Americans as a people. These political developments set the stage for a
major revision of racial thought in the region, in the form of the concept
of “racial democracy” (see Chapter 8). Where the scientific racists had
either rejected the notion of black contributions to national life, or had
treated those contributions as almost entirely negative, writers and intel-
lectuals associated with new ideologies of racial inclusion – Gilberto
Freyre in Brazil, Fernando Ortiz in Cuba, José Vasconcelos in Mexico,
Juan Pablo Sojo in Venezuela – acknowledged the role of Africans and
their descendants in creating new, distinctly Latin American national
cultures, societies, and identities. Those cultures and societies were neither
African nor European in form or content. Rather, they were a mixture of
African, European, and Amerindian elements, combined in a centuries-
long process of cultural and racial mixture that had produced something
completely new in world historical experience: a “New World in the
tropics,” in Freyre’s formulation, or a new “cosmic race,” in the language
of Vasconcelos.
The willingness of the proponents of racial democracy to acknowledge
black contributions to national life opened the door to greatly expanded
research on Afro-Latin American topics. This was most notably the case
in Brazil, where Freyre (1933, 1936), Arthur Ramos (1937, 1940), and
Edison Carneiro (1936, 1937), to mention only the most prominent
names, spearheaded a wave of research on Afro-Brazilian history and
culture in the plantation zones of the Northeast. Some of their findings
were presented at two Afro-Brazilian Congresses held during the 1930s
(Congresso Afro-Brasileiro 1937, 1940), which in turn stimulated more
such work; a small core of scholars started working on racial questions in
the southeastern state of São Paulo in the 1940s (Nogueira 1942; Bicudo
1947; Bastide and Fernandes 1953). In Cuba, the Sociedad de Folklore
Cubano and the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, both founded by
Fernando Ortiz during the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, carried out
research on black contributions to Cuban culture and national identity,
much of it published in Ortiz’s journal, Estudios Afrocubanos. Similar
institutions were created in Venezuela (the Servicio de Investigaciones
Folklóricas, established in 1946), Colombia (the Instituto Etnológico
Nacional, 1943), and Brazil (the Comissão Nacional de Folclore, 1947).

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 6 Afro-Latin American Studies

In other countries, individual scholars – Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1946,

1958) in Mexico, Aquiles Escalante (1964) in Colombia, Armando
Fortune (Maloney 1994) in Panama, Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (Carvalho
Neto 1955) in Uruguay – carried out pioneering research.
These early efforts tended to focus on black religion, dance, linguistics,
and other cultural forms, or on community studies. For the most part
they left aside questions of racial inequality or discrimination, largely
accepting the argument that Latin America’s historical experience of
racial and cultural mixture had eliminated racism and prejudice and
produced societies that offered equal opportunity to all. There were some
dissenting voices, however, particularly in the black newspapers of the
region, which noted sharp disparities between semi-official ideologies of
racial equality and the empirical realities of discrimination, prejudice, and
black poverty (de la Fuente 2001; Andrews 2010; Geler 2010; Guridy
2010; Alberto 2011; see also Chapter 6). Those voices in the black press
were joined in the 1930s and 1940s by Communist activists in Brazil,
Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries, who made anti-racism a central
plank of their party programs, and then in the 1940s and 1950s by a
handful of intellectuals and scholars who increasingly questioned whether
Latin American societies were in fact racial democracies. Most of these
critics were Afrodescendant: in Brazil, Edison Carneiro, Clóvis Moura
(1959, 1977), Abdias do Nascimento (1968; Quilombo 2003), and
Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (1957); in Cuba, Gustavo Urrutia, Alberto
Arredondo (1939), Juan René Betancourt (1945, 1954, 1959), Serafín
Portuondo Linares (1950), and Walterio Carbonell (1961); and in
Colombia, Aquiles Escalante (1964), and Manuel Zapata Olivella (1967).
In Brazil, some of the racial democracy critics were white, particularly
in São Paulo, where French sociologist Roger Bastide had encouraged
his students Florestan Fernandes, Oracy Nogueira, and others to study
Brazilian race relations, and Fernandes had gone on to train his own
students, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Octávio Ianni, to do the same.
These white intellectuals enjoyed much greater legitimacy and received far
greater public and scholarly attention than their black colleagues. Black
critics of racial democracy were more likely to occupy marginal positions
in academic and intellectual life, both because of their racial status and
because of their questioning of one of the core components of national
identity. They were also more easily dismissed as poorly adjusted malcon-
tents with personal axes to grind. White critics, by contrast, acted from
seemingly disinterested motives; the previously mentioned white Brazil-
ians, far from being socially or professionally marginal, were affiliated

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 The Making of a Field 7

with the most prestigious institution of higher education in the country,

the University of São Paulo.
Still, even if white critics of racial democracy received more attention
than black ones, neither group had much immediate impact on main-
stream scholarly institutions in the region, which remained for the most
part indifferent to Afro-related themes. Despite the undeniable progress
that had been made since the 1930s in studying black history and culture,
by the 1970s the quantity of scholarly literature available was still minis-
cule, in relation either to studies of black history and culture in the United
States or to studies of Amerindian populations in Latin America. During
the last forty years, however, the situation has changed dramatically,
as the chapters in this volume make clear.
Why this explosion of work on Afro-Latin America? One reason
is undoubtedly the growth in Latin American higher education more
generally. Since 1960, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and other
countries have invested enormous sums in expanding their university
systems; inevitably this expanded those countries’ research capacity as
well (Balán 2013). But after years of relative indifference to Afro-Latin
American topics, why did researchers start turning toward black history
and culture as an area of study?
That turn took place in part because of thickening scholarly networks
and dialogues between Latin America and the United States, particularly
around questions of slavery and race. In response to the rise of the civil
rights and Black Power movements, scholars in the United States were
paying increasing attention to questions of race, producing classic works
that are still obligatory reading today (Woodward 1955; Stampp 1956;
Davis 1966, 1975; Franklin 1967; Wilson 1978). As US scholars thought
about their country’s racial past and present, many pushed on to ask how
the US experience of slavery, or of the post-emancipation period, or of
present-day race relations, compared to similar experiences in Brazil,
Cuba, and the British Caribbean. At the same time, newly trained US
historians of Latin America wrestled with the other end of the compari-
son: how did the racial experiences of Latin America compare to those of
the United States? A few undertook research comparing the two regions
(Tannenbaum 1946; Elkins 1959; Harris 1964; Klein 1967; Degler 1971;
Hoetink 1973). Most, while motivated by comparative interests, focused
on Latin America, and usually on the experience of slavery. The result
was a surge of scholarship during the 1970s that, while small in relation
to the amount of work being done on the United States, nevertheless
represented a marked increase in scholarly attention to Afro-Latin

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 8 Afro-Latin American Studies

America (e.g., Knight 1970; Hall 1971; Conrad 1972; Bowser 1974;
Skidmore 1974; Toplin 1974; Whitten 1974; Dean 1976; Rout 1976).
Those early comparative studies were based on the belief that race
relations in Latin America were more harmonious than in the United
States and that this difference was the product of dissimilar histories of
race and slavery. Scholars such as Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins
had fully absorbed the racial democracy arguments that Latin American
intellectuals had articulated in the 1920s and 1930s. They studied Latin
America, but they did so in order to understand and find solutions to race
problems in the United States. The same belief animated some of the first
studies about racial inequality in Latin America, sponsored by UNESCO
in the 1950s. In a world besieged by racial conflicts, these studies sought
to understand how Brazil had succeeded in creating a functioning racial
democracy. In the process, they made two key contributions to the field.
First, they highlighted the need to study contemporary race relations
(not just slavery) in the region. Second, their findings generated a healthy
skepticism concerning some of the central claims of the proponents of
racial democracy.
This skepticism informed the work of a new generation of Latin
American scholars, some of whom had studied in US universities. In the
1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, these scholars produced their own readings of
the Afro-Latin American past and present (Fernandes 1965; Costa 1966;
Carvalho Neto 1971; Moreno Fraginals 1978; Silva 1978; Hasenbalg
1979; Colmenares 1979; Deive 1980; Nistal-Moret 1984; Friedemann
and Arocha 1986; Reis 1986; Machado 1987). As they did so, they
engaged not just with their North American counterparts but also with
the black political movements that were forming in various countries of
the region during the 1970s and 1980s. Those movements, discussed in
depth in Chapter 7, had major impacts not just on the politics of the
region but on its intellectual and scholarly life as well.

    

 
On December 5–7, 2000, more than 1,700 activists and government
representatives from all over the Americas convened in Santiago de Chile.
They were attending the Regional Conference of the Americas, in prepar-
ation for the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that would take place in Durban,
South Africa, a year later. It was a landmark event. On the one hand, the

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 The Making of a Field 9

widespread participation of activists and community leaders illustrated

how much the movement for civil rights and racial justice had advanced
in Latin America since the collapse of most authoritarian regimes in the
1970s and 1980s (Andrews 2004, 2016; Yashar 2005; Hernández 2013).
On the other hand, the event marked the public acknowledgment by state
authorities that racism is a major problem in the region, demanding a
serious policy response. As the conference’s concluding declaration
stated, “ignoring the existence of discrimination and racism, at both the
State and the society level, contributes directly and indirectly to perpetu-
ating the practices of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and
related intolerance.” Racism and discrimination were characterized as
historical products of “conquest, colonialism, slavery and other forms
of servitude” but, taking a cue from scholarship on contemporary engines
of racial stratification, the declaration noted that the effects of these
processes persisted and “are” – in present tense – “a source of systemic
discrimination that still affects large sectors of the population” (UN
General Assembly 2001).
In order to combat the effects of racism, discrimination and racial
injustice in the region, the Conference approved an ambitious “Plan of
Action” (UN General Assembly 2001). This plan had deep implications
for the field of Afro-Latin American studies, for several of its measures
were linked to the production and dissemination of knowledge concern-
ing people of African descent in the region. The plan “urged” states to
compile and disseminate statistical data on racialized groups. This infor-
mation would serve as the basis for programs of inclusion and access to
basic social services and economic opportunities, including policies of
affirmative action. Some of the items in the plan concerned education in
fairly concrete ways. The parties agreed on the need to create educational
and research programs about Africa’s contributions to history and civil-
ization, as well as to disseminate information against racial stereotypes
and myths. The plan asked states to include the study of racism in
university curricula and to organize courses on racism and discrimination
“for prosecutors, law enforcement officials, members of the judiciary and
other public employees.” Attention was also given to the media, to its role
in disseminating racial images and information and to the need “to ensure
the fair and balanced presence of people of African descent” in it.
One of the key contributions of the Santiago Conference is that it
sanctioned and normalized the category of “Afrodescendants” as a group
with legal, cultural, and ethical implications in the arenas of international
justice and human rights (Laó-Montes 2009; Campos García 2015).

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 10 Afro-Latin American Studies

It also helped consolidate and make visible a transnational network of

race-justice activists that was able to exercise pressure on national gov-
ernments for the adoption of specific policies against racism and discrim-
ination. As part of these efforts, activists not only deployed knowledge
produced by academics, as was notably the case in Brazil during the
1980s and 1990s (Htun 2004), but they also produced, systematized,
and disseminated important new knowledge concerning their commu-
nities. As activists formulated demands in the areas of health care, educa-
tion, environmental justice, job training, gender violence, poverty
eradication, and police brutality, among others, they were compelled to
gather and produce valuable information concerning Afrodescendants
and their cultures and living conditions across the region. On top of that,
the movement itself has become a subject of intense study, prompting
numerous studies about race and mobilization in contemporary Latin
America (Escobar 2008; de la Fuente 2012; Martínez 2012; Pisano
2012; Rahier 2012; Pereira 2013; Valero and Campos García 2015;
Paschel 2016).
This volume constitutes yet another example of the impact of activists
from the Afrodescendant movement on the field of Afro-Latin American
Studies. Our book has been conceived and executed in conversations
between academics and activists. These exchanges took place in two
landmark events sponsored by the Afro-Latin American Research Insti-
tute at Harvard University, in collaboration with the University of Carta-
gena, in 2015 and 2016. The events gathered prominent figures of the
Afrodescendant movement, many of whom had attended the 2000 meet-
ing in Santiago, to assess the implementation of the Plan of Action, its
successes and failures. Part of the agenda, however, was also to analyze
the impact of the movement on the field of Afro-Latin American studies,
in order to articulate new research questions and agendas. Just as we
attempted to evaluate the outcomes of the Santiago meeting, we sought
also to evaluate the trajectory of this field of study that, not coinciden-
tally, has come of age along with the consolidation and expansion of the
Afrodescendant movement. The field has grown enough to sustain spe-
cialized journals such as Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Afro-Hispanic Review,
Revista Áfro-Asia, América Negra (published in Colombia from 1991 to
1998), and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies; to allow for
the publication of several synthetic overviews (Andrews 2004; Wade
2010; Gates 2011); to sustain specialized research units such as the
Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) at Harvard University;
and to populate the Afro-Latin America book series at Cambridge

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 The Making of a Field 11

University Press. It is precisely because the field has grown so much, both
thematically and in terms of disciplinary approaches, that we felt the need
to assess its current state, recent achievements, and possible future direc-
tions. That is the purpose of the chapters in this volume.

 
In thinking about how to organize the volume, we faced a series of
questions. What topics were essential to include? And how should those
topics be presented: as literature reviews tracing the development of a field
or subfield (how have scholars thought and written about, for example,
Afro-Latin American religions over time?); as historical narratives based
on syntheses of past and current literature (how have Afro-Latin Ameri-
can religious forms evolved and developed over time?); or as some com-
bination of those two? Meanwhile, what about the challenges of
achieving full regional and chronological coverage? All of the topics in
this volume have long historical trajectories, and most of them appear, in
one form or another, in all or most of the countries in the region. How
could we effectively compress 500-year continent-wide experiences into
relatively short synthetic articles?
On both fronts – mode of presentation, and temporal and geographical
coverage – we ultimately decided that authors would be free to decide
how best to present their topic. Concerning mode of presentation, most
opted for some combination of literature review and historical narrative.
In terms of geographical coverage, the volume ended up leaning heavily
on Brazil, with Cuba and Colombia in second and third place. Those
emphases reflect both the size of Afrodescendant populations in those
countries – Brazil alone accounts for over 70 percent of Latin America’s
Afrodescendants (Telles and PERLA 2014, 26) – and, not coincidentally,
the relative state of development of Afro-Latin American studies in those
countries. In an effort to ensure adequate coverage of Spanish America,
we invited contributors who have worked on Argentina, Central America,
the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela. One of our
hopes for the volume is that setting the Brazilian literature in dialogue
with its Spanish American counterparts will spark new research questions
on both sides of that exchange, leading to further development and
enrichment of the field.
From the beginning of the volume to the end, a focus on the voices,
actions, strategies, and decisions of Africans and their descendants drives
every one of the chapters. In direct response to earlier generations of

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 12 Afro-Latin American Studies

scholarship, recent work on Afro-Latin American studies privileges the

concept of black agency. The scientific racists had seen black people as
hapless victims of their genetic inferiority. The proponents of racial
democracy did not completely escape the heritage of scientific racism,
assuming that blacks and mulattoes would progress in Latin American
societies only to the degree that they were able to whiten themselves,
either genetically or culturally. The Marxist-influenced writers of the
1950s and 1960s (e.g., Fernandes 1965; Costa 1966; Rama 1967;
Moreno Fraginals 1978) forcefully rejected any hint of racism but viewed
Afro-Latin America and its inhabitants as being very much at the mercy of
the needs and “imperatives” of capitalist development.
A focus on black agency is most obvious in chapters by Frank
A. Guridy and Juliet Hooker on black political thinkers (Chapter 6); by
Doris Sommer on black writers (Chapter 9); by Tianna Paschel on black
political movements (Chapter 7); by Alejandro de la Fuente on black
visual artists (Chapter 10); and by Karl Offen (Chapter 13) on the cultural
geographies of black settlement in the New World. But the other chapters
follow this approach as well. In Chapter 2, Roquinaldo Ferreira and
Tatiana Seijas trace the multiple roles of Africans in the Atlantic slave
trade, not least their role in introducing African understandings of the
world to colonial societies in the Americas. Offen focuses in Chapter 13
on the environmental knowledge that Africans brought with them, and
how they and their descendants applied that knowledge first to under-
stand and then to modify the landscapes that were their new homes.
Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg, and Hebe Mattos apply a similar
perspective in Chapter 5 to the legal landscapes that enslaved Africans
encountered in the New World, showing how Africans and their descend-
ants learned those landscapes and then, through quiet lobbying and legal
action, gradually transformed them. Lara Putnam considers Afrodescen-
dants’ decisions on how, when, and whether to move from one place to
another, and the evolving migratory streams and experiences that those
decisions produced in Chapter 14. George Reid Andrews discusses the
broad range of strategies that Afrodescendants used to move upward in
colonial and post-independence societies in Chapter 3.
All of the chapters grapple as well with the notorious methodological
difficulties of researching the Afro-Latin American past and present.
For example, in order to recover the ideas and voices of black political
thinkers, Guridy and Hooker push well beyond traditional canons of
political thought in the region to include black newspapers, poetry, and
song lyrics. In Chapter 10, de la Fuente cautions that most of the artistic

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 The Making of a Field 13

production that he is writing about no longer exists, and most of its

creators are now forgotten. In almost all of the subfields addressed by
the chapters, scholarly reconstructions of that past and present are very
much still in progress, and in some cases just beginning.
The volume begins with a section of chapters on the deeply embedded
inequalities that have shaped the development of Afro-Latin American
societies over time. Ferreira and Seijas present the starting point of those
inequalities, the Atlantic slave trade, in Chapter 2. Noting how scholarly
research on the trade began in the 1950s and 1960s with questions that
were primarily quantitative (how many people were involved? from what
parts of Africa? traveling to what parts of the Americas?), they discuss
how recent research has sought to supplement quantitative interpret-
ations with approaches drawn from social, cultural, and Atlantic history.
Those approaches are more likely to focus on the lived experiences of
those caught up in the slave trade and on the reciprocal impacts of long-
term ties between Africa and the Americas.
Chapters by Andrews (Chapter 3) and Peter Wade (Chapter 4) also
begin with slavery and then go on to trace the long-term historical
impacts of colonial institutions and practices. Andrews surveys the evolv-
ing intersections of racial, class, and gender inequality in the region over
the last 500 years. Wade takes as his starting point the colonial ideologies
and regulations governing African and indigenous peoples. While those
practices assigned Africans and indigenous peoples different places in
colonial racial hierarchies, they did not prevent frequent cross-racial
contacts and interaction and the creation, in much of Afro-Latin America,
of large Afro-indigenous populations. Black and indigenous peoples con-
tinue to interact up to the present, helping to shape the contours of
present-day multicultural movements and state policies in the region.
Focusing specifically on Brazil, Fischer, Grinberg, and Mattos
(Chapter 5) examine the legal structures through which inequality was
established and maintained during the colonial period, followed by the
“racial silence” of the post-slavery period, in which Brazilian (and Span-
ish American) law dropped almost all references to race and any formal
pretense to maintaining racial inequality. They find that “racial silence”
did little to reverse inequalities inherited from the colonial period and in
some ways worked to reinforce them. The chapter concludes with a
review of recent (post-1985) policies that seek to combat racial inequality.
A second section of chapters considers the realm of politics. In
Chapter 6, Guridy and Hooker examine the broad spectrum of Afro-
Latin American political thought during the 1800s and 1900s. They

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 14 Afro-Latin American Studies

demonstrate the multivocality and intellectual richness of the debates

among those thinkers. Especially valuable is the chapter’s discussion of
black feminist thinkers and, as suggested earlier, its efforts to recover
ideas that were expressed in venues other than canonical political writing.
Paschel’s chapter on black political movements pays equally close atten-
tion to black feminism, and to Afrodescendant participation in key
moments of the region’s history: independence and nation-building in
the 1800s, the rise of populism and mass-based political movements in
the 1900s, and the multicultural turn of the late 1900s and early 2000s
(Chapter 7).
One of the central demands of the most recent (post-1980) generation
of black movements and thinkers has been that Latin American societies
reconsider the idea that they were, to use the Brazilian term, “racial
democracies.” In Chapter 8, Alberto and Hoffnung-Garskof carefully
trace the origins of that term and concept and identify its national variants
in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Spanish American
countries. In so doing, they document a lively hemispheric conversation
on ideas of racial inclusion and exclusion that continues to the present.
A third section of chapters examines black thought and action in
various cultural fields: literature (Chapter 9), visual arts (Chapter 10),
music (Chapter 11), religion (Chapter 12), and cultural geographies
(Chapter 13). While exploring those topics, the chapters grapple with
several common questions, beginning with what we mean when we talk
about Afro-Latin American cultural artifacts. Do we mean works pro-
duced by Afrodescendants, works on Afrodescendant themes or topics,
works incorporating African or African-derived cultural elements, or
something else entirely? Sommer responds to that question by focusing
on formal literary strategies, and in particular on black authors’ use of an
“unrelenting . . . doubling of codes, of systems, beliefs, meanings, lan-
guages, personae.” De la Fuente adopts a three-part definition incorpor-
ating works produced by Afrodescendant artists, works that include (or
claim to include) African-derived cultural elements, and works that com-
ment in some way on race and blackness. Paul Christopher Johnson and
Stephan Palmié focus in Chapter 12 on the second part of that definition,
examining religious beliefs and practices that claim descent from Africa.
They explore the content and meaning of such claims and how they have
evolved over time to produce, since 2000, a transnational religious
“superform” drawing elements from across the region and from Africa.
They also consider the question of what we mean when we talk about a
“religion,” as distinct from spiritual beliefs and practices.

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 The Making of a Field 15

Religion figures as well in Robin Moore’s chapter on music

(Chapter 11) and Offen’s on African and Afro-Latin American cultural
geographies (Chapter 13). Music was intimately connected to African
religious observance, and many nineteenth- and twentieth-century
musical forms – Cuban rumba, Brazilian samba, Uruguayan candombe –
trace their antecedents to African ritual musics. As those forms were
commercialized and “nationalized” (Moore 1997) in the 1900s, becom-
ing core symbols of national identity, how did that change their rela-
tionship to blackness and to the African-derived traditions on which
they were based? Offen explores both the spiritual meanings that
Africans and their descendants read in New World landscapes and the
scientific understandings that they applied to those landscapes. Both sets
of understandings were critical to slave survival on plantations and to
the establishment of independent quilombo and free black communities
in the countryside. They also continue to inform current debates on
rural black communities and their claims to land and cultural rights.
Reflecting an important recent trend in social scientific and humanistic
scholarship, a final set of chapters considers the role of transnational
connections and spaces in Afro-Latin American life. Beginning with the
Atlantic slave trade and continuing up to the present, Putnam surveys
the many different migratory streams that developed both within Latin
America, and from the region to destinations in North America and
Europe (Chapter 14). In keeping with the volume’s emphasis on agency,
she discusses how, why, and when individuals, families, and entire com-
munities made strategic decisions to leave specific places to move to
others, producing an evolving panorama of movement that indelibly
shaped the societies of the region. The volume’s concluding chapter, by
Jennifer A. Jones, focuses specifically on Afro-Latin American migration
to the United States and the recent emergence of a new scholarly subfield,
Afro-Latino studies (Chapter 15). Reflecting on the challenges that that
migration has posed to racial understandings both in this country and in
Latin America, Jones calls for the further development of Afro-Latino
studies as a field that can mediate among African diaspora studies,
African-American studies, and Afro-Latin American studies.

 
Our volume highlights the complexity and richness of this growing field,
but by no means exhausts it. There are many themes that have resulted
in the production of significant bodies of scholarship – gender and

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 16 Afro-Latin American Studies

patriarchy, slave emancipation, marronage and slave resistance, the rise of

legal human rights regimes concerning blackness – that could have been
considered for possible chapters. These themes do appear in the chapters
in this volume, but we readily concede that there are alternative ways to
organize an exploration of the field.
Many of the chapters are chronologically ambitious and encompass
the colonial and the national periods. By adopting this temporal frame,
they explore the long-term impact of slavery on post-emancipation
societies. This is one of the research questions that has guided the field
since the comparative studies of the mid-twentieth century, which
posited that the explanation for differences in modern race relations
was to be found in the evolution of different slave systems. In the 1970s
and 1980s, scholars became critical of what they perceived as teleo-
logical narratives connecting slave systems and post-emancipation race
relations. Carl Degler (1971, 92) for instance, concluded that slavery
did not shape race relations in “fundamental” ways. In his comparative
study of racist regimes in the United States and South Africa, John
Cell (1982, xii) offered a similar formulation, arguing that slavery had
“relatively little to do” with subsequent racial dynamics. Anthony
Marx (1998, 8–9) agreed that slave systems “cannot directly explain”
the shape of later racial orders. None of these authors disputed that
some connection exists between slavery and race relations after eman-
cipation, but they did not explore the nature and possible importance of
these links.
Recent scholars dealing with this problem have noted the need to pay
serious attention to the contradictory expectations and goals informing
emancipation processes everywhere. Rebecca Scott emphasized the unpre-
dictability of these processes in her landmark comparative study of Lou-
isiana and Cuba, arguing that it is unlikely that we will be able to create
“any simple global explanation” that accounts for different outcomes in
how slave societies evolved after emancipation. “Neither structures nor
struggles could fully determine the outcome,” she notes, thus the need
to study how conflicts over rights, standing, and resources produced
different results in each case (Scott 2005, 263, 264). These conflicts were
framed by preexistent practices, understandings, and expectations, how-
ever, so it remains necessary to research them under slavery in order to
establish possible continuities and innovations. Andrews (2004, 8) offers
a possible analytical path forward by suggesting patterns that could
become the subject of specific future research: “forms of behavior that
originated under slavery. . . proved unexpectedly durable and long lasting,

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 The Making of a Field 17

and continued to shape the course of Afro-Latin American history. . . in

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
Among those behaviors that proved to be remarkably resilient are
African-based cultural practices. There is a growing literature concerning
the reproduction and longevity of African cultures in colonial societies,
provoked by longstanding debates concerning creolization (Mintz and
Price 1992; Thornton 1998; Sweet 2003; Bennett 2003, 2009). As dis-
cussed in several of the chapters in this volume, some of these cultural
practices came to be identified as foundational elements of national
identity in the twentieth century, although it is not always clear why some
were selected while others were not. Processes of cultural nationalization
were invariably mediated by stylization, appropriation, and filtering
efforts that made popular cultures legible and acceptable to the middle
classes. Are we to interpret this primarily as an expression of the endur-
ance and creativity of Afro-Latin Americans, or as successful elite coopta-
tion strategies that deprive Afrodescendants of their own culture? What
are the social and political implications of transforming Afro-diasporic
symbols and artifacts into national symbols? Do these processes lead to
the commodification and depoliticization of such symbols (Hanchard
1994), or do they create opportunities for political action, empowerment,
and community formation, not to mention sustenance, visibility, and
mobility for practitioners (Moore 1997; Alberto 2011; Hertzman 2013;
Putnam 2013; Abreu 2015)? These debates are not strictly academic, as
activists have frequently pondered the effectiveness of cultural spaces to
make demands for racial justice. For example, in countries where open
discussions of racism and discrimination have not been welcomed, such as
in Cuba or in Brazil during the dictatorship, art became a platform to
discuss issues of racial justice (Fernandes 2006; de la Fuente 2008, 2010,
2013, 2017; Alberto 2011; Gaiter 2015).
The long-term impact of colonial processes also points to another
important area of research: comparisons with indigenous populations.
Years ago, Peter Wade (1997, 39) called for the need to integrate
“blacks and indians into the same theoretical frame of reference, while
recognizing the historical differences between them.” As he details in his
chapter in this volume, significant scholarship has been produced on
Afro-indigenous relations in the last few years, including work on com-
munities of mixed African and indigenous origins, such as the Garifuna
of Central America. But taking seriously Wade’s (1997, 35) insight
about the “different location of blacks and indians in the political and
imagined space of the nation” means that we are faced with contrasting

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 18 Afro-Latin American Studies

histories of inclusion and citizenship that merit further attention. The

dissimilar location of so-called Indians and blacks in colonial societies is
well known. To what degree did these configurations create dissimilar
platforms for citizenship and belonging after independence (Larson
2004; Sanders 2004; Gotkowitz 2011)? Why have ideologies of mesti-
zaje and racial harmony been produced in some countries but not
others? Scholars interested in those ideologies would benefit by crossing
the traditional divide between indigenous peoples and Afrodescendants.
Furthermore, as Andrews notes in his discussion of inequality, indigen-
ous poverty rates are consistently higher than Afrodescendant rates in
the region (with the exception of Uruguay). Why? “Colonial tracings,”
to use Florencia Mallon’s (2011, 281) expression, can be found in the
histories of both indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples, but they seem
to operate in different ways.
These questions and agendas are not just about reconstructing the past.
The field of Afro-Latin American studies is deeply implicated in current
struggles for racial justice and its existence is inseparable from past
mobilization efforts. A richer understanding of these histories of race,
culture, nation, and mobilization is indispensable for envisioning futures
of equality, respect, coexistence, and belonging.

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