Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru

5. Black Is Beautiful or White Is Right?

chapter 5 Black Is Beautiful or White Is Right? Ellas son morenas, pero bonitas. (They are brown-skinned, but pretty.) Ricardo, Ingenio resident in his fifties, describing two women Puede que seas blanca, pero picuda. (You may be white, but [you are] big-lipped.) Carlos, a boy from Ingenio, arguing with his sister From time to time during my fieldwork in Ingenio, I would go to Señora Zulema’s house in the afternoons and watch telenovelas with her and Señora Gertrudis, her sister. Both women were in their fifties and lived relatively comfortably, although not nearly as luxuriously as the wealthy people portrayed in the telenovelas they watched.Señora Zulema’s daughter worked in Lima as a household domestic and regularly sent her mother money. She bought Señora Zulema a television for her birthday one year, and subsequently installed a solar panel on her house so that she could watch television all afternoon, even though there was no electricity in Ingenio at the time. Señora Gertrudis ran a small but relatively lucrative restaurant out of her living room. The profitability of this enterprise caused some women in town to accuse her of doing witchcraft to ensure her financial success. Nevertheless, both of these women would self-identify and be seen by development agencies as poor,on the basis of the adobe brick walls and dirt floors of their homes. 144 r Yo Soy Negro One afternoon, I tried to get Señoras Zulema and Gertrudis to give their opinions as to why the stars of the telenovelas they watched were always white and blond, and the kitchen staff was always darker-skinned. In the telenovela we were watching at the time, the brown-skinned maid was frantic about relationship problems that the blonde,white-skinned lady of the house was having.I thought to myself that the lady of the house would be unlikely to be so worked up about the maid’s personal life. During the commercial break, which was the only time I could expect the engrossed women to respond to me, I asked, “Why is it that the stars are always blond and the maids brown?” Señora Zulema said,“¿Porqué será?” (Why is it so?), and Señora Gertrudis shrugged her shoulders and gestured her chin in agreement. They had no further comment on the subject. I then asked whether it bothered them that this was always the case.Both women responded no, and that was the end of the conversation. That conversation was part of my attempt, through ethnography, to understand how media portrayals of blacks and whites affect the ways that African-descended villagers in Ingenio talk about race and racism. In Peru white models predominate not only in telenovelas, but also in advertisements for beer, retail stores, grocery items, and beauty products. Ingenio is relatively isolated, and villagers are largely unable to afford the consumer items advertised by white models. Nevertheless, the walls of stores in Ingenio are frequently decorated with images of scantily clad, light-skinned models promoting the consumption of one or another brand of Peruvian beer. Villagers are inundated with images of white heroes, white beauty queens, and brown- or black-skinned people in servile positions. On the other hand, they also they have access to images of beautiful black women, such as Alek Wek, Naomi Campbell, and Rosa Elvira Cartagena, Miss Peru in 1999, as these representations also come to the small screen in Ingenio . The question is how villagers interpret these images and what their interpretation means for how they think about themselves and their fellow villagers in racial and color terms. Both Señoras Gertrudis and Zulema are the color of dark-roasted coffee , and thus potentially could have been offended by the small number of people who look like them in starring roles in telenovelas. Alternatively, they could see that telenovelas reflect a certain reality in Peru, in that they know personally quite a few brown-skinned women who work in the homes of wealthy white Limeños, including Señora Zulema’s own daughter ,Yraida.Their nonchalance could lead us to believe that they are victims Black Is Beautiful or White Is Right? r 145 of negative portrayals of blacks and have internalized these images to the extent that they see depictions of black subservience as completely normal . This explanation is however at best incomplete because at times...