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  • Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000 by George Reid Andrews
  • Marshall C. Eakin
Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600–2000. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016. 136 pp. Maps. Figures. Notes. Index.

For nearly four decades George Reid Andrews has been producing outstanding, innovative work on the history of people of African descent in Latin America. His first book (1980) was a pioneering monograph on Afro-Argentines in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. He then shifted his attention (and languages) to Brazil, publishing a cleverly crafted monograph on blacks and whites in São Paulo from 1888–1988. Turning his attention to yet a third nation in 2010, his third monograph turned to the history of Afro-Uruguay. In addition to making innovative and lasting contributions to the historiographies of three different countries, he also crafted a synthetic overview of Afro-Latin Americans from 1800–2000 (2004). It is not surprising, then, that Andrews was invited to give the prestigious Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2012. This slim volume is the revised version of those lectures.

Although the title and the period are similar to his 2004 survey text, this short book is very different. Divided into five chapters spanning less than 100 pages, the central theme is the visibility/invisibility of blacks in the history of Latin America. Ironically, as Andrews points out, elite efforts to remove race and blackness from official national narratives was necessary precisely because blackness was such "an integral part of national society, politics, and culture" (16). In just ten pages in the first chapter, Andrews provides a sweeping and concise overview of the history of Afro-Latin America setting the stage for the next three chapters. In particular, he emphasizes how the shift from whitening ideologies and immigration in the late nineteenth century was followed by the emergence of narratives of mestizaje and racial democracy in the early twentieth century. These narratives, he argues, emphasize blending races into one new ethnicity and deemphasize the contributions of blacks (and indigenous peoples) to nation building and national identity. Social movements over the past few decades have attacked these narratives, argued for the recognition of diversity and multiculturalism, and they have made blackness very visible and audible.

Chapter 2 looks at census data in Latin America and how it reveals "methodological, political, and even ethical problems" (16). Who chooses to count which groups, how those groups are constructed, and who is counted are fundamental questions for those hoping to make quantitative statements as seemingly simple as what is the percentage of Afrodescendants in each country of Latin America over the last two hundred years. Strikingly, many countries did not even ask about race in their censuses for decades. The trend in some countries in recent years has been to recognize blackness, but each nation has grappled with how to count Afrodescendants accurately. From this macro-level, quantitative survey Chapter 3 moves to four brief but fascinating portraits of Afro-Latin Americas who left documents about their lives. Úrsula de Jesús, a nun in seventeenth-century Peru, provides us with a glimpse of a black female mystic through her "spiritual diary." [End Page E36] Two nineteenth-century soldiers—one in Uruguay and the other in Cuba—offer examples of black men who became visible through their military prowess and writings. Finally, through the life of the female activist María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno we see the history of twentieth-century Cuba.

Chapter 4 moves to the transnational as Andrews provides insight into Afro-Latin America through the eyes of African American travelers, from James Weldon Johnson in the early twentieth century to E. Franklin Frazier in the mid-twentieth century and Michael Hanchard in the late twentieth-century. In a concluding section of a few pages, Andrews comments on recent events, especially the efforts of Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador to recognize their histories of racism and to move toward policies of affirmative action.

The one flaw in this fine volume is the lack of attention to terminology, in particular, what is blackness and who is black. Although Andrews reflects...

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