Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru

2. Locating Black Peruvians in Latin America

In the first chapter, I explored the presumption that the history of slavery in Ingenio would give rise to a collective memory of slavery. In this chapter , I consider another common assumption: the presumed importance of cultural and social (as opposed to physical) attributes for defining race in Latin America. I argue that, although cultural and social attributes have been crucial for defining what it means to be Indian in Peru, the same is not true for blacks. Over the course of the twentieth century, skin color and facial features, as shown in the epigraphs, have been central to definitions of race for Afro–Latin Americans. My finding that in Ingenio blackness is understood primarily in terms of skin color, not in terms of a common history or shared cultural attributes , led me to ask to what extent the same was true for the rest of Peru chapter 2 Locating Black Peruvians in Latin America su nariz, ligeramente roma, sus labios anabelfos, adelgazados , . . . y aquellos cabellos suaves, delgados, y discretamente rizos (his nose slightly Roman, his fine, thin lips . . . and those soft, thin, discreetly curly locks) Enrique López Albújar, describing José Manuel, a mulatto slave de chimpanesco mentón. Su negrura y fealdad al lado de la arro­ gante figura de José Manuel resaltaba enormemente (with an apelike chin. His blackness and ugliness stood in marked contrast next to the arrogant face of José Manuel) Enrique López Albújar, describing Congo, a black slave 60 r Yo Soy Negro and for other countries in Latin America. Notably, the primacy of skin color in Ingenio seems to contradict the widely accepted idea that,in Latin America, nonwhites can be whitened through mestizaje. In the Peruvian context, mestizaje is described as the process by which Indians can be included in the nation through an abandonment of indigenous cultural forms; there has been very little analysis of blacks’ participation in this process. Within Latin American studies more generally, few scholars distinguish between black and Indian participation in mestizaje. Some even insist that these processes are not distinct. For example, Carol Smith (1991), in her insightful essay “The Symbolics of Blood,” equates mestizo (white/Indian) with mulatto (white/black) mixture by including both of them under the same rubric of mestizaje. She posits that“a publically identified mestizo can be virtually any biological mixture—from all Indian/African to all European—but must have acquiesced to the dominant ‘national’ culture, severed kinship ties with community members of non-European culture, and speak Spanish” (505). Her suggestion that a person of primarily African descent can acquiesce to the dominant culture and thereby become mestizo seems implausible in Ingenio for two reasons. First, blackness in Ingenio is defined in terms of skin color, not cultural attributes such as dress or language. Second, most blacks in Ingenio share in the dominant (criollo) culture in Peru, leaving cultural assimilation with little meaning in this context. How true is this for all of Peru? How do we locate black Peruvians within national discourses when little attention has been paid to them? Does the national discourse on blackness give the same primacy to skin color as the local discourse in Ingenio does? What about in the rest of Latin America? Can we distinguish between the participation of blacks versus Indians in mestizaje in other Latin American countries? In this chapter, I approach these questions through a historical analysis of nation-making discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a discussion of the role of blacks in cultural production during the same period. I argue that, in Peru, blacks and Indians have participated in mestizaje in dissimilar ways,and that this distinction is crucial for understanding how blackness is conceptualized there. In addition, I contend that this situation is not unique to Peru: across Latin America, blacks and Indians have played different roles in mestizaje. Whereas mestizaje for Indians has been more likely to involve acculturation, for blacks it has meant intergenerational whitening. Locating Black Peruvians in Latin America r 61 This chapter highlights the importance of skin color for defining blackness and of cultural attributes for defining indigeneity. Revealing this distinction is important not to uncover a hierarchy of oppression, but to clarify that processes of mestizaje and exclusion work in different ways for blacks and Indians. At the same time, it is crucial to keep in mind that the idea of...