Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru

4. Diasporic Discourses and Local Blackness Compared

When these three Peruvians use the word black, what are they referring to? Can we presume that their willingness to use the word black, instead of moreno or brown, implies solidarity with people in other parts of the world who identify as blacks? Or, is the relationship between these uses of black and those in other parts of the diaspora purely semantic? Doña Perla insists that blackness is no more than a skin color.Could this be true? Why does Arañita—albeit in a fictional representation—reject the label as having only negative connotations? And, why is Don Esteban proud to be black? The label black seems to evoke a history of colonialism and slavery ; of oral, musical, and literary production; of exploitation, oppression, and racism. But must it? Is there a global discourse of blackness that is chapter 4 Diasporic Discourses and Local Blackness Compared A mí, no me gusta que me digan negro, porque dicen negro con asco, y me caliento. (I don’t like when they call me black, because they say disgusting black, and I get worked up.) Arañita, a character in the movie Juliana (1988) Me gusta que me digan negro porque soy orgulloso de ser negro. (I like to be called black because I am proud to be black.) Don Esteban, fifty-year old agricultural worker, Ingenio Negro es una [sic] color, nada más. (Black is a color, nothing more.) Doña Perla, fifty-year-old housewife, Ingenio Diasporic Discourses and Local Blackness Compared r 115 necessarily conjured up by the word black? Could Perla use the word to refer to her skin color in an act unrelated to the historical and contemporary experiences of people in the African diaspora? Could a term with such a violent history (and present) ever be divorced from social meaning? These questions center on the extent to which a global discourse of blackness— defined as one where black carries the same connotations across various contexts—influences how people talk about being black in Ingenio. I address these questions through a discussion of the gendered nature of access to global and local discourses of blackness in Ingenio, where the majority of residents self-identify as black. As I discussed in chapter 1, many people in Ingenio refer to themselves as black, but do not see themselves as part of a broader community of people descended from African slaves. In Ingenio, blackness is not necessarily tied to African ancestry or to a history of slavery. What, then, do people in Ingenio mean when they say they are black? What is the local discourse of blackness in Ingenio, and how is it related to the global discourse of blackness? In this chapter, I explore the meanings people give to blackness and place those meanings in the local and global contexts. These analyses permit me to examine the extent to which there is continuity across contexts and the extent to which we can use the global to understand the local. As in the previous chapters, this chapter highlights the centrality of color in understandings of blackness in Peru. Specifically, I consider how color is at the core of local discourses of blackness, while also exploring how global discourses that stress ancestral roots in Africa, the history of slavery, and a common experience of oppression among blacks interact with local discourses of blackness in Ingenio. Drawing from Patricia Hill Collins (2004), Charles Briggs (2005), and Michel Foucault (1990), I conceptualize discourse as public and private conversations, sets of ideas and practices, and mass-media messages that shape both societal conceptions and social power. The ideological dimensions of discourses on blackness work in both hegemonic and counterhegemonic fashions to influence the ways people think and talk about blackness. I explore discourse primarily at the level of interpersonal conversations ,and consider mass media in more detail in the next chapter.Because of the gendered division of social roles and public spaces in Ingenio, men and women participate in different ways in public and private conversations and have varying levels of access to these conversations, especially to those that occur outside the community. Local discourses are those that 116 r Yo Soy Negro are particular to Ingenio. Global discourses have a wider dissemination and purported sphere of influence. In Peru, between 6 and 12 percent of the population of about 28 million can be identified as being descendants of African...