From Emancipation to Equality: The Afro-Latin's Unfinished Struggle

Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. By George Reid Andrews. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 320 pages. $49.95 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

The expansion of interest in Afro-American¹ history in recent decades has reshaped our understanding of U.S. history, forcing a confrontation with the paradox of racial subordination in a nation that took special pride in freedom and egalitarianism. Still, despite its importance, the history of Afro-Americans in the United States is but a small part of a much larger hemispheric experience. Only about 6 percent of Africans brought to the Americas came to what is now the United States. Today no more than one-third of the hemisphere's Afro-Americans are in the United States. Latin American slavery persisted longer and more intensely than it did in the United States. The Portuguese and Spaniards began enslaving Africans early in the fifteenth century. Slavery would finally end in Brazil in 1888.²

Comparative slavery has long been a robust field, especially since the 1946 publication of Frank Tannenbaum's Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. But the literature on peoples of African descent in Latin America after emancipation is more uneven. We know a fair amount about some societies, for example, Brazil and Cuba. For others, relatively little is known. There has also been little attempt at a broad synthesis of Afro-Latin history. Historian Leslie Rout's 1976 publication of The African Experience in Spanish America provided a valuable look at slavery, but considerably less information about the postemancipation period. With Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000, George Reid Andrews steps in to fill the breach, giving us a history that moves Afro-Americans from the periphery and closer to the center of Latin American history.³

Andrews's task is formidable. Despite substantial populations of African descent throughout the Americas, the history of Afro-Latins is often not well known, even by regional specialists. The question of racial classification further complicates the task. Who is or is not Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Columbian, or Afro-Mexican, and so on, is often not very clear. Students of race in the United States study a society whose culture and law have traditionally dictated that all persons with traceable African ancestry belong to a single group and that the group includes individuals with substantial European or indigenous ancestry. Americans have been inclined to think of race as a dichotomy. One is either black or white. Racial mixture has certainly been noticed. It has at times been the basis for sharp social distinctions among Afro-Americans. But in the United States, formal recognition of racial mixture has tended to be grudging and unsystematic despite occasional use of terms such as mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon in the past and recent debates about adoptions of categories such as biracial or multiracial in official records.

Latin America is different. If race is a social construct, in Latin America it is one that is often difficult for North Americans to grasp. Spanish and Portuguese have meticulous vocabularies detailing every conceivable racial mixture, real and sometimes imagined. Latin American lexicons are filled with terms such as negro, preto, pardo, moreno, mulatto, trigueño, zambo, and others detailing presumed degrees of African, European, and indigenous admixtures. Traditionally, peoples of partial African descent have rejected identification as blacks, a rejection supported by the prevailing culture. Some persons with known African ancestry are accepted as white. In Latin America, racial identity often involves a complex negotiation involving ancestry, phenotype, social status, and family connections. Racial classification is contextual. A racial hierarchy exists, in which European ancestry and phenotype are more prized than African ones. Yet at times whites will allow Afro-Latins to proclaim a whiter status than ancestry might dictate. This is done partly as a courtesy and also because it confirms many whites in their view that they live in essentially white societies. Despite this, the individual of...