Abstract
Latin America has long been exalted as a racial paradise, a region free of ethnic and racial conflict. Still, in the past decade, ethnic and racial issues have gone from invisibility to full exposure as black and indigenous social movements have become central to mainstream politics in the region. In the case of Latin America’s black population, scholarship must now shift from trying to find “invisible” blacks to understanding contemporary social issues affecting these populations and the social movements that have begun to address them.1 With the increasing visibility of racial inequalities and with the emergence of policies such as affirmative action in Brazil, we can now begin to discuss “black politics” in Latin America as being linked to social movements and black nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Although there are many historical examples of black resistance and organization in this region, such initiatives have multiplied in recent years as black organizations have emerged and challenged the state in new ways. These shifts in Latin American politics are taking place within the context of increased globalization, making transnational networks and advocacy key components in their articulation. We examine the complex ways that movement leaders oscillate between organizing at the national and international levels. We find that Afro-Latin American leaders are involved in many transnational networks of Afro-descendants, which they see as stemming from similar histories of slavery in the Americas as well as similar conditions of marginalization, discrimination, and inequality today. This new configuration of domestic and transnational social movements should be considered under the rubric of “black politics” and as an emergent field of study in itself.
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Notes
Sujatha Fernandes, “Fear of a Black Nation: Local Rappers, Transnational Crossings, and State Power in Contemporary Cuba,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2005): 575–608; Mark Q. Sawyer, “Race to the Future: Racial Politics in Latin America 2015,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 3 (2005): 561–64; Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Tianna Paschel “The Right to Difference: Explaining Colombia’s Shift from Colorblindness to the Law of Negritude” (master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2007).
John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1987): 1212–41.
Carl N. Degler, Neither Black Nor White (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971); Michael Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimiento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo Brazil, 1945–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
France W. Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Jim Sidanius and Yesilernis Peña, and Mark Sawyer, “Inclusionary Discrimination: Pigmentocracy and Patriotism in the Dominican Republic,” Political Psychology 21, no. 4 (2001): 827–51; Mark Q. Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1997).
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 41–58.
Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Sidanius and Peña, et al. “Inclusionary Discrimination: Pigmentocracy and Patriotism in the Dominican Republic,” 827–51; Yesilernis Peña and Jim Sidanius, “Racial Democracy in the Americas: A Latin and U.S. Comparison,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, no. 6 (2004): 749–62; Mark Q. Sawyer and Yesilernis Peña, “Cuban Exceptionalism: Group-based Hierarchy and the Dynamics of Patriotism in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba,” The Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 93–113; Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
By color-blindness we mean the belief that society is not stratified by race and that race is not salient in determining social relations. It follows that the state should not consider, reference, or collect data about race even if such efforts are aimed at rectifying historic racial inequality or discrimination. See Mark Q. Sawyer, “Comparative Perspectives on the African American Experience: What We Can Learn from Cuba,” Souls 5, no. 2 (2003). 63–80.
Miguel Angel Centeno, Black and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
For a thorough response to the charges leveled by Bordieu and Wacquant and the position it represents, see Michael Hanchard, “Acts of Misrecognition: Transnational Black Politics, Anti-Imperialism and the Ethnocentrisms of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 4 (2003): 5–29; and Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought.
Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Marvin Harris, Town and Country in Brazil. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956); Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1956) Caribbean Race Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (New York: Knopf, 1947).
Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimiento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo Brazil, 1945–1988. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
See Mala Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 60–89.
Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Melina Pappademos, Alchemists of a Race: Politics and Culture in Black Cuban Societies, 1899–1959 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Henley C. Adams, “Fighting an Uphill Battle: Race, Politics, Power and Institutionalization in Cuba,” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 155–67; Sawyer, Racial Politics in Post Revolutionary Cuba. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Ibid.
Juliet Hooker, “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37, no. 2 (2005): 285–310.
Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
Peter Evans, “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization,” World Politics 50, no. 1 (1977): 62–87.
Carlos Efren Agudelo, “La Constitución Política de 1991 y la inclusión ambigua de las poblaciones negras” in Utopia para los excluidos: El multiculturalismo en Africa y América Latina (Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004).
Ibid. Paschel
Peter Wade, “The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia,” in Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and Arlene Torres (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 342–58.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998)
Helen Safá, “Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America.” Critique of Anthropology 25 (3): 307–30.
Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimiento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo Brazil, 1945–1988. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Safá, “Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America, Critique of Anthropology, 25(3) 307–30; Peggy A. Lovell, “Race, gender and regional labor market inequalities in Brazil” Review of Social Economy, 58, no. 3 2000):277–93.
Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
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© 2009 Manning Marable and Leith Mullings
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Paschel, T.S., Sawyer, M.Q. (2009). Contesting Politics as Usual. In: Mullings, L. (eds) New Social Movements in the African Diaspora. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104570_2
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