Compares the contemporary movements for cultural autonomy and social legitimation organized by the indigenous and Afrodescendant populations of Latin America. These movements are challenging the concept of blanqueamiento or whitening embedded in the process of mestizaje in Latin America. Whitening proclaimed the superiority of white European culture over indigenous and black culture, a concept these movements are challenging by proclaiming their own cultural autonomy.
About a unique case of assimilation: the entry of descendants of nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century European immigrants to southern Brazil into Afro‐Brazilian religious groups, some as heads of their own centres. The discussion is placed within the framework of the contemporary multiculturalist debate over assimilation. The emigration of Europeans to rural southern Brazil is summarized. African slaves are shown to have been established ‐ with their syncretized Afro‐Catholic religions ‐ in the incipient urban centres. T
Since July 4, 1991, a new constitution has allowed Colombians to exercise their citizenship by displaying cultural diversity rather than by concealing it as required by the previous political charter. Paradoxically, invisibility continues not only to impede full ethnic inclusion of Afro-Colombians but to aggravate ethnic asymmetries that, in turn, erode nonviolent coexistence among the black and Indian people who have shared portions of the Baudo River valley (Department of Choco) for at least 150 years.
