African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
145 p, The Guatemalan government sought to build an extensive railroad system in the 1880s, and actively recruited foreign labor. For poor workers of African descent, immigrating to Guatemala was seen as an opportunity to improve their lives and escape from the racism of the Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Using primary and secondary sources as well as ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were ultimately inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Regularly suffering class- and race-based attacks and persecution, black laborers frequently met such attacks with resistance. Their leverage--being able to shut down the railroad--was crucially important to the revolutionary movements in 1897 and 1920.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
280 p., Compares the experiences of persons of African origin and descent in the towns of Baltimore and Sabara, Black Townsmen reconsiders their relationship to eighteenth-century urban environments in the Americas. Following Africans and their descendants through their struggle with slavery, manumission, and life in freedom, Dantas explains how these men and women's efforts and choices helped to define the trajectory of these two towns.
Whitten,Norman E., Jr. (Editor) and Torres,Arlene (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
unknown
Published:
Bloomington.: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
2 vols., If we are to understand the meanings of "blackness" in the African diaspora and elsewhere, we must critically examine the paradigms that have emerged over the past five centuries out of Euro-American racism and black liberation. So argue the editors of these seminal volumes that add immeasurably to our understanding of black experiences in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean while establishing new research directions.
Whitten,Norman E. (Editor) and Torres,Arlene (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1998
Published:
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
520 p., Argues that if we are to understand the meanings of blackness in the African diaspora, and elsewhere, we must critically examine paradigms that have emerged over the past five centuries out of Euroamerican racism and black liberation. This work clarifies many issues of cultural representation and social identity in Latin America and the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
369 p., Provides a history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social and political changes in Brazil during the last 100 years have shaped race relations. By examining government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country's most economically important state, Sao Paolo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America's most urban, industrialized society.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p., Analyzes how imperial control met with resistance and how Africans, Indians, and Spaniards, and their descendants interacted with one another. Her study uncovers an intersection and cross-fertilization of sociocultural measurements identifiable in the workplace, courts, church, and private lives. Brockington innovatively uses Spanish colonial documentary sources, including serial financial accounts of wealthy orphans, court cases, parish records, and census information of hacienda workers to elucidate race, ethnic, class, and gender issues within the colonial reality of contradiction and ambiguity.