Fischer reviews the two-volume work Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean: social dynamics and cultural transformations, by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Arlene Torres>
Presents information on the authors' association with writer Andre Gunder Frank whom he first met in a meeting of the World Congress of Sociology in Mexico City, Mexico. Though the internationalism of the Black Liberation Movement is certainly linked to Pan Africanism, there is a broader internationalism that had been inspired by Frank and others who had come to intellectual, political, and moral maturity while laboring to understand the world in order to change it in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s. Frank's stance is that underdevelopment results from the same processes that have produced development, and the development of capitalism itself is also the development of underdevelopment.
The African heritage hypothesis posits that the substantial African ancestry of Puerto Ricans explains why this group is less segregated from African-Americans than non-Hispanic whites. This pattern is unlike that of other Hispanic groups, who have been found to be highly segregated from African-Americans but modestly segregated from whites. The research presented here shows that Dominicans, another Hispanic group with substantial African ancestry, are also less segregated from African-Americans than whites. Dominicans, therefore, also appear to be conforming to the African heritage thesis by residing in neighborhoods with greater proximity to African-Americans than whites.
