The book "Imaginarios ambiguos, realidades contradictorias. Conductas y representaciones de los negros y mulatos novohispanos, siglos XVI y XVII" by Úrsula Camba Ludlow is reviewed.
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.
"A change in attitudes toward nature and "natural persons" during the 1920's-30's in the United States led in part to a revision in North American attitudes toward Latin Americans. Insofar as the peoples of Latin America, including Indians, blacks, women, children, and the poor, symbolized natural folk - that is, those individuals not participating in mainstream capitalist culture - they became the substance of a stereotype made popular by a countercultural revolution in the 1920's-30's." (author)
For almost twenty years, Latin American and Caribbean "autonomous feminism", a small yet active movement, provokes debates and proposes important analysis which renew and deepen those proposed by dominant feminism. This movement, in which some indigenous and afrodescendant lesbian feminists play a very significant role, stems from a criticism of international institutions's role in the domestication of feminism (and especially the United Nations).
A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The authors examine Gates' presentation of blackness in Mexico and Peru. Their critique of the film focuses on the themes of national ideology, racial categorization, and portrayals of the 'black' experience.
Examines racial politics in Brazil by analyzing the city of Salvador da Bahia's cultural policies over time and their relationship to national ideology and racial identity in Brazil more generally. It argues that the re-Africanization of Salvador's Carnival and its historical center, the Pelourinho, although initially products of the mobilization of Afro-Bahians themselves, have become institutionalized and ironically serve today as testaments to Brazil's diversity, tolerance, and integration.
