Discusses the issue of slavery experienced by the Blacks in Latin America. He explores the slave life experienced by the Black community as well as examines the role of gender, culture and ethnicity in evaluating the narrative of slavery and freedom in the country.
Argues that although evangelical Christianity involves a variety of beliefs that are incompatible with a strong ethnic identity, this religion also includes a range of ideas and practices that nourish rather than corrode black identity.
" While the black man's paintings or carvings were considered works of the Devil, music, on the other hand, did not cause much inconvenience. The plantation owners in Cuba, for example, allowed their slaves to beat their drums and dance every evening because this showed that they were in good health and that their "ebony flesh' was fit for hard labour. Meanwhile, the slaves listened to what they heard around them. During the sixteenth century, when they were first taken to America, they assimilated Spanish ballads, songs from Portugal and even French square dancing. They discovered musical instruments unknown in their own lands and learned to play them." --The Author
Article is concerned with the relations of Afro-Latin Americans to modes of production (slavery, capitalism, socialism), economic institutions (the plantation, transnational corporations), economic development models, transnational relations, political systems, institutions, behavior, group and class relations (including class struggle), social mobility, and political mobilization.
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
"The description of Negro family life in Bahia, Brazil, as given by E. F. Frazier is reviewed. The disintegration of African patterns held to have resulted from white contact, when analyzed in terms of aboriginal tribal family organization, particularly with reference to underlying sanctions, is found to exist to a very slight degree. The Afro-Bahian family manifests traits particular to it, but these are the results of accommodation to an acculturative situation, and are not a sign of demoralization." --The Author
Explores the challenges that Afro-descendants face when trying to claim collective rights in Latin America, focusing specifically on the kinds of collective rights and modes of justification of such rights open to Afro-descendant movements in Latin America today.
When Ernesto Estupinan Quintero was elected mayor of the city of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, in 2000, he was the first self-identifying Black person to reach this position. The city of Esmeraldas is the capital of the only province of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorians are the largest racial and cultural group. Immediately upon his election, Ernesto began commissioning murals and statues that contested traditional representations of Blackness.
