While some forget that the United States does not have a monopoly over the title "America," the term, with some exceptions, encompasses most of the Western Hemisphere. As such, many of the communities of African descent that reside within this range possess equal claim to the name "African Americans." The event commemorated "Black Consciousness Day," an annual holiday that is celebrated in Brazil on November 20. The public holiday pays tribute to an African ancestor, Zumbi dos Palmares, revered by Blacks in the country for his fierce resistance to slavery in the 17th century. The day was consciously chosen to symbolize the ongoing struggles of Blacks to achieve social and economic equality in Brazil.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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196 p., Explores how Quilombo recognition has significantly affected the everyday lives of those who experience the often-complicated political process. Questions of identity, race, and entitlement play out against a community’s struggle to prove its historical authenticity—and to gain the land and rights they need to survive.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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213 p., Examines the need for international solidarity with grassroots movements in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora. Intertwined with the everyday happenings of a social movement currently underway in Brazil, the author conveys an in-depth sense of the women who drive the community movement in the neighborhood of Gamboa de Baixo in Salvador (Brazil).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.
Portuguese and Spanish slavers supplied the Americas with "los Negros," the Blacks. Only those young and strong, impervious to European disease and able to withstand months of torturous living packed in the cruel quarters of slave shipholds survived the middle passage. Those who arrived, stunned and malnourished, lost in a foreign land, were easy prey to the slavers. Removed from a world that had nourished them, left to the mercy of those whose own lack of humanity prevented the recognition of theirs, they were utterly dependent and at the mercy of their captors. Vestiges of racism threaten to dismantle further progress in South America, as they do here. The prophecies of Willie Lynch, a slave owner who created a divisive plan to keep Blacks separate by fostering dissent among them, are coming true. Lynch outlined the differences in physical characteristics among the slaves-skin shade, hair texture, height, etc. By playing up these differences, Lynch promised, "The Black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands." Throughout North and South America, Lynch's plan lives on. Color lines rule, with the predominantly European strains remaining in power, and those of darker skin and crisper hair texture continue to be oppressed. It is a chilling reality that echoes down from the brutal suppression of the native peoples of Chiapas to the continued repression of Mexicans here and in their own country, to the harsh discrimination shown the Blacks of Brazil and America.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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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.
Reviews the book "Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship," edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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213 p., A ollection of stories about the lives of 10 remarkable people in the region. From Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia and the Dominican Republic to Columbia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico, readers will come to know individuals whose lives reflect the history and immense changes underway in these countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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310 p., Explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles' new identities.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Originally published: London : Latin American Bureau, 2006., 205 p., Relates the story of Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, an organization based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that employs music and an appreciation for black culture to inspire residents of shantytowns to resist the drugs that are ruining their neighborhoods.
