Afro-Latin Americans
Winter 2018 | Volume XVII, Number 2
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn ErlickMatos Series Inaugurated
First Take
The Rise of Afro-Latin America
It was a foundational event. Never before had so many activists concerned with issues of race and justice in Latin America come together to discuss their experiences and to chart new agendas for the future. Never before had racism and racial inequality been so visible, so…
Memory and Resistance
A View of Afro-Diasporic History from Colombia
The Muntu Bantu, a memorial museum and cultural center in Quibdo, Chocó, on Colombia’s Pacific coast region, seeks to work “for the study, promotion and diffusion of the Afro…
Transforming Havana’s Gay Ambiente
The epicenter of Havana’s gay ambiente might be La Rampa—a stretch of Calle 23 in the touristy El Vedado neighborhood— but the peripheral neighborhoods of Havana are also…
Slavery and Precarious Freedom
Slavery was a form of labor exploitation in which workers became the property of others; slaves were considered things, thus routinely exposed to transactions such as sale, auction…
Sandoval Redux
“While I lie on a cushion of worm slime, Father Alonso de Sandoval appears”: So remarks one of the several enslaved narrators in Afro-Colombian author Manuel Zapata Olivella’s 1983…
The Routine of an Unconventional Path
As a scientist by training and by conviction, I wish sometimes that I could just be like so many of my esteemed colleagues: just keep doing research in High-Energy Astrophysics, build a career around it, and hopefully derive my life’s satisfaction from it…
Mining and the Defense of Afro-Colombian Territory
We—an anthropologist and photographer, sister and brother—visited Yolombó in the department of Cauca, Colombia, in June 2017. Yolombó is part of a federation of ve towns…
Afro-Boricua Agency: Against the Myth of the Whitest of the Antilles
Puerto Rico is in crisis, made unimaginably worse by Hurricane Maria, this ongoing crisis highlights the racial character of our colonial condition. President Trump, who charged that…
African and Afro-Indian Rebel Leaders in Latin America
On Christmas Day in the year 1521, and half a world away from home, a group of enslaved West African Muslim warriors led a slave revolt on the island of Hispaniola, a distant island…
“I Found My Island”: Field Reflections of a Black Nuyorican in Puerto Rico
I landed in San Juan for the first time as a young adult with a bright orange 52-pound suitcase, my dog Zora, and an eager excitement to be reunited with the island…
Discrimination and Forms of Action
Witches, Wives, Secretaries and Black Feminists
The issue of gender has been front and center for me, both as a subject of my fieldwork on black politics in Latin America, and how I conducted that research, particularly in how I…
Reflections on the Afro-Chilean Social Movement
English + Español
A saying popularized by the Afro-Uruguayan leader Romero Rodríguez comes up again and again in the history of the Afro-Latino and Afro-Caribbean movements: “We entered as…
Salvador de Bahia: Pelourinho as Inclusive Heritage
“Bom dia, moço! Todo bem? Bem-vindo à Bahia!” three enthusiastic women, one of them dressed as a typical Baiana, greeted me warmly at the tourism office at Salvador de Bahia in…
Prejudice and Pride
What does it mean to be black in Central America? From the Garifuna people along the Atlantic Coast to the descendants of Jamaican and other West Indian groups throughout the…
Afro-Latin America by the Numbers
Where did the all-encompassing term “Afro-Latin America” come from? While “Afro-Cuban,” “Afro-Brazilian” and other national terms were invented in the rst half of the 1900s, the broad…
Music and Dance
The Bearers
English + Español
Viñales’s spectacular natural beauty makes it one of Cuba’s busiest tourist attractions, but tourists don’t come to this mango grove, and the bus driver who brought us wasn’t happy about taking the beat-up road that leads here. Plus, it’s raining. No matter, there’ll be a party…
In the Footsteps of La Rebambaramba
English + Español
Tracing the journey of Amadeo Roldán’s Afro-Cuban ballet La Rebambaramba (1928) I arrived in Paris. Yes, in Paris, France… both the author of the original libretto, the Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier, and the—also Cuban— choreographer Ramiro Guerra…
La Candela Viva
The drum beat is the pulse of Palenque de San Basilio; it is central to birth, death, marriage and other celebrations. In this Colombian town, drumming is about communion and…
Negra/Anger
Nina Simone once said that her life had been a constant struggle between blacks and whites…and that she had finally found her balance between the black and white keys of…
Multi-Faith Lives of Brazilian Congadeiros and Umbandistas
I stood outside of the small chapel, pointing my video camera through the grates of the window. Inside, the devotees of the religious group Moçambique Thirteenth of May of Our…
Black Aesthetics and Afro-Latinx Hip Hop: “I’m an African”
The U.S. emcees from the group dead prez rapped, “I’m an African, I’m an African,” in front of a crowd of thousands at the 1999 Cuban hip hop festival. The amphitheatre resounded with the thundering response of the Cuban…
Afro-Roots and Mozart Too
I discovered jazz at 13 in my musical household in Cuba when my brother brought home a cassette tape of Chick Corea’s record “Friends,” and ever since I have been obsessed with…
Building Bridges
Compañeros En Salud
English + Español
I have lived in non-indigenous rural Chiapas in southern Mexico since 2013, working with Compañeros En Salud (CES)—a Harvard af liated non-profit organization that partnered with…
Book Talk
Anatomía de una Trampa
English + Español
While campaigning, many politicians in Latin America use the rhetoric of dignity and rectitude to sway voters. However, in power, they often forget electoral promises, abusing…
Social Policies and Decentralization in Cuba
From my snapshot views of Cuba in ve visits over the years, two eye-opening moments stand out. In 1980, after visiting one workplace after another where union and management…
Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context
When I was running a newspaper bureau in Nicaragua, I once went to look for my housekeeper to ask where we kept something or other. She wasn’t there, but her TV was on…
Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil
Sergio Delgado’s brilliant book, Delirious Consumption, performs a truly radical feat of locating anti-capitalist resistance precisely in the heart of the beast, in consumer culture…