THE BLACK AMERICAS 1492-1992

...H ISTORY WEIGHS HEAVILY ON THE BLACK peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean...

...The Latin American Left, a creature of nationalism and anti-imperialism, has done little to challenge this basic tenet of identity...

...To varying degrees, the multi-faceted black struggle for liberation, ongoing since 1502, was subsumed in "class" struggle, while racism, previously an openly acknowledged characteristic of society, became a taboo subject, denied along with the people who suffered its effects...

...Few years went by without major black uprisings from then until emancipation over 300 years later...

...Like much of the reality of oppressed peoples, the Black Americas have been obscured in a cloud of distorted history, outdated notions of culture and nationhood, denial and self-denial...

...We found that, outside the halls of academia, black history has been hidden, distorted or ignored...

...Though rigid and hierarchical, the colonial caste system did allow for the affirmation of identity and a certain respect for diversity...

...There, hidden from view, people built sophisticated and adaptable black cultures, drawing on the entwined processes of tradition, history and identity...

...Some of these challenge discriminatory practices through the courts and seek greater black participation in the electoral arena...

...Our attempt to trace some of the broad contours of America's past and present in this and the previous issues of our quincentenary series was prompted by the failure of traditional political paradigms to challenge the blindness of the official world...

...Others champion "blackness" and black heritage, reclaiming black history and insisting on respect for the black contribution to national culture...

...Black political movements are gathering strength in a number of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador...

...Ethnic, racial and cultural diversity came to be viewed as subversive, a challenge to the official nation defined by its supposed homogeneity: one mestizo people speaking a single tongue and believing in a single god...

...The effort led us to imagine alternative ways of seeing the region and its history-from the conquest as "Inventing America," to imperialism as the "Conquest of Nature," to Native American peoples as "The First Nations," and now black peoples as "The Black Americas...

...Still others seek territorial autonomy for the indomitable maroon communities which survive to this day...

...To conclude our series marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus, we set out to examine these "invisible" peoples, who number somewhere between 35 and 95 million...

...Such discrimination is compounded by a nearly universal denial of black heritage and identity, even in countries with large black populations, that has effectively rendered blacks invisible...

...Even there, a mulatto elite has emerged, as has a black ghetto in Port-au-Prince...

...Even today, "lightening" remains key to social advancement, while "darkening" is blamed for everything from poverty and underdevelopment to the whole sorry history of the region...

...And runaway slaves, known as maroons, formed communities that boasted tens of thousands of inhabitants and lasted for more than a century...

...YET A VIBRANT SENSE OF BLACK SELFHOOD persevered, particularly where maroons had seized their freedom and asserted their culture and territory: various parts of Brazil, the interior of Suriname and the Guianas, the Yungas of Bolivia, the northwest coast of Ecuador, the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and Cauca Valley of Colombia, the Llanos and northern coastal crescent of Venezuela, the Mosquitia of Honduras and Nicaragua, the Atlantic coast of Central America, the mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica's Blue Mountains and Red Hills, and the Oriente of eastern Cuba, to name just the most prominent...

...Only in Haiti have African heritage and black identity been embraced by the nation as a whole...

...Some of the worst racist legacies of colonial society were perpetuated by nineteenth-century progressives who sought to overcome them...

...In the 1850s the city of Buenos Aires was one-third black...

...Following the social revolution that the wars of independence wrought, this system was replaced by one which enshrined as the embodiment of equality and freedom the "mestizo race"-made up of "mixed white and American Indian," as The New York Times put it recently-thus denying black people's existence, despite their significant numerical and cultural weight...

...Colonial society classified people by an intricate system of graduated differences in skin color and other somatic features, correlated with degrees of affinity with European culture...

...A few facts: Both Bolivar' s and San Martin's armies which wrested independence from Spain were mostly black...

...DESPITE PERVASIVE LITANIES ABOUT Latin America's colorblind "racial democracy," blatant discrimination continues to plague descendants of the ten million African slaves who were brought to toil on the plantations and mines of the New World...

...The self-liberation of the slaves began in 1502, when Africans first joined with Native Americans to rebel against their European oppressors...

...Seeing the world through new eyes, we hope, will prompt new efforts to change it...