Blackness in the Americas
Whitten, Norman E. Jr. & Torres, Arlene
WHETHER OR NOT BLACK AFRICANS OR black Iberians reached the New World with Columbus in either of his first two voyages is not clear.' Nor is it clear whether Africans reached the New World...
...The "mixture" emphasized Spanish-indigenous heritage, with privilege accorded to the former...
...Adaptedfrom the introduction to their Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean (Carlson Publishing, 1992...
...The interplay between the discourses and practices of "white culture" and "darkened people" has produced a myriad of racial concepts and codes...
...Fernando Ortiz, Historia de una pelea Cubana contra los demonios (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), and Los Negros Cunas...
...The case of the black people who hold territorial sovereignty in the interior of Suriname demonstrates how black governance challenges the broader nation-state...
...Then, in the mid- 1980s, as Suriname entered a phase of avowed socialist nationalism, the sheer existence of peaceful and autonomous black people in a "plural" nation seemed to threaten the sovereignty and territoriality of an increasingly bloodthirsty and oppressive military state...
...troops in several areas (among them, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Puerto Rico) facilitated this process...
...Roberto Aeazola, Palenque:primerpueblolibredeAmerica(Cartagena: Ediciones HernAndez, 1971...
...2-3 (1946), "La habitaci6n rural en cuba," Antropologia No...
...A theme running through the history of black America is the dialectic between, on the one hand, the darkening influences of white domination in the African diaspora and, on the other, the illuminated creativity produced and reproduced in the eternal fires of black rebellion...
...Kent, "Palmares: An African State in Brazil," in Price, Maroon Societies...
...As a consequence, black and indigenous awareness ofexclusion and continuous struggle for ethnic power will remain prominent...
...Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation ofCultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp...
...Thoden van Velzen and W. van Wetering, The Great Father and the Danger: Religious Cults, Material Forces, and Collective Fantasies in the World of the Surinamese Maroons (Dordrecht, Holland: Foris Publications, 1988...
...the Dari6n, coasts and interior of Panama...
...And eich rontPemnnrrv icoilrre mayv reveal far more about black or indigenous history and identity than reified inscriptions in learned volumes about "genuine" (but "disappearing") Africans and Indians in the New World...
...To the east of Haiti, on the same island, lies the Dominican Republic, where "the 1844 independence movement stressed the European, Catholic, 'civilized' culture of the Dominicans over against the African and 'barbarous' Haitians South of Haiti lie Venezuela and Colombia, lands also governed by mestizaje ideology...
...In 1978, the Saramaka elder Pel6ki voiced the greatest fear of all maroons, prophesying that those times--the days of war and slavery-shall come again," Price wrote...
...Great war 6bias that had lain dormant since the eighteenth century were dug from the earth and revivified...
...They aspire to be more civilized and "conscious" than "darker" black and indigenous peoples...
...In the Americas only Haiti has adopted an explicit nationalist ideology of nmgritude...
...Black Power Movement, and the official U.S...
...See Rout, The African Experience...
...The "sooted" (darkened, blackened) concept has an earlier (or deeper) etymology from the Latin flagrare, "flame," "burn" and, by association, "flagrant...
...Emergent Puerto Rican nationalism under Spanish rule embraced the ideology of mestizaje, in which thejibaro (Puerto Rican peasant) was the bearer of a nascent Puerto Rican identity and culture...
...Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980...
...Yet patterns do suggest relationships to the past and trajectories toward the future...
...This same uneasiness about blackness is evident in the images of Haiti held by many white and mestizo people living in the Spanish Caribbean and adjacent Spanish Main, and in Ecuador and Peru...
...and Arlene Torres teach anthropology at the University oflllinois at Urbana-Champaign...
...Martin's Press, 1989), p. 4 1 . 4. Jalil Sued Badillo and Angel L6pez Cantos, Puerto Rico Negro (Rio Piedras: Editorial Cultural, 1986), pp...
...See G.R...
...What the slaves used to say in sotto voce on the plantations, they were able to say aloud in the maroon settlements...
...175-189...
...Un Siglo de Investigacion Social: Antropologia en Colombia (Bogota: Etno, 1984...
...The fearful specter of a black state was not lost on some observers...
...Price, Alabi's World, p. v. 26...
...the Mosquitia of Honduras and Nicaragua...
...See Franqois Bourricaud, Changements ia Puno (Paris: Institut de hautes etudes de l'Amlrique latine, 1962), Julian Pitt-Rivers, "Race, Color, and Class in Central America and the Andes," Daedalus, Vol...
...de Friedemann and Cross, Ma Ngombe...
...Significantly, then, in Dutch Guiana, which was to become Suriname, as elsewhere, one of the first things that selfliberated slaves did was to shed their European clothes...
...58, No...
...2 In western Hispaniola, where the French established colonial St...
...Herskovits, The Myth ofthe Negro Past...
...Richard Price, Maroon Societies, First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), and Alabi's World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990...
...Known variously as palenques, quilombos, mocombos, cumbes, ladeiras, or mambises, these new societies ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members and surviving for generations or even centuries...
...2. Carlos Federico Guillot, Negros rebeldes y negros cimarrones (perfil afro-americano en la historia del Nuevo Mundo durante el siglo XVI) (Montevideo: Farifia Editores, 1961), p. 77, cited in Richard Price (ed...
...Equally telling, perhaps, is the call of dark people in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, when beginning the English game of cricket: "Put on your whites...
...2 9 At the Cali Congress, black people, well aware of these stereotypes and the power of racist symbols, insisted on using the term la cultura negra...
...IN NON-ANGLOPHONE AMERICA TODAY, COlombia-Ecuador and Haiti constitute polar nationalist opposites...
...In the Cauca Valley of Colombia, with a history characterized by increasing white wealth, oppression of black yeomanry, and destruction of indigenous people, black people are viewed as morally "darkened" by history, geography, and descent...
...Or it can come from a collective, inner sense of the oneness of a people, in contradistinction to nationalist racialist hegemony.'" Black-based ethnicblocs in the Americas often adopt the ideology of negritude and, in so doing, are perceived as a threat to the sovereignty and territoriality of the official "nation...
...Ethnographer Richard Price writes: "For more than four centuries, the communities formed by such runaways dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to the southeastern United States, from Peru to the American Southwest...
...8. Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics, pp...
...As Taussig puts it: "From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation...
...To discuss "communities," "regions" or "societies" in the New World where blackness is an important criterion for social categorization and interaction is to plunge into contradictory ideologies of "races," and to chart the moral topographies of deeply held religious and aesthetic feelings about racial separation and racial mixture...
...In the former, the colonial dream of overcoming the barriers of racial classification that limit economic opportunities became transformed into a nationalist, democratic ideology of "racial mixture...
...Altmougn in many areas jibaros vary in skin color from brown to black, there de, affirms from brown to black, there...
...2 5 A NTHROPOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF black cultures and traditions in the New World has often bogged down in debates about how to scale Africanisms against Europeanisms in such areas as aesthetics, ritual, play, theater, folklore, cosmology, music, dance, religion and ideology...
...In retaliation, the Church and Crown in Puerto Rico accused freed and enslaved black men and women of sorcery and witchcraft.' In 1522 black people revolted in Santo Domingo, the major city of Hispaniola...
...Guillermo Baralt et al., El Machete de Ogan...
...Paradoxically, BolIvar himself feared the worst for elite whites and mixed Creoles if the energies manifest in black cultures were unleashed.2 Indeed, when black soldiers of libera- tion began to rally around one of his black Haitian generals, he had the general shot...
...Nina S. de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha, De sol a sol: Gdnesis, transformnacion y presencia de los negros en Colombia (BogotA: Planeta, 1986...
...James G. Leyburn, The Haitian People, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941, 1966...
...2 8 Ecuadorian blacks in attendance said they deeply resented the use of this figure of speech as a way of asserting the mestizo character of Ecuadorian "popular" culture...
...3 ' When united as male and female these images form a symbol of imminent transformation...
...Jorge Ibarra, ldeologiaMambisa (Havana: InstitutoCubano del Libro, 1972);Ortfz,Historia de una Pelea...
...7 Writing about Haiti, Laguerre says: "Marronage was a central fact in the life of the colony, not only because of maroon military power and the number of slaves who REPORT ON THE AMERICASconstantly joined them, but also because of the danger inherent in expeditions to destroy revolutionary centers of these fugitive slaves....[W]herever there were slaves, there were also maroons....Living in free camps or on the fringes of port cities, they were a model for the slaves to imitate, embodying the desires of most of the slaves...
...From the beginning of the African diaspora in Europe and the Americas, "whitening" and "darkening" have been dual symbolic processes of classification and identity...
...Challenges to dominant racialist ideologies often come from what Clifford Geertz calls "ethnic-blocs...
...2 6 Black Bermudans' fondness for English Cricket is no less "theirs" in the late twentieth century than white Mississippians' taste forokra (which blacks brought to the Americas from Africa...
...32...
...Domingue, and in the interior of the Spanish territory that eventually became the Dominican Republic, "marronage" (flight from servitude) sustained an atmosphere of liberation...
...For example, Melville Herskovits, "Problem, Method, and Theory in Afro-American Studies," Afroamerica Vol...
...Although not often recognized as such, the ideology of "whitening" is an unconscious psychological process that accompanies the economic state of underdevelopment in the twentieth century...
...3-4 (1987...
...Whitten, Sicuanga Runa and Black Frontiersmen...
...I. They probably did not...
...El Machete de Ogiin: las luchas de los esclavos en Puerto Rico (siglo XIX) (Rio Piedras: CEREP, 1990...
...has argued elsewhere that ethnic-bloc formation is a process of contra-nationalism, and that the symbolic processes of ethnic-bloc formation are similar to, or the same as, those identified in processes of nationalist consolidation...
...the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and Cauca Valley of Colombia...
...Self-liberation came early to black slaves in the Cauca Valley...
...Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Sicuanga Runa: The Other Side of Development in Amazonian Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985...
...Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 1. 3. Michel S. Laguerre, Voodoo and Politics in Haiti (New York: St...
...This firm sense of black selfhood and social history developed under the shadow of enduring racism...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICASIn many black regions and communities, the word mestizo may refer to "black blood" (meaning "darkening"negreando) with no connotation of "lightening...
...In the woods that enclose the Cauca Valley,' wrote the German traveler Freidrich von Schenk in 1880, 'vegetate many blacks whom one could equate with the maroons of the West Indies.' They sought solitude in the woods, 'where they regress once again slowly to the custom of their African birthplace as one commonly sees in the interior of Haiti....These people are tremendously dangerous, especially in times of revolution when they get together in gangs and enter the struggle as valiant fighters in the service of whatever hero of liberty promises them booty.'"" 2 The blacks of Colombia do not accept the position of ethnic disadvantage that whites assign them, nor do they describe themselves as whites do...
...La cultura negra comes from black people in black communities, but is the polar opposite of "popular culture...
...Even within Haiti, somatic and/or cultural categories are also prey to the ideological specter of "lightening...
...Blackness, they asserted, in all its flagrant dimensions, is to be cultivated and understood, not "studied" as a set of scattered artifacts...
...2 4 Today black Puerto Ricans, who have maintained their autonomy since the formation of maroon groupings on the island, are challenging the official interpretation of Puerto Rico's ethnic heritage...
...In some areas, however, it may mean "darkened white," or just plain "darkened...
...VOLUME XXVNUMBER U A IL...
...Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 58...
...21-22 ff...
...Black people of the Pacific lowlands of Panama, Colombia and Ecuador-who constitute 90% or more of the population there-emphatically deny an African diaspora...
...the Yungas of Bolivia...
...see also pp...
...It provides a single term by which to assert the positive power inherent in, and the positive aesthetic forces of, "blackness," leaving many avenues open for the definition of what and who is and is not to be considered "black...
...With the fleet of Governor Ovando, bound for Hispaniola in 1502 to reinvigorate the faltering colony that Columbus had left behind the previous year, sailed 'a few Negroes...brought out by their masters,"' wrote historian Carlos Federico Guillot...
...Lydia Cabrera, Otdn lyebiye: Las piedras preciosas (Miami: Cabrera y Rojas, 1970...
...The blood of hundreds of maroons-men, women, and children-as well as that of other Surinamers has once again stained the ground...
...27-29...
...Afro-American Ethnohistory in Latin America and the Caribbean (Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1976), and Urban Life in the Caribbean (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing, 1982...
...the mountains of Haiti and the Dominican Republic...
...In 1986, after two centuries of peace, they did...
...13.Jean Price-Mars,Ainsiparla lo 'ncle (Paris: Imprimerie de Compiegne, 1928...
...In the wars of liberation against European colonialism (between 1813 and 1822) led by Simon BolIvar, black troops from revolutionary Haiti helped overthrow colonial governments in the territories which became the Republic of Gran Colombia: from the Orinoco River in today's Venezuela to the Pacific coast, and from what is now northern Peru to Panama...
...Such racism stems from the legacies of slavery and black self-liberation, in concert with the later white tradition of importing black laborers from the adjacent Pacific lowlands...
...At the First Congress on Black Culture of the Americas, held in Cali, Colombia in 1977, a prominent Ecuadorian folklorist presented a paper based on his extensive research on Afro-Ecuadorian "beliefs and superstitions...
...For whites and mestizos in the valley, negro refers to "lazy" and "dangerous" migrants from a "jungle" littered with African "superstitions...
...With the abolishment of slavery between the mid- and late nineteenth century, the terminology became "mulatto/ black" in black regions, and "white/mulatto" in regions dominated by peoples of lighter skin color...
...But cultural traditions may come from any source, and may change radically for a variety of reasons...
...The phenomenon of "lightening" is well known in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, where people classed as mestizo usually refer to themselves as blanco (white...
...Like the maroons in the interior of Suriname and French Guiana, their collective notion of history is alive with events establishing their own communities in their own territory by their own creative volitions...
...If we are to understand the meanings of "blackness" in the African diaspora and elsewhere, we must sharpen our critical perspectives on cherished paradigms that were forged over the past five centuries on the anvil of Euroamerican racism and in the fires of black liberation...
...9 Although few twentieth-century scholars have taken time to document such information, self-liberation in the midst of war, pestilence, and death is thoroughly embedded in the dynamic history of African-American people hemisphere-wide.' 0 Out of this creative process emerged most of the region's prominent black areas: among them, various parts of Brazil...
...Though dominant in nationalist rhetoric, mestizaje is not viewed positively in black communities and regions, where, nevertheless, lightness is often considered superior to darkness...
...Simon Collier, Harold Blackmore and Thomas E. Skidmore (eds...
...7. See Miguel Barnet, Biografia de un cimarron (Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, Instituto de Etnologia y Folklore, 1966...
...Marshall Sahlins as well as Adam Kuper correctly locate transformation as a means of understanding traditions...
...and Peter Wade, "Blackness and Race Mixture in Colombia," (unpublished mss., University of Liverpool, 1990...
...151-154...
...categorization of Puerto Ricans as "minorities" and "people of color...
...VOLUME . NUMBER 4 ......In the 1970s Saramaka people had cautiously told ethnographers Richard and Sally Price about customs they no longer practiced except in times of collective crisis, because these were associated with "First-Time," a real, historical period of war and rebellion which, if discussed, would "kill people...
...Mulatto" often signifies "free black" as well as "lightened black...
...They reject concepts that suggest that they are lost souls separated from a distant homeland...
...In 1591 four enslaved women were hanged and burned on the outskirts of San Juan...
...1 (1985), p. 59...
...Some scholars have even stewed over the relationships between Native American cultures and black cultures, holding learned conferences on "Black Indians...
...Thereafter, revolt was ubiquitous in the Caribbean and mainland South and Central America...
...Indigenismo, which complements both mestizaje and nigritude, is a dual concept reflecting, on the one hand, a search for the creative dimensions of nationalism through the symbolism of an indigenous past and, on the other, remorse over the living conditions of contemporary "acculturated Indians...
...Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Curros (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1986...
...is little, II any, national emphasis on the African component of Puerto Rican heritage...
...61, No...
...For example, the oft-raised possibility that BolIvar had black ancestors was (and is) viewed as a positive trait in Haiti, but as a negative one in the territory of Gran Colombia and among his white and mestizo biographers, who are clearly uneasy about the blackness within the mestizo "mixture...
...eds...
...They may be based on criteria such as common residence, language, tradition or custom...
...39-40...
...Rather they insist that they are possessors of their own homeland-the coastal and riverine sectors of this tropical rain forest...
...Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves in several parts of the hemisphere, remaining fiercely proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases at least, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history...
...These processes are especially evident in the largest vestige of United States colonialism in the Caribbean: Puerto Rico...
...sophisticated, existential, experiential and adaptable black culture, in which entwined processes of tradition, history, and modernity spur ever higher levels of black civilization...
...Coulthard, Race and Colour...
...2 (1967), and "Race in Latin America: The Concept of 'Raza,'" Sociologie...
...Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981...
...In the interior of Suriname and French Guiana, six nations of self-liberated black people-the Saramaka, Matawai, Kwinti, Djuka, Paramaka and Aluku--emerged from the creativity of African-American ethnogenesis...
...the Venezuelan Llanos and northern coastal crescent...
...the interior of the Guianas...
...In the latter, blackness inundated a formative New World gene pool to create, in the revolution of 1791-1804, the first self-liberated democratic island republic in the Americas with collective, self-conscious roots in its African and European past...
...One of the codes of the Old World to be immediately imposed on the New World was to "clothe" the subjugated Native Americans and black Africans in European garb...
...Roger Bastide, Les amdriques noires: les civilisatioins africanes dan le nouveau monde (Paris: Payot, 1967...
...The "Caribs" were regarded as captives of "just wars," whereas Arawak and African slaves were regarded as "inferior beings...
...the Jamaican Blue Mountains and Red Hills...
...and the Oriente of eastern Cuba...
...Its first meaning today is "opposite to white...
...But in the coastal areas, the people are predominantly black...
...1 (1973...
...In Spanish-, Portuguese- and French-speaking re- publics today we find two nationalist ideologies of racial culture: mestizaje (racial mixture) and nmgritude (blackness...
...Competing with nPgritude in black communities is another master symbol of ideology: blanqueamientosomatic, cultural, or ethnic lightening to become increasingly acceptable to those classified and self-identified as "white...
...These peoples are collectively called bushenenge, "forest blacks" by Dutch-speaking outsiders and "Bush Negroes" by English speakers searching for "lost Africans...
...96, No...
...For excellent discussions of the light elite/black yeoman distinctions in Haiti, see Price-Mars, Ainsiparla I'oncle...
...Writing of the descendants of the self-liberated black cimarrones there in the 1880s, Michael Taussig says: "...these black peasants were outlaws-free peasants and foresters who lived by their wits and weapons rather than by legal guarantees to land and citizenship...
...Mestizaje, the ideology of racial intermingling, is an explicit master symbol of the nation in all Latin American countries...
...Within the cultural ideologies of these regions, those who self-identify as "white" or "light" often associate with Haiti the idea of brutal impoverishment and a revolution out of control...
...7 The power of identity within an ethnic bloc can derive from ethnic exclusion, as when indigenous people or black people are ethnically disfranchised from full participation in the dominant society...
...26 (Havana, 1952), "Cuban Palenques," in Price, Maroon Societies...
...Price, First-Time, and Alabi's World...
...14, No...
...These cultural forms may also exist in the living memory of people who no longer engage in them...
...Ricardo E. Alegrfa "Notas sobre la procedencia cultural de los esclavos negros de Puerto Rico durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVI," La Revista del Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, No...
...Absence of on-going practice is not necessarily evidence of "culture loss" or "acculturation," because talk of past customs may become a vehicle for cultural continuity...
...Essentially, blanqueamiento accepts the implicit hegemonic rhetoric of the United States with regard to "white supremacy," and often blames those classed as black and indigenous for the worsening state of the nation...
...This was further reinforced by the view that the paternalist social order of the plantation contributed to racial integration...
...Michel S. Laguerre, "Belair, Port-au-Prince: From Slave and Maroon Settlement to Contemporary Black Ghetto," in Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...There, they say, their ancestors seized their freedom, asserted their culture, and made the productive land "theirs...
...Extended occupation by U.S...
...The consequence was a civil war, news of which scarcely reached beyond Suriname's borders...
...234-310...
...Traditional African-American arts and rituals, for example, exist as material objects (sculpture, carving, painting, quilting, weaving, pottery) or cultural forms (storytelling, jokes, poetry, myths, historic narrative, worship, dance, mime, music, theater) that certain peoples take to be part of their own heritage and identity...
...Each of these peoples fought for more than a hundred years against the Dutch to win their independence...
...For example, Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981...
...Taussig, The Devil...
...Laguerre, "Belair, Port-au-Prince," p. 26...
...The process of darkening is called mulatizacion in Cuban communities in Cuba and Miami...
...Ronald Stutzman, "El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion," in Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...Nina S. de Friedemann and Richard Cross, Ma Ngombe: guerreros y banderos en Palenque (Bogota: Editora Carlos Valencia, 1979...
...From the first years of slavery on the Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...See, for example, Sandra T. Barnes, Africa's Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989...
...In Alabi's World, published in 1990, Richard Price gives moving testimony to the strength of Saramaka tradition, sustained through historical lore and prominent in the continuing struggle against domination...
...In words from Puerto Rican lore: 3 2 At last, Ogdn's machete that severs the heads of old myths has as his ally these times we are living, this convulsive new era when everything can be questioned, when to build the better societies to which we aspire, we turn our sights toward the past, critically, vividlycutting the brush from our way when necessaryto forge, firmly and forcefully, the future...
...Indeed, indigenismo may be thought of as a key support for the exclusion of contemporary native peoples from nation-state affairs...
...Wherever slavery existed, self-liberation began...
...We do know, however, that with the first serious European settlement on the island of Hispaniola, the African diaspora in the Americas began with a seminal moment of self-liberation...
...The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983...
...T HE TERM "BLACK," ACCORDING TO WEBster' s, is an adjective derived from the Latin cognate meaning, in a literal sense, "sooted, smoke black from flame...
...Black Haiti, the nation occupying the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, abuts Cuba's black Oriente region to the west, where Fidel Castro launched his revolutionary movement in 1956 from the Sierra Maestra mountains...
...Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 284...
...See Arthur A. Schomburg, Negroes in Seville (Opportunity, 1928), p. 93...
...1 (1945), Man and his Works (New York: Knopf, 1948), and TheMythoftheNegroPast(Boston: BeaconPress, 1958...
...Blacks" and "Indians" are considered people without consciousness (a quien lesfalta consciencia) and hence unself-reflective and stupid...
...Francisco P6rez de la Riva, "El negro y la tierra, el conuco y el palenque," Revista Bimestre Cubana, Vol...
...This imagery suggests a racialist revulsion and spiritual awe of the power of blackness within mestizaje...
...Among them was the first Afro-American maroon, an anonymous slave who 'escaped to the Indians' [Tafno Arawaks] in the mountainous interior soon after setting foot in the New World...
...Columbus, on his first voyage, was struck by one feature of the Taino Arawak (and later, other) indigenous people whom he encountered: they did not wear clothes...
...Ibid., p. 58...
...Angel G. Quintero-Rivera, "The Rural-Urban Dichotomy in the Formation of Puerto Rico's Cultural Identity," New West Indian Guide, Vol...
...Those seeking to become "whiter" view their "whiteness" in cultural terms...
...Paulode Carvalho Neto, Elnegro uruguayo (hastalaabolicidn) (Quito: Editorial Universitaria, 1965...
...by the late eighteenth century white-owned plantations and black palenques developed not only in competition with one another, but at times in collaboration...
...Price, First-Time...
...island," wrote Michel S. Laguerre, "Indians and slaves had run away to inaccessible mountains, and throughout the colonial period, every mountain in Haiti was used at one time or another by fugitive slaves...
...Having stressed the positive value of blackness in Ecuadorian, Colombian and Peruvian cultures and traditions, black delegates, and others, called the distinguished scholar "un mestizo...
...Indeed, the bases for bloc identity may slip and slide around the criteria themselves, as the bloc itself becomes increasingly strong...
...Norman E. Whitten, Jr., Black Frontiersmen: Afro-Hispanic Culture of Colombia and Ecuador (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1986& 1974...
...troops and subsequent enforced segregation gave impetus to the nationalist ideology of mestizaje and especially to its dimension of blanqueamiento...
...As Creole nationalist spirits rose, so too did ethnic unity among the black communities that marched with BolIvar, and continued their struggles after independence had been won...
...The plunge deepens where "blackness" expands, and the process of immersion brings surprising revelations of the richness of cultural experience among New World peoples who are called, or call themselves, black, Negro, mulatto, negro, zambo, moreno, triguefio, mulato, pardo, negre, preto, cafugo, noire, nengre-or libre (free) as in El Choc6 region on the Pacific coast of Colombia...
...and Sidney W. Mintz, "Introduction to the Second Edition," in Leyburn, The Haitian People...
...Such is the case with the Portuguese term, inestico (as "darkening" or "darkened") in many parts of Brazil and the French inetissage in parts of the francophone Caribbean...
...Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors amid Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 7; Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988...
...5. Ibid., pp...
...the northwest coast of Ecuador...
...the Atlantic coast of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua...
...They pointed to the lack of the Spanish article (la) before both Inca and Mandinga, which, they argued, demeaned the indigenous cultures of the Americas (bound up in the word inga) and indigenous cultures of Africa (bound up in the word mandinga) as something "vernacular," worthy of study only by folklorists, not by historians of Latin American civilization...
...Sued and L6pez argue that relatively little attention has been paid to these initial uprisings because the conquistadors publicly supported the capture of"cannibals" (including Arawaks) as substitutes for costly African slaves...
...6. Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 104...
...The concept "bloc" is taken from politics (as in a political bloc...
...Shang6 is fire...
...Nigritude is a concept that denotes the positive features of blackness among "black" people...
...Still worse, cultura negra in the Americas is viewed as unrefined, inchoate, fragmented, and static, studied only to find "Africanisms" as scattered traits, reinterpretations, or syncretisms that suggest a bit of Africa retained and an enormous amount of "culture lost...
...This specific term was brought into French literary thought in 1947 by the black Martiniquan poet, Aim6 C6saire...
...See, for example, Osvaldo Hurtado, PoliticalPower in Ecuador, Nick W. Mills, Jr., translator(Albuquerque: University ofNew Mexico Press, 1980),p...
...Evidence for this in western Ecuador and Colombia comes from a ritual performed only at Easter, called La Tropa, "the troop...
...This particular rendition of "El Machete de Ogiun" is from Marilu de Laosa, "Abolici6n de la Esclavitud," review essay of El Machete de Ogun, in El Mundo, Puerto Rico Ilustrado (San Juan), March 18, 1990...
...According to Leslie B. Rout, Jr., "Some 40 slaves working at the sugar mill on the plantation of the governor, Admiral Diego Columbus (a son of the explorer), conspired with other blacks working on nearby establishments...
...whatever its basis, power of identity is crucial...
...In his presentation, he used the proverb, "Lo que no tiene de inga tiene de mandinga" ("That which is not of [the] Inca is of [the] Mandinga...
...The 1898 invasion by U.S...
...It is also rooted in a deep-seated white and mestizo fear of the free black people who have long resided there...
...Guillermo Baralt et al...
...R ACE" IS A POWERFUL IDEOLOGICAL concept in modem Latin America and the Carib- bean...
...3 8 In the "Black Americas"-from the Pacific lowlands of Colombia and Ecuador, to Brazil, to Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico-illuminating ethnic power often arises in mythical and religious contexts, taking the form of two forces derived from African deities: Og6n is iron...
...This popular saying in Ecuador and Peru is a pejorative reference to the darkening of national history, implying essentially, "We are in this plight because of our Indian and African blood...
...MESTIZAJE IS A POWERFUL FORCE OF EXclusion of both black and indigenous communities in the Americas today.2...
...Nina S. de Friedemann, "Estudios de Negros en la Antropologia Colombiana: Presenciae invisibilidad," inJaime Arocha RodriguezandNina S. deFriedemann (eds...
...An urban mulatto elite has separated itself from the rural black masses of poor people.2' Moreover, in downtown Port-au-Prince a "black ghetto" has come into being due to the historical flow of power away from the black poor...
...Puertorriquefios clearly regard their island as a naciin and are as "nationalist" about their identity as are Colombians, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Jamaicans, Cubans or Haitians...
...Ethnic blocs could be defined as conscious reference groups for those who share recurrent processes of self-identification...
...WHETHER OR NOT BLACK AFRICANS OR black Iberians reached the New World with Columbus in either of his first two voyages is not clear.' Nor is it clear whether Africans reached the New World prior to Columbus...
...Using many techniques of sophisticated communication, they told of battles, rituals, and powerful artifacts, while withholding specific details...
...Rather, they presented their sense of individual and collective identity by such means as body and face painting, hair dressing, stone adornments in lips and cheeks, and nasal and ear adornments of precious metals (gold and guanin...
...Migration to and from the mainland United States has intensified the multifaceted debate by infusing it with features of the U.S...
...and de Friedemann and Cross, Ma Ngombe...
...Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (eds...
...This, still in confrontational context, was also significant, because the man clearly self-identified as blanco, white, while proclaiming the nation of Ecuador to be mestizo...
...Notable exceptions include Baralt et al., El Machete de Ogun...
...The ideology of mestizaje embraces both senses of indigenismo...
...In the first indigenous and black revolution on the island of Puerto Rico, two Taino Arawak chiefs and their people allied with black ladinos (Spaniards of African descent) to fight against the representatives of the Spanish Crown in 1514.' A second major uprising 17 years later that involved the enslaved black population represented a greater threat to the colonizers because the number of "blacks" had grown, while the "white" population had decreased...
...9. Price, Maroon Societies, p. 1. See also H.U.E...
...Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman: A Study in Healing and Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 135...
...Lydia Cabrera, La SociedadSecreta Abakud: Narrada por Viejos Adeptos (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Col, 1969...
...Norman E. Whitten, Jr...
...In countries undergoing an intensive process of building national identity, the term "ethnic" comes to mean something at variance with what nationalist ideologues proclaim is "traditional" to the nation's "authentic past...
...Blacks turn such stigmatization on its head through narrative modes-all too often strung together and published as "folklore"-that constitute a rich embodiment of enlightened and insightful black representation of the entwined stories of conquest, domination, and self-liberation...
...Racialist ideologies influencing the complementary processes of nationalism and ethnic-bloc formation became tightly intertwined...
...Winthrop R. Wright, Cafe con Leche: Race, Class, andNational Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp...
Vol. 25 • February 1992 • No. 4
