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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Black/Red ViewBlack Latin Americaby John Alan A year ago, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the Latino population had displaced African Americans as the nation’s largest ethnic minority. What this now means, socially and politically, has yet to manifest itself in a significant way. However, it should be noted that the Latino world, both in the U.S. and in Latin America, has a Black dimension deeply embedded in its history and is vigorously alive today. Blacks first appeared in Latin America as members of Columbus’ crew and were among the crew of every subsequent expedition that left a Spanish or a Portuguese port for Latin America. Black slaves were very common in Spain and Portugal even before Columbus discovered the so-called New World. According to Hugh Thomas, the English historian and author of THE SLAVE TRADE, Black African slaves were numerous on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and were in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. In 1444, Portugal mounted the first seriously organized raid on Blacks to work as slaves in Portugal. The economy in the Americas was based on a never-ending need for greater and greater numbers of slaves to extract a maximum amount of labor. To get this labor, Spain in 1713 contracted with England to supply its American colonies “with at least one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves at the rate of forty-eight hundred per year” (W.E.B. Du Bois, THE NEGRO). TREATIES OF BLOOD Slave contracts, known as Asiento treaties, reaped a harvest of wealth for the English slave traders. They fulfilled their Asiento agreement by destroying many villages and killing many people in Africa and shipping hundreds of thousands of Africans to the Spanish colonies in Latin America. It has been estimated that the total number of African slaves imported into Spanish America is 1,552,000 over the whole period of the slave trade. That figure does not contain the number of African slaves imported to Brazil, which has been estimated to be more than three and a half million. The ravenous hunger Spain and Portugal had for African slave labor has been explained in many spurious ways, such as Blacks were stronger than the Indians and had a greater resistance to the white man’s diseases. Karl Marx described this period in history: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa in to a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Black revolts, conspiracies and a myriad of other forms of resistance to enslavement went on throughout the history of African slavery in Latin America. Brazil was plagued by Black resistance throughout its entire history as a slave-owning nation. It could not prevent or stop massive Black revolts with punishment or terror. Of course, Brazil is not the only Latin American country to feel the power of Black resistance and rebellion against slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in THE NEGRO: “Before 1530 there were enough Negroes in Mexico to lead an insurrection, where Negroes fought desperately, but were overcome and their ringleader executed. Later the followers of another Negro insurgent, Bayano were captured and sent back to Spain.” Both W.E.B. Du Bois and Hugh Thomas contend that: “African Muslim slaves were more difficult to control for, as the Brazilians found in 1830s in particular, some of them were at least as cultivated as their masters, and were capable of mounting formidable rebellions” (THE SLAVE TRADE, by Hugh Thomas). THE PROBLEM TODAY Of course, there are no slaves in Latin America today. However, the race division, which was created by slavery, has never been absolutely purged from many Latin American countries, but has merged with the class division. For example the CRISIS (November/December 2002) published an article on how Afro-Ecuadorians are now engaged in a struggle to prevent their ruling class from “whitening” Ecuador by manipulating the census to undercount Afro-Ecuadorians which would make them an invisible ethnic group in Ecuador’s population. Today, in Colombia, racism and classism combine to keep Afro-Colombians in a permanent status of second-class citizenship. Although Afro-Colombians and the indigenous people have a constitutional jurisdictional authority over their communities in Colombia, the state at the same time maintains a military presence on their land and both have lost much to government mega-development and landlord encroachment. To stop this encroachment Afro-Colombians and the indigenous people have formed a new political group, the Unity of Afro-Caucano Organization. This ethnic unity of Afro-Latinos and indigenous people, of course, is a great leap forward in the battle against racism and classism in Latin America. Capitalism has put us through a history of genocide and slavery leading to today’s poverty and exploitation of labor. As we try to discern the meaning of ethnicity for today, however, we should pay close attention, not just to numbers, but to the concrete history of each group’s struggle for liberation. |
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