Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay
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Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens.
In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.
George Reid Andrews
George Reid Andrews is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000.
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Blackness in the White Nation - George Reid Andrews
BLACKNESS IN THE WHITE NATION
BLACKNESS IN THE WHITE NATION
A History of Afro-Uruguay
GEORGE REID ANDREWS
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
Chapel Hill
© 2010 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Jacquline Johnson Set in Cycles by Keystone Typesetting
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book
Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the
Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission in revised
form from "Remembering Africa, Inventing Uruguay: Sociedades
de Negros in the Montevideo Carnival, 1865–1930," Hispanic
American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 693–726,
and Rhythm Nation: The Drums of Montevideo,
ReVista
2, no. 2 (2003): 64–68.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andrews, George Reid, 1951–
Blackness in the white nation : a history of Afro-Uruguay /
George Reid Andrews. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8078-3417-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8078-7158-4 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Blacks—Uruguay—History. 2. Blacks—Uruguay—Social
conditions—19th century. 3. Blacks—Social conditions—Uruguay—
20th century. 4. Candombe (Dance)—Uruguay. 5. Uruguay—Race
relations. I. Title.
F2799.N3A53 2010
989.5’00496—dc22 2010010133
cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
paper 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
To
Rubén Darío Galloza, 1926–2002
painter, poet, composer, activist
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 This Noble Race Has Glorious Aspirations, 1830–1920
2 Remembering Africa: Comparsas and Candombe, 1870–1950
3 The New Negros, 1920–1960
4 Today Everyone Dances Candombe, 1950–2010
5 Dictatorship and Democracy, 1960–2010
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
Illustrations
South America 10
Afro-Uruguayan infantry sergeant, 1860s 33
Gramillero and mama vieja, 1957 66
Escobero, mama vieja, and gramillero, 1964 67
Warrior drummers, 1943 69
Parodistas de Chocolate, ca. 1950 75
Society matrons at a blackface dance, 1958 76
Neighborhood tablado, El Congo está de fiesta,
1935 77
Miscelánea Negra, 1948 78
Martha Gularte, 1950 80
Carnival float, 1963 82
Carnival spectators, 1960 83
Vedette and drummers, 1979 115
Rosa Luna 171
Tables
I.1 Population Counts by Race, in Percentages, Uruguay, 1852–2006 7
I.2 Racial Terminology in Mainstream Uruguayan Newspapers and Magazines, in Percentages, 1870–2000 13
I.3 Racial Terminology in Afro-Uruguayan Newspapers, in Percentages, 1870–2000 14
5.1 Human Development Indicators in Selected Latin American Countries, 2000 156
5.2 Average Years of Schooling in Uruguay and Brazil, by Age and Race, 1996 157
5.3 Percentage Rates of Academic Enrollment in Uruguay and Brazil, by Age and Race, 2006 158
5.4 Civilian Employment, Uruguay (1996) and Brazil (1991), by Race, in Percentages 159
5.5 Population of Uruguay and Brazil, in Percentages, by Quintiles of National Income Distribution and Race, 2006 160
5.6 Social Spending as Percentage of GNP in Selected Latin American Countries, by Major Categories of Spending, 1990–2005 163
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book has its origins in the energy and generosity of three individuals. In the year 2000, my then-student and now friend and colleague Jorge Nállim invited me to a conference he had helped organize in Buenos Aires. While there, I took advantage of the opportunity to cross the Río de la Plata to visit Montevideo. In Montevideo, I dropped by the headquarters of the black civil rights organization Mundo Afro, whose executive director, Romero Rodríguez, extended me an effusive welcome and urged me to return someday to do research on Afro-Uruguayan history. Shortly after returning home from that trip, I saw an announcement for a fellowship competition at the Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios Latinoamericanos (CEIL) at the Universidad de la República in Montevideo. Under the leadership of the distinguished literary theorist and cultural critic Hugo Achugar, CEIL was seeking to promote research on cultural diversity in Uruguay. This struck me as a harmonic convergence that I could not ignore. I applied for the fellowship, was accepted, and arrived in Montevideo in July 2001 to begin an almost decade-long immersion in Afro-Uruguayan history.
So many people have helped me during those years that it is hard to know where to begin. Alex Borucki, Ana Frega, and Gustavo Goldman answered questions and provided invaluable suggestions on research sources and collections. Romero Rodríguez was instrumental in helping me arrange interviews with comparsa directors and veteran carnavaleros. Tomás Olivera Chirimini invited me to his home and, with Juan Antonio Varese, to lunches at the Mercado del Puerto that epitomized gracious hospitality. Pilar Alsina and Roberto Righi, directors of the Gozadera comparsa, welcomed a novice drummer with two left hands and two left feet (it sometimes seemed) to their Sunday morning ensayos in Malvin. And Miguel García and Sergio Ortuño, guerreros africanos y candomberos de ley, introduced me and the other students in their drumming classes to candombe and then led us in the Llamadas.
The staffs at the Archivo Fotográfico de Montevideo, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguay Negro, the Biblioteca del Poder Legislativo, the Biblioteca Nacional, Mundo Afro, the Museo del Carnaval, the Museo Romántico, and the Archivo Histórico Municipal were unfailingly courteous and helpful. Anne Garland Mahler, Lars Peterson, Lindsay Ruprecht, and Christine Waller provided invaluable research assistance and very good company indeed.
In addition to a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship awarded by CEIL, the research and writing for this project were supported by the University of Pittsburgh through a Faculty Fellowship, research support from the University Center for International Studies, and sabbatical and research support from the School of Arts and Sciences. In addition to that financial support, the university is generous in human terms as well. I am blessed to work with dear friends and colleagues who help me in many different ways: Bill Chase, Alejandro de la Fuente, Seymour Drescher, Pinar Emiralioglu, Janelle Greenberg, Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Van Beck Hall, Lannie Hammond, Patrick Manning, Lara Putnam, Marcus Rediker, Rob Ruck, Liann Tsoukas, and Bruce Venarde.
When the manuscript was completed, Alejandro de la Fuente, Christine Ehrick, and my wife, Roye Werner, did me the great favor of reading it closely and carefully and making thoughtful comments for revision. So did two tremendously helpful anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press and that press's legendary senior editor, Elaine Maisner. The text was further improved by Alex Martin's meticulous copyediting. My thanks to all and my apologies for any errors, infelicities, or omissions that may have slipped through despite their best efforts.
Roye and our children Eve, Jesse, and Lena all came with me to Montevideo for a joyous year in 2001–2; Roye and Eve then returned with me on a follow-up trip in 2004. Thank you, dear family, for sharing the tranquilidad and for making life so beautiful!
Most of all I must thank the many Uruguayans (some of whom are listed in the bibliography) who took time out of their lives to talk to an inquisitive foreigner about candombe, Carnival, Afro-Uruguayan history, and life in general. All of those encounters were enlightening; some were unforgettable. For especially illuminating conversations, I am grateful to Diputado Edgardo Ortuño, to Beatriz Santos, and to the late Rubén Galloza, a friend and mentor since our first meeting in Buenos Aires thirty-five years ago. He did not live to see this book completed; it is dedicated to his memory.
INTRODUCTION
A drum corps sixty strong, we march through the Montevideo night, pounding out the African rhythms of candombe (can-DOME-bay). Racing winds blowing off the Río de la Plata drive thick banks of thunderclouds across the sky. Rain threatens; we will soon be drenched. But carried on surging waves of rhythm, and cheered by thousands of spectators who line the parade route in Montevideo's historic Barrio Sur, we march on.
Tonight is the 2002 Llamadas, the annual parade of the African-inspired Carnival comparsas (drum and marching corps) and one of the most characteristic and defining features of Uruguayan popular culture. Thousands of people gather to celebrate and dance through the night to the thundering rhythms laid down by Serenata Africana, Yambo Kenia, Elumbé, Senegal, and some thirty other groups. But amid all the alegría (joy, festivity), one cannot help noting an apparent paradox. The drums are African, the rhythms are African, the names of the groups are African. Yet most of the performers—drummers, dancers, flag carriers, and others—are white! Some groups are entirely white, most are majority white; only a handful are majority Afro-Uruguayan.
How can this be? How did an African-based cultural form come to be practiced and populated mainly by white people? And how did a nation that has historically prided itself on its European heritage and traditions, one that used to bill itself as the Switzerland of South America, come to embrace African-based cultural forms as core elements of its cultural identity?
These questions in turn raise others. When an overwhelmingly white
nation opts to define itself as, at least in part, culturally black,
what impact does that decision have on patterns of racial equality, or inequality? Does such a decision reflect racial equality and egalitarianism or tend to promote the achievement of such egalitarianism over time? Or by emphasizing the exotic otherness
of blackness and African-based culture, does it reinforce lines of racial difference and hierarchy?
How White Your White Whiteness
In 1925, and again in 1930, Uruguayans gathered to commemorate the centennial of their existence as a nation.¹ There was much to celebrate. In 1904, after decades of intermittent civil war in the 1800s between the Blanco and Colorado political parties, the national government had finally brought the fighting to an end. Under the visionary leadership of President José Batlle y Ordóñez (1903–7, 1911–15), Uruguay went on to enact one of the most progressive bodies of social legislation anywhere in the world at that time, including the eight-hour workday; workers’ rights to unionization and collective bargaining, workers’ compensation, and workplace protections; universal male suffrage (women received the vote shortly after the centennial, in 1932); the right to divorce; the expansion of elementary, secondary, and university education; and the beginnings of a national social security system. Booming exports in meat and wool provided the tax base for these programs: as of 1913, Uruguay had the highest per capita gross domestic product in Latin America and the highest per capita tax receipts. That prosperity produced social indicators that were the envy of the region: the lowest birth and death rates, and the highest levels of literacy and newspaper readership, anywhere in Latin America.²
El libro del Centenario del Uruguay, a semiofficial publication prepared under the direction of the Ministry of Public Instruction, highlighted the country's many achievements. In the area of politics and governance, Uruguay's institutional system has perfected its ability to guarantee the equal exercise of the broadest democratic rights. Centuries-old struggles between races and religions, which in other countries have provoked such serious conflicts, in Uruguay pose no obstacle to the ceaseless work of progress and the perfection of our social programs. Liberal, progressive laws have reduced the magnitude and bitterness of the struggles between labor and capital, keeping to a prudent level the revolutionary extremism that so affects other rich and prosperous societies.
³
In the social realm as well, Uruguay had achieved something unique: it was the only American nation that can make the categorical statement that within its borders there is not a single town or settlement of indigenous population. The last Charrúas disappeared as a tribe … in 1832 and since that long distant date, almost a century ago, the Uruguayan territory has remained in the absolute possession of the European race and its descendents.
To remove all doubt on this point, the chapter on demography began with the sentence, Uruguay is populated by the white race, totally of European origin.
The indigenous population no longer existed, and the small contingent of the Ethiopian race, brought to the country by the Spanish conquerors from the African continent to serve as slaves, has visibly declined, to the point of constituting an insignificant percentage of the total population. Furthermore, for reasons of climate, environment, and mixture with the European race, its original characteristics have suffered fundamental modifications,
though these modifications went unspecified.⁴
In celebrating the country's European character, El libro del Centenario both expressed and confirmed the prevailing consensus among turn-of-the-century Uruguayan elites. The 1907 annual report on the state of primary education in the country informed readers that Uruguayans constitute a new ethnic type…. All the countries of the white race have contributed to our formation and perfection, working in common.
The [Uruguayan] race is Caucasian,
concurred geographer Orestes Araújo in 1913, as the result of race mixture that will not cease as long as Uruguay continues to receive individuals from the other civilized peoples on the planet.
The principal text on Uruguayan geography informed its readers that the country's inhabitants were all of the white race…. One must emphasize that in our country there are no Indians and very few blacks. Our million-and-a-half inhabitants are worth more than the four or five million semicivilized Indians that one finds in other South American countries. Only Argentina has a race as select as ours.
No other country of the Americas can display a population like ours, where the Caucasian race so clearly prevails,
proclaimed Horacio Araújo Villagrán in 1929. The [Uruguayan] national type is active, noble, honest, hospitable, intelligent, strong, valiant, and almost entirely of the white race, which implies our nation's great superiority over others in the Americas, where the majority of the population is composed of Indians, mestizos, blacks, and mulattoes.
⁵
The message of Uruguayan whiteness was further instilled by the textbooks used in the country's schools.⁶Democracia, one of a series of readers published from the 1920s through the 1960s, was built on two recurring themes: the uniquely democratic character of Uruguayan politics and society, and the importance of European immigrants in building that society. Gauchos were acknowledged as having contributed to Uruguay's national character, but it was the immigrants who had come to Uruguay longing for freedom, which meant that they were, by definition, democrats…. Thus the Uruguayan nation was always democratic.
⁷
One of the indicators of that democratic spirit, the book noted, was the country's relatively early abolition of slavery, in 1842. This was one of only two references to Afro-Uruguayans in the entire book, the other being a paean to Uruguayan democracy that returned, as always, to the immigrants. The Fatherland that [the patriots] created was not just for one class or caste. It was for the white and for the black; it was for the gaucho and for the Charrúa; and it was not just for those born here,
but for the immigrants as well, so that men from all latitudes would feel like her children and live here as citizens, enjoying the privilege of her laws.
⁸
Nowhere else in the book were Afro-Uruguayans mentioned: not in an essay on the independence armies, which were heavily African and Afro-Uruguayan in composition; not in an essay on colonial Montevideo, where Africans and Afro-Uruguayans had constituted one-third of the population; not in a piece on Carnival (where black comparsas, as we will see, were absolutely central); and, most incredibly of all, not even in an essay on Pedro Figari, the famous painter of Afro-Uruguayan themes and subjects.⁹ Blackness was invisible in the book, which concluded, in semi-delirium, with the poem How White Your White Whiteness
(Blanca tu blancura blanca
), by Marta Aguiar.
How white your white whiteness.
How white the face of the things
That reflect your whiteness.
How white the cloud that looks down on your paleness,
How white the secret color of the rose
That brought a flush to your white face.
How white your soul, with white ethereal murmurs.
How white your perfume.
There was none whiter:
White essences, in white flasks.¹⁰
Why How White Your White Whiteness
should have been the concluding text of a reader on Uruguayan democracy was not at all clear. But the book's overall message, like that of the celebrations of Uruguay's centennial, left little room for uncertainty: Uruguay's political, economic, social, and racial progress all went hand in hand. Peace, democracy, economic growth, and guarantees of legal equality powerfully attracted European immigrants, who in turn were responsible for the country's continuing economic, political, and social advancement. Afro-Uruguayans were certainly free to watch that progress and, because of the country's firm commitment to civic equality, to share in it. But as an insignificant percentage of the total population,
they did not contribute to that process and were essentially extraneous to Uruguayan modernity.
Just three years after the 1930 centennial, two events called into question the centennial's assertions of Uruguayan political and social democracy. First, in March 1933, President Gabriel Terra dissolved the national legislature, suspended the Constitution of 1918 and ruled as dictator until 1938. In comparison to the right-wing governments that ruled Argentina at the same time, or the semifascist Estado Novo instituted by Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Terra's government was relatively restrained in its authoritarianism. But it was a clear departure from the civilian democracy that had functioned in the country since 1904 and a troubling indication that perhaps Uruguay was not so different from its South American neighbors after all.¹¹
The second event occurred five months later, on 25 August (Independence Day) 1933, when a group of Afro-Uruguayan writers and intellectuals launched what would become one of the longest-lasting black newspapers in all of Latin America.¹² Published regularly from 1933 through 1948, Nuestra Raza (Our Race), was the most important of the many black periodicals published in Uruguay. Between 1870 and 1950 Afro-Uruguayans produced at least twenty-five newspapers (usually monthly or biweekly) aimed at black readers.¹³ During these same years, Brazil, with a black and brown population today almost four hundred times larger than Uruguay's, produced between forty and fifty periodicals aimed specifically at the black population; Cuba, with a black population twenty times larger than Uruguay's, produced fourteen. Per capita, Afro-Uruguayans generated by far the most active black press anywhere in Latin America, and in absolute terms the second-largest, after Brazil.¹⁴
Nuestra Raza and the other black newspapers effectively contradicted two central tenets of Uruguay's national mythology: that the country had no significant black population and that those Afro-Uruguayans who might exist were completely integrated into national life and felt no sense of difference from their white compatriots. By chronicling the community's numerous social and civic events, and the individuals and organizations who oversaw these events, the Afro-Uruguayan papers made clear not only that the country had a black population but that its members felt themselves to be marginalized in various ways from full participation in national life. Reports of discrimination and, occasionally, outright segregation revealed both the limits of Uruguayan democracy and, at the same time, Afro-Uruguayan activists’ determination to make real the nation's promises of equality for all.
What do these newspapers and other sources—the mainstream press, interviews, and research and writing by Uruguayan scholars—reveal about the conditions of black life in Uruguay during the past two centuries, and about Afro-Uruguayans’ responses to these conditions? How did the country's blacks pursue social and economic advancement and political and civic equality? What kinds of organizational structures and what kinds of individual and collective tactics and strategies did they use? With what results?
Chapters 1, 3, and 5 of this book address these questions for the period 1830–2010. Before turning to these chapters, however, we must first ask who exactly are the subjects of this book and how we will recognize them when we see them.
Who Are the Afro-Uruguayans?
As in other Latin American countries, the Afro-Uruguayan population includes both dark-skinned negros (blacks) and lighter-skinned, racially mixed mulattoes or pardos (browns) who show visible evidence (skin color, hair texture, facial features) of African ancestry. Colonial Spanish law and custom consigned both groups to legal and social inferiority, with no distinction between blacks, mulattoes, and other subraces.
Free pardos and morenos (a colonial euphemism for negros) suffered the same debilities under colonial law, served in the same colonial militia units, and worshiped in the same segregated Catholic lay brotherhoods.¹⁵
In Uruguay's national census of 1852, and in the Montevideo municipal census of 1884, blacks and mulattoes were counted separately from whites. From 1884 to the late twentieth century, the Uruguayan state gathered no data on race; when it once again began to do so, in the national household surveys of 1996 and 2006, it again tabulated blacks and racially mixed nonwhites separately from whites. By the late 1900s, however, the word mulatto
was no longer considered to be acceptable usage; searching for a more neutral term for racially mixed people, the household surveys opted for negra-blanca (1996) and afro-blanca (2006).
Sources: Anuario Estadístico, 1902–1903, 45, 150; INE, Encuesta continua, 1; Bucheli and Cabela,
Perfil demográfico, 14–15.
aPopulation of Montevideo only.
The four population counts tabulated in table 1.1 show clear statistical and terminological changes over time. The two nineteenth-century counts used the same racial categories but found very different levels of African and Afro-Uruguayan representation in the population: 8.8 percent (or, if we exclude the unspecified
column from the total, 12.1 percent) in 1852, versus less than 1 percent in 1884. This dramatic decline in the recorded black percentage of the population resulted in part from massive European immigration into Uruguay during the 1800s. It might also be partially explained by differences in the black percentage of the country as a whole (1852) and of the city of Montevideo (1884), though the 1852 census showed blacks and mulattoes constituting a slightly larger proportion of Montevideo (10.7 percent) than of Uruguay as a whole (8.8 percent). A third possibility is that census takers in 1884 were more willing than those in 1852 to count racially mixed mulattoes as white: while the negro group was about one-third larger than the mulatto group in 1852, in 1884 the former outnumbered the latter by two-to-one, the opposite of what we would expect during a period of large-scale white immigration and race mixture. However, even if the mulatto population had been equal to or slightly larger than the negro population, total Afro-Uruguayan representation in the city that year would still have been only slightly higher than 1 percent.
A fourth explanation for the decline in the Afro-Uruguayan population between those two years is the possibility of a substantial undercount of the entire nonwhite group in 1884. Some years ago I made similar arguments concerning a possible undercount of the Afro-Argentine population in the Buenos Aires municipal census of 1887. That census found Afro-Argentines comprising less than 2 percent of the population of the Argentine capital; yet at that time black people were abundantly in evidence in photographs of the city's streets and squares. They also sustained an active black press and a range of black mutual aid, civic, and Carnival organizations.¹⁶
As we will see in the course of this book, evidence of a continued black presence is even stronger in Montevideo than in Buenos Aires. Black newspapers and social organizations were more numerous and active in the former city than the latter; and while the Afro-Argentine population today probably comprises less than 1 percent of the national population, recent population counts in Uruguay show Afro-Uruguayans accounting for 6–9 percent of the national population.¹⁷ This disparity in black presence in the two countries results from two factors. First, while both nations received large numbers of European immigrants between 1880 and 1930, Argentina received far more, in both absolute and relative terms. Net migration to Argentina was 3.8 million during these years, a figure 1.6 times larger than the country's 1880 population of 2.4 million; net migration to Uruguay was 580,000, a figure only slightly larger than the 1880 population of 520,000.¹⁸ Thus while both countries’ racial composition was significantly whitened
by European immigration, that process went further in Argentina than in Uruguay.
A second factor is that over the course of its history Uruguay has been closely tied politically, economically, and socially to its northern neighbor, Brazil. Montevideo was established in 1724 as part of Spain's effort to prevent Portuguese incursions into the Río de la Plata. In the late 1700s the two empires clashed repeatedly over control of Uruguay (or, as it was known at that time, the Banda Oriental, the eastern shore of the Uruguay River). When Uruguay won its independence in 1828, it did so not from Spain but from Brazilian forces that had invaded and occupied the country in 1816. Even after independence, landowners based in Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, continued to hold large properties in Uruguay that they worked with slaves brought from their Brazilian estates. After the abolition of Uruguayan slavery in 1842, some of these landowners continued to import slaves into the country under the rubric of indentured laborers. Other Brazilian slaves came to Uruguay under their own power, fleeing across the border in search of freedom.¹⁹ Population movement between the two countries continued even after the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888; and since the population of Rio Grande do Sul was almost one-quarter (24 percent) black and mulatto in 1890, a significant portion of that migration was Afro-Brazilian. The northern border departments of Artigas and Rivera are today the blackest
regions of Uruguay, with populations that are 26 and 20 percent Afro-Uruguayan, respectively. These border zones are sparsely populated, however, and owing to persistent rural-urban migration over the course of the 1900s, most Afro-Uruguayans (54 percent) live today either in Montevideo or the adjacent suburban department of Canelones. It is Montevideo, therefore, that will be the focus of this book, with occasional attention to black communities in other parts of the country.²⁰
As the recipient of less European migration than Argentina, and more Brazilian (and Afro-Brazilian) migration, Uruguay is today a blacker
nation than its southern neighbor, though exactly how much blacker is open to interpretation. The national household surveys of 1996 and 2006 showed Afro-Uruguayans constituting 5.9 and 9.1 percent of the national population, respectively—a difference of over 50 percent. At the same time, the proportion of the population identifying as white declined from 93.2 percent in 1996 to 87.4 percent in 2006. Afro-Uruguayan activists and organizations seized on these figures as evidence of the growth of either the black population or the number of Afro-Uruguayans willing to acknowledge their blackness, or both. The figures do suggest the impact on Uruguayan society of the racial debates and discussions of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as the effectiveness of the Afro-Uruguayan movement in highlighting the presence of blackness in the country's racial and ethnic mix.²¹ But the differences between the two counts can also be explained by the respective questions they posed.
While the 1996 survey asked respondents, To what race do you think you belong?
the 2006 survey asked respondents, Do you think you have ——— ancestry?
and allowed them to check off all racial terms that they felt applied. As the report on the 2006 survey acknowledged, these two questions were not equivalent and therefore did not measure the same thing. In 2006 the operative term in the question was ancestry. This concept refers to the genetic inheritance of individuals but not necessarily to their physical appearance.
²² The 1996 figures therefore probably measure more accurately that portion of the population that would be generally recognized by Uruguayan society,