Andrews, George Reid - Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (2004, Oxford University Press) PDF

Afro-Latin America,
1800–2000
GEORGE REID ANDREWS
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

AFRO-LATIN AMERICA, 1800–2000
This page intentionally left blank
AFRO-LATIN
AMERICA,
1800–2000
GEORGE REID ANDREWS
1
2004
3
Oxford New York
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Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
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Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrews, George Reid, 1951–
Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 / George Reid Andrews
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-515232-8; 0-19-515233-6 (pbk.)
1. Blacks—Latin America—History. 2. Racially mixed people—
Latin America—History. 3. Latin America—Race relations.
I. Title.
F1419.N4A63 2004
980'.00496—dc21 2003056411
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Freddy in L.A., who wanted to know more
❂
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book had its beginnings in my undergraduate course on Afro-Latin Amer-

ica, History 0502, at the University of Pittsburgh. Many thanks to the students
who took that class over the years, and especially to Lillian Bertram, Jack Bishop,
Sheriden Booker, Alicia Hall, Sydney Lewis, Shauna Morimoto, and Ory Okolloh,
who helped show me the way.
Having decided to write the book, I needed money to carry out the research. I
gratefully acknowledge generous financial support from the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, at
the University of Pittsburgh, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the University Cen-
ter for International Studies, and the Center for Latin American Studies.
Having obtained money, I traveled to many libraries. My sincere thanks to the
staffs at the national libraries of Costa Rica, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela; the
libraries at Tulane University, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the Univer-
sidad de Costa Rica, the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), the Universidad de
Panamá, the Centro de Estudos Afro-Orientais at the Universidade Federal da
Bahia, and the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica; the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture (New York); the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (Bo-
gotá); the Museo Afro-Antillano (Panama); and Mundo Afro (Montevideo). My
largest debt is to Eduardo Lozano, founder and tireless maintainer of the remark-
able Lozano Collection at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library.
I was greatly assisted in my work by three enterprising and technologically
savvy research assistants: Lena Andrews, James DeWeese, and Jorge Nállim.
Having carried out the research, I called on other scholars to help me put it to-
gether and understand what it all meant. Jaime Arocha, Avi Chomsky, Ana Frega,
Dale Graden, Keila Grinberg, Aline Helg, Franklin Knight, Marixa Lasso, the late
Robert Levine, Gary Long, Peggy Lovell, Randy Matory, Jeffrey Needell, Lara Put-
nam, Berta Pérez, João Reis, Doris Sommer, Ed Telles, Robert Farris Thompson,
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Richard Turits, Ted Vincent, Peter Wade, and Doug Yarrington answered ques-
tions and generously shared their work with me. Alejandro de la Fuente helped
orient me in the field of Cuban history, pushed me hard on key points, and gave
me the gift of a close, careful, and comradely reading of the manuscript. James
Sanders and Rebecca Scott offered equally close and constructive readings, as did
two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press.
Susan Ferber encouraged this project from early on and improved it tremen-
dously with her sharp editorial eye. I am grateful on both counts.
Throughout my years of studying this subject I have been energized and in-
spired by the activists and organizers that I have been privileged to meet. My re-
spect and admiration to the following: in Argentina, Carmen Platero; in Brazil,
Nelson Arruda, Benedita da Silva, Ivair Augusto Alves dos Santos, Carlos Antônio
Medeiros, Dulce Pereira, Hélio Santos, Maria de Lourdes Siqueira, Maria Apare-
cida Silva Bento Teixeira, and the late Hamilton Cardoso; in Colombia, Alexander
Cifuentes; in Costa Rica, Mitzi Barley and Quince Duncan; and in Uruguay, Mar-
garita Méndez, Tomás Olivera, Beatriz Ramírez, Amanda Rorra, Romero Ro-
dríguez, and, sorely missed, the late Ruben Galloza.
I have the great good fortune to work with lively and good-hearted colleagues.
Warm thanks for their friendship and support to Bill Chase, Seymour Drescher,
Janelle Greenberg, Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Van Beck Hall, Marcus Rediker,
Rob Ruck, Hal Sims, Bruce Venarde, and the late, lamented Michael Jiménez.
My beloved children, Lena, Jesse, and Eve, walked with me every step of the
way, helping to keep it real. Let me hear your Spartan spirit!
Words cannot express my debt to Roye Werner—cunning researcher, brilliant
reader and writer, gifted analyst of people and their behavior, and, despite all that,
an indefatigable optimist. Life with her is a blessing.
Finally, dear reader, none of this would have any point at all were it not for you.
Welcome, please read on, and thank you so much for coming.
❂
CONTENTS
Maps, xi
Introduction, 3
Chapter 1
1800, 11
Chapter 2
“An Exterminating Bolt of Lightning”:
The Wars for Freedom, 1810–1890, 53
Chapter 3
“Our New Citizens, the Blacks”:
The Politics of Freedom, 1810–1890, 85
Chapter 4
“A Transfusion of New Blood”: Whitening, 1880–1930, 117
Chapter 5
Browning and Blackening, 1930–2000, 153
Chapter 6
Into the Twenty-First Century: 2000 and Beyond, 191
Appendix: Population Counts, 1800–2000, 203
Glossary, 209
Notes, 213
Selected Bibliography, 247
Index, 275
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
MEXICO Havana
DOMINICAN
Mexico CUBA REPUBLIC
City PUERTO RICO
Santo San Juan
HONDURAS
Domingo
NICARAGUA
GUATEMALA
San José Caracas
EL SALVADOR
COSTA RICA VENEZUELA

PANAMA Bogotá
Panama
City COLOMBIA
Quito
ECUADOR
Recife
PERU
BRAZIL
Lima Salvador
La Paz
BOLIVIA
Rio de Janeiro
PARAGUAY
PACIFIC
Sao
São Paulo
OCEAN Asunción
CHILE ARGENTINA
Santiago URUGUAY
Buenos Montevideo
Aires
Percent black and mulatto
0–4
5–14
15–29
30–49
50–74
75–100
No data
Not mapped
map 1. Afro-Latin America, 1800. Credit for all maps: William Nelson.
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
MEXICO Havana
DOMINICAN
City PUERTO RICO
Santo San Juan
HONDURAS
Domingo
NICARAGUA
GUATEMALA
San José Caracas
EL SALVADOR

PANAMA Bogotá
Panama
City
COLOMBIA
Quito
ECUADOR
Recife
PERU
BRAZIL
Lima Salvador
La Paz
BOLIVIA
Rio de Janeiro
PARAGUAY
PACIFIC
São Paulo
Sao
OCEAN Asunción
CHILE ARGENTINA
Santiago URUGUAY
Buenos Montevideo
Aires
0–4
5–14
15–29
30–49
50–74
75–100
No data
Not mapped
map 2. Afro-Latin America, 1900.

ATLANTIC
OCEAN
MEXICO Havana
DOMINICAN
City PUERTO RICO
Santo San Juan
HONDURAS
Domingo
NICARAGUA
GUATEMALA
San José Caracas
EL SALVADOR

PANAMA Bogotá
Panama
City COLOMBIA
Quito
ECUADOR
Recife
PERU
BRAZIL
Lima Salvador
La Paz Brasilia
Brasília
BOLIVIA
Rio de Janeiro
PACIFIC PARAGUAY
São Paulo
OCEAN Asunción
CHILE ARGENTINA
Santiago URUGUAY
Buenos Montevideo
Aires
0–4
5–14
15–29
30–49
50–74
75–100
No data
Not mapped
map 3. Afro-Latin America, 2000.

AFRO-LATIN AMERICA, 1800–2000
❂ 1
INTRODUCTION
“New Census Shows Hispanics Now Even with Blacks,” the headline proclaimed.
Documenting a profound shift in the racial and ethnic composition of American
society, the 2000 census of the United States showed that, as a result of continuing
immigration from Latin America, during the 1990s the national Hispanic popu-
lation had grown by more than 60 percent. For the first time ever, the country’s
35.3 million Hispanic residents now slightly exceeded the black population of 34.7
million.1
Quietly elided in such a report is the fact that “blacks” and “Hispanics” are not
necessarily separate groups. In the nations of Latin America, people of African
ancestry are an estimated one-quarter of the total population. Indeed, the heart
of the New World African diaspora lies not north of the border, in the United
States, but south. During the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came
to Spanish and Portuguese America (5.7 million) as to the United States
(560,000). By the end of the 1900s, Afro-Latin Americans outnumbered Afro-
North Americans by three to one (110 million and 35 million, respectively) and
formed, on average, almost twice as large a proportion of their respective popula-
tions (22 percent in Latin America, 12 percent in the United States).2
Especially as ties of immigration, commerce, tourism, and culture bind the
two regions ever more closely together, it seems obvious that we need histories of
Latin America’s African diaspora comparable to those of the United States’s
African diaspora.3 This book is an effort to provide such a history.
I first encountered the term “Afro-Latin America” in the late 1970s, in articles
by two political scientists, Anani Dzidzienyo and Pierre-Michel Fontaine.4 It
struck me as a brilliant coinage. Latin American writers and intellectuals had long
been referring to their fellow citizens of African ancestry as Afro-Brazilians, Afro-
Cubans, Afro-Venezuelans, and so on;5 from this usage the concept of a larger,
transregional category of Afro-Latin Americans followed naturally. To the best of
4 AFRO-LATIN AMERICA
my knowledge, however, no one before Dzidzienyo and Fontaine had thought to

transform plural Afro-Brazilians or Afro-Cubans into a singular Afro-Brazil or
Afro-Cuba, let alone an all-embracing Afro-Latin America.6
Fontaine used the term to “designate all regions of Latin America where signif-
icant groups of people of known African ancestry are found.”7 This requires some
further definition, starting with “Latin America.” In keeping with customary
usage both in that region and in the United States, I define Latin America as that
group of American nations ruled from the 1500s through the 1800s by Spain or
Portugal. Note that this leaves out the English- and French-speaking Caribbean
countries, such as Jamaica, Haiti, and Barbados. These countries are very much
part of the New World African diaspora, and their proximity to the islands of the
Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico), to Central
America, and to northern South America involves them directly in the history of
the region. But for the purposes of this study, they do not form part of Afro-Latin
America.
The second term requiring definition is “significant.” Fontaine clearly meant
this is in a quantitative or numerical sense but did not specify numbers. In this
book I have set the threshold of “significance” at people of African ancestry con-
stituting 5–10 percent (or more) of the population for that region or nation to be-
come part of Afro-Latin America. This seems to be the level at which “blackness”
becomes a visible element in systems of social stratification and inequality, and at
which African-based culture—patterns of sociability and group expression—be-
comes a visible part of national life.
People of African ancestry are not the only ones who live in Afro-Latin Amer-
ica, of course. Whites, Indians, Asians, and racially mixed people live there, too,
often (and since 1900, almost always) outnumbering the black population.
Whether majority or minority, however, the black presence marks a specific his-
torical experience shared by almost all the societies of Afro-Latin America: the ex-
perience of plantation agriculture and African slavery. As the citizens of present-
day Afro-Latin America struggle to escape the economic heritage of poverty and
dependency left by plantation agriculture, they do so under the shadow of the so-
cial heritage of racial and class inequality left by slavery. This requires them to de-
fine their relationship to “blackness,” the most visible and obvious indicator of
low social status. They must also decide whether, and to what degree, they wish to
participate in forms of black cultural expression that have long been regarded by
local and national elites as primitive and barbaric but have increasingly formed
the basis of popular and mass culture in the region. All of these make the African
inheritance of the plantation zones, and the issues of race and “blackness,” as in-
escapable for the white, mestizo, and Indian inhabitants of Afro-Latin America as
for those of African ancestry.
INTRODUCTION 5
Fontaine’s definition also implies movement and change in the boundaries of

Afro-Latin America over time. Afro-Latin America is not a fixed or immutable
entity; rather, it ebbs and flows, though the tendency has clearly been for it to con-
tract over time. Countries that in 1800 were majority black and mulatto—such as
Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico—by 1900 or 2000 no longer were so. Other coun-
tries that in 1800 had formed part of Afro-Latin America—such as Argentina,
Mexico, and Peru—by 1900 or 2000 were no longer part of the region, as their
black and mulatto populations fell below the 5 percent threshold. This is not to
say that people of African ancestry disappeared from those countries or ceased to
exist. Their absolute numbers, in fact, may even be greater today than they were in
1800 (though the lack of racial census data in those countries makes it impossible
to prove this point). And while, for example, Mexico and Peru as a whole no
longer qualify for inclusion in Afro-Latin America, specific subregions where
black populations remain heavily concentrated—such as the coastal states of Ve-
racruz and Guerrero in Mexico, and Ica in Peru—still do.8
Why has the proportional representation of the black population tended to
decline throughout the region over time? Part of the explanation can be found in
material causes: higher death rates and lower life expectancies for blacks than for
whites, European immigration into the region, and other factors. But declines in
the percentages of Latin Americans who identify themselves or are considered by
others to be “black” had cultural causes as well, and these causes center on the
third key term that Fontaine left unspecified: What constitutes a group, or for that
matter a person, “of known African ancestry”? Even in the United States, answer-
ing this question has become more complex and difficult in recent years. In Latin
America, where racial boundaries have historically been much more fluid and
flexible than in the United States, the complexities and ambiguities of a person’s
racial identity are greater still. Racial markers—skin color, hair, facial features—
are not necessarily conclusive in Latin America, where economic success and
other forms of upward mobility can “whiten” dark-skinned people in ways that
were not the case in the United States.9
How then do we “know” who in Latin America is of African ancestry and who
is not? We “know” simply by accepting what natives of the region tell us. Any in-
dividuals described by themselves or by others as “black” (negro or, in Brazil,
preto) or “brown” (pardo) or “mulatto” will be considered, for the purposes of this
study, to be “of known African ancestry.”10
Such a procedure has several possible drawbacks. Some may question
whether racially mixed pardos are really “of known African ancestry.” The very
concept of “brownness” indicates that Latin Americans draw a distinction be-
tween people of mixed and unmixed African ancestry and see them as separate
groups. To lump them into a single “black” category is in effect to impose North
American racial concepts on a part of the world where racial practices and cate-
gories are quite different.
Although “brownness” and “blackness” are distinct, both categories marked
“impure,”“unclean,” socially contaminated ancestry—which is to say, African an-
cestry. During the colonial period this was true both at the level of formal state di-
rectives and in the popular mind, where blacks and browns were characterized by
images and stereotypes that were somewhat different but in both cases over-
whelmingly negative. Even after the colonial racial laws were struck down in the
1800s, these negative images of people of African ancestry persisted, regardless of
whether that ancestry was mixed or unmixed.
Pardo racial status was created precisely in order to bar individuals who could
claim European ancestry from the full benefits of whiteness. Like blackness,
brownness was thus clearly differentiated from whiteness and imposed signifi-
cant social disabilities on its members. Furthermore, as race mixture has pro-
gressed in the region over time, brownness rather than blackness has become the
principal marker of African ancestry and nonwhite racial status.11 And as re-
search on the largest country of Afro-Latin America has made clear, racially
mixed pardos suffer from racial barriers and discrimination very similar, both in
degree and kind, to those suffered by pretos.12
This book is not about race as a scientific, genetic fact. It hardly could be, since
race is not a scientific fact but a social, cultural, and ideological “construction”—
a set of ideas—through which societies have sought to organize, structure, and
understand themselves.13 This book examines how Latin American societies have
used ideas about race to reserve wealth and power for those members defined as
“white” and to deny those goods to members defined as “black” and “brown.” This
is why, in his definition of Afro-Latin America, Fontaine referred to people of
known African ancestry rather than simply to people of African ancestry. Society
had to recognize them as African, and it signaled that recognition through the use
of the color terms “brown” and “black.”
The question of who is of known African ancestry and who is not raises a sec-
ond possible definition of Afro-Latin America. While Fontaine’s definition fo-
cused on places or societies with significant populations of African ancestry, an
alternative definition of Afro-Latin America would focus not on a geographical
region but, rather, on those groups and individuals identified, either by them-
selves or by the society in which they exist, as being of African ancestry. In a
number of ways, this second definition is in direct contradiction to the first. The
first is racially inclusive—again, most of its “Afro-Latin Americans” are not black
or brown—and “Latin America-centric” in its emphasis on local demographic
and social conditions. The second does not ignore those local conditions; local
usage, after all, determines who is considered nonwhite. But it is primarily dias-
INTRODUCTION 7
poric rather than local in its orientation; and it is racially exclusive, rather than
inclusive.
Which Afro-Latin America is this book about: Afro-Latin America as a mul-
tiracial society based on the historical experience of plantation society, or Afro-
Latin America as the largest single component of the overseas African diaspora?
Unavoidably, it is about both, which, in turn, requires care and consistency of ter-
minology to avoid ambiguity. Thus, in this book, I use “Afro-Latin America” in
the racially inclusive, “Latin America-centric” sense to refer to those regions or
societies where people of African ancestry constituted at least 5 to 10 percent of
the total population. I use the term “Afro-Latin Americans,” however, in the
racially exclusive, diasporic sense to refer to those individuals considered by
themselves or by others to be “brown” or “black”—and therefore “of known
African ancestry.”
Both meanings, and both phenomena, are equally important. The former
plantation zones of Latin America were powerfully and irrevocably shaped by the
presence of Africans and their descendants. If we wish to understand how the so-
cieties, economies, political systems, and cultures of those regions came to be
what they are today, we must study the people who did much of the shaping: the
members of the African diaspora. However, that diaspora did not form and act in
a vacuum. From the very beginning of their presence in the New World, Africans
and their descendants lived under the severest of constraints: those of slavery. As
in the United States, black slavery persisted in Latin America into the second half
of the 1800s. Even as Afro-Latin Americans made their way into freedom, first as
individuals and later as a people, they found themselves further constrained by
Spanish and Portuguese racial laws, by racism, and by poverty.
Previous attempts to synthesize Afro-Latin American history, all published in
the 1960s and 1970s, tended to emphasize the limitations imposed on black action
by those structural constraints.14 More recent research published in the 1980s and
1990s, however, not only has shed new light on previously unknown areas of the
Afro-Latin American past but also has suggested new approaches to black history
in the region, as well as new possibilities for synthesis. While acknowledging the
importance of structural conditions—the economy, the political system, long-
standing conditions of social inequality—scholarship of the last 20 years has
tended to focus much more on slave and free black “agency” and their ability to
take action against the structural and human forces that oppressed them.15
In the case of slavery, such actions ranged from the obvious, violent, and ag-
gressive—flight, rebellion, theft, assault—to more subtle, “everyday” forms of re-
sponse: negotiations with masters, speeding up or slowing down work rhythms,
appealing to state courts and officials, forming family units, and developing
African-based cultural practices.16 None of these responses succeeded in produc-
ing the changes in living and working conditions that slaves sought; rather, they
produced complicated and contradictory results that moved slavery in directions
that neither masters nor slaves had foreseen. Slave actions thus had powerful ef-
fects on the course of colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American history,
effects that continued far beyond emancipation and the abolition of slavery. And
forms of behavior that originated during slavery—negotiation with powerful pa-
trons, collective labor actions, the struggle to form families, African-based cul-
tural forms—proved unexpectedly durable and long-lasting, and continued to
shape the course of Afro-Latin American history, and therefore of Latin Ameri-
can history, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Both histories are the product of the ever-evolving interplay between struc-
tural constraints and human thought, will, and action. This book is an effort to
explore both sides of the relationship between macrolevel structure and mi-
crolevel human action, and especially the interactions between the two. How
have larger structural conditions determined, limited, or expanded the opportu-
nities available to Afro-Latin Americans? How have Afro-Latin Americans re-
sponded to those opportunities? And how have those responses, in turn, modi-
fied larger structures of economy, government, and society? Or to put those
questions another way: How did Latin America set the terms on which the
African diaspora in the region made its history? And in making its history, how
did the diaspora transform Latin America, turning vast areas of it into Afro-
Latin America?
In trying to provide answers to those questions, this book pays particular at-
tention to the broad range of institutions and collective practices that Afro-Latin
Americans forged as part of their struggle to construct lives of their own choos-
ing. Some of those institutions and practices correspond to the racially inclusive,
“Latin America-centric” definition of Afro-Latin America and represent in-
stances in which blacks and mulattoes joined with whites, Indians, and mestizos
to create multiracial movements that had profound impacts on the region. These
include the independence armies, the national Liberal parties of the 1800s and
early 1900s, the labor unions of the same period, and the populist parties and
movements of the mid-1900s.
Other institutions and practices constructed by people of color correspond
more closely to the racially exclusive, diasporic definition of Afro-Latin America.
These include, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, runaway slave communities, black
militias, and African-based mutual aid societies and religious congregations. By
the late 1800s and early 1900s, middle-class Afro-Latin Americans were creating a
rich array of racially defined social and athletic clubs, cultural and civic organiza-
tions, newspapers, and political parties. And by the end of the 1900s, race-based
organizing had taken the form of resurgent black civil rights movements, recall-
ing the clubs and organizations of a century earlier.
INTRODUCTION 9
Other movements were initially diasporic in character but evolved over time
to become pan-racial in their appeal. African-based forms of music, dance, and
corporal movement—samba and capoeira in Brazil; rumba and son in Cuba;
candombe, milonga, and tango in Argentina and Uruguay; merengue in the Do-
minican Republic—were rejected by white elites and middle classes in the 1800s
as primitive, barbaric, and bordering on the criminal; in the 1900s these same
dances were embraced as core symbols of national cultural identity. The same was
true of African-based religions—Santería, Candomblé, Umbanda—that by the
1900s were winning millions of new adherents, many of them white.
Through these various organizations, institutions, and practices, people of
color have played a central and crucial role in transforming the political, social,
and cultural life of the region. Not only have they created much of what defines
modern Latin American culture, but also they have driven forward a process of
social reform and political democratization that has been at the heart of Latin
America’s political development over the last two hundred years. The history of
the African diaspora in Latin America is thus inseparable from the history of the
national and regional societies that it is part of. Just as African-American history
can be read as the struggle of the United States to realize its highest civic and
moral ideals, so, too, is Afro-Latin American history an integral part, and perfect
reflection, of Latin America’s struggle over the last two centuries to escape the
limits imposed on it by poverty, racism, and extreme inequality.
❂
This book begins with an extended look at Afro-Latin America at the end of the
colonial period. After a survey of the political economy of slavery, chapter 1 exam-
ines the multiple ways in which slaves responded to their situation, employing a
repertoire of tactics and strategies that were strikingly similar from one part of
the region to another. And the results were surprisingly comparable as well: by
1800 slave resistance had succeeded in creating a web of runaway communities
that stretched across Afro-Latin America, as well as free black and brown popula-
tions that dwarfed those of British, French, and Dutch America and, in most of
the region, were larger than the slave population itself.
Free blacks and mulattoes had much greater freedom to organize collectively
than slaves, and they used that freedom to create Catholic religious brother-
hoods, extended families, African-based mutual aid societies and religions, and
state-sponsored militia units. Militia service in particular paved the way for ex-
tensive black participation in the wars of independence, which in most of Span-
ish America were fought and won in large part by soldiers and officers of color.
Those wars, dealt with in chapters 2 and 3, and the Liberal-Conservative political
struggles that followed, produced a massive wave of social and political reform
in the region as Afro-Latin Americans first overturned slavery and the colonial
racial laws and then pushed on to demand the full benefits of citizenship and
legal equality.
Conditions were different in Brazil and Puerto Rico, which did not experience
independence wars, and in Cuba, where islanders did not strike for independence
until the second half of the 1800s. Thus, while slavery was being eliminated from
mainland Spanish America, it was expanding and reaching its highest levels ever
in Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean. Continuing imports of African slaves rein-
forced the presence of African-based cultural institutions in those countries, in-
cluding African national associations, religious congregations, capoeira gangs,
and, not least, runaway slave communities.
By the end of the 1800s, slavery had been abolished throughout Latin America,
and the societies of the region were attempting to escape the legacy of the experi-
ence of slavery by “whitening” and “Europeanizing” themselves. While some
countries—Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay—succeeded in attracting millions
of European immigrants and altering their racial composition, most did not. In
fact, for Panama, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and other countries that
received hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the British and French West
Indies, this was a period not of “whitening” but of “blackening.” Chapter 4 looks
at the consequences of both developments, and of the export-based economic
growth that took place during those years, for local societies and their citizens of
African ancestry.
One of the principal black responses to the turn-of-the-century “export
boom” was to join in the work of building labor movements that were multiracial
in character. Chapter 5 explains how these movements went on to form the social
and electoral base for the populist regimes that by the 1930s and 1940s had come
to power in most of Latin America. Turn-of-the-century “whitening” was now
displaced by new imaginings of Latin American nations as egalitarian “racial
democracies.” The ideology of racial democracy, and intensifying industrializa-
tion and urbanization, combined to create unprecedented opportunities for
black upward mobility in much of the region. But widespread racial prejudice
and discrimination continued to impede black advancement, leading in the final
decades of the century to a new wave of racially defined black political mobiliza-
tion in Brazil, Colombia, and other countries.
Chapter 6, the concluding chapter, considers the current moment in Afro-
Latin American history, examining the combined impacts of neoliberalism and
democratization on black populations in the region and speculating on possible
future directions of change.
❂ 1
1800
When British clergyman Robert Walsh arrived in the Brazilian capital of Rio de
Janeiro in 1828, he was struck both by the sheer size of the city’s black population
and by its startling diversity of conditions. Passing through the dock area, he first
noticed the slave stevedores and porters, half-naked, exhausted,“lying on the bare
ground among filth and offal, coiled up like dogs, . . . exhibiting a state and con-
formation so unhuman, that they not only seemed, but actually were, far below
the inferior animals around them.”1 His initial feelings of horror and disgust were
soon displaced by admiration for a unit of several hundred black militiamen on
parade: “They were only a militia regiment, yet were as well appointed and disci-
plined as one of our regiments of the line. . . . Clean and neat in his person,
amenable to discipline, expert at his exercises,” these black soldiers were in every
way the equal of British regulars, Walsh concluded.
Continuing through the city, he next happened upon a group of
negro men and women bearing about a variety of articles for sale; some in
baskets, some on boards and cases carried on their heads. . . . They were all
very neat and clean in their persons and had a decorum and sense of re-
spectability about them, superior to whites of the same class and calling. All
their articles were good in their kind, and neatly kept, and they sold them
with simplicity and confidence, neither wishing to take advantage of others,
nor suspecting that it would be taken of themselves. I bought some confec-
tionary from one of the females, and I was struck with the modesty and pro-
priety of her manner; she was a young mother, and had with her a neatly
dressed child, of which she seemed very fond.
Finally, that afternoon Walsh witnessed a black Catholic priest, “a large comely
man, whose jet black visage formed a strong and striking contrast to his white
vestments,” conducting a funeral service in one of the city’s churches.
figure 1.1. Street vendors, Rio de Janeiro, 1884. Credit: Photographs and Prints Divi-
sion, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In the space of a single day, Reverend Walsh had received a rich lesson in the
complexities of Afro-Latin America. He had seen slaves working at the lowest lev-
els of the urban economy, slaves and free blacks working as independent street
vendors, free black men entrusted with arms and wearing the king’s uniform, and
a free black man officiating as a Catholic priest. “I had been but a few hours on
shore, for the first time, and I saw an African negro under four aspects of society;
and it appeared to me, that in every one his character depended on the state in
which he was placed, and the estimation in which he was held.”
Colonial society had intended to place “the African negro” in only one state,
that of chattel slave; but between 1500 and 1800, the development of the colonial
economies and societies, and the actions and initiatives of slaves and free blacks
themselves, altered that original plan. As the colonial economies grew and diver-
sified, slaves were assigned to a remarkable variety of jobs, each of which offered
different combinations of opportunities for applying leverage against masters.
Slaves repeatedly seized those opportunities, agitating for improvements in their
situation. The resulting negotiations between slaves and masters reveal not just
the tactics and strategies that slaves used but also the issues of greatest immediate
concern to them: control over their bodies, their time, and their families, and ac-
cess to material goods (especially food and land) and spiritual goods (religion,
music, and dance). These tactics and goals defined the core elements of slave life
1800 13
and culture, and their legacy exercised profound influence on Afro-Latin Ameri-
can life and culture in the 1800s and 1900s.
Slave negotiations with masters also produced black and mulatto populations
of whom the majority, by 1800, were free. No longer directly constrained by slav-
ery, free blacks and mulattoes pressed on to create the social and cultural institu-
tions—Catholic religious brotherhoods, African religious congregations, colonial
militias, artisan guilds, nuclear and extended families—around which Afro-Latin
American life was organized. Some even managed to push their way into profes-
sions and social spheres that, under colonial law, were supposedly closed to them.
None of this had been foreseen in the 1500s, when Spanish and Portuguese
empire-builders first started bringing Africans to the New World. In order to
understand how it came about, it is necessary to examine first the conditions
under which slavery developed in colonial Latin America and then the varied
ways in which slaves responded to those conditions. This chapter then con-
cludes with an examination of that majority of Afro-Latin Americans who by
1800 lived in freedom.
The Political Economy of Slavery

Africans did not choose to come to the New World. These decisions were made
for them, first by the African rulers and merchants who enslaved, bought, and
sold them, then by the European and American merchants and ship owners who
transported them to the New World, and finally by the slave owners who bought
them. No Africans would ever have chosen the destination to which most of them
were sent: the sugar, coffee, tobacco, cacao, and cotton plantations of the Carib-
bean, Atlantic, and Pacific coasts.
Individual Africans and Afro-Spaniards had accompanied the first Spanish ex-
plorers to the Caribbean in the 1490s and early 1500s. Their numbers increased
sharply in the 1510s and 1520s, when Spanish and Italian entrepreneurs estab-
lished the first New World sugar plantations, on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti
and the Dominican Republic today). As Spaniards moved on to Mexico, New
Granada (Colombia), Venzuela, and Peru in the 1520s and 1530s, they brought
sugar and Africans there as well.2
But by 1600 the most important centers of Latin American plantation agri-
culture were located not in Spanish America but in Brazil. During the 1400s Por-
tuguese and Italian merchants and planters had developed a substantial sugar
industry on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa—Madeira, Cape Verde,
São Tomé—using slave labor imported from the African mainland. Beginning in
the 1520s and 1530s they transplanted this form of agriculture to Brazil; by 1600
the coastal regions of Bahia and Pernambuco accounted for over one-half of the
world’s sugar production.3
Brazilian planters initially relied on Indian workers to provide labor for the
plantations. But the Indians of Brazil soon suffered the same holocaust that had
befallen the Caribbean islands. Between 1500 and 1550, the Indian populations of
Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico were annihilated by enslavement, ex-
cessive labor demands, and, most destructive of all, new European diseases to
which the Indians had no inherited immunities. In Brazil, one-third of the Indi-
ans living in Jesuit missions in the sugar zones died of smallpox and measles dur-
ing the 1560s. Epidemics of these diseases and others continued through the rest
of the century; those Indians who survived fled inland.4
In the 1560s and 1570s the Portuguese started importing Africans to replace the
Indians. By 1600 the labor force on the Brazilian plantations was overwhelmingly
African; and as the sugar industry grew and expanded, so did the number of
slaves. Over half a million Africans arrived in the Portuguese colony during the
1600s, ten times as many as during the previous century, and then another 1.7 mil-
lion during the 1700s. By 1800 Brazil had received a total of 2.5 million Africans, as
compared to fewer than 1 million Africans brought to all of Spanish America
combined.5
Demand for slave labor intensified in Brazil in the 1700s because of mining.
During the 1500s and 1600s, the major mining centers of Latin America had been
the highland silver mines of Mexico and Peru, where African slaves were not a
principal source of labor. In the Caribbean and Central America, however, the
discovery of small but significant gold deposits, the shortage of Indian laborers,
and the familiarity of many West African slaves with gold-mining techniques—
all led to the use of slaves as gold miners in Hispaniola, Cuba, Central America,
Colombia, and Venezuela during the 1500s.
These early Spanish American mines were dwarfed by the major gold strikes
made in the inland Brazilian regions of Minas Gerais and Goiás in the 1690s and
early 1700s. During the 1700s Brazil was the world’s most important producer of
gold, which was mined by a labor force that was majority African and Afro-
Brazilian; by 1800 Minas Gerais’s slave and free black populations were the largest
in Brazil.6 A smaller gold rush in the Pacific coastal regions of Colombia relied
even more heavily on African slave labor, imported through the Caribbean port
of Cartagena. Intensely hot and humid rainforest conditions made the region in-
tolerable to Europeans and Indian laborers from the highlands. Mine owners
therefore relied on cuadrillas (work gangs) of slaves, often managed by free black
or mulatto overseers.7
Most Africans were brought to the New World to produce precious metals or
tropical plantation crops. This corresponded to the structure of the colonial
economies, which were based on the production of primary commodities for
export back to Europe. As those economies developed and matured, however,
they spawned a variety of productive activities, and slaves participated fully in
1800 15
almost all of them, often alongside free workers. Primary commodities were
worthless, for example, without transport to move them to their final destina-
tion. Slaves worked as muleteers in the countryside and as porters and steve-
dores in the towns and cities, carrying goods and people through the streets, and
loading and unloading cargoes from ships in the port. They worked on the water
as well, as sailors or fishermen on coastal vessels in Brazil, or as bogas (oarsmen)
in Colombia, ferrying passengers and cargo up and down the Magdalena River
in large canoes.8
Slaves labored in a variety of urban occupations, ranging from the most un-
skilled and degraded to the most highly skilled.9 They were prominent in any
enterprise requiring large groups of laborers gathered in one place, such as con-
struction and manufacturing. Food processing establishments, such as bakeries,
or the meat salting and drying factories of southern Brazil and Argentina, made
heavy use of slave labor, so much so that in Lima and other cities slaves con-
victed of crimes were sent to work off their sentences in local bakeries. Slaves
worked in comb, furniture, and hat factories in Buenos Aires and in shipyards,
ironworks, and glassmaking establishments in Rio de Janeiro. They also worked
in smaller artisan workshops producing shoes, clothing, metalwork, leather
goods, and other items. Though most worked as apprentices and journeymen,
enough rose to the level of master artisan to constitute a visible presence in the
skilled trades.
In addition to construction and manufacturing, slaves worked in two other
categories of urban labor. The first was that of domestic service. Though no firm
figures are available, slave servants probably outnumbered free servants in such
major slave ports as Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Havana, and they
were common even in cities further removed from the slave trade, such as La Paz
and Quito. Slaves did all manner of household work, from cooking, cleaning, and
shopping to the more intimate functions of nursing slave owners’ infant children
and, in some cases, providing sexual services to masters and their adolescent chil-
dren.10 A second major area of urban slave labor was street vending. Slaves sold
numerous items, especially food, candies, drinks, and other refreshments, often
made by themselves or members of their families. Men, women, and children all
participated in street commerce, their marketing cries a characteristic feature of
the urban scene.
Finally, in addition to work in plantation agriculture, mining, and urban oc-
cupations, slaves also worked in non-plantation agriculture, producing crops for
local consumption. Slaves worked as cowboys on cattle ranches in Argentina,
Uruguay, southern Brazil, the backlands of the Brazilian northeast, the Venezue-
lan llanos (plains), and Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic). As
gold production declined in Minas Gerais in the second half of the 1700s, the local
economy turned increasingly to the production of dairy products, livestock, and
figure 1.2. Women workers, Salvador, ca. 1880. The woman on the left made sweets
and sold them in the street; the woman on the right was probably a servant. Their neck-
laces and bracelets were highly valued as personal adornments; the street vendor’s um-
brella was carried both as a mark of gentility and to provide shelter from the sun. Credit:
Latin American Library, Tulane University.
vegetables for sale to local towns and cities and the colonial capital, Rio de
Janeiro. Haciendas outside Lima produced sugar for export to Pacific Coast mar-
kets in Chile and Ecuador, but they grew foodstuffs as well for the capital and the
highland mining centers. In all of these agricultural economies, slaves made up a
large share, and in many cases the majority, of the work force.11
In short, the societies and economies of Latin America depended enormously
on African slave labor. The level of dependence varied greatly, however, over time
and from region to region. That variation was explained by two factors: the de-
gree to which local economies were integrated into the international export econ-
omy, and the availability (or lack thereof) of Indian labor. In regions that did not
participate extensively in the export trade to Europe, and that had Indian popula-
tions sufficient to meet local labor demands, as in Chile, Central America, and
Paraguay, there was little demand for African slaves.12
For most of the colonial period, the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Santo
Domingo, and Puerto Rico were similarly peripheral to the European export
1800 17
trade. But following the annihilation of their Indian populations in the early
1500s, these islands had no indigenous labor force to meet even their limited labor
demands. As a result, both Cuba and Santo Domingo imported relatively small
numbers of Africans, but more than did Central America or Chile: some 50,000
arrived in Cuba in the 250 years prior to 1760, and perhaps half that many to Santo
Domingo.13
In Mexico during the first century of colonization (1520–1620), as the Indian
population fell from 10–12 million to less than 1 million, local slave owners im-
ported an estimated 86,000 Africans. Then during the 1700s—as the Indian pop-
ulation began to recover, growing to some 3 million by 1800—slave imports fell to
fewer than 20,000, despite the rapid economic growth and increasing demand for
laborers.14
Export-oriented colonies in which Indians (and, by the 1700s, Euro-Indian
mestizos) were the bulk of the labor force—Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador,
Argentina—tended to have slave populations concentrated in subregions associ-
ated with specific forms of labor: sugar cultivation, as on the Caribbean coasts of
Mexico and Colombia, the Pacific coast of Peru, or parts of inland Colombia and
Argentina; urban slavery, which was most important in coastal cities such as
Buenos Aires, Cartagena, Lima, and Montevideo, but was significant even in
highland cities such as Potosí (Bolivia) and Quito; and gold mining.15
The most important centers of slavery were those colonies that both were ex-
port-oriented and had insufficient Indian labor to meet local demand. This was
the case in Brazil from the late 1500s through the end of the colonial period. It was
true of Venezuela, which in the early 1600s began exporting cacao to Mexico and
to Europe. And in the second half of the 1700s it became true of Cuba and of
Puerto Rico, both of which by 1800 were being transformed from economic back-
waters into major producers of sugar for export. These highly developed centers
of plantation-based export production became the largest importers of African
slaves, and thus the heartlands of Afro-Latin America.
Planters and slave owners imported slaves in such numbers both because of
the absence of alternative sources of labor and because of slave populations’ con-
sistent inability to reproduce themselves. In order to maintain itself at a steady
level, a population’s annual number of births must equal the annual number of
deaths. In order to grow, births must exceed deaths. But year after year, in planta-
tions, mining camps, and towns and cities throughout Spanish and Portuguese
America, the number of slave deaths exceeded the number of slave births, some-
times by narrow margins, sometimes by very wide margins. This was especially
the case in the plantation zones, where the harsh and often brutal conditions of
plantation life struck particularly hard at newborns and infants, leading many
owners to conclude that it was simply a waste of money to invest resources in try-
ing to raise a slave child to adulthood. Brazilian Senator Cristiano Ottoni com-
mented in 1871 that only 25 to 30 percent of slave children born in the countryside
survived to the age of eight, and that conditions had been even worse in the first
half of the century. This sounds like impossible exaggeration, until one considers
that child mortality during the 1800s for all male children in Brazil, including the
children of slave, free black, and white mothers alike, was one-third during the
first year of life, and almost one-half by the age of five. Free infants died at rates
lower than those figures, slave infants at rates higher.16
Further depressing the slave population’s replacement rates was the sexual im-
balance among Africans imported into the New World. On average, only about
one-third of slaves brought to the Americas were female.17 As a result, most plan-
tation work forces were majority male, as was the slave population in most towns
and cities.18 Even when slave women produced three or four children over the
course of a lifetime, their numbers—both of women and of children—were in-
sufficient to sustain the population as a whole.19
The slave population thus suffered from a particularly vicious demographic
circle. Only when New World slave populations became majority American-
born, and relatively balanced in their sex ratios, could they start to reproduce
themselves and grow by natural increase. That transition was only likely to occur
during periods of prolonged economic downturn, when owners had little incen-
tive to buy and import more slaves.20 During periods of expansion, by contrast,
owners had to import large numbers of Africans simply to maintain their labor
forces at a constant level, and even larger numbers of Africans if they wanted
those labor forces to increase. But bringing in more Africans reinforced the gen-
der imbalance in the slave population, which further reduced the ability of that
population to reproduce itself, which in turn increased the need for further im-
ports from Africa, which in turn further reduced the ability of the population to
reproduce itself—and so on and on in a grinding chain of suffering, waste, and
destruction.
The starting point of our story, 1800, was just such a moment of economic ex-
pansion and intensified imports of Africans. Over the course of the 1700s, both
Spain and Portugal had instituted a series of new economic and administrative
policies in the colonies. Known as the Bourbon reforms in Spanish America and
the Pombaline reforms in Brazil, their goal was the promotion of economic
growth and the increasing of tax revenues. Since that growth was based in large
part on the production of sugar and other tropical commodities for export back
to Europe, Spanish and Portuguese policymakers paid particular attention to
promoting plantation agriculture in the colonies. During the 1730s and 1740s,
Spain created state-chartered trading companies to develop transatlantic com-
merce with Cuba and Venezuela. Portugal followed suit in the 1750s with compa-
nies aimed at promoting trade with Pernambuco, where sugar production had
declined sharply during the first half of the century, and with the cotton-growing
1800 19
region of Maranhão. Then during the 1760s and 1770s both nations adopted a
policy of limited “free trade,” gradually removing restrictions on trade between
colonial ports and the metropolis. In 1789 Spain took the even more radical step
of removing all restrictions on the slave trade to its colonies and instituting gen-
uine free trade; ships flying the flag of any nation were now permitted to bring
slaves into Spanish ports.
The impact of these policies on the plantation zones was further magnified by
events in the Caribbean, the new center of world sugar production. Beginning in
the late 1600s, the British islands of Barbados and Jamaica, and then the French
colony of Saint Domingue, had displaced Brazil as the leading sugar producers in
the Americas. From 1776 through the end of the century, however, Caribbean
sugar exports were periodically disrupted by warfare between France and Eng-
land, creating opportunities for Brazil and the Spanish colonies to expand pro-
duction. Those opportunities increased further in the 1790s, when the slaves of
Saint Domingue rose up in an epoch-making revolution that by 1804 had abol-
ished slavery—the first New World nation to do so—and created the independ-
ent republic of Haiti. By ending slavery, the revolution also put an end to the rich-
est plantation economy in the world. In 1791 Saint Domingue had exported over
80,000 tons of sugar; in 1804, about 24,000; in 1818, less than a thousand; and in
1825, only one.21
War and revolution in the Caribbean opened the way for planters in Brazil,
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other colonies to regain lost ground. Sugar production in
the Brazilian northeast, which had fallen during the first half of the 1700s, recov-
ered and resumed expansion during the second half of the century. In 1759 Bahia
had 166 functioning sugar mills; by 1798 the number had more than doubled, to
400, and then grew reached 500 mills. Growth was even more rapid in the newer
sugar-growing zones of Rio de Janeiro, which had over 600 mills by 1800, and in
Cuba, where over 500 mills were operating by the early 1790s.22
More plantations meant more slaves, and imports of Africans increased ac-
cordingly. Between 1750 and 1780, between 16,000 and 17,000 Africans per year
had arrived in Brazil. That number rose to 18,000 per year in the 1780s, to 23,000
per year in the 1790s, and to 24,000 per year in the first decade of the 1800s.23
Rates of increase were even sharper in Cuba. Up to 1760 the island had received
average annual imports of less than 1,000 slaves per year. Between 1764 and 1790
that more than doubled, to 2,000 slaves per year; and between 1790 and 1810, by
which point Spanish authorities had opened the slave trade to foreign nationals,
more than 7,000 Africans arrived each year.24
Other parts of Spanish America also saw sharp increases in slave imports,
though at absolute levels well below those of Brazil and Cuba. Slave imports into
Venezuela rose from about 600 per year during the first half of the century to
1,000 per year between 1774 and 1807. Some 15,000 Africans came to Puerto Rico
during the same period—three times as many as during the previous 250 years.
Firm numbers are not available on the numbers of slaves arriving in Argentina
and Uruguay, but of 124 slave ships recorded as docking at Montevideo or Buenos
Aires between 1742 and 1806, a total of 109 did so after 1790.25 The only regions of
Spanish America not to receive significant imports of slaves during this period
were those where African slavery had either never taken deep root (Central Amer-
ica, Chile, Bolivia) or had gone into decline and been displaced by other forms of
labor (Mexico and Santo Domingo).
By 1800 more Africans were arriving in Spanish America and Brazil than ever
before. They were predominantly adult males, and relatively young. As during the
1600s, they came primarily from the Congo, Angola, and the Atlantic coast of
West Africa. As the demand for slaves intensified, coastal merchants extended
their trading networks further inland. In the Congo and Angola, trade routes
stretched 300 to 400 miles into the interior of the continent, a journey of several
months. In West Africa sources of supply remained closer to the coast; even here,
however, slave traders pushed further north in search of new captives. Merchants
in the trading cities along the Biafra coast of present-day Nigeria doubled their
numbers of slave exports between 1710 and 1750, and then doubled them again by
1780, by which point they were sending on average of more than 20,000 slaves per
year to the Americas.26 In Mozambique, a region that prior to 1800 had not par-
ticipated in the Atlantic slave trade, African and Portuguese merchants purchased
large numbers of captives, both from the coast and from deeper inland, for ship-
ment to the New World.27
The expanding regional scope of the African slave trade made for great diver-
sity among Africans arriving in the Americas. Though there were tendencies for
slaves from given regions of Africa to be concentrated in certain parts of the
colonies, nowhere in the New World were local African populations ethnically
homogeneous. In Rio de Janeiro, directly connected by transatlantic trade routes
to the Congo and Angola, and probably the largest urban concentration of
Bantu-speaking slaves anywhere in the Americas, a sizable minority—approxi-
mately one-quarter—of the city’s Africans were from Mozambique, and another
5 to 7 percent were from West Africa. The Bahian capital of Salvador, a long-
standing trading partner of West Africa, was the reverse: three-quarters West
African and one-quarter Congo and Angolan.28 Buenos Aires, geographically
closest to Angola, nevertheless recorded arrivals between 1790 and 1806 of 4,800
slaves from Mozambique, 4,000 from West Africa, and 2,700 from the Congo and
Angola; the municipal census of 1827 recorded twice as many West Africans as
Congo and Angolans.29 Cuban slave imports were particularly mixed: 45 percent
West African, 31 percent East African, and 24 percent Congo-Angolan.30
Slave owner preferences played only a minor role in determining the distribu-
tion of African ethnic groups around the hemisphere. For the most part, histori-
1800 21
ans concur, New World buyers of slaves had to choose from whatever the market
brought them—and the market availability of slaves was ultimately determined
by the decisions of African rulers and merchants on whether or not to sell slaves,
and in what numbers.31
The effects of these decisions were catastrophic, both for the individual cap-
tives and for the societies from which they came. What made the slave trade
within Africa possible was a combination of compelling economic incentives and
the absence of any sense of shared identity between conqueror and victim. In
most cases Africans were not selling people whom they regarded as kinsmen or
countrymen. They were selling people that they saw not as “brothers” but as “oth-
ers”—members of other villages, other ethnic groups, other nations—whom, in
many cases, they had conquered and taken prisoner precisely in order to sell into
slavery. Europeans may have viewed Africans as sharing a common racial identity,
but most Africans did not learn about that identity until they arrived in the New
World and were informed that they were all “blacks.”32
Even in the New World African ethnicity remained a primary determinant of
slave identities and a source of difference, division, and occasional conflict
within the slave population. Slave owners and colonial administrators sought to
maintain those divisions, seeing in them a defense against unified slave resist-
ance. The Count of Arcos, governor of Bahia during the 1810s, defended his pol-
icy of allowing African slaves to hold public street dances by arguing that the
dances reinforced national divisions among the slaves, which constituted “the
strongest guarantee of safety for the great cities of Brazil. . . . If some day the dif-
ferent African Nations forget the anger that disunites them, and if the Dahomey
become brothers of the Yoruba, the Ewe with the Hausa, the Tapa with the
Ashanti, and so forth: from that moment onward enormous and inevitable dan-
ger will confront and desolate Brazil.”33 His point was confirmed some years
later, when a Yoruba slave revolt in 1835 failed in large part because of the refusal
of Congo, Angolan, and Creole (native-born Brazilian) slaves to take part in it.
Even non-Yoruba West Africans held back, viewing the revolt, in the words of a
Hausa slave interrogated after the event, as “a Nagô [Yoruba] disturbance” in
which he wanted no part.34
Nevertheless, for every case in which members of different African ethnic
groups refused to join together, there were several others in which they did. While
Hausa and Yoruba slaves failed to ally in the 1835 revolt in Bahia, they had in fact
done so on earlier occasions in 1809 and 1814 and had suffered violent reprisals
from the authorities—perhaps one reason for Hausa slaves’ caution in 1835.
Cross-ethnic cooperation could and did develop as a result of the slaves’ shared
status as exploited human property. As the Count of Arcos went on to say in argu-
ing for the street dances, ethnic divisions among the Africans “are being erased,
little by little, by their common misery. . . . For who can doubt that misfortune
creates brotherhood among the miserable?” And as misfortune created brother-

hood, so too did it create the patterns of collective resistance and response born of
such brotherhood.
Slave Actions and Reactions

On March 19, 1801, the 1,065 residents of Santiago del Prado, a rural village in the
Cuban province of Oriente, gathered in the town square to receive their freedom.
By royal decree, King Charles IV not only liberated them from slavery but also
granted them collective ownership of the lands surrounding the town. Though
the decree portrayed both grants as a gift from the monarch to his subjects, in fact
they were the outcome of a century and a half of struggle and perseverance by the
town’s slaves.35
Those slaves had already won a sort of limited de facto freedom in the mid-
1600s, when the copper mine on which the town’s economy was based went bank-
rupt. Never formally freed, but for all practical purposes abandoned by the mine’s
owners, the cobreros (copper miners) created a rural community based on subsis-
tence agriculture, placer mining, and hunting. In 1670 the mines and the town
were expropriated by the Spanish Crown, and the inhabitants became “royal
slaves,” the direct property of the king. When, several years later, officials ordered
the male inhabitants of the village to proceed to Havana, there to serve as con-
struction workers on the city’s fortifications, the men refused to go. As they put it
in a 1677 petition, “we are all married and have families whom we have always
supported, quietly and peacefully,” who would be left unprotected and with no
means of support.36 Fleeing into the nearby forests, they refused to return until
the royal authorities agreed to a rotating labor draft in which slave gangs would
work for the Crown two weeks out of every eight, and never on construction
projects outside the region.
That agreement did not end the conflict between the Crown and its slaves.
Friction continued through the 1700s, both over the terms of the rotating labor
system and over rights to the agricultural lands surrounding the town. In fighting
what they saw as mistaken actions by misguided royal officials, the slaves contin-
ued to strike, to flee, and to make use of the royal courts, sending villagers to Ha-
vana, to the neighboring island of Santo Domingo, and even to Spain to plead
their case. Eventually tiring of these struggles, in 1780 the Crown decided to re-
turn ownership of the mine and its slaves to the heirs of the original owner, who,
rather than attempt to reopen the mines, moved to round up the slaves, sell them,
and pocket the proceeds. This sparked massive flight from the town and armed
rebellion.
In 1784 the villagers sent one of their number, Gregorio Cosme Osorio, to
Spain to argue their case before the king and his court. Not until 1795 could Os-
1800 23
orio report that he had done so. But after reviewing the slaves’ petition and re-
ports from local priests and officials, and having considered the dangers of
Haiti’s slave revolution (1791–1804) possibly spreading into eastern Cuba,
Charles and his advisors decided to take the extraordinary step of granting the
townspeople their freedom and title to the lands they had worked for the previ-
ous century and a half.
Both the beginning and end of this story make it a very unusual case. The in-
formal freedom won by the slaves early on, and the formal freedom (and land)
eventually granted to them by the Crown, were hardly typical of Latin American
slavery. But in achieving those extraordinary outcomes, the cobreros acted in
much the same way as slaves elsewhere in Spanish and Portuguese America. Both
their goals (autonomy from their owners, acceptable living and working condi-
tions for themselves and their families, and, ultimately, freedom and land) and
their tactics (bargaining and negotiations, strikes, appeals to higher authority,
flight, and rebellion) were pursued by slaves everywhere in Latin America. Those
tactics not only altered the terms of slavery as an institution but also set the stage
for slave participation in the independence struggles of the 1810s and 1820s and
the eventual abolition of slavery.
Given the conditions under which they lived and worked, collective action by
slaves was hardly surprising. Along with the silver mines of Mexico and Peru,
sugar plantations were the first truly industrial sites in Latin America: capital-in-
tensive enterprises employing large work forces in a complex series of interde-
pendent and highly integrated activities. In 1816, almost half of the slaves in the
sugar-growing zones of Bahia lived on plantations employing between 60 and 100
slaves, and another quarter lived on plantations employing 100 or more. The av-
erage number of slaves per farm was 65. In the newer sugar zones around Rio de
Janeiro, plantations were smaller, but even here the average number of slaves per
plantation was 50, with some employing up to 200. In Matanzas province in
Cuba, which like Rio de Janeiro was experiencing the beginnings of large-scale
sugar cultivation, the average number of slaves per plantation in 1820 was 69;
some 14 years later, in all of western and central Cuba, most plantation slaves lived
on estates that employed 100 or more slaves. Even in secondary centers of sugar
cultivation, producing primarily for local consumption, slave labor forces were
not small. In the rural hinterlands surrounding Lima, the average number of
slaves per estate in 1813 was 56.37
Working and living conditions on the plantations varied from place to place
and over time. They tended to be somewhat less harsh in the secondary planta-
tion zones, or during periods of economic downturn, when owners had less
incentive to wring maximum productivity out of their slaves. Nowhere could
conditions be described as good, however; and in the core areas of sugar pro-
duction—coastal Brazil, or Cuba after 1800—and during periods of economic
figure 1.3. Slaves drying coffee beans, São Paulo, 1882. Credit: Photographs and Prints
Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Li-
brary, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
expansion, they could only be described as hellish. Underfeeding, malnutrition,

and overwork led to high levels of disease and industrial accidents, especially dur-
ing the harvest period, when workdays of 16, 18, and even 20 hours were not un-
common. “The work is great, and many die,” laconically noted an observer of the
Bahian sugar industry in the early 1600s. Some 100 years later, Jesuit priest João
Antônio Andreoni described the plantation zones of Bahia as “hell for blacks”;
and in the late 1790s, yet another observer of the industry expressed his disgust at
“the barbaric, cruel, and bizarre way that the majority of masters treat their un-
fortunate working slaves.”38
Conditions were somewhat better, but still difficult, in the gold mines. Pro-
longed exposure to cold water in the placer mines of Minas Gerais produced dis-
ease and disability among slaves, as did the harsh environment and shortages of
food in the Pacific rainforests of Colombia.39 As on the plantations, slaves in the
gold fields worked collectively. In the Chocó region of Colombia, 90 percent of
slave miners worked in gangs of 30 or more. Cuadrillas of 100 to 150 were not un-
common, and some slave owners assembled corps of 300 to 500 slaves to work
their holdings.40 Work gangs were smaller in Minas Gerais, and some slaves
worked as individual prospectors, roaming the region in search of small un-
1800 25
claimed deposits. Most, however, worked in groups, either in placer mines or in

shallow pit excavations.41
Gang labor was less central to urban slavery, but businesses requiring large
numbers of laborers often resorted to slaves, especially during the period of in-
creased slave imports in the late 1700s. Usually, as in a Lima brick factory employ-
ing 400 slaves, or a Buenos Aires comb factory employing 100, these gangs were
assembled by owners.42 In some areas of the economy, however, individual slaves
sent into the streets to earn their living took the initiative in organizing them-
selves into gangs. Slave street porters in Brazilian cities, for example, created a sys-
tem of cantos (“street corners”), in which groups of porters headed by an elected
“captain” sought to monopolize the carrying trade in their particular neighbor-
hood.43 And even slaves who did not work in larger units, such as domestic ser-
vants or street vendors, were in regular contact with each other and passed infor-
mation back and forth as they circulated through the streets and market places of
the city.
The proto-industrial settings in which many slaves worked fostered a process
of negotiation and bargaining between masters and slaves that was in some ways
analogous to modern bargaining between industrial workers and their employ-
ers.44 Usually these negotiations were informal, subtle, and largely implicit; at
times, however, they surfaced into open, explicit discussions between masters and
slaves. In Bahia, for example, the highly integrated and mechanized nature of
sugar-making gave slaves the ability both to hinder production (through slow-
downs or sabotage) and to facilitate it (by mastering the skills associated with
sugar-making and then applying them through hard and conscientious work).
Slaves used both tactics to extract a variety of concessions from their owners:
extra food rations, access to garden plots, occasional free time, promotion to
higher-skilled occupations, cash payments, and even, in isolated cases, promises
of freedom.45
While such negotiations usually took place between individual masters and
slaves, they occasionally turned into something approaching collective bargain-
ing, producing some of the earliest strikes in Latin American history. The co-
breros’ seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work stoppages certainly fall into
this category; similarly, the 1857 strike of slave and free black street porters in the
Bahian capital of Salvador was the first such labor mobilization in that city’s his-
tory. It would probably have never occurred to the slaves on a hacienda near
Ibarra, Ecuador, to call their actions a strike, yet that was essentially what they
were doing when they informed royal officials in the late 1780s that they would
not work “nor set foot on the hacienda” until the new owner of the estate, who
had imposed greatly increased labor demands on them, had been removed.46
Neither colonial law nor customary practice recognized slaves’ right to strike
or bargain collectively. For most slave owners, bargaining with individual slaves
was only barely tolerable, if that. Collective work stoppages by slaves were com-
pletely unacceptable and, from the owners’ perspective, tantamount to rebellion.
Yet most such actions by slaves were aimed not at overturning or escaping from
slavery but rather at enforcing commonly understood terms and conditions of
enslavement that they felt had been violated. Most of these violations came under
the general heading of abuse and mal trato (bad treatment), usually at the hands
of overseers. This was what motivated 20 slaves on the Quebrada hacienda in
Cañete, Peru, to march into Lima in 1809 and demand that royal officials remove
their abusive overseer, and a group of 23 slaves in Guayama, Puerto Rico, to lay
down their tools and set off for town to complain to the corregidor (a local Span-
ish official).47
Sometimes groups of slaves would push further and attempt to renegotiate the
conditions of their enslavement. Two such instances took place on a hacienda
near Mompox, Colombia, in 1803, and on the Santana plantation in southern
Bahia in 1789. In both cases slaves refused to return to work until their owners had
responded to lists of demands that the slaves had prepared and submitted. It is in-
structive to compare the two lists, which lay out recurring core issues in negotia-
tions between masters and slaves.48 Heading both sets of demands was the issue
of time away from work. Both groups of slaves demanded two days off per week
“for [our] own work,” as the Mompox strikers put it. That work was undertaken
at least in part to earn money for their own use: the Mompox slaves also asked for
permission to travel to local markets to sell corn that they had grown, while the
Santana slaves requested “a large boat so that when it goes to [Salvador] we can
place our cargoes aboard and not pay freightage.” Those cargoes likely included
the rice that the slaves demanded the right to plant “wherever we wish, and in any
marsh, without asking permission for this.”
Produce grown by slaves for their own use was a frequent bone of contention
between masters and slaves, and a prime example of the ambiguities of their rela-
tionship. Many owners provided garden plots to their slaves, on which the latter
grew fruits and vegetables for their own consumption and to sell, either to the
owner or in nearby markets. Slaves benefited from more nutritious and varied
diets, along with the opportunity to earn money; owners benefited by reducing
their food costs (which were now partially borne by the slaves) and also through
what many perceived as the plots’ pacifying effect on slaves. “Slaves who have
[provision grounds] neither flee nor make trouble,” commented several planters
in Rio de Janeiro province. Their garden plots “distract them a bit from slavery,
and delude them into believing that they have a small right to property.”49 This
“right” may indeed have been illusory, but slaves claimed the plots as their own
and argued constantly with masters over the amount of time they would be per-
mitted to work on them. These disputes over provision grounds foreshadowed
1800 27
the land disputes that would break out in the plantation zones of Afro-Latin
America following independence.50
After their initial demand for time off, the Santana slaves then focused most of
their attention on the time they spent working and on the conditions of that
work. They proposed fixed maximum quotas for planting and harvesting, mini-
mum numbers of workers for given tasks (“the wood that is sawed with a hand-
saw must have three men below and one above”; “at the milling rollers there must
be four women to feed in the cane”), and work that they would no longer do
(“you are not to oblige us to fish in the tidal pools nor to gather shellfish”; “we will
go to work in the cane field of Jabirú this time and then it must remain as pasture
for we cannot cut cane in a swamp”). They also demanded the discharge of the es-
tate’s overseers, and the right to approve new ones hired in their place.
The Mompox slaves, by contrast, had nothing to say on the question of work.
Their bargaining focused on material necessities: a new issue of clothing for every
slave, medical care and medicines, and, most important of all, food. This most
basic of human needs was the one most consistently denied on the plantations. In
Bahia, “evidence is consistent from the beginning of the sugar economy to the
end of the colonial period that slaves did not receive an adequate ration.” Even
when food was sufficient in bulk, vitamin and mineral deficiencies reduced its
nutritional value. As a result, reported a medical student studying diseases among
plantation slaves in Rio de Janeiro, “there are plantations where the slaves are
numb with hunger, so that their appearance fills us with sorrow.”51
Food emerges as a central theme in one of the very few first-person accounts
left by a Latin American slave, the autobiography of Afro-Cuban Juan Francisco
Manzano (1797–1854). Food “was for me the most sacred and essential kindness”
that one human being could provide another. Even as a relatively privileged do-
mestic slave, Manzano found it impossible to get enough to eat: “I was always
thin, weak, and emaciated. . . . Always hungry, . . . I ate everything I found . . . I
would stuff myself and gobble the food down almost without chewing, so I fre-
quently had indigestion.” He had learned this style of eating while scavenging his
masters’ leftovers. “I had to be clever to gobble it all up before the table was
cleaned off because as soon as they finished I had to follow them out” of the din-
ing room.52
Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that food was the most frequent
object of thefts by slaves or that the Mompox strikers should have made the pro-
vision of food one of their principal demands. They initially petitioned their
owner for a daily ration of bananas; when he agreed to this demand, they quickly
added a request for regular rations of bread and meat.
Finally, the Mompox slaves demanded that their owner provide them with
Catholic baptismal and burial rites. Possibly this was another effort to get more
time off from work. A priest’s presence on the hacienda would also have provided
an external authority to mediate between the slaves and their owner, and he
would be a possible guarantor of agreements arrived at between them. Just as
likely, however, is that the slaves’ request for religious services reflected their gen-
uine embrace of Christianity and the spiritual benefits that it offered. This em-
brace was visible throughout Afro-Latin America. In Puerto Rico, African slaves
nearing death insisted on receiving Catholic baptism and last rites. When masters
failed to provide those rites, “the slaves themselves baptized their dying compan-
ions.”53 Even after escaping captivity and fleeing into the mountains and forests
to form encampments of runaways, slaves continued to worship Catholic saints
and deities, seeking out priests and bringing them to their settlements to lead
services, conduct marriages, and administer the sacraments.54 In demanding the
provision of religious services, the Mompox slaves were behaving much the same
as their escaped colleagues.
Slaves’ acceptance of Christianity did not necessarily imply their abandon-
ment of African religion. While Iberian Catholicism demanded rigid orthodoxy,
an absolute monopoly for its gods and rituals, and the complete rejection of all
other religions, African religions (except for Islam) required no such exclusivity.
To the contrary, most African sects had evolved and developed over the centuries
through an extended process of exchanging gods and rituals with each other, usu-
ally as a result of commercial contact or military conquest.55 This process of ac-
cretion continued in the New World, as slaves added Christian saints and deities
to African pantheons and even invested them with the attributes of African gods.
Thus in Brazil, for example, Yoruba slaves from West Africa saw in Jesus qualities
similar to those of Oxalá—orixá (embodiment) of the sun and the sky—and
revered both figures as powerful sky-lords. The Virgin Mary they linked to Ye-
manjá and Oxun (orixás of the sea and fresh water, respectively), the Devil to Exu
(the lord of crossroads, choices, and uncertainty), and other saints to other
Yoruba deities.56
In linking African and Christian gods and spirits, slaves profoundly reworked
and modified both religious traditions. They then further transformed Chris-
tianity by insisting that access to those gods be mediated not just by Catholic
priests and rituals but by African priests and rituals as well. The spiritual power of
Catholic sacraments was highly prized and valued; but equally powerful was the
African sacrament of trance and possession, through which gods entered the
bodies of their worshippers to “mount” and “ride” them.57
The rite of spirit possession was in turn connected to the Santana slaves’ final
demand, that they be free “to play, relax, and sing any time we wish without your
hindrance nor will permission be needed.” With this the Santana slaves articu-
lated one of the most deeply held of all slave aspirations: the desire not just to rest
from hard labor but to “re-create” themselves through African music, song, and
1800 29
dance. Music and dance were healing on almost every level, a balm for body and
mind. The graceful movements of dance, movement done purely for pleasure and
enjoyment, were the antithesis and direct negation of the pain and exhaustion of
coerced heavy labor. And when performed collectively, as they usually were,
African song and dance removed, at least for a moment, the degraded social sta-
tus of slavery and created alternative, deeply healing senses of person- and peo-
ple-hood.58
Thus at a street dance in Montevideo celebrating the Christmas season of 1827,
a French traveler was struck by how “more than six hundred blacks seemed to
have regained for a moment their nationality, in the heart of that imaginary
country, whose memory . . . made them forget, for one single day of pleasure, the
pains and sufferings of long years of slavery.”A British traveler left a vivid descrip-
tion of a similar occasion in Rio de Janeiro in 1808. “Onward pressed the groups
of the various African nations. . . . Here was the native of Mosambique, and
Quilumana, of Cabinda, Luanda, Benguela, and Angola.” As the singing and
dancing intensified over the course of the afternoon, “I [knew] not whether the
energy of the musicians, or that of the dancers was most to be admired.” By-
standers, overcome by the rhythm, “with a shriek or a song . . . rushed in and
joined the dance. The musicians played a louder and more discordant music; the
dancers . . . gathered fresh animation; . . . the shouts of approbation and clapping
of hands were redoubled; every looker-on participated.” Small wonder that, as the
Buenos Aires city council bitterly complained in 1788, slaves “think of no other
thing but of the time when they can go to dance.”59
Rhythm was central to producing these healing and energizing effects. One of
the central messages of African music is that rhythm lifts us out of the daily grind
by transforming consciousness, transforming time, transforming and heighten-
ing our experience of the moment.60 And that consciousness-altering effect is en-
tirely purposeful: in Africa and its New World diaspora, rhythm and music were
an essential part of religious observance, particularly in creating the emotional
and spiritual conditions for the gods to manifest themselves by possessing and
“mounting” their worshippers. Drumming and dance were fundamental ele-
ments of African religious ritual; and as Africans adopted Christianity and turned
it to their uses, a final way in which they transformed Iberian Catholicism was to
inject it with the power of African drums. Throughout Spanish and Portuguese
America, Sundays, saints’ days, and religious holidays became occasions for
African dancing and music-making. Some slave owners, priests, and officials al-
lowed these events to proceed unchecked, recognizing in them not just a neces-
sary concession to slaves’ spiritual well-being, but a useful means of keeping a po-
tentially rebellious population divided into different African ethnic groups. Most,
however, were made profoundly uneasy both by the alien, unfamiliar quality of
African music and dance and by the perceived dangers posed by large gatherings
figure 1.4. African drummers, Rio de Janeiro, 1868. Credit: Photographs and Prints
Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Li-
brary, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
1800 31
of slaves and free blacks. As a Bahian observer noted in the 1790s, “it does not
seem politically wise to permit throngs of negroes, of both sexes, to have their
barbarous war drum dances in the streets and squares of this city. They dance in a
lascivious fashion, sing heathen songs, speak in strange tongues, all the time
screaming horrendously and in a dissonant manner that arouses both fear and
suspicion.”61 The Buenos Aires town council expressed similar misgivings:
It has been observed that in these dances the Blacks perform Gentile Rites of
the places in which they were born, with certain ceremonies and speeches
that they perform in their Languages. . . . It can truthfully be said that in
these dances they forget the sentiments of the most Holy Catholic Religion
that they accepted, that they renew the rites of the gentiles, that they pervert
the good customs that their Owners have taught them, that they learn noth-
ing but vices, . . . and that the Republic is very badly served.62
When added to the other conditions presented by the Santana strikers, this
final demand that slaves be permitted to sing and dance whenever they wished
brought the negotiations to an abrupt end. While the owner of the Mompox ha-
cienda eventually accepted most of the conditions proposed by his slaves, the
owner of the Santana plantation called in the militia to crush the slaves’ uprising
and haul them off to prison.
Despite this difference in outcomes, in both cases slave strikers raised a num-
ber of the core issues over which masters and slaves bargained during the late
colonial period: control over time, over land, over food, over conditions of work,
and over religion and culture. In neither case, however, did the strikers raise a
final issue that emerged repeatedly in slave disputes with masters: slaves’ connec-
tions to their spouses, children, and other relatives.
Spanish and Portuguese law guaranteed the right of slaves to marry and form
families. This right was further confirmed by Catholic teachings on the sacra-
ment of marriage and the sinfulness of sexual relations outside of wedlock. If
anything, though, laws prohibiting masters from breaking up slave couples and
families by selling them apart converted many owners’ indifference to the ques-
tion of slave marriage into outright opposition. Further obstructing slave mar-
riage and family formation was the persistent gender imbalance among African
slaves, which condemned many African men to a life without women.
For all these reasons, early historians of Latin American slavery for the most
part assumed that marriage and families were both relatively rare among slaves.
This was particularly the case, they believed, on large plantations, where slaves
lived, in the words of one observer, under conditions of “depressing promiscuity.”
In recent years, however, historians have come to conclude that, by concentrating
under one owner relatively large (if unbalanced) numbers of men and women,
the plantations in fact provided greater opportunities for family formation than
did urban slavery, where most owners held slaves in much smaller numbers. In
Venezuela at the end of the colonial period, marriage rates among rural slaves
were twice as high as among urban slaves, were essentially the same as those for
rural free blacks and mulattoes, and were only slightly below those for rural
whites. Perhaps as a result, child/woman ratios (average numbers of children per
woman of child-bearing age) were more than 50 percent higher among slaves in
the countryside than in the city.63
Marriage rates were even higher among slaves on haciendas outside Lima,
where 60 percent of adult slaves were married as of 1790.64 Comprehensive fig-
ures are harder to obtain for Brazil, but research on individual plantations sug-
gests that the larger the work force, the higher the incidence of slave marriage. In
the Lorena district of São Paulo in 1801, 18 percent of slaves on small farms (farms
owning 1–4 slaves) were married, versus 40 percent on farms with 10 slaves or
more. Of the 186 slaves on the Santana plantation in Bahia in 1752, at least 80 per-
cent lived in family units headed by a male and female couple, and another 13 per-
cent lived in single-headed family units. And surveying records on slave families
on the plantations of Rio de Janeiro, “one is surprised by the level of autonomy
and family stability that [the slaves] achieved, extremely close to that of the free
people among whom they lived.” 65
Like large plantations, mining camps also brought together males and females,
many of whom married and formed families. As we have seen, the copper miners
of Santiago del Prado described themselves as “all married, and [with] families
whom we support.” Among slaves working in gold mines in the Chocó region of
Colombia, one-third were married in 1782, and many of the unmarried slaves
were children living with their parents. As on the plantations, the larger the work
force, the higher the rate of marriage. Among 550 slaves belonging to one mine
owner, two-thirds of the adults were married, and almost all of the slaves (93 per-
cent) lived in family units, most of which were headed by couples, and many of
which included three generations (grandparents, parents, and children).66
Visiting Cuba in the early 1800s, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
noted not just the existence of family units among plantation slaves but the
tremendous social and psychological benefits of family membership: “The sugar-
mill slave who has a wife, who lives in a separate house, who with the affection
that characterizes most of the Africans, finds after a day’s work someone to care
for him, in the midst of an indigent family, has a fate that cannot be compared to
that of a slave who is isolated and lost in the crowd.”67 These benefits emerge
clearly in the autobiography of Juan Francisco Manzano, for whom his mother
and brothers were the very center of his world: “I loved [my mother] so much that
I always prayed to God to take my life before hers. I did not believe that I had
enough strength to survive her.” Whenever he was punished, his family would al-
ways come to visit him, bringing him food or talking to him through the door of
1800 33
his cell. On such visits his mother would “call to her husband from the grave, be-
cause by then my father had already died.” On one of the rare occasions in later
years when the family was briefly reunited, they “stood hugging each other, form-
ing a group. My three younger brothers surrounded us, hugging our legs. My
mother was crying and held us tightly to her bosom. She was thanking God for al-
lowing her the favor of seeing us again.”68
In addition to emotional sustenance, families provided important economic
benefits. At one point Manzano’s mother informed him that she had saved
enough money to buy his freedom: “Juan, I have here the money for your free-
dom. You see, your father has died and you are now going to be the father of your
brothers.” This was a frequent strategy among slave families, who pooled their
resources to buy the freedom of family members one at a time.69 His mother’s
savings, in fact, derived in part from a horse given to young Manzano by his slave
grandparents; and as his mother implied, it was expected that, once free, he
would assume responsibility as the head of the family for rescuing his siblings
from slavery. However, this strategy went awry when Manzano’s mother died
shortly thereafter and their owner confiscated her savings. Manzano was able to
retain only a single gold bracelet of his mother’s, which he sold to pay for masses
for her soul.70
Slave families were less common in cities, where most owners held slaves in
groups of four or less. As a result, in the Bahian capital of Salvador, “slaves had
scant opportunities for affectionate relationships, either episodic or long-last-
ing.” Of 186 slaves arrested in connection with the uprising of 1835 in that city,
only 4 were recorded as married. Much the same was true in Rio de Janeiro, where
slave marriage rates were a mere fraction—one-seventh or less—of marriage
rates for the free population. As late as the 1840s, slaves accounted for only 4 per-
cent of annual marriages in the city, despite their comprising 40 percent of the
total population.71
This urban/rural disparity between rates of slave marriage and family forma-
tion may explain why the Mompox and Santana slaves did not include family is-
sues in their lists of demands: in comparison to their urban peers, they may al-
ready have been in a relatively advantaged position in this respect. For urban
slaves, however, the obstacles to forming family units were enormous, forcing
them to appeal to royal courts and officials for enforcement of their right to
marry.72
These appeals were in turn part of a larger effort by slaves to use the laws gov-
erning slavery as a source of power and leverage in their negotiations with mas-
ters. Lawsuits, petitions, and complaints directed to royal officials were yet an-
other form of slave resistance and response, as well as a way to try to force
concessions from abusive or recalcitrant masters. In Spanish America, slave legal
actions of this sort seem to have increased noticeably during the final decades of
colonial rule, in response to two sets of laws aimed at strengthening the protec-
tion of slave rights: the Código Negro (Black Code) of 1784, and the royal Instruc-
tions of 1789. The Crown’s goal in drawing up these laws was to reduce owners’
abuse and mistreatment of slaves, and therefore some of the causes of the rising
incidence of slave flight and rebellion.73
Slave owners angrily rejected the laws as unwarranted state interference in
their private affairs, protesting to such a degree that the Código Negro was never
implemented, and the Instructions remained in effect only five years before being
revoked by royal order in 1794.74 Even in setting these laws aside, however, the
Crown urged local officials to keep their provisions in mind when adjudicating
disputes between slaves and masters; and both during and after the brief period
in which the Instructions were in effect, slaves made repeated efforts to avail
themselves of the legal protections afforded them. Spanish officials in Louisiana,
for example, “quickly discovered that the slaves were bold and independent-
minded, very much aware of their rights, and ready to travel to New Orleans to
complain if these rights were violated.”75 In Puerto Rico, slaves
brought complaints of inadequate food and clothing, and excessive work;
they protested having to work on holidays, suffering excessive punishments,
deceptions practiced by their owners, and the violation of the right, guaran-
teed by law, to buy their own freedom. They were the first to expose and de-
nounce the sexual exploitation of slave women. They brought cases con-
cerning lack of medical care, the destruction of slaves’ property, verbal
abuse, the breaking up of slave families, owners’ unpaid debts to slaves, and
numerous other issues.76
One of the principal ways by which slaves sought to escape abusive treatment
was to avail themselves of their right to change owners. Under Spanish law, if
slaves could find a prospective master to whom they would rather belong and
who was willing to pay their market price, they were entitled to be purchased by
that individual. This law was generally opposed by slave owners, since it created a
mechanism by which slaves could “escape” from harsher masters to less abusive
ones; and owners often fought to prevent or delay such transfers of ownership,
usually by contesting the slave’s declared cash value. But slaves persisted in these
cases, seeing in them a potent means both for improving their living and working
conditions and for avoiding the breakup of marriages and families.77
Suits of this sort—indeed, slave legal complaints of all sorts—were much
more common in urban areas than in the countryside. Urban slaves had greater
access both to information about their legal rights and to the officials responsible
for enforcing those rights. Also, most urban slave owners were individuals of
modest means who owned relatively small numbers of slaves and who did not
have the influence with royal officials that plantation or mine owners did. In legal
1800 35
disputes urban slaves thus often confronted their owners from a position of less
disadvantage than did rural slaves.
For slaves laboring on plantations in the countryside, or in mining camps
deep in the Colombian rainforest, finding out about royal laws was more diffi-
cult, as was access to royal officials. This is why, in making their complaints, rural
slaves were more likely to act as part of a group and with the support of their
companions. Owners characterized such collective actions as rebellion and in-
subordination; but in fact these slaves were not rebelling against official author-
ity or seeking to escape or overturn slavery. Rather, they were appealing to that
authority for the enforcement of its own duly constituted laws. If anything they
were seeking to align themselves with the colonial state and take advantage of its
protections, in much the same way that the slave owners themselves profited
from state protection.
Needless to say, royal courts and officials did not always, or even usually, find
in favor of slaves. In the 1801 case in Guayama, for example, the corregidor found
the slaves’ complaints of mistreatment to be unfounded and ordered twelve
lashes for each of the men involved and ten lashes for the women. Before reaching
this decision, however, he investigated the case thoroughly, questioning each of
the slaves at length, having a doctor examine them for evidence of mistreatment,
and finally traveling to the plantation to verify conditions there. Clearly the slaves’
complaint was taken seriously; and while this particular official decided against
them, others proved more receptive to slave allegations. Slaves took note of which
officials were more likely to give them a hearing and consistently directed them-
selves toward those individuals.78 They cultivated the court-appointed attorneys
responsible for investigating slave complaints and slave rights, the Defensores de
Esclavos. And as those public defenders repeatedly witnessed the abuses and in-
justices of slavery, some of them even began publicly to question the institution.79
Others roused slave owner ire simply by holding to the letter of the law, leading
landowners in Peru to denounce one such Defensor as “agriculture’s greatest
enemy and most terrible obstacle. The smallest detail that any slave reports to
him is enough to support notoriously unjust judgments against his owner, and
enough to spark rural disorder among owners, slaves, and freed people.”80
Slave law, and the officials charged with enforcing those laws, became potent
weapons for slaves to use in their confrontations with owners. They also provided
a language and rhetoric through which slaves could assert the concept of the basic
rights inhering in them as human beings and—though this had not been the in-
tent of the laws—as subjects of the Crown. The governor of Popayán (Colombia),
reporting to the Crown on what he saw as the negative consequences of the In-
structions of 1789, noted both aspects of the law: the legal protections it gave
slaves and its rhetoric of rights. Slaves now treat their owners, he reported in 1792,
“with a sort of disdain, paying them merely formal obedience and taking every
opportunity to dispute their obligations and even daring to express their ideas
concerning equality.”81
In fact one does not find many assertions of “equality” in these court cases.
Spanish law made it quite clear that neither slaves nor free blacks were the legal
equals of whites. But subordination did not mean a complete absence of rights,
and slaves repeatedly invoked the concept and even the terminology of rights in
their petitions to royal officials. In their petitions and court cases, the cobreros of
Santiago del Prado asserted “the right of subsistence . . . rights to the preservation
of marriage and the family . . . collective political rights . . . rights to land.” In
Puerto Rico, Yoruba slave Francisco Castaño justified his proposed sale to a new
owner in Cuba by arguing that “in Puerto Rico blacks have no rights at all.” In fact
slave rights were violated as frequently in Cuba as in Puerto Rico, but Castaño
sought to justify his sale to another owner (itself a right guaranteed slaves under
Spanish law) in terms of how it would grant him access to prerogatives he had
been denied in Puerto Rico. Another Puerto Rican slave, María Balbina, used the
same language when she petitioned the authorities to prevent her owner from
selling her away from her children (again, a right guaranteed her by Spanish law).
She had brought the complaint, she said, in order to “hacer valer mis derechos”—
to enforce her rights and make them valid.82
Since Portuguese laws governing slavery descended from the same Roman
precedents as Spanish law, slaves in Brazil theoretically enjoyed the same legal
rights as those in Spanish America. A royal order of 1710 specifically charged state
attorneys in the colony to act on complaints and cases brought by slaves, but as a
delegate to the Constituent Assembly of 1823 commented 100 years later, the order
had gone largely unenforced because “it was of no interest to anyone except those
miserable ones.”83 As a result, observed English visitor Henry Koster in the 1810s,
it was “almost impossible for a slave to be heard” in an official setting. Through-
out the colonial period, agrees historian João Reis,“slaves had little or no access to
the laws of the State.”84
Only after independence, it appears, did slave appeals to royal justice start pro-
voking much official response.85 Even at that point (by which time slavery was
being abolished in most of Spanish America), Brazilian laws governing slavery
were less progressive than Spanish colonial laws. For example, while Spanish law
guaranteed a slave’s right to buy his or her freedom, Portuguese and (following
independence in 1822) Brazilian law recognized no such right. The practice of
slaves buying their freedom did exist in Brazil; indeed, most manumissions (indi-
vidual freeings) were purchased, rather than outright grants. But unlike as in
Spanish America, such freeings could only take place with the consent of the
owner. As an 1854 decision by the country’s highest court noted, “we do not have
any legal provision according to which the master can be forced to free his slave.”
Another case in 1884, four years before the final abolition of slavery, went even
1800 37
further, concluding that “deprived of civil rights, slaves do not possess a right to
property, to freedom, to honor or to reputation. Their rights are reduced to the
preservation and sustainment of their bodies”—rights that were as much in the
interest of the owner as of the slave.86
Portuguese law and practice thus resulted in negotiations between masters
and slaves taking place with relatively little intervention by colonial officials, and
that intervention mainly at moments of crisis, when negotiations had broken
down completely and slaves had either fled or risen up against their owners. In
both Spanish and Portuguese America, such acts of rebellion constituted yet an-
other form of slave resistance and response. Though slave uprisings occurred
throughout the colonial period, they tended to cluster at the beginning of that pe-
riod (when European control over these new societies in the making was particu-
larly tenuous) and at the end (in the late 1700s and early 1800s). African slaves had
barely begun to work on sugar plantations in Santo Domingo when in 1522 they
first rose up. That rebellion was put down within several days, but a number of
the survivors and other runaways fled into the forests to join the Indian chieftain
Enriquillo, who had taken up arms against the Spanish in 1519 and who fought a
continuing guerrilla war against them through the early 1530s. The Colombian
city of Santa Marta was completely destroyed by a slave uprising in 1530 and then
attacked again in 1550; Havana was sacked and pillaged by slaves in 1538 following
an attack on the city by French corsairs. An uprising of slaves in Mexico City was
only narrowly averted in 1537, and significant rural rebellions broke out in 1546
and 1570. Slaves working at gold mines in Cuba, Honduras, Colombia, and
Venezuela rebelled repeatedly between 1533 and 1552; in 1598 some 4,000 slaves de-
stroyed mine workings near Zaragoza, in Colombia, and they were not subdued
until the following year.87
The gradual consolidation of Spanish and Portuguese rule reduced the fre-
quency of such rebellions during the 1600s, but several factors then led to their
resurgence in the 1700s and early 1800s. One was the rising political discontent
among the free population, caused by Bourbon and Pombaline economic policies
that increased the tax load on the colonial economies. This turbulence among the
free population provided openings for slave rebellion as well. In Venezuela, rebels
opposed to Spanish commercial and tax policies recruited slave participants to
their uprisings in 1732 and 1749. During the second rebellion, slaves on planta-
tions in the Tuy Valley, near Caracas, plotted independently. Their conspiracy was
uncovered several weeks before the planned event, to the relief of local officials,
who feared that the Indian population might have joined in the uprising. The
anti-tax Comunero rebellion in Colombia (1781) also triggered slave uprisings up
and down the Magdalena River and in the Cauca Valley.88
International political developments in Europe and the Caribbean also stimu-
lated slave rebellions in Latin America. When revolutionaries in France and Saint
Domingue decreed the racial equality of free blacks and whites (1791) and then
the abolition of slavery (1793–94), slaves and free blacks in Latin America imme-
diately took notice. Between 1795 and 1799 a wave of slave uprisings took place on
sugar plantations in Cuba (this was one of the reasons for the Crown’s conces-
sions to the cobreros in 1800). Slave rebels in the city of Coro, Venezuela, called in
1795 for the “Ley de los Franceses” (French Law) and the abolition of slavery; sim-
ilar plots among slaves in Louisiana (1795) and the Colombian port of Cartagena
(1799) were uncovered and disarmed by authorities shortly before coming to
fruition.89 Revolutionary conspiracies by whites and free blacks in Buenos Aires
(1795), Caracas (1797), and Bahia (1798) were similarly foiled. There was no signif-
icant slave participation in these last three incidents, but since the goals of the
plotters included the abolition of slavery, had the conspiracies materialized they
would doubtless have ignited slave uprisings in those cities as well.
Probably the most important cause of increased slave rebelliousness was the
growing number of young male Africans coming into the region. Many of these
young men were veterans of African wars triggered by the slave trade, and they
arrived in the New World with a volatile mixture of military experience and im-
mense anger and unhappiness about their new situation. The result was a sharp
rise in rebelliousness and in slave flight to runaway communities (quilombos or
mocambos in Brazil; palenques or cumbes in Spanish America).90 Such settle-
ments had first appeared in Spanish America early in the colonial period. Ex-
tended, multiyear guerrilla wars were fought between Spanish forces and cimar-
rones (the Spanish word for cattle that had escaped from their owners and
roamed “wild” was applied to slave runaways as well) in Santo Domingo during
the 1530s and 1540s; in Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador during the 1550s; and in
Colombia and Mexico during the early 1600s. While most of the runaway settle-
ments were eventually defeated and destroyed, a number—San Basilio in
Colombia, Nirgua in Venezuela, San Lorenzo and Cujila in Mexico, the settle-
ments in the Esmeraldas region of Ecuador—succeeded in fighting Spanish
forces to a draw and negotiating peace treaties that granted them charters as self-
governing municipalities.91
Runaways were even more of a challenge to royal authorities in Brazil. As early
as 1597 a Portuguese observer in Bahia noted that “the colonists’ major enemies
are the insurrectionary Guinea Negroes, who live in the mountains, coming
down to carry out their raids.” By 1602 runaways from the sugar plantations of
Bahia and Pernambuco had joined together to form the famous quilombo of Pal-
mares, a federation of West African-style villages in the mountains of Alagoas. By
mid-century these villages housed between 10,000 and 15,000 inhabitants. In the
1670s and 1680s, the Portuguese launched a series of military expeditions against
them, all of which failed. Not until the 1690s, almost a century after their founda-
tion, were the villages finally overrun and their inhabitants recaptured. All of
1800 39
Brazil joined in acknowledging Palmares’s defeat as the epochal event that it was.
While slaveholders celebrated with parades, masses, and other public festivities,
slaves and their descendants preserved memories of the quilombo and its heroic
last monarch, Zumbi, through folk tales, songs, and community festivals. Yet the
destruction of Palmares did not mark the complete end of the quilombo. As was
almost always the case with runaway communities, handfuls of survivors man-
aged to escape the Portuguese forces and establish new encampments near the
sites of Palmares’s villages. Others made their way north to create new settlements
in Paraíba that survived until the 1730s.92
During the 1700s the center of Brazil’s economy, and thus of Brazilian slavery,
shifted from the sugar zones of the northeast to the gold-mining region of Minas
Gerais. As slaves poured into the mining zones, quilombos proliferated to such a
degree that local slave owners began to worry that runaways might form a new
Palmares. As it turned out, none of the region’s quilombos attained the size or
longevity of Palmares: the largest, the Quilombo de Ambrósio, housed between
600 and 1,000 people and was destroyed in 1746. But even as quilombos were
eliminated, more sprang up to replace them. Royal documents mention 160 run-
away settlements in Minas over the course of the century. Hundreds more doubt-
less existed that never found their way into official records.93
In Minas as elsewhere in Latin America, most runaway settlements were small
and short-lived. Any that grew larger and more established soon attracted the at-
tention of local authorities. This was the case, for example, with Buraco de Tatu
(Armadillo’s Hole), a quilombo founded in 1743 outside the city of Salvador. As
the settlement grew to 32 houses, 65 adults, and an unrecorded number of chil-
dren, royal authorities became concerned about its attacks on local farmers and
travelers (many of them free blacks); in 1763 the governor ordered its destruction.
The Peruvian palenque of Huachipa suffered a similar fate in 1713 after its mem-
bers became excessively bold in their attacks on local haciendas. When the
palenque was finally overrun, Spanish forces found the hides of over 200 cattle
stolen from local ranchers, the meat from which the palenqueros had used to buy
food, alcohol, and other goods.94
Still, royal forces could not be everywhere, and as runaway encampments were
destroyed in one place, they multiplied elsewhere, in the words of a Brazilian offi-
cial, like the heads of the Hydra.95 This was even more the case during the late
1700s and early 1800s, as hundreds of thousands of Africans poured into Spanish
America and Brazil. Historian Jaime Jaramillo Uribe describes a veritable “move-
ment of palenques” in Colombia during the 1770s and 1780s.96 The governor of
Venezuela reported in 1785 that newly arrived Africans were escaping into the
mountains along the coast in greater numbers than ever before. There they joined
cimarrón communities that launched periodic attacks on local towns and planta-
tions. Those attacks peaked in intensity in the early 1770s and again in the 1790s.
Spanish forces struck back with an anti-palenque campaign in 1794–95 that cap-
tured over 500 runaways, many of whom had been at liberty for periods of two
years or more.97 In 1796, authorities in Cuba drew up a plan for combating run-
aways and palenques that remained in effect through the 1840s. It called for sys-
tematic patrolling of the countryside and the hiring of professional slave hunters
(rancheadores) who tracked runaways through the forests and mountains in
hopes of finding their encampments.98 And in Brazil the monarchy responded to
the increased incidence of slave flight by ordering in 1799 a colony-wide assault
on the quilombos and the “extinction of such settlements, leaving not the slight-
est trace.”99
As Latin American slavery grew in size during the late 1700s, so did the scope
and intensity of slave resistance. This resistance took various forms, ranging from
individual and collective negotiations with masters; to appeals to royal authori-
ties and the courts; to rebellion, violence, and flight. As of 1800 it was not appar-
ent to any of the participants in these events that slave resistance had undermined
slavery or the plantation economy in even the slightest degree. But in fact it had,
as the events of the 1810s would soon make clear. Slaves had repeatedly demon-
strated their ability to take advantage of any opening or opportunity created by
conflict among competing political forces. As a result, when royal administrators
and Creole elites confronted the gathering political and military crisis of the
1810s, it would prove impossible for them to ignore the slave population and its
demands.
Freedom
In addition to weakening the institution of slavery from within, slave resistance
had transformed slavery, and colonial society, in another way as well: by creating
free black and brown populations that by 1800, in most of Afro-Latin America,
outnumbered the slaves. While free blacks and mulattoes constituted 5 percent of
the population or less in the major French and English colonies,100 in Brazil and
much of Spanish America they were 20 to 30 percent of the population or more
(table 1.1). In Panama they were a majority of the population, in Venezuela a near
majority, and in Puerto Rico 40 percent. Only in Brazil and Cuba, the two major
centers of Latin American plantation agriculture during this period, was the slave
population larger than that of free blacks and mulattoes. This was not the result
of greater rates of natural increase among the slaves but of massive imports of
Africans to those two colonies, which further depressed the slave population’s al-
ready low rates of reproduction. Free blacks and mulattoes, by contrast, were
“probably the most rapidly growing racial element” in Brazil.101
Free black populations were larger in Spanish and Portuguese America than in
English or French America for the simple reason that slaves were freed at higher
1800 41
table 1.1. Population (total number above, percent below) of Afro-Latin America,
ca. 1800
Afro-Latin Americans
Country Free Slaves Subtotal Whites Mestizos Indians Total
Brazil 587,000 718,000 1,305,000 576,000 61,000 1,942,000

30 37 67 30 3 100
Mexico 625,000 10,000 635,000 1,107,000 704,000 3,676,000 6,122,000
10 >1 10 18 12 60 100
Venezuela 440,000 112,000 552,000 185,000 161,000 898,000
49 12 61 21 18 100
Cuba 114,000 212,000 326,000 274,000 600,000
19 35 54 46 100
Colombia 245,000 61,000 306,000 203,000 122,000 156,000 787,000
31 8 39 26 16 20 100
Puerto Rico 65,000 25,000 90,000 72,000 162,000
40 15 56 44 100
Peru 41,000 40,000 81,000 136,000 244,000 771,000 1,232,000
3 3 6 11 20 63 100
Argentina 69,000 70,000 6,000 42,000 187,000
37 37 3 23 100
Santo Domingo 38,000 30,000 68,000 35,000 103,000
37 29 66 34 100
Panama 37,000 4,000 41,000 9,000 12,000 62,000
60 6 66 15 19 100
Ecuador 28,000 5,000 33,000 108,000 288,000 429,000
7 1 8 25 67 100
Chile 31,000 281,000 34,000 37,000 383,000
8 73 9 10 100
Paraguay 7,000 4,000 11,000 56,000 30,000 97,000
7 4 11 58 31 100
Costa Rica 9,000 5,000 30,000 11,000 55,000
16 9 55 20 100
Uruguay 7,000 23,000 30,000
23 77 100
Note: Brazil totals incomplete; two captaincies (Mato Grosso and Pará) did not provide racial data.
Ecuador figures show whites and mestizos combined. Colombia figures in italics indicate author’s
estimate. Empty cells represent “no data.”
Sources: See Appendix.
rates in Latin America than in the rest of the hemisphere. At first glance those
rates do not appear particularly generous: 1.2 to 1.3 percent per year (i.e., of every
1,000 slaves, 12 or 13 were freed each year) in the cities of Buenos Aires and Lima
in the early 1800s, and “about 1 percent” per year in Bahia for the colonial period
as a whole.102 But when compounded annually over the 300-year colonial period,
and further increased by the descendants of those freedmen and women, now
born in freedom rather than slavery, they provided the basis for the largest free
black populations in the New World.
Grants of manumission, though often portrayed by masters as gifts and acts of
generosity to their slaves, were in fact the product, like so much else in slave life, of
negotiations between master and slave.103 Manumission may be seen, in fact, as
the ultimate expression of those negotiations, since it was the greatest concession
that slaves could wrest from their owners. Such a concession was rarely made
spontaneously and of the master’s own volition. Rather, virtually every manumis-
sion was the outcome of slaves’ long-term efforts, often extending over many
years, to pressure and persuade their owners to grant them freedom.
Certain categories of slaves had clear advantages in conducting those negotia-
tions, and thus won their freedom more frequently than others. Urban slaves ob-
tained freedom at higher rates than rural slaves; women at higher rates than men;
native-born Creoles at higher rates than Africans; and racially mixed mulattoes at
higher rates than people of unmixed African ancestry.
Urban slaves were more likely than rural slaves to obtain freedom because of
their greater opportunities to earn cash wages, which could then be used to buy
freedom. Slaves in the countryside were not completely deprived of such opportu-
nities: one does encounter cases of rural slaves attempting to buy their freedom
with money earned from selling crops or animals they had raised.104 But in com-
parison to their plantation counterparts, slaves in cities had access to a much more
active and varied labor market, in which employers regularly hired slaves for
short- or long-term jobs. Many slaves lived by hiring themselves out in this way,
paying their owners a set daily fee established by law and then keeping the rest of
their earnings for themselves. Even slaves who generally worked without pay, such
as domestic servants, could work for money on Sundays and other holidays. As a
result, slaves in towns and cities were in a better position to accumulate the cash
savings required to buy freedom. And because of their greater (in comparison to
plantation slaves) proximity to, and contact with, their owners, they were also bet-
ter positioned to conduct the negotiations and bargaining that led to freedom.
Women obtained freedom more frequently than men for two reasons. The
first was the manumission strategies followed by slave families. Whether chil-
dren were born slave or free was determined by the mother’s legal status, not by
the father’s. Buying freedom for a woman or girl therefore guaranteed freedom
for any future offspring she might have. In negotiating for the freedom of family
members, slave families showed a marked preference for manumitting women,
especially when their freedom could be purchased at somewhat lower prices
than for men.
A second reason for the higher frequency of female manumissions was the fact
of sexual relations between male masters and female slaves. Such liaisons were al-
1800 43
most never stated frankly in the manumission documents, but occasionally they
were hinted at, and sometimes they emerged openly, as in the previously men-
tioned case in which Puerto Rican slave María Balbina sought to prevent her mas-
ter from selling her away from her children. In her complaint, Balbina stated that
her owner was the father of the children and that prior to each birth he had prom-
ised her eventual freedom. He never made good on this promise and was now
seeking to sell her to a new owner, which finally drove her to the authorities.105 In
an 1811 case against her master, who had been exploiting her sexually since she was
14 years old, Lima slave María Isabel Rioja explained that “I was forced to yield for
two reasons: the first because of the master’s status; the second because . . . it being
certain that the greater the interest of one’s master, the better his treatment for us
women.”106 Submission to the master’s desire did not produce freedom in either
of these cases, but in others it did.107
Sexual relations between slaves and masters also help explain mulattoes’
greater success, as compared to slaves of unmixed African ancestry, in winning
manumission. Racially mixed slaves were not infrequently the children of their
owners, or of members of the owners’ families. We cannot say for certain what
proportion of such slaves were freed, but clearly many were.108
Even in cases in which there was no blood relation between owner and slave,
mulattoes, almost all of whom were American-born, benefited from the relative
advantages accruing to Creole slaves. Slaves born in the Americas learned from
birth how colonial society functioned and how best to maneuver through that so-
ciety in pursuit of freedom. Speaking their master’s language, growing up in their
masters’ culture, and knowing their masters’ laws, American-born slaves were far
better equipped than newly arrived Africans, many of whom would never even
learn to speak Spanish or Portuguese, to cultivate ties with their owners and con-
duct the negotiations required to obtain freedom.
Thus while slaves during this period were more likely to be Africans than Afro-
Latin Americans, more likely to be black than racially mixed, and more likely to
be male than female, the free colored population was the reverse: more American
than African, more racially mixed than black, and with equal numbers of makes
and females. And while the slave population suffered constant demographic de-
cline, free black and mulatto populations enjoyed rapid rates of increase. This was
in part a function of the large numbers of females among the free population, as
opposed to their scarcity among the slaves. But it was equally, or even more so, a
function of freedom, which gave mothers and families greater opportunities to
provide for their offspring. Free black mothers were less likely to face excessive
labor demands, and more likely to be able to call on family networks of support
or to earn cash incomes on their own, than were slave mothers. As a result, free
black children had better chances of surviving the crucial first year of life, and
eventually reaching adulthood, than did slave children.
By 1800, then, free blacks and mulattoes outnumbered slaves in every part of
Latin America except for Brazil and Cuba. Assertions of harmonious and egali-
tarian race relations in twentieth-century Latin America often trace that egali-
tarianism back to the prominence of free blacks and mulattoes in colonial soci-
ety and to their greater ability (as compared to their counterparts in the English
or French colonies) to make their way upward in that society. But this was far
from the original intent of Spanish and Portuguese policymakers. Rather, colo-
nial administrators sought to establish, by law, a racially stratified society that
would reserve for whites all opportunities for social and economic advancement
and that would relegate nonwhites to inferior legal and social status. Precedents
for such a system existed in the Spanish and Portuguese laws governing people of
“unclean blood”—Arabs, Jews, gypsies, and Africans—in the Old World. During
the 1600s, this body of racial law, the first of its kind in the modern West, was ex-
tended to the New World and systematized into the régimen de castas, a Caste
Regime governing free blacks and mulattoes, Indians, mestizos, and other
racially mixed peoples.109
Under the dictates of the Caste Regime, only whites enjoyed the full status of
king’s subject. Free blacks and mulattoes, by contrast, suffered numerous restric-
tions and disabilities. They were forbidden to wear expensive clothing or jewelry,
or to enter non-manual professions such as the church, the law, or the universi-
ties. In some localities their access to the more prestigious manual professions,
such as gold or silversmithing, was also restricted. Regarded as potential threats to
public order, they were forbidden to carry guns or swords and were required to
have white patrons who would vouch for their whereabouts and good behavior.
And Spanish law subjected them, like the Indians (but unlike whites and mesti-
zos), to a racially defined head tax, the tribute, that was not just a financial burden
but an unequivocal sign of their racial and legal inferiority.
The caste laws created an inferior, subordinate social space for free blacks and
mulattoes and then sought to confine them to that space. In conjunction with the
limited opportunities for advancement offered by the colonial economies, the
laws were indeed successful in restricting most nonwhites to the lower levels of
colonial society. In the cities, ex-slave artisans, vendors, servants, and laborers
continued to work at those trades after winning freedom. Other “free slaves,” as
they were called in Brazil, opted to remain in the countryside, either carving out
smallholdings in unsettled frontier areas or working as agregados (literally, ad-
juncts) of plantations and haciendas, farming small plots of land and doing occa-
sional wage labor on the estates.
In carrying out these manual occupations, free blacks inevitably competed
with slaves doing the same sorts of work. The results were lower wages for the
free laborers and a strong association in the public mind among three pro-
foundly degrading social conditions: nonwhite racial status, unfree legal status,
1800 45
and manual labor. In societies that upheld whiteness and freedom from manual
labor as definitions of high social standing, these three conditions—blackness,
liability to slavery, and working with one’s hands—represented the epitome of
social degradation. And these images and attitudes were confirmed by the caste
laws, which explicitly stated the connection between nonwhite racial status and
manual labor. Thus there was “nothing more ignominious than being a black or
descended from them,” noted a Spanish cleric describing racial conditions in
Puerto Rico in the 1780s. A Portuguese official in Brazil at the same time con-
curred. Blacks and mulattoes, he observed, formed “the bottom-most class of
people in this land.”110
In confining nonwhites to “vile occupations,” however, the caste laws had the
unanticipated consequence of reserving for them some narrow but significant av-
enues of upward mobility. Despite the presence of slaves in the skilled crafts, and
the crafts’ correspondingly low social status, talented artisans were able to earn
incomes sufficient to maintain their families, with small surpluses left over for
moneylending, investment in real estate, the expansion of their businesses (often
by purchasing slaves and training them as artisans), educating and arranging ad-
vantageous marriages for their children, or other productive uses. As a result, “by
the eighteenth century, and perhaps before, veritable dynasties of free colored ar-
tisans had developed in Spanish America” and Brazil.111
Free blacks and mulattoes also pursued opportunities in retail commerce, an
area of the economy that, unlike most of the trades, was open to female initiative
as well as male. While most urban free black women held low-paying jobs in do-
mestic service or as laundresses, many worked as street vendors or stall keepers in
the urban markets, selling prepared foods, lace, ribbons, combs, brushes, and in-
numerable other products. Almost all of these businesses remained small, but oc-
casionally black women and men of unusual entrepreneurial ability, and with ac-
cess to sources of capital, experienced the same levels of success as the master
artisans, expanding their enterprises into shops, restaurants, taverns, and inns.
These successful black and mulatto businesspeople were not numerous, but when
added to the larger numbers of artisans, they constituted a small but visible elite
within the free black and mulatto population.112
Barred by the caste laws from white social and cultural institutions, these up-
wardly mobile nonwhites constructed their own parallel institutions, beginning
with Catholic religious brotherhoods, or cofradías. Perhaps the most important
form of community organization in Spain and Portugal, the brotherhoods
played a similarly prominent role in colonial society. In accord with the dictates
of the Caste Regime, they were racially segregated (though occasional exceptions
were made for white members of black brotherhoods). Their primary responsi-
bility was to provide for the building and maintenance of churches and the sup-
port of masses, festivals, and other religious activities. The lavishness of those
festivities, and the buildings in which they took place, reflected directly on the
social and economic standing of the members, who sought to provide as high a
degree of luxury as possible. At the same time, the brotherhoods sponsored a va-
riety of philanthropic activities, including death and disability benefits for
members and their families, and manumission funds to buy the freedom of in-
dividual slaves.113
Another indicator of high standing in the free black community was service as
an officer in the colonial militia. The Anglo-French wars of the late 1700s, and the
British invasions of Cuba in 1762, Puerto Rico in 1797, and Argentina in 1806–7,
led both Spain and Portugal to build up their militia establishments during the
final decades of the century. Blacks and mulattoes volunteered for militia service
at rates higher than whites, and in 1778 a Spanish decree confirmed the right of
nonwhites to purchase militia commissions up to the rank of captain. By 1800
thousands of free blacks and mulattoes were serving in the Spanish militia, ac-
counting for 35 to 40 percent of recruits in Mexico and Venezuela, and over 50
percent in Colombia and Cuba.114
Men of color volunteered for military service in part for material reasons, in-
cluding pension rights, exemption from tribute payments, and access to military
courts, which tended to be more lenient than civilian courts with soldiers and of-
ficers accused of crimes. These benefits were probably less important, though,
than the opportunity to don the king’s uniform and become part of the official
colonial “establishment.” Compared to the civilian bureaucracy, the church, and
the universities, all of which barred nonwhites, the military was the colonial insti-
tution most open to black initiative and advancement. And in societies with
strong traditions of military service and conquest, acquiring officer rank was one
of the most tangible expressions of black achievement. Black service in the militia
also established a precedent that would take on enormous importance in the wars
of independence in the 1810s and the subsequent civil wars that convulsed most of
Spanish America during the first half of the 1800s. Military service thus simulta-
neously expressed the rise of an upwardly mobile free black class and forecast a
future of black involvement in the political struggles of nineteenth-century na-
tion-building.115
A final core institution of the free black elite was the family. In both Spanish
America and Brazil, white and free black society alike was structured around the
fundamental building block of the extended family. No members of colonial so-
ciety could hope to make their way upward without support and assistance from
family networks, and family ties and connections were even more necessary for
members of a small, disadvantaged group battling for a place in that society. Even
more important than cementing one’s individual social and economic position
was cementing the position of the family, which was achieved by securing the ed-
ucation, advantageous marriage, and inheritances of one’s children.
1800 47
Members of the black elite tended to marry into each other’s families or, alter-
natively, into middle- or lower-status white families. The latter alternative offered
no economic advantages, but, as we have seen, upward mobility in the colonial
world did not depend exclusively on economic achievement. Racial barriers to
such mobility had to be overcome as well, and “improving the race” (a phrase
used in Cuba and elsewhere) by marrying whites and producing lighter-colored
descendants was one way to do so.116
Especially in Spanish America, political and economic conditions during the
last decades of the 1700s strongly favored the expansion and further advancement
of the Afro-Latin American middle class. The economic growth stimulated by the
Bourbon reforms opened greater opportunities for free black artisans and busi-
nesspeople, and the political reforms decreed by the Bourbons also tended to
favor free black advancement. The goal of these reforms was to reduce the politi-
cal power of the native-born Creole elites, who, despite Spanish laws to the con-
trary, had thoroughly infiltrated the colonial administration through means both
legal (by purchasing positions in the bureaucracy) and illegal (bribery and influ-
ence peddling). Bourbon policy sought to eliminate Creole influence in colonial
government by reducing the number of American-born appointees to official po-
sitions and by cracking down on corruption. These efforts were only partially
successful, but they provoked strong reaction among colonial elites, who increas-
ingly came to see Spain as their enemy rather than their protector.117
As the same time that Spain sought to curtail the power of the Creoles, it was
slowly and gingerly beginning to acknowledge and respond to the aspirations of
the free castes. During the 1600s and early 1700s, the Crown had generally sup-
ported and enforced efforts by white artisans and businessmen to maintain racial
barriers in commerce and the trades.118 During the second half of the 1700s, how-
ever, it began to change position on these issues. In 1765 the Crown abolished
racial restrictions that had excluded free blacks and mulattoes from taking part in
retail commerce in Panama. In 1799 its officials struck down efforts by Spanish
shoemakers in Buenos Aires to establish racially segregated training programs for
apprentices and to bar Afro-Argentines from serving as officers in the guild.119
And in 1795 the monarchy issued the gracias al sacar decree, a set of legal proce-
dures by which nonwhites could in effect be “pardoned” from their “unclean”
racial status by purchasing or requesting from the Crown the privileges of white-
ness. The decree established a system of fees by which nonwhites could purchase
a legal waiver of their racial status, thus buying access to professional and educa-
tional opportunities hitherto reserved only for whites.120
Each of these reforms and concessions took place in response to pressure from
below. Like the slave population, but from a much stronger social and economic
position, a growing and increasingly assertive black middle class directed a steady
stream of lawsuits, petitions, and appeals to the Crown and its officials, seeking to
overturn or circumvent the racial laws of the Caste Regime.121 At a moment when
the Crown faced enemies and opponents both internal (local white elites) and ex-
ternal (England and France), it could not afford to alienate a rising social group
on which it depended for military and political support.
A final factor favoring the ascension of the black middle class was the com-
plexity of the racial laws and the immense difficulty of enforcing them. This was
most clearly the case in Mexico, where by the end of the 1700s the caste laws were
“all but obsolete as a mechanism of status definition,” replaced by class-based cat-
egories of wealth and property.122 After multiple generations of race mixture,
most people’s ancestry was simply impossible to ascertain. Trial records from
Mexico City show witnesses repeatedly disagreeing on the racial status of the in-
dividuals being tried. A court attorney in 1770 angrily noted
the liberty with which the plebs have been allowed to choose the [racial]
class they prefer. . . . They very often join the one or the other as it suits them
or as they need to. . . . A Mulatto, for instance, whose color helps him some-
what to hide in another caste says, according to his whims, that he is Indian
to enjoy the privileges as such and pay less tribute . . . or, more frequently,
that he is Spaniard, Castizo or Mestizo, and then he does not pay any [trib-
ute] at all.123
At the beginning of the colonial period, caste identities had been based on the
three racial groups associated with their different continents of origin: New
World Amerindians, African blacks, and European whites. In the very first colo-
nial generation, however, race mixture created three new miscegenated groups:
Afro-European mulattoes, Indo-European mestizos, and Afro-Indian zambos.
And with each subsequent generation, both the possibility and the reality of ever
more complex mixtures grew exponentially. By the eighteenth century, Spanish
officials recognized no fewer than 16 permutations of race mixture among
Africans, Europeans, and Indians. Some compiled even more refined lists of up to
52 such mixtures; but after twelve generations or more of race mixture, even these
represented only an infinitesimal fraction of the possible combinations.124
In the face of such multiplying complexity, racial identities became increas-
ingly difficult to pin down with any degree of certainty. The easy corruption of
the parish priests who maintained the church’s birth, marriage, and death reg-
istries further undermined the system, as the Crown noted in a 1778 decree on in-
terracial marriage. Racially mixed nonwhites,“in order to conceal their defect, at-
tempt to register their baptisms in the books for Spaniards and erase from them
by reprehensible means the information on their ancestry, later justifying with
ease and the aid of witnesses that they are held to be white.”125 One sees clear ev-
idence of this practice in the birth, death, marriage, and census records of black
and mulatto militia officers in Buenos Aires, where disparities among the same
1800 49
individual’s racial identification in different documents were commonplace. The

evidence was also clear in two censuses of nonwhite artisans in the same city, one
taken in 1792 and the other in 1796: of those individuals who appeared in both
documents, the number whose racial labels were different in the two counts was
greater than the number whose racial labels were the same.126
In its 1778 decree, the Crown had argued that these alterations in racial status
were a pernicious practice that “causes affliction to those vassals who are truly
white and who cannot avoid marriages taking place between their families and
those who being mixed pretend the contrary.”Yet enforcing the accuracy of racial
labels, responded a Cuban complainant whose own whiteness had been called
into question, would materially damage those who had struggled so hard to make
their way upward in life: “Nature herself teaches that the one who has luckily and
successfully begun to get out of the swamp should be protected and allowed to
proceed until he is high and dry and clean.” And in the absence of any royal meas-
ures to combat alterations of racial identity, priests continued to accommodate
those with the money or social leverage to make a case for their whiteness. The
Archbishop of Mexico informed the Crown in 1815 that, when entering racial in-
formation in the registries, priests “rely on the word of the parties. They do not
demand proofs, nor do they dispute what they are told.”127
The metaphor of the low, muddy swamp of blackness, and the high, dry, clean
uplands of whiteness, eloquently expresses the feelings of “those undefined and
so common and awkward castes, who neither want to mix with the pardos whom
they scorn nor are accepted by the whites, by whom they themselves are disdained
in turn.”128 As the royal attorney in Mexico had so exasperatedly noted, the inde-
terminacy of racial identities opened abundant opportunities for those “awkward
castes” to try to escape their position in the colonial racial hierarchy; and now
Spanish policy, both economic and political, had moved to further expand those
opportunities. The Crown’s promotion of blacks and mulattoes in the militia
(1778), its new slave codes (1784, 1789), and its granting of racial dispensations to
nonwhites (1795) all seemed to signal that Spain was seeking to neutralize Creole
power by constructing new alliances with previously excluded groups. White
elites responded with anger, shock, and incredulity to these changes. “Only the
citizens and natives of America know from birth, or from their many years of res-
idence here, the immense distance that separates the Whites and the Browns,”
protested the Caracas town council in 1795: “the eminence and superiority of the
former, the lowliness and subjection of the latter.” If gracias al sacar were imple-
mented, “one can only expect movements that will scandalize and subvert the
order established by the wise Laws that have governed us up until now.”129
Free blacks and mulattoes, needless to say, had a different view of those laws.
Conceding that many nonwhites did indeed suffer from the vices and moral fail-
ings alleged by the Creoles, Caracas’s Gremio de Pardos (Pardo Guild) neatly
turned the tables by attributing those failings to the caste laws themselves, and to
the “beaten down, despised state” to which those laws confined free people of
color. Honor and integrity arise not in response to abuse, the guild argued in a
1797 petition to the king, but rather in response to rewards, encouragement, and
the possibility of advancement—all opportunities denied them by the caste laws.
“Grant us those conditions, and you will see us advance in the same manner as
the whites, and the total disappearance of the bad qualities that they attribute to
us, which are the natural consequence of our oppression and misery.”130
But free black advancement was exactly what the Creoles feared. If pardos
were granted the privileges formerly accorded only to whites,“[university] classes
will be full of Mulatto students; they will seek to enter the Seminary; they will buy
and hold positions on the city council; they will serve as royal officials, and in the
Treasury; they will take charge of all public and private business. . . . They will be-
come unbearable in their insolence, and very soon they will want to dominate
those who have hitherto been their lords.”131
When German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt traveled through Spanish
America in the first decade of the 1800s, he found the ideology and practice of
white supremacy very much intact: “In the colonies, the color of the skin is the
real badge of nobility. In Mexico, as well as Peru, at Caracas as in the island of
Cuba, . . . every white man is a gentleman.”132 But increased upward mobility
among nonwhites was stretching the limits of the Caste Regime and subjecting
the laws to ever-greater pressure. As the Caracas councilors so clearly recog-
nized, to treat pardos as whites was to call into question the very meaning of
whiteness and white racial privilege. This had been the effect, whether intended
or not, of Spanish economic and racial policy in the final decades of the century.
The struggle over whiteness that had been joined at that time would continue
into the early 1800s and become a core issue of the independence wars that broke
out in 1810.
In Brazil as well, economic growth in the late 1700s generated greater opportu-
nities for free black advancement and some relaxation of the laws restricting that
advancement. Living in Pernambuco in the 1810s, Englishman Henry Koster
pointedly contrasted the status of free Afro-Brazilians to “the degraded state of
the people of colour in the British colonies. . . . In Brazil, even the trifling regula-
tions which exist against them remain unattended to. A mulatto enters into holy
orders or is appointed a magistrate, his papers stating him to be a white man, but
his appearance plainly denoting the contrary.”133 This movement by free Afro-
Brazilians into positions and offices supposedly barred to them by law took place
not because of visible shifts in state racial policy, as in Spanish America, but by a
quieter, more informal practice of not enforcing existing racial laws. Nor did such
advancement occur in a consistent way throughout Brazil. In Minas Gerais, the
end of the mining boom in the 1770s and 1780s was closely followed by the depar-
1800 51
ture of many of the slave owners and Portuguese immigrants who had come to
seek their fortune. This opened the way for free blacks and mulattoes to assume a
larger role in local commerce and agriculture, and even to take up positions on
town councils and as low-level royal officials. In the northeast and in Rio de
Janeiro, by contrast, the renewed growth of the sugar industry during the same
period strengthened the planter and merchant classes, who continued to enforce
racial laws and attitudes that guaranteed their own positions of privilege.134
In the absence of state policies openly favoring free blacks, elite fears in Brazil
remained focused where they had always been: not on upwardly mobile free
blacks, but on the slave and poor free black masses, whom elites viewed as a con-
stant threat to social and political stability in the colony. In the face of that threat,
elites looked to the Afro-Brazilian middle class as a potential ally and source of
support. And in fact, upwardly mobile blacks and mulattoes identified much
more closely with the masters of Brazilian society than with its slaves. But even
(or especially) for economically successful Afro-Brazilians, the racial exclusions
of the colonial order rankled deeply and, as in Spanish America, would become a
central issue in the political turbulence of the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s.
❂
By 1800 the societies of Afro-Latin America had been in existence for some 300
years, their histories inextricably tied to that of the Spanish and Portuguese em-
pires. The builders of those empires intended Africans to play an entirely subor-
dinate role in the construction of this New World, working and dying as slaves.
And indeed most Africans brought to the Americas suffered that fate. But as they
did so, they set in motion a chain of unintended and unforeseen consequences
that by 1800 had created a colonial world vastly different from that imagined by
its founders.
In most of Spanish America, and in large parts of Brazil, by the end of the colo-
nial period most people of African descent were not slaves, but free. Most had
been born free. Others, former slaves, had acquired their freedom through a com-
bination of hard work and negotiating with their owners. Those negotiations in
turn formed part of a larger process of bargaining between masters and slaves,
not just over the acquisition of freedom but over the basic conditions under
which slaves lived and worked. Most of the cards in those negotiations were held
by the masters. But occasionally slaves succeeded in winning measurable im-
provements in their situation. And in so doing, they defined a set of bargaining
points that would remain at the center of discussions between workers and em-
ployers following independence in the 1800s.
Meanwhile, free blacks and mulattoes were carving out a place for themselves
in colonial society that violated the colonizers’ original vision in almost every
way. In living, flesh-and-blood contradiction of racial laws prohibiting intermar-
riage and miscegenation, most Latin Americans of African descent were of Euro-
pean and/or Indian descent as well. Having defied the laws prohibiting race mix-
ture, free blacks and mulattoes went on to defy the laws that reserved upward so-
cial mobility for whites only. Like their slave forbears, through a combination of
negotiation and hard work Afro-Latin Americans succeeded in pushing their way
into the colonial middle class and even into the lower reaches of the supposedly
white elite.
These acts of black resistance and response directly undermined the racial
structures of Iberian colonialism. This was most obviously the case with the racial
laws of the Caste Regime, which by 1800 had become increasingly unenforceable.
At first glance slavery appears less affected by black resistance: by the late 1700s
and early 1800s it was expanding at a faster rate than ever before, with increased
imports of African slaves arriving in most of Latin America, and especially to
Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean. But as we have seen, by 1800 slaves had devel-
oped a broad repertoire of tactics to fight back against slavery, as well as an agenda
of issues over which they struggled with masters. These issues would continue to
define elite–nonelite bargaining in Afro-Latin America over the course of the
1800s. In the meantime, slavery’s turn-of-the-century expansion intensified the
stresses and tensions locked within its structures. More Africans coming into the
region meant more males, rising gender imbalances, and a rising spirit of rebel-
liousness. As runaways and rebellions increased in number, slave owners and
colonial governments did not hesitate to respond with force. Every slave uprising
was put down, and police and militias throughout the region stepped up their
campaigns against the quilombos and palenques. But in the 1810s and 1820s, when
colonial governments were no longer able, or willing, to defend slave owners
against their slaves, the accumulated impact of 300 years of slave resistance would
be felt with a vengeance.
❂ 2
“AN EXTERMINATING BOLT OF LIGHTNING”
The Wars for Freedom, 1810–1890
Beginning in 1775, a wave of revolution rolled through the Atlantic world. It

began in North America, with the American Revolution (1775–83), swept into Eu-
rope, in the form of the French Revolution (1789–99), and then back to the Amer-
icas, with the slave revolution in Haiti (1791–1804). Each of these world-historical
events was powerfully felt in Spanish and Portuguese America; each spoke to the
peoples of the region in different ways. The United States showed how a New
World society could throw off the shackles of colonial rule and construct a new
political system based on the principles of national sovereignty and liberal repub-
licanism. The revolution in France offered Latin Americans an object lesson in
how to overthrow an ancien régime based on absolutist monarchy. Creole elites
recoiled at its assault on aristocratic privilege, but it was precisely those assaults,
and the revolution’s invocation of democratic egalitarianism and the rights of
man, that made the French experience of such compelling interest to free blacks
and mulattoes and lower-class whites.
The Atlantic revolutions affected Latin America not just by the force of their
example but by their geopolitical impacts as well. Just as the American Revolution
indirectly triggered its French counterpart,1 so did the French Revolution indi-
rectly trigger the independence struggles in Latin America. In 1807–8 French
forces invaded and occupied the Iberian peninsula, overthrowing the Spanish
monarchy and driving the Portuguese court into exile in Rio de Janeiro. These
events immediately presented Spanish Americans with a pressing series of ques-
tions: Would they accept the French conquest of the mother country? Would they
reject French rule and remain loyal to the deposed Bourbon monarchy? Or would
they follow the example of the United States and strike for independence?
As Spanish Americans grappled with these questions, they paid greatest atten-
tion of all to the Haitian revolution. Closest to them geographically, Haiti was also
the society most directly comparable to those of Spanish and Portuguese Amer-
ica: a tropical plantation colony ruled by an absolutist Bourbon monarchy, based

on African slavery, and governed by caste laws modeled in large part on those of
Latin America. And of the three revolutions, its outcomes were by far the most
radical: not just independence, or the destruction of the ancien régime, but the
complete overturning of slavery, the destruction of the richest plantation econ-
omy in the world, the implanting of black and mulatto rule, and, not coinciden-
tally, the annihilation of the white population.2
Awareness of the Haitian experience was widely diffused throughout Latin
America, among elites, commoners, and slaves alike.3 That experience made only
too clear the explosive forces locked within the structure of societies based on
racially defined forced labor, and the enormous risks of trying to overthrow cen-
tral authority in such societies. The revolution had begun when the various ele-
ments of the colony’s free population—“big white” planter elites seeking greater
autonomy from France, “small white” artisans and workers seeking democratic
equality with the planters, and free blacks and mulattoes seeking racial equality
with the whites—took up arms against each other and went to war. The resulting
turmoil and disorder, and the breakdown of coercive controls on the island’s
sugar plantations, gave the slaves—90 percent of the total population of the
colony—the opportunity to rise up and go to war on their own behalf.4
For dominant classes throughout the hemisphere, the lessons to be drawn
from Haiti were obvious: wherever large populations of nonwhites lived under
conditions of forced labor, political revolution could all too easily become social
revolution. Elites in the richest mining and plantation economies were corre-
spondingly cautious in cutting their ties to Europe. Mexican and Peruvian elites,
who ruled over millions of Indians laboring in conditions of semi-servitude in
mines, workshops, and haciendas, remained loyal to Spain throughout the 1810s.
Planters in Cuba and Puerto Rico saw in their societies even clearer parallels to
Haiti. Both groups were importing thousands of African slaves in a bid to replace
Saint Domingue as the world’s leading sugar producer. Neither chose to risk their
investments by an ill-advised bid for independence; both remained loyal to Spain
into the second half of the 1800s.
Movements for Spanish American independence originated not in the core re-
gions of African and Indian forced labor but on the peripheries, where mestizos
outnumbered Indians and whites and free blacks and mulattoes outnumbered
slaves. In Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, Cartagena, and Cali, Creole
juntas seized power from Spanish officials in 1809 and 1810, taking the first steps
toward creating new nations.5 As they did so, they assumed that, in a recapitula-
tion of the North American experience, it would be the free population—whites
and, if necessary, free nonwhites—who would win independence. What they had
not foreseen was that the free population would prove just as internally divided in
Spanish America as in Haiti and that bitter civil wars would rage on in much of
THE WARS FOR FREEDOM, 1810–1890 55
the region for a decade or more. As in Haiti, these wars would provide Spanish
American slaves with opportunities to escape slavery and to fight for their eman-
cipation. Nowhere in the region did slaves represent the overwhelming majority
of the population as they had in Haiti, with the result that nowhere in the region
did the independence wars produce outcomes as uncompromisingly radical. But
throughout Spanish America (including, 60 years later, in Cuba and Puerto
Rico), the independence wars broke the back of colonial slavery, dealing the insti-
tution a fatal blow. And as in Haiti, that blow was struck by the slaves themselves.
In taking up arms to fight for their freedom, slaves not only won independence
for the societies in which they lived but also helped launch the first great wave of
social and political reform in Latin American history.
War and Abolition

For slaves throughout the Americas, national independence and chattel slavery
were mutually exclusive concepts. For them it was self-evident that nations that
had fought and suffered for freedom could not now deny that right to their slaves.
As a French visitor to Brazil observed in 1822, “liberty” is a word “that has much
more force in a country of slaves than anywhere else.”6 Thus when independence
came to Spanish America and Brazil, many slaves concluded that their own free-
dom could not be far behind. In 1818, as the Spanish viceroy in Peru awaited the
invasion of the colony by rebel forces massing in Chile, he informed his superiors
in Madrid that the local slave population was “openly decided for the rebels, from
whose hands they expect liberty.” When the victorious invaders declined to de-
clare immediate emancipation, slaves denounced the contradiction between na-
tional freedom and the continuation of slavery. “If our liberal constitutions have
any meaning at all,” argued the lawyer for Lima slave Juana Mónica Murga in
1826, “it is the freedom of every man to no longer be a slave.”7
In Brazil, where slavery had sunk especially deep roots, independence leaders
themselves cultivated the rhetorical connection between independence and
freedom, condemning colonial rule as a form of national enslavement. Thus
when colonial rule came to an end in 1822, so, presumed the slaves, would slav-
ery. In Minas Gerais, thousands of slaves gathered in the mining towns of Ouro
Preto and São João do Morro to await news of their liberation, as did smaller
groups in Espírito Santo. In the Bahian capital of Salvador, a French visitor re-
ported that “not only do the free and Creole Brazilians want political independ-
ence, but even the slaves, born in the country or imported twenty years ago,
claim to be Brazilian Creoles and talk of their rights to freedom.” When those
rights failed to materialize, slaves in the Bahian city of Cachoeira petitioned the
Portuguese Cortes (Parliament) in 1823 for their freedom. They may not have re-
alized that Portugal no longer held authority over Brazil; more likely they were
signaling their discontent with the new Brazilian government’s refusal to even
consider the question of abolition.8
Some Creole leaders acknowledged the contradiction between national inde-
pendence and the continuation of slavery. José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, one
of the architects of Brazilian independence, was an early exponent of emancipa-
tion, asking how a free people could condone anyone’s right “to steal another
man’s freedom and, even worse, to steal the freedom of his children and his chil-
dren’s children.” The two great Spanish American liberators, José de San Martín
and Simón Bolívar, initially perceived no conflict between independence and
slavery, but by the second half of the 1810s both men had reversed position. Bolí-
var dismissed as “madness [the idea] that a revolution for liberty should try to
maintain slavery,” and he and San Martín imposed programs of gradual emanci-
pation on the territories they conquered—in the case of San Martín, Chile and
Peru; in the case of Bolívar, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela—despite opposi-
tion from local slave owners.9
But the voices of anti-slavery, even when emanating from powerful individu-
als in positions of command, were few and far between. Other than the slave re-
bellions of the late colonial and early independence periods, nowhere in Latin
America during the early 1800s was there a significant organized movement ded-
icated to opposing slavery. Pro-slavery forces were far better organized than anti-
slavery, both through the kinship and business networks that permeated elite
classes and through elite civic and commercial associations. Planters and mer-
chants readily agreed that slavery was a lamentable, barbarous inheritance from
the colonial past, one that would eventually have to be overturned as the region
continued its march toward modernity. But even elites committed to independ-
ence insisted that current economic conditions—particularly the supposed lack
of alternative sources of labor—and the property rights of slave owners made
abolition impossible for the time being.
Despite this opposition, by 1825 almost every Spanish American country had
banned further imports of slaves from Africa and enacted programs of either
gradual or immediate emancipation (table 2.1). Slave owners had not weakened
in their opposition to such measures. Political pressure to maintain slavery con-
tinued in the decades after independence, making emancipation an extended
struggle that was not finally resolved until the 1850s and 1860s. Masters agreed to
free their slaves only reluctantly, resisting every step of the way. But slaves were
also skilled at resistance; and the turbulent conditions of the independence pe-
riod offered unprecedented opportunities for slaves to pursue freedom, through
both official and unofficial means.
War strengthened slaves’ bargaining position vis-à-vis their masters and the
state in three ways. First, as in Haiti, the turmoil that war brought in its wake
table 2.1. Abolition of the African slave trade and of slavery, 1810–1888
Slavery
Country Slave trade Free Womb law Final abolition
Dominican Republic 1822 — 1822

Chile 1811 1811 1823
Central America 1824 — 1824
Mexico 1824 — 1829
Uruguay 1825 (1838) 1825 1842
Ecuador 1821 1821 1851
Colombia 1821 1821 1852
Argentina 1813 (1838) 1813 1853
Peru 1821 1821 1854
Venezuela 1821 1821 1854
Bolivia 1840 1831 1861
Paraguay 1842 1842 1869
Puerto Rico 1820, 1835 (1842) 1870 1873
Cuba 1820, 1835 (1866) 1870 1886
Brazil 1830, 1850 (1852) 1871 1888
Note: Years refer to date slave trade and slavery were legally abolished. Dates in parentheses
indicate actual ending of the slave trade, if later than legal abolition. Spain signed treaties
with Great Britain in 1817 (effective 1820) and 1835 to abolish the slave trade to Cuba and
Puerto Rico. Brazil signed a similar treaty with Great Britain in 1826 (effective 1830) and for-
mally abolished the slave trade in 1850. The Dominican Republic, Central America, and Mex-
ico did not enact Free Womb laws.
Sources: Clementi, Abolición; Eltis, Economic Growth; King, “Latin-American Republics”;
Rout, African Experience.
greatly reduced owners’ control over their slaves, while increasing slaves’ oppor-
tunity to flee. Second, war gave thousands of male slaves the opportunity to ob-
tain freedom through military service. Finally, the price of slave participation in
the independence armies was the enactment throughout Spanish America of
programs of gradual emancipation.
Plantation slavery was predicated on the rigorous control and supervision of
slaves, both on the plantations (through overseers and guards) and off (through
police, militia, and hunters of escaped slaves). As fighting swept through the
plantation zones, those guardians of order were swept away, either caught up in
the violence or fleeing to escape it. The resulting lack of supervision opened op-
portunities for slaves to escape servitude, to redefine working conditions on the
plantations, or even to make war on their masters—all to a degree that had never
been possible before.
In Mexico hostilities began with the Hidalgo rebellion of 1810, a massive upris-
ing of Indian and mestizo miners and peasants who burned and looted their way
through the mining zones northwest of Mexico City before being defeated and
dispersed by royal troops. Following Hidalgo’s defeat, rebel leaders sought to keep
the insurrection alive by recruiting support among the plantation slaves of Vera-
cruz province on the Caribbean coast, one of the few regions in Mexico where
slaves formed a significant portion of the labor force. Circulating through the
countryside and informing the slaves of the insurrection’s call for the abolition of
slavery, the rebels persuaded hundreds of them to flee the plantations and join the
guerrillas. Slaves “dominated the ranks” of the rebellion in Veracruz, maintaining
a hit-and-run war for five years against local towns and plantations. In 1817, rebels
in the province finally bowed to superior Spanish force, accepting an amnesty
and laying down their arms. The amnesty included no provision for the freeing of
slave combatants, however. Concluding that if they gave themselves up they
would be re-enslaved and returned to their owners, slave rebels retreated into the
heavily forested hills and mountains and continued to prey on local plantations
and commerce. Even after Spain’s defeat and the achievement of Mexican inde-
pendence in 1821, they refused to come down from the mountains, still fearing re-
enslavement. Not until slavery was abolished in 1829 did these slave rebels finally
bring their war to an end.10
Fighting between rebels and royalists in Venezuela created similar opportuni-
ties for slaves to flee. Here the independence movement was led not by lower-
middle-class radicals, as in Mexico, but by wealthy planter elites who had no in-
tention of abolishing slavery. To the contrary: early in 1811, alarmed by the rising
number of slave runaways in the plantation zones, the rebel Congress created a
National Guard “for the apprehension and capture of fugitive slaves.” “Honest
and hardworking slaves need fear nothing from these measures,” the rebels de-
clared, but slaves in the Barlovento region east of Caracas clearly disagreed. Dur-
ing the late 1700s Barlovento had been the scene of frequent slave flight and insur-
rection.11 Now, as fighting between royalists and rebels swept the countryside,
thousands of slaves fled the plantations to join cumbes and guerrilla bands. These
smaller groups occasionally combined to form larger and more threatening
forces. In 1811 four thousand escaped slaves marched on Caracas but were turned
back by Creole troops. The following year, slaves seized the town of Curiepe and
attacked the port of La Guaira, again unsuccessfully.12
Slave runaways in Barlovento were actively encouraged by Spanish priests and
officials trying to undermine the rebel cause; Bolívar himself viewed the slave up-
risings as royalist in character. But in Venezuela as in Mexico, the slaves were

fighting “their own autonomous struggle, independent of Spaniards and creoles
alike.”13 It was Spain, after all, that had created and maintained slavery in the
colony; and though Spain was now offering freedom to individual slaves willing
to enlist in its armies, it had no intention of doing away with slavery as an institu-
tion. Nor did the Creoles, who offered freedom to slave enlistees but stopped
short of any broader plans for emancipation.14
Amid the turmoil of war, the slaves were forging their own emancipation. As
royalists and rebels battled back and forth through the coastal regions of
Venezuela, “plantation discipline collapsed and the recovery of runaways became
next to impossible.”15 This was the case in the Cartagena and Cauca regions of
Colombia as well, where plantation slaves fled to nearby runaway communities,
looting and pillaging the plantations as they left. Since most of the planters were
Creoles, Spanish commanders and officials initially encouraged such assaults.
When royal forces retook Cartagena in 1815, they then sought to reestablish order
in the countryside and to rein in the marauding slaves, but they were unable to do
so. By 1820 the plantation economy on Colombia’s Caribbean coast had been
largely destroyed, not to revive again until after midcentury.16
The effects of fighting were just as severe in the Cauca, where, as in Cartagena
and Barlovento, Spanish officers encouraged slaves to destroy their Creole mas-
ters’ property. When royalist forces were finally driven out of the region in 1817,
reported a local Creole official, “many of these slaves followed them; some re-
turned to their masters, and others remain at large in the forests . . . fearing the
punishment they deserve for the crimes they committed.”17
Long-established runaway communities in the Patía Valley southwest of
Popayán took advantage of the fighting to wreak vengeance on their former own-
ers. Founded in the 1600s and early 1700s by slaves fleeing from the sugar planta-
tions of the Cauca and the gold mines of neighboring Barbacoas, over time these
communities had been recognized by local Spanish officials as free black settle-
ments, in return for their acknowledgment of Spanish sovereignty. The Patianos
had thus negotiated an acceptable modus vivendi with the Crown while retaining
clear and bitter memories of their experiences as slaves. As a result, when war
broke out in 1809, the villagers promptly pledged their allegiance to Spain and
joined the Spanish forces as mounted guerrillas. That allegiance was further con-
firmed in 1811, when rebel troops invaded the valley and burned black settlements
to the ground. When Spanish forces counterattacked and briefly occupied the
Cauca five years later, their commanders gave the Patianos free rein to burn and
loot from one end of the valley to the other, visiting on their former masters the
same pain and destruction that those masters had once inflicted on them.18
In Uruguay, a complex multiparty war among Spanish forces, invading
armies from Argentina and Brazil, and local militias gave slaves similar opportu-
nities to declare war on their former owners and loot the estancias on which they
had formerly labored. Rebel leader José Artigas made a direct bid for slave, free
black, and poor white support by decreeing a general land reform in 1815 and
promising that under his regime “the most downtrodden shall be the most priv-
ileged.” A French visitor traveling through Uruguay during the war years re-
ported that “the rebel soldiers would enter the estancias and take whatever they
liked, mainly arms; they would kill the cattle and steal the horses. . . . Often a
black, a mulatto, [or] an Indian would appoint himself an officer and, together
with his band of followers, would rob the landowners.” As in Mexico, Colombia,
and Venezuela, the slaves “were fighting for their own freedom,” he noted.
Landowners fought back by allying with an invading Portuguese army from
Brazil that by 1820 had vanquished the rebels and restored order (and slavery) to
the countryside. As Artigas went down in defeat, his black troops formed the
loyal hard core of his forces and followed him into permanent exile in Paraguay,
where they settled in two Afro-Uruguayan towns outside Asunción that still exist
to the present.19
Choosing to remain loyal to Spain through the 1810s, Peruvian elites were
largely spared the ordeal of war until 1820, when rebel forces under José de San
Martín invaded from Chile. At this point, as elsewhere in Spanish America, slaves
fled the coastal haciendas to join the bands of guerrillas and bandits that soon
sprang up in the countryside. Fearing for their lives, hacendados and plantation
owners also fled their estates. In their absence, those slaves who remained behind
converted their living quarters into “liberated territory, in which slaves began to
exercise a certain measure of self-determination over their lives.” As civil violence
and banditry continued into the 1830s and 1840s, slaves on some estates attained a
state of “virtual self-government,” lamented one landowner in 1838, in which they
essentially ran and administered their owners’ holdings.20
Throughout Spanish America, the disorder and turmoil of the wars gave slaves
unprecedented opportunities for pursuing their own goals and interests. The
devastation of much of the plantation sector, the weakening and impoverishing
of the planters as a class, and the destruction of the Spanish state all combined to
greatly strengthen slaves’ bargaining power. Within this changing balance of
forces, however, slaves still remained slaves. More of them than ever before sought
freedom through flight; but that freedom remained precarious and uncertain,
subject to revocation at any time. More permanent and secure—though also
more difficult to obtain—was the freedom offered through a second opportunity
created by war: that of military service.
Every New World colony that won independence through warfare faced the
issue of whether or not to arm slaves. The risks of doing so were substantial: slave
soldiers could just as easily turn on their masters as on their masters’ enemies.
Slaves also would not place their lives in jeopardy without some promise of free-
dom, which made their services far more expensive, in purely financial terms,
than those of whites and free blacks. But as the wars ground on and free black and
white recruits became harder to find, Spain and the rebels both found themselves
turning to slave soldiers. Rebel governments in Argentina and Venezuela began
conscripting slaves in 1813; a year later Chile followed suit. Spain did not initially
resort to conscription but did offer freedom to those slaves who volunteered for
service. In 1821, having been defeated everywhere else in the continent, the Span-
ish government in Peru drafted 1,500 slaves in a last-ditch (and unsuccessful) ef-
fort to turn back San Martín’s invading army.21
Once the first flush of patriotic fervor wore off, conscription was not a popu-
lar measure with slave owners. Masters in Argentina and Chile flooded govern-
ment offices with appeals for exemptions. Many were caught trying to conceal
their slaves from recruiters, often by removing them from the city to rural hacien-
das.22 Slave owner resistance was even more intense in Colombia, Venezuela, and
Peru, where slaves formed the heart of the plantation (and in Colombia, the min-
ing) labor force. Colombian hacendados bitterly protested Bolívar’s 1820 draft de-
cree, provoking him to pose his oft-quoted question: “Is it right that only free
men die to free the slaves? Would it not be just for the slaves to win their rights on
the battlefield and diminish their dangerous number by this powerful and legiti-
mate means? In Venezuela we have seen the free population die and the slaves re-
main; I do not know if this is politic, but I do know that if in [Colombia] we do
not make use of the slaves, the same thing will happen again.”23
Slave owners were not convinced. Recruiting agents in the Cauca region re-
ported that they could not meet their quotas because hacendados were hiding
their slaves in nearby forests. In the neighboring province of Popayán, local au-
thorities rewrote the conscription decree, offering freedom to slave volunteers
but removing all mention of forced enlistment.24 In Peru, planters’ resistance to
slave conscription was so widespread that San Martín declared it a criminal of-
fense for owners to prevent their slaves from enlisting, punishable by the confis-
cation of all property for a first conviction and exile for a second. But after San
Martín left the country in 1823 and returned to Argentina, President de la Riva
Agüero bowed to the demands of slave owners, ending the recruitment of slaves
and returning to their masters even those who had volunteered.25
Owners’ opposition to the recruitment of slaves is quite clear; the attitudes of
the slaves themselves are more ambiguous. Some responded enthusiastically. In
Chile in 1811, well before the announcement of slave conscription, 300 slaves in
Santiago hired a lawyer to petition the government for the right to enlist and
threatened to rebel if they were not admitted into the army. In Peru in the early
1820s, slave mothers actively sought out rebel recruiting agents to enlist their sons
and make them free.26 On the other hand, there was also ample evidence of slave
reluctance to enter the armed forces. Rebel recruiting agents in the Cauca
reported that slaves joined their masters in trying to evade the draft. Recruiters in
Peru found that, while on some haciendas 15 or 20 slaves would step forward,
ready to sign up, on others only one or two were willing to enlist, the rest declar-
ing “that they could not forsake their owners,” one officer reported.27
Bolívar complained bitterly about the slaves’ refusal to serve, charging that
they “have lost even the desire to be free” and threatening them with capital pun-
ishment if they did not report for duty.28 But of course the slaves had not lost the
desire to be free. Rather, they were far from certain that military service repre-
sented the most likely way to obtain their freedom. Slave recruits did become lib-
ertos (freedmen) upon entering the army, but this was conditional upon success-
ful completion of their term of military service—five years in Argentina and
elsewhere, or even longer if they incurred disciplinary infractions or other pun-
ishments. Though comprehensive studies of slave losses during the wars remain
to be done, it is clear that many slaves died before completing their enlistments.
Of the 2,000 to 3,000 Argentine libertos who crossed the Andes into Chile with
San Martín in 1817, fewer than 150 returned with him in 1823, after six years of
campaigning through Chile, Peru, and Ecuador. In a different theater of opera-
tions, Argentine libertos suffered terrible losses during the early 1820s in Indian
wars in southern Buenos Aires province. During the winter of 1824, slave troops
fought in subfreezing temperatures without shoes or adequate rations. They re-
turned to the capital crippled by frostbite and gangrene, many of them having
lost toes, fingers, or parts of limbs. Well into the 1840s and 1850s, crippled black
veterans begging in the streets were a common sight in Buenos Aires—as in Lima,
Caracas, Cali, and other cities.29
Census data from Buenos Aires and Montevideo make clear the terrible cost
paid by those cities’ black populations in the wars. Between 1810 and 1827 the mas-
culinity index (number of males per 100 females) among the white population in
Buenos Aires declined from 103 to 90. Among the black population, the index
dropped by almost half, from 108 to 59, a catastrophic rate of loss. In Montevideo,
the masculinity index among slaves alone dropped from 119 in 1805 to 78 in 1819.30
Lack of comparable data from other countries makes it unclear whether their
black populations sustained comparable losses, but if slaves were being killed and
disabled at even half the rates observed in Argentina and Uruguay, the effects
would have been devastating.
Given these statistics, and the generally miserable conditions of life in the
army, what is surprising is not that slaves sought to avoid military service but that
so many agreed to serve. In Argentina, some 4,000 to 5,000 slaves joined the rebel
forces between 1813 and 1818; when San Martín invaded Chile in 1817, half or more
of his army was composed of liberto troops. In Colombia, some 5,000 slaves
joined Bolívar’s forces between 1819 and 1821. In Ecuador, an estimated one-third
of his recruits were slaves.31
figure 2.1. Infantry sergeant, Uru-

guay, 1860s. Credit: SODRE (Servicio
Oficial de Difusión Radio Televisión y
Espectáculos), Montevideo.
Given slave owners’ fierce desire to hold on to their slaves, merely responding
to a conscription decree required a conscious decision. The testimony of one
such liberto, Antonio Rodríguez of Montevideo, suggests some of the motives
for such a decision. Having served as a soldier in the rebel army, and then having
been imprisoned after refusing to pay his former master a portion of his daily
earnings as a farm worker, Rodríguez demanded to know how, “against all jus-
tice,” his former owner could seek “to enslave me again, when the Fatherland has
made me free and given me my rights.”32 Though Rodríguez credited “the Fa-
therland” with his freedom, in fact it was his own military service that had won
him that coveted good.
Fighting for their freedom, slaves played a crucially important role in win-
ning independence for Spanish South America, and in so doing they triggered
the programs of gradual emancipation enacted during those years. Under these
Free Womb laws, as they were called, children of slave mothers were born free, as
libertos or manumisos (manumitted ones). As minors, they were required to
serve their mothers’ masters, receiving wages for their work. But when they
reached the age of majority (between 18 and 21, depending on the country), they
became free citizens of the republic.
Free Womb laws were enacted either at the very beginning of the wars, as in
Chile (1811) and Argentina (1813), or at the very end, as in Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru, and Venezuela (all 1821) and Uruguay (1825). In each case they were closely
tied to the question of slave military service. While the earlier laws were a conces-
sion aimed at gaining slave support for the revolution, the later laws were a re-
ward for wartime service.33 Supporters of gradual emancipation preferred to
present it as the natural outcome of the liberal principles on which independence
had been based. But Brazil and the United States were both countercases that
proved it was possible to have national independence based on liberalism but
without emancipation. Furthermore, if liberal ideology was the force motivating
the Free Womb laws, why did that ideology stop short of its logical conclusion:
immediate and total emancipation?
The Free Womb laws were the tense and highly contested outcome of inde-
pendence wars directed (in large part) by masters but won (in large part) by
slaves, a compromise between the interests of these two groups. Under the new
laws, slave owners’ immediate interests were for the most part satisfied. Slaves re-
mained slaves, libertos born under the new laws had to wait 18 years or more to
claim their freedom, and their owners retained the labor of both groups. But
while slave owners reaped the immediate benefits of the compromise, gradual
emancipation, in conjunction with the abolition of the slave trade, spelled the de-
finitive demise of slavery. With no more African slaves being imported, and no
more American slaves being born, the end of slavery as an institution was now
clearly in sight.
As that end drew nearer, and particularly as libertos began to reach the age of
majority, slave owners launched a desperate series of delaying actions aimed at
extending black servitude as long as possible. The Free Womb laws had stipulated
that libertos serve their patrons until the ages of 18 to 21 (24 in the case of male
slaves in Peru). Between 1837 and 1842, as the first libertos began to cross that
threshold, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela all extended the age of majority for
libertos to 25. Peru went even further, decreeing in 1839 that libertos would not
reach adulthood and freedom until age 50.34 Peru also reopened its slave trade be-
tween 1843 and 1847, importing some 500 slaves from Colombia (with the ap-
proval of that country’s Congress). Argentina and Uruguay reopened their slave
trades as well, importing some 600 Africans to Uruguay, and several thousand to
Buenos Aires, during the early 1830s.35
But these delaying tactics could not prevent the inevitable final outcome,
which was further assured by slaves’ continuing efforts to escape from slavery.
Colonial laws guaranteeing slaves’ right to manumission remained in effect after
independence, and slaves continued to pursue freedom through self-purchase
and other arrangements. As during the colonial period, many of these strategies
focused on collective family efforts to free individual members. In Venezuela dur-
ing the 1820s and 1830s, “masters were amazed at the sacrifices a slave would en-
dure to collect enough money to free his wife so their children would be born free
of all servitude.”36 On the haciendas outside Lima, slave parents sought opportu-
nities to live and work in the city so that they could earn cash to buy their own or
their children’s freedom. Between 1840 and 1854 some 1,300 manumissions were
recorded in the province, most of them urban and most of them paid.37 And in
Colombia, when President Mosquera announced a new program in 1848 under
which the government would assist those slaves who had saved some portion of
the money required to buy their freedom, slaves poured into government offices,
“handing over their savings to buy their own freedom or that of their parents or
children,” reported an official in Barbacoas, “a situation that leads me to believe
that slavery will soon be extinct.”38
Manumission, freedom through military service, high rates of mortality
(both in the wars and in daily life), and the absence of any further slave births all
combined to greatly reduce the numbers of slaves in the years after independ-
ence. Venezuela’s slave population fell from 64,000 in 1810 to 40,000 in 1830 and
15,000 in 1850; Peru’s from 50,000 in 1820 to 20,000 in 1850; and Colombia’s from
70,000 at the end of the colonial period to 20,000 in 1850.39 But slavery could not
become extinct until governments made it so, through full emancipation. The
first Spanish American nations to take this step were Chile (1823), the Central
American Federation (1824), and Mexico (1829).40 In each of these countries,
however, the slave population numbered only a few thousand or less and was an
insignificant part of the local labor market. In countries where slaves were more
numerous, owners remained violently opposed to emancipation. Just as war had
initiated the process of abolition, war would complete it: specifically, the civil
wars that raged through much of Spanish America during the first 50 years after
independence.
In Venezuela, rebel forces had recruited slaves by promising freedom to those
who enlisted in their ranks. In the decades after independence, provincial mili-
tary caudillos and, in the 1840s and 1850s, the newly formed Liberal and Conserv-
ative Parties followed a similar strategy. Threatened or actual uprisings “seemed
to spur all governments to greater efforts on behalf of the slaves”; and in 1854,
after Conservatives accused the Liberal government of selling infant libertos into
slavery in Puerto Rico and called on the slaves to rise up in revolt, the Liberals de-
cided to cement slave support for their cause by decreeing final emancipation,
while retaining slave owner support by obligating the government to pay full
compensation for the freed slaves.41
In Peru liberal guerrilla leaders recruited heavily among runaway slaves. The
1850 election of conservative hacendado José Echenique to the presidency was
soon followed by a major rebellion of plantation slaves in the Chicama Valley.
Some 300 slaves briefly seized the town of Trujillo, demanding their freedom on
the grounds that their harsh working conditions violated the 1825 Slave Code (a
relatively progressive body of laws imposed on the country by Bolívar). When lib-
eral ex-president Ramón Castilla rose against Echenique in 1853, he appealed di-
rectly for black support by decreeing the final abolition of slavery. After his vic-
tory and installation in power the following year, he reaffirmed the decree (again,
as in Venezuela, with compensation for slave owners), bringing Peruvian slavery
to an end.42
In the Argentine civil wars as well, conservative Federalists and liberal Unitari-
ans (supporters of a centralized, “unitary” national government) battled for slave
and free black support. While the Unitarians denounced Federal dictator Juan
Manuel de Rosas’s continuation of slavery and his reopening of the slave trade,
Rosas assiduously courted the African “nations” (cultural and mutual aid societies
based on African ethnic identities), promoted free blacks and former slaves to po-
sitions of command in the army, and posed as the benevolent protector of the
black population. These tactics, combined with ruthless repression of his enemies,
appear to have been effective in cementing black support for Rosas’s regime.
Africans and Afro-Argentines served in his armies in large numbers, allegedly used
their positions as domestic servants to spy and inform on his opponents, and they
conspicuously cheered his victories. When Rosas was finally defeated by Unitarian
forces in 1852 and sent into exile, one of the major challenges facing the victors was
how to break the connection between the dictator and his black supporters. Their
solution was to abolish slavery in the Constitution of 1853.43
The struggle against Rosas produced abolition in neighboring Uruguay as
well. In 1839 Uruguay declared war on the Rosas regime, igniting not just an inter-
national conflict but also a 12-year civil war between local allies and opponents of
the Argentine dictator. Three years into the war, and in desperate need of recruits,
in 1842 the national government issued a decree combining the final abolition of
slavery with the forced conscription of all able-bodied male slaves. The forces op-
posing the government issued a broader decree in 1846, with no accompanying
obligation of military service, and the latter decree remained in effect after the
war ended in 1851.44
In each of these cases—as well as in Colombia and Ecuador, both of which

abolished slavery in 1851—slavery was brought to an end as part of political and
military struggles between liberals and conservatives. Each party sought to attract
slave and free black support—or at least to deny such support to its opponent. In
each case, however, conservatives refused to take the final step of declaring eman-
cipation, leaving it to liberal leaders or parties to do so. This helped forge a bond
between liberalism as a political movement and Afro-Latin American popula-
tions that continued through the second half of the 1800s, with important conse-
quences for politics in the region.
Peace (and War)

What of slaves and slavery in those few countries—Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico—
that escaped sustained warfare during the first half of the 1800s? In the absence of
the destabilizing effects of war, slavery as an institution not only endured but ex-
panded to higher levels than ever before. As the slave trade poured ever more
Africans into those countries, the African bases of black community life were
powerfully reinforced. So were more violent, conflictive forms of slave resistance.
When emancipation finally came in Cuba (1886), it did so in much the same way
as in mainland Spanish America: through slaves exploiting opportunities created
by a decade-long independence war. In Brazil, by contrast, emancipation in 1888
occurred not through war but through a massive campaign of civil disobedience,
carried out partly by slaves and partly by a cross-racial abolitionist movement
based in the free population.
War was averted in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico largely through elites’ deter-
mination to avoid a repetition of the events in Haiti. In the 1790s and early 1800s,
governments and plantation owners in each of these colonies had seized the op-
portunities created by the destruction of Haiti’s sugar economy to dramatically
increase their own levels of sugar production and imports of African slaves. As
they did so, they were only too aware that, in trying to reproduce the French
colony’s economic achievement, they ran the risk of reproducing its political
achievement as well: the only successful slave revolution in the modern world.
Elites in all three colonies referred frequently to their Haitian counterparts ruined
and destroyed by the revolution. In 1814 a group of merchants and planters from
the Bahian capital of Salvador wrote to the king to express their fears about the
rising state of rebelliousness among the slave population. After cataloguing inci-
dents of assault, crime, and “insolence” by slaves, they concluded that, unless
harsh measures were taken, “nobody with good sense can doubt that the fate of
this captaincy will be the same as that of the island of Saint Domingue. . . . [The
slaves] know about and discuss the disastrous occurrences that took place on the
Island of Saint Domingue, and one hears mutinous claims that by St. John’s Day
there will not be one white or mulatto alive.” Two years later, 180 planters and
merchants from the Bahian town of São Francisco repeated the point: “The spirit
of insurrection is seen among all types of slaves, and is fomented principally by
the slaves of the city [of Salvador], where the ideas of liberty have been commu-
nicated by black sailors coming from Saint Domingue.” The commander of Por-
tuguese forces in Pernambuco persuaded local planters to abandon a republican
uprising in 1817 by reminding them of the dangers of a slave revolution and citing
“the example of the island of Saint Domingue . . . so horrible and so recent.” Dur-
ing a second republican rebellion in Pernambuco seven years later, “the one topic
of conversation [in Recife, the capital,] was Henri-Christophe and the uprising in
Saint Domingue.”45
The example of Haiti loomed even larger in Cuba and Puerto Rico, which had
sheltered many of the revolution’s white, free black, and slave refugees. In 1799,
while the revolution was still in progress, Havana’s Royal Consulado, an official
body representing local planters and merchants, sent the captain general a set of
proposals for maintaining “the tranquility and obedience of the slaves in this
colony”: “The independence of the slaves in Saint Domingue justifies our present
state of fear and concern. . . . Nothing will be easier than to see in our country an
eruption of those barbarians, and it is urgent that precautions be taken to prevent
a catastrophe.” Ten years later, the mayor of San Juan expressed similar fears. The
French had used African slaves to build Saint Domingue into the wealthiest
colony in the world, he observed, and then had been destroyed by those very
slaves. “If we follow the same maxims by which our French neighbors made
themselves powerful, won’t we in the end be poor unfortunates like them, and
victims of the insatiable fury of the black barbarians? . . . Won’t [the slaves] come
to form a multitude that, if not in our days, then in those of future generations,
will become an exterminating bolt of lightning?”46
In 1806 Spain banned the entry into Cuba and Puerto Rico of all people of
color arriving on ships from Haiti. The governor of Puerto Rico added to this
measure by ordering a listing of slaves in every municipality of the island and a
report on “where they gather.” Despite these measures, major slave conspiracies
were uncovered on both islands in 1812. News of the debates in the Spanish
Cortes that year over whether or not to abolish slavery had reached the islands,
provoking excited rumors among the slaves that they were in fact free and that
their owners were holding them illegally. Authorities in Puerto Rico uncovered
the slaves’ plans before they came to fruition; in Cuba, free black conspirators
(several of them Afro-Dominican veterans of the Haitian Revolution) managed
to coordinate uprisings of plantation slaves in the provinces of Havana, Puerto
Príncipe, Bayamo, and Holguin. The principal Cuban conspirator, free black
carpenter and militiaman José Antonio Aponte, was arrested and put to death.
Among the incriminating evidence found in his house were portraits of Haitian
independence commanders Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe grac-

ing his parlor.47
Well aware of the risks of slave revolution, and facing a large Spanish military
presence in both islands, Cuban and Puerto Rican elites opted to remain loyal to
Spain, thus escaping the violence that wracked the mainland. Brazil also escaped
such warfare, though for different reasons. While the Spanish colonies had been
forced to decide in 1809–10 whether or not to remain loyal to a sovereign de-
posed by France, Brazilians had been spared that decision when King João VI
and his court fled the French invaders by sailing across the Atlantic and taking
up residence in Rio de Janeiro. The first concrete step toward independence—
Brazil’s elevation in 1815 to the status of kingdom, the administrative equivalent
of Portugal—was initiated by the monarch himself. Brazilian independence was
then declared in 1822 by João’s son, Prince Regent Pedro, who had been left be-
hind to rule the kingdom when his father returned to Portugal in 1820. Though
Portuguese garrisons in the northeast put up some brief resistance, they were
soon overcome and peace was restored. The institutions of central political au-
thority remained in place, prepared to maintain order in the countryside. No
plantations were destroyed, no slaves were recruited for military service, no Free
Womb law was passed, and no serious consideration was given to ending the
African slave trade.48
In Brazil as in Cuba and Puerto Rico, both slavery and the plantation economy
survived intact through the first half of the 1800s and into the second, poised for
their most intense period ever of growth and expansion. Between 1800 and 1850
Cuban sugar exports increased tenfold (from 29,000 tons per year to 295,000),
and Brazilian exports sixfold (from 20,000 tons in 1800 to 120,000 in 1850).
Puerto Rico’s output was much lower, but the rate of increase was more dramatic:
from less than 1,000 tons per year in 1810 to over 50,000 in 1850.49 Slave imports
increased accordingly. Between 1800 and 1850 Brazil received 1.7 million Africans,
as many as during the entire 1700s. Cuba received 560,000 (and an additional
150,000 between 1850 and 1867), and Puerto Rico some 50,000.50
These were the largest numbers of Africans ever to come to those countries—
or to any Latin American country—and the impact of their arrival was strongly
felt. In all three countries the African character of black community life was
greatly reinforced, as evidenced by a proliferation of African-based cultural insti-
tutions and practices.
In Cuba, African membership organizations, the cabildos afrocubanos, had ex-
isted since the late 1500s, and by the mid-1700s at least 21 such organizations op-
erated in Havana. During the first half of the 1800s the number of cabildos in the
city more than tripled, reflecting the increasing size and diversity of the African
population. The cabildos filled a wide range of economic, political, and cultural
functions. Most provided mutual-aid benefits when members became sick or dis-
abled; all provided some form of death benefits, helping to cover the cost of fu-
nerals and financial assistance for the member’s family. Over time some cabildos
acquired buildings and other real estate from which they derived rental income.
That income, combined with dues and other contributions, was then used to help
members buy their way out of slavery or set up businesses.51
Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who in the 1890s and early 1900s stud-
ied firsthand some of the last surviving cabildos, emphasized their role as a polit-
ical nexus between the slave and free black populations and the colonial govern-
ment. Each cabildo elected a “king” who “was accredited to the [Spanish
government] as the ambassador of his immigrant group, or better said, of his re-
spective African nation,” and was empowered to negotiate with the authorities on
issues of interest to the membership. These negotiations gave rise to a constant
tug-of-war between the cabildos and the government. The government sought to
use the cabildos as a means of controlling the city’s slaves and free blacks, who in
turn sought to advance their own interests. These contradictory goals were ap-
parent in the very name of the cabildos’ chief executive: while cabildo members
referred to him as a king, Spanish officials used the term “overseer” (capataz) and
held him responsible for the “good behavior” of his subjects.52
One of the recurrent points of contention between the authorities and the ca-
bildos were African cultural observances: music, dance, and religion. During the
second half of the 1700s, the church had tried to convert the cabildos into
Catholic religious brotherhoods, assigning each of them a patron saint and in-
structing their members in Catholic doctrine and observance. As elsewhere in
Latin America, African worshippers were receptive to Christianity but insisted on
retaining African gods and rites as well; and the cabildos were the setting within
which those gods were worshipped and rites preserved.
As church control over Cuban society weakened in the 1800s,53 and more
Africans than ever before came pouring into the island, the African cultural ori-
entation of the cabildos was further strengthened, giving rise to new Afro-
Cuban religions: Santería, Abakuá, and Palo Monte. Each of these originated in
the cabildos of their respective nations: Santería in the Yoruba (also known as
Lucumí) cabildos (of which 8 functioned in Havana during the 1820s and 1830s),
Abakuá in the Carabalí (Calabar coast) cabildos (25), and Palo Monte in the
Congo cabildos (15).
These religions had much in common. Each emphasized the powerful role in
people’s lives of the spirits of their ancestors and of supernatural forces embodied
in nature; each invoked closely guarded sacred mysteries and secret knowledge.
But each religion also differed in its philosophy and observances, reflecting its
African origins. Former slave Esteban Montejo, for example, when describing
conditions of plantation life, distinguished between “two African religions . . . ,
the Lucumí [Yoruba] and the Conga. The Conga was the more important . . . be-
cause the witches put spells on people. . . . The difference between the Congo and
the Lucumí is that the Congo does things, and the Lucumí tells the future.”54
Congo religion presumed a single all-powerful god, Nzambi Mpungu, who
created the universe and still rules over it, but from an immense metaphysical
distance, invisible and inaccessible to human mediation. In their efforts to im-
prove life on earth, therefore, Congo priests appealed to the numerous spirits of
deceased ancestors and of powerful natural forces that inhabit the middle realm
between Nzambi and humans and that intervene directly in human affairs.
Those spirits were addressed through the use of ritual objects—dirt from ceme-
teries, seeds, stones, animal skins, roots, sticks and branches—combined in rit-
ual bags or pots. The Congo priest “places in the kettle all manner of spiritualiz-
ing forces: there he keeps the cemetery and the forest, there he keeps the river
and the sea, the lightning-bolt, the whirlwind, the sun, the moon, the stars—
forces in concentration.”55
The Yoruba concurred with the Congo in believing that these spiritual forces
exerted direct control over human destiny. But while the Congo located those
forces in natural objects, the Yoruba anthropomorphized them into a pantheon
of deities, the orishas. The Congo priests worked with their minkisi and prendas
(ritual objects), but “the old Lucumís liked to have their figurines, their gods,
made of wood,” recalled Montejo. “Witchcraft is more common with the Congos
than with the Lucumís. The Lucumís are more allied to the Saints and to God.”56
The Yoruba brought their orishas to the New World: Shangó, god of thunder
and lightning; Yemayá, goddess of the sea and rivers; Ogun, god of iron and
war; and others. Some of these deities had originated among other African peo-
ples and then were incorporated into the Yoruba pantheon; and as the Yoruba
encountered yet another set of sacred powers—God the Father, God the Son,
the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, the saints—a similar process now took place
with the Christian gods. Partly as a device to conceal their continuing worship
of their own gods, partly as an act of appropriation, the Yoruba slaves and free
blacks of Cuba incorporated the Christian gods and saints into their obser-
vances, producing a new African-based American religion: Santería, the way of
the saints.57
Santería ritual focuses on serving the orishas through prayer, dance, and
“feeding,” this last through animal and other forms of sacrifice. Santeros also seek
to read through divination the nature of the relationship between individual
worshippers and the particular gods who govern them, and to resolve any prob-
lems or difficulties in that relationship. Montejo interpreted these differences be-
tween Congo and Yoruba observance as the difference between active interven-
tion in the spirit world (“doing things”) and more passive “telling the future.” But
in reading the relationship between the orishas and their followers, the santeros
“did things” as well. The purpose of divination was to identify the spiritual forces
determining one’s path through life and to help individuals avert danger and mis-
fortune on that path by harmonizing their relationship with their gods. In so
doing, Montejo noted, “the old Lucumís . . . would clean the evil a person had
done out of him.”58 As much as Congo magic, Santería was (is) a faith based on
helping and healing the afflicted.
Of the three main currents of Afro-Cuban religion, Abakuá was the only one
with which the young Montejo had no contact, doubtless because it did not pen-
etrate into the countryside, where he spent his youth. In Cuba as in Africa,
Abakuá was an urban-based religion closely tied to seaports and oceangoing
commerce. Known in Africa as the Leopard cult, it had flourished in the 1700s
and early 1800s in the slave trading ports of the Calabar coast, in the Niger and
Cross River deltas. It shared many liturgical and doctrinal features—pantheon
of deities, animal and other forms of sacrifice, devotion to the spirits of the
dead—with Yoruba religion. It added to those features, however, an exclusive
and tightly organized cell-like structure. The Leopard cult was a membership so-
ciety organized into local lodges or chapters and based on a body of secret ritual
knowledge that members paid high fees to learn and promised never to divulge.
The first Abakuá lodge was established in the Havana suburb of Regla in 1836.
Within ten years 40 more such lodges, or potencias, had been established in the
capital. Lodges subsequently spread to Guanabacoa and Marianao in Havana
province, and to the ports of Matanzas and Cárdenas in neighboring Matanzas
province.59
In Cuba as in Africa, the system of lodges and the high cost of initiation gave
Abakuá a character that was as much political and economic as religious. The
very name of the Cuban lodges—potencias, or “powers”—is significant; and in-
deed, the lodges sought, and acquired, considerable political and economic
power within the Afro-Cuban community. They were highly hierarchical and dis-
ciplined in their internal procedures. The aura of secret mystical knowledge that
surrounded members conferred further prestige and authority, and the lodges
also accumulated significant earnings and financial resources. As soon as they
came into existence, they moved to acquire control over the hiring of stevedores
and dockworkers in the port of Havana. It may well be, in fact, that the first lodges
were founded in the 1830s, at the height of the island’s first sugar boom, precisely
in order to capitalize on such opportunities.60
Because port workers were almost entirely African and Afro-Cuban, the lodges
were able to divide the port into specified territories, within which each lodge had
a monopoly on negotiating with dock and warehouse owners over labor con-
tracts and the provision of work gangs. As the sugar economy began to slow after
1860, and the number of potencias continued to grow, competition among them
escalated into pitched nocturnal battles among Abakuá brawlers armed with
knives and straight razors. The entry of white members into the cult in the 1850s,
and the founding of seven white potencias in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, seems to
have further exacerbated tensions. In the face of this violence, the Spanish gov-
ernment outlawed the religion in 1876 and deported hundreds of ñáñigos (mem-
bers of Abakuá lodges) to prisons in Spain’s African colonies of Ceuta and Fer-
nando Po—where, according to some accounts, they promptly established new
lodges.61
Abakuá never appeared in any other Latin American country and to this day
remains confined to Cuba. But during these same years (1800–1850) Brazil expe-
rienced a different kind of African-based cultural movement comparable in some
ways to Abakuá. This was the martial art of capoeira, a combination of dance and
kick-boxing based on Angolan antecedents and developed into a distinctively
New World discipline and aesthetic by African slaves. The term and the phenom-
enon first appeared in Brazilian documents in the 1770s. By the 1790s and early
1800s capoeiristas were organizing themselves into the maltas, or gangs, that be-
came as much a part of nineteenth-century urban life in Brazil as the Abakuá po-
tencias were in Cuba.62
As in Abakuá, the capoeira gangs were entirely male and based on rigorous
codes of secrecy and loyalty to the group. Betrayal of the code meant harsh pun-
ishment, up to and including death. Also like Abakuá, capoeira was closely tied to
seaports and the sea:
Many capoeiristas are known to have been employed in waterfront activities:
as fishermen, boat owners, stevedores, and merchant sailors. Songs of the bay
and the sea are among the most popular themes in capoeira lyrics. Even the
basic move in capoeira, the ginga, has as one of its meanings “to row (a boat)”
and the motion of the body when doing the ginga resembles rowing.63
As in Havana, though with much less success, capoeira gangs in Rio de Janeiro
sought to acquire control over the hiring of dockworkers in the port. Frustrated
in this effort, they turned to protection rackets and other forms of criminal activ-
ity, dividing the city into small fiefdoms and fighting violent turf wars against
each other. The gangs somewhat rehabilitated their public image in 1828, when
they joined forces with the army to defeat a mutiny by German and Irish merce-
naries. During the second half of the century they sought to establish patron-
client ties with powerful protectors by hiring themselves out as the bodyguards
and “enforcers” of important politicians and businessmen. But again as in Cuba,
the violence of the intergang struggles provoked intensifying police repression
and the eventual outlawing in 1890 of “the exercise of agility and corporal dexter-
ity known as capoeira.”64
Capoeira had no specifically religious content, but most of its practitioners
were followers of the African-based religions that were crystallizing in Brazil at
this time. The Brazilian counterpart of Santería was Candomblé, a Yoruba-based
religion that incorporated elements of the Catholic pantheon and liturgy. It de-
veloped in Bahia, in mobile, floating quilombos in the forests surrounding Sal-
vador. Despite periodic police raids on them, “these quilombos were busy reli-
gious centers, where members of Salvador’s black population, both slave and free,
sought cures for illnesses, guidance from African priests, and meetings with an-
cestral deities.”65 In 1830, availing themselves of the 1824 Constitution’s guaran-
tees of religious toleration, three free African women founded the city’s first Can-
domblé temple, Ilê Iyá Nassô, which still exists to this day. Other congregations
followed, though small itinerant services in forests or worshippers’ homes re-
mained the customary venue for most Candomblé services.66
The picture is murkier for Rio de Janeiro, where historians searching for evi-
dence of African-based religion have found “only vague descriptions of ‘strange’
practices—in the eyes of outside observers—the exact origins of which are un-
known.” The general origins of these practices, however, are clearly Congo.
African religious leaders in the city were referred to by the Congo term nganga or
the Portuguese term feiticeiro (witchdoctor or sorcerer) and won followings in di-
rect relation to their demonstrated powers over ritual objects and the casting of
spells. Such spells could be used either for good or evil; in the popular imagery of
the time, it was “the stereotype of the African religious leader as an evil male
witchdoctor” that tended to predominate.67
This doubtless reflected not just the power of African magic but larger and
equally real fears, primarily among the white population but often among Creole
blacks as well, of the growing African population and its intensifying opposition
to slavery. As the number of Africans arriving in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico in-
creased in the 1790s and early 1800s, so did the incidence of flight, violent crime,
and rebellion. In Puerto Rico, Africans fled in groups to the inland mountains
and forests. Since many spoke little or no Spanish, police were often unable to de-
termine where they had come from or who their owners were. Slaves more fluent
in the language made their way to nearby towns and cities to complain to royal of-
ficials about conditions of treatment on the plantations. Some tried to use the sea
to make their escape, stealing small boats or fishing vessels or hiring themselves
out as sailors in an effort to cross the Mona Passage and reach free territory in
Haiti or Santo Domingo (where slavery was abolished by Haitian occupation
forces in 1822).68
In Cuba, runaway communities multiplied during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s.
In the sugar-growing province of Matanzas, encampments of up to 300 people
were reported. Palenques dotted the westernmost province of Pinar del Río,
where slaves took refuge in the rocky mountains of the Sierra de los Órganos, and
the eastern province of Oriente. Between 1815 and 1838 Spanish forces fought a
continuing battle against the cimarrón communities surrounding the eastern city
of Santiago, destroying a number of them but never overcoming the largest such
settlement, Muluala. Professional slave hunters (rancheadores), many of them free

blacks and mulattoes, tracked runaways through the forests and mountains of the
island. Occasionally they were successful; more often, lookouts alerted their com-
panions, and the rancheadores arrived to find hastily abandoned huts, plantings,
tools, and as the diary of one such expedition noted in 1837, “leather bags full of
witchcraft.”69
In the Brazilian province of Bahia, the capital city of Salvador was surrounded
by small quilombos: “If destroyed in one place, they reappeared elsewhere, nour-
ished . . . by the uninterrupted stream of slaves” arriving from Africa.70 Further
south, quilombos spread through the hills and mountains outside Rio de Janeiro
as Africans poured into the city or passed through it on their way to the sugar and
coffee plantations. In 1823 the governor ordered “a general attack on all quilom-
bos known to exist” in the province. One police operation against a single en-
campment just outside the city netted more than 200 captives. A year later, local
authorities admitted that they could not stop “the increase in the number of run-
away slaves who join the many others in the various quilombos” surrounding the
city or control the “ever-increasing danger to public security.”71
Just as worrisome, in light of recent events in Haiti, were the slave rebellions
that plagued the plantation zones. Puerto Rican authorities uncovered slave con-
spiracies in 1812, 1821, and 1825, all of which were foiled before violence broke
out.72 In Cuba, similar conspiracies in 1812, 1825, and 1843 came to fruition, pro-
ducing coordinated uprisings on multiple plantations in Havana, Matanzas, and
other provinces. Numerous smaller uprisings took place on individual estates.
The island’s Executive Military Commission reported and investigated 89 such
rebellions between 1825 and 1850; many others went unrecorded.73
In Brazil, African slaves in Bahia led their own “war to end slavery.”74 Follow-
ing initial rebellions in 1809, 1814, and 1816, slaves launched major revolts every
other year from 1822 to 1830, and then in 1835 shook Salvador with the largest
urban slave rebellion in Brazilian history.75 The 1820s and 1830s were similarly ag-
itated in the southern sugar- and coffee-producing zones. As early as the 1810s,
planters in the Campinas region of São Paulo were expressing to royal officials
their “daily fears of assaults or invasions by our slaves.” Slave conspiracies were
uncovered in the plantation zones of the province in 1825, 1830, 1831, and 1832.
Anxiety among São Paulo slave owners further intensified after the Bahia rebel-
lion of 1835 and then an 1838 uprising of several hundred plantation slaves in the
Vassouras region of Rio de Janeiro. The two events combined, observed a group
of Campinas sugar planters in 1838, had badly aggravated their “constant fright
and fear of a sudden slave uprising.”76
Simultaneous with the slave rebellions of the 1830s was a wave of provincial
revolts in the northeast: the War of the Cabanos in Pernambuco and Alagoas
(1832–35), the Cabanagem revolt in Pará (1835–40), the Sabinada rebellion in
Bahia (1837–38), and the Balaiada revolt in Maranhão (1835–40). In each of these
rebellions, provincial elites seeking greater autonomy from the central govern-
ment led uprisings that were almost immediately seized and taken over by lower-
or lower-middle-class leaders and combatants, most of them free Afro-Brazil-
ians. In all four provinces, slaves seized on the resulting turmoil to rise up against
slavery, either as part of the larger uprising or—as in Spanish America 20 years
earlier—fighting their own “independent wars.” And in each of the rebellions,
they proved to be the most committed and longest-enduring element of the
rebel forces.
In Maranhão by the final year of the Balaiada rebellion, the core of the rebel
army was a column of some 3,000 runaways drawn from the province’s planta-
tions and quilombos. Government troops were ordered to capture these slaves
alive so that they could be returned to their owners, but the ferocity of the slaves’
resistance made this impossible, and they were defeated only with heavy losses to
both the government and the rebels. Even at this point, many of the runaways
managed to evade capture. An estimated 800 of them fled the province, making
their way west to the inland province of Goiás, where they established new settle-
ments and encampments. Others stayed in Maranhão, forming new quilombos
where, in the 1850s, government forces captured numerous surviving veterans of
the Balaiada who had been at liberty for a decade or more.77
Slave rebels refused to give up in Pernambuco, too. When free black and In-
dian rebels decided to accept a general government amnesty in 1835, the slaves
among them, knowing that they would be sent back to their former plantations,
said no. Instead they fled north, into Alagoas, the site of the seventeenth-century
quilombo of Palmares. Here they constructed new redoubts from which they
continued the insurrection, at one point briefly invading and occupying the
provincial capital of Maceió. Not until 1850, some 18 years after the outbreak of
the original rebellion, were government forces finally able to track down and de-
stroy these last remnants of the uprising.78
These provincial rebellions gave Brazilians a taste of the civil wars convulsing
Spanish America at the same time, and they created the same sorts of opportuni-
ties for slaves to escape the plantations and fight for their freedom. In Brazil this
civil violence did not lead to emancipation, however, for two reasons. First, in
Brazil a stronger, more consolidated central government was consistently able to
defeat rebel forces and maintain slavery in place. Second, the rebels themselves
proved to have little interest in freeing the slaves; most, including even the free
black leadership, were actively opposed to the idea. The Maranhão rebels specifi-
cally exempted slaves from their calls for mass-based insurrection. The Bahian
rebels, fearing a repetition of the slave uprising of 1835, were similarly reluctant to
admit slaves into their ranks. And the insurgents in Pará forcefully repressed a
slave insurrection in territory under their control.79 As pressure from govern-
ment forces bore down on the rebels, some grudgingly accepted slaves into their
forces. But only the Bahian rebels called for general abolition, and they did so
only during the last desperate days of the rebellion. Significantly, they limited
their emancipation decree (as they had limited their earlier acceptance of slave
enlistees) to native-born Brazilian slaves. Africans were to remain in chains.80
In Brazil the relentless expansion of the slave trade during the early 1800s in-
tensified all the conflicts and divisions of a slave-owning society: the conflicts
between slaves and masters, rich and poor, blacks and whites, and Africans and
Brazilians. These divisions contributed in no small measure to the defeat of
every one of the nineteenth-century uprisings. Slave rebellions received almost
no support from the free population, or even from Creole slaves, who main-
tained a clear distance between themselves and the more militant Africans. And
the more broadly based provincial rebellions invariably foundered on the divi-
sions between landowning elites and the urban and rural poor, as well as be-
tween poor free-born Brazilians, both black and white, and, again, African
slaves. Plantation slavery generated explosive social and political pressures that
erupted repeatedly in Brazil between 1800 and 1850 but simultaneously undercut
those pressures by dividing the slave and free populations into mutually antago-
nistic groups that proved unable to unite against the forces oppressing them. As
a result, central authority consistently prevailed in the civil disturbances of the
period, slavery was maintained, and more Africans were imported into Brazil in
the 1840s than in any previous decade in the country’s history (with the sole ex-
ception of the 1820s).
An increased slave trade exacerbated social tension and conflict in Cuba as
well, including at the elite level. During the first half of the century Cuban elites
remained loyal to Spain, in large part because of their fear of the slave population.
However, not all landowners prospered from their loyalty. While sugar planta-
tions in the western half of the island expanded and multiplied, smaller produc-
ers of coffee, tobacco, and sugar in eastern Cuba fell further and further behind,
marginalized in the competition for markets, capital, and slaves. In 1868, stung by
Spain’s imposition of new taxes and its refusal to grant the island expanded pow-
ers of self-rule, representatives of these eastern elites declared Cuban independ-
ence and launched an armed insurrection against Spanish rule.
From the beginning of the Ten Years War (1868–78), slavery, and the role of
slaves in the insurrection, was as central an issue in the Cuban independence
struggle as it had been 60 years earlier in Spanish South America. If anything,
given the massive presence of slaves on the island—370,000 of them in 1861, a
quarter of the total population—slavery was a more pressing issue in Cuba than
it had been anywhere on the mainland. The rebel government initially sought to
retain slave owner support by delaying a decision on abolition until after inde-
pendence had been won. But within a year, under pressure from the abolitionists
in the rebel movement (many of them free blacks and mulattoes), and also seek-
ing support from the United States, the rebel government decreed full and imme-
diate emancipation. Unwilling to do away with slavery, but aware of the need to
retain the obedience of slaves in the Spanish-controlled western half of the island,
Spain countered in 1870 with a Free Womb edict, the Moret Law. Under this law
children born to slave mothers after September 1868 would serve their mother’s
master until age 22, at which point they would become free.81
Meanwhile slaves were taking their own actions. In eastern Cuba, the scene of
most of the fighting, they seized on the turmoil created by war to flee the planta-
tions. At first the rebel government tried to keep libertos at work by requiring
them to sign labor contracts with local employers. But continuing resistance by
the libertos and the reluctance of rebel commanders, many of them free blacks, to
enforce these laws, led to their repeal in late 1870.
As in mainland Spanish America 60 years earlier, wartime conditions “led to a
breakdown of the old mechanisms of control within plantations” and the negoti-
ation of new systems of work discipline. This was less the case in Matanzas and
Havana, where, as in the 1810s, planters fearful of unleashing slave rebellion re-
mained loyal to Spain and Spanish forces retained control of the countryside.
Even on the western plantations, however, there was “a substantial shift in planta-
tion discipline. Slaves [became] more assertive,” and when rebel forces invaded
the western provinces in 1875, runaways and disobedience increased markedly.82
While many slaves fled the war zones to create runaway communities in the
mountains and forests of Oriente province, thousands joined the rebel armies. In
so doing, they provided ammunition to Spanish propagandists who portrayed
the independence struggle as a conflict between white loyalists fighting for Euro-
pean civilization and African rebels promoting savagery and barbarism. This
propaganda found its mark: as the war settled into stalemate in the mid-1870s,
white Creoles increasingly withdrew their support from the insurrection, turning
Spanish characterizations of the independence army as an African horde into a
self-fulfilling prophecy.83
Facing overwhelming Spanish force and declining support among the white
population, the rebels laid down their arms in 1878. In turn Spain agreed to grant
freedom to all slaves who had served in the rebel army, recognizing that, in the
words of one Spanish commander, sending back to the plantations veteran sol-
diers who had fought as free men would sow “seeds of discord and more desire for
emancipation” among those slaves who had stayed behind. But for all other liber-
tos the rebel abolition decree was rescinded, and those who had not fought in the
army were returned to slavery. Afro-Cuban Antonio Maceo, commander in chief
of the rebel forces, bitterly protested this condition, as did other black officers
and, of course, the libertos. The Spanish commander in Oriente reported that
former libertos were engaging in “passive resistance to work,” refusing to follow
orders or obey their overseers. “They want their freedom like the convenidos,”
those freed through military service.84
A year later, in 1879, rebel forces in Oriente province rose in a second inde-
pendence rebellion, the Guerra Chiquita (Little War). Those forces, and those
who led them, were even more Afro-Cuban in composition than the rebels of
1868; anger over the reinstitution of slavery was one of the principal motives of
the rebellion.85 Slaves in the eastern provinces fled the plantations in even larger
numbers than during the Ten Years War, forcing planters into an unprecedented
concession: in exchange for the slaves’ agreement to return to work, slave owners
promised to free them in four years’ time and pay them wages in the interim. A re-
vised version of this planter initiative was confirmed by the Spanish Parliament,
in the form of an 1880 law promising final emancipation by 1888 and wages and
improved working conditions in the meantime.
In actions recalling slaves’ responses 100 years earlier to the Instructions of
1789, Cuban slaves bombarded Spanish officials with lawsuits, petitions, and
demands for the enforcement of the rights and conditions spelled out in the 1880
law. As the date of final emancipation drew nearer, and their market value
plunged, many slaves accelerated the process of emancipation by purchasing their
freedom at bargain prices. In other cases, owners no longer interested in enforc-
ing property rights that would soon be moot gave up efforts to control their slaves
and simply “renounced” them. By 1886 the number of slaves still in the custody of
their owners had shrunk to only 25,000, down from 200,000 just ten years before.
In the face of slavery’s rapid disintegration, the Spanish Crown intervened in 1886
with a decree of final emancipation.86
War, and slaves’ responses to war, brought slavery to an end in Cuba in much
the same way as in the other Spanish colonies. There were two main differences,
however, between the Cuban experience and that of the rest of Spanish America,
both of which can be attributed to the greater size and importance of slavery in
Cuba. The first difference was the 60 years’ delay in Cuban elites’ decision to strike
for independence, a delay caused by their fear of a Haitian-style slave revolution.
Such fears were also partially responsible for the second difference between Cuba
and the mainland: on the mainland, the rebels eventually won their wars, while in
Cuba, they lost.
The Cuban rebels lost the Ten Years War, and then the Guerra Chiquita, in part
because of superior Spanish force. In the 1810s Spain had had to fight across an
entire continent, on multiple fronts against numerous and widely scattered op-
ponents. In the 1870s Cuba was its only opponent, on which it could concentrate
its full strength. The rebel commanders had believed that there was a way to
counter that strength: invade the western half of the island, where the bulk of the
slave population lived, free them all, and lead them in an assault on the centers of
Spanish power—the sugar plantations and the capital city of Havana. The rebel
high command, headed by Dominican revolutionary Máximo Gómez and Afro-

Cuban Antonio Maceo, argued repeatedly for this option. The civilian provi-
sional government, composed almost entirely of white landowners, consistently
rejected it. To free the slaves and destroy the plantations, they feared, would turn
Cuba into another Haiti—a conclusion that Spanish propaganda drove home in
no uncertain terms. So except for a brief sally into western Cuba in 1875, fears of
slave insurrection kept rebel forces confined to the eastern half of the island. The
centers of Spanish power in the west remained untouched, and the rebels lost
their war.87
Despite these differences between the Cuban and South American wars of in-
dependence, in the area of slavery they had very much the same result: the widen-
ing of opportunities for slaves to pursue freedom, as well as the undermining of
the institution to such a degree that, within eight years of the termination of the
Ten Years War, slavery was over.88
Only in Brazil did war not play a major role in slave liberation. The first step
in that process was the ending of the African slave trade to Brazil in 1850.89 The
elimination of the slave trade set off a chain of consequences. With no new
Africans entering the country, the slave population declined at a rate of 1 to 2
percent per year between 1850 and the late 1880s.90 Its numbers were still sub-
stantial—1.5 million in 1872, the year of the first national census—but no longer
sufficient to fill the ever-growing demand for workers on the nation’s planta-
tions, farms, and ranches and in its towns and cities. The result of this shortfall
was the growth of an internal slave trade within Brazil, in which slaves were sold
away from areas of lesser demand to areas of greater demand. In practice, this
meant the transfer of slaves from urban areas to the plantation zones; and as cof-
fee cultivation in the southeastern provinces continued to expand while sugar
production in the northeast stagnated, slaves were also sold southward in a vig-
orous interprovincial trade.91
This internal commerce accelerated during the 1860s and reached its height
during the 1870s. Its principal destination was the plantation zones of São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro, where planters and government officials observed a notice-
able increase in slave violence, both against other slaves and against masters and
overseers. In his 1878 annual report to the emperor, the governor of São Paulo
noted as an “extremely grave fact” “the frequency of crimes [by slaves] against
landowners or their underlings.” In Rio de Janeiro, 800 planters petitioned their
own governor on the same subject, observing that “conditions on rural properties
are profoundly shaken and altered, discipline broken, and [our] prestige and
moral force completely shattered.”92
Southeastern planters attributed these rising tensions on the great estates to
“bad elements from the North,” and accused northern slave owners of selling off
their most difficult and alienated workers.93 There may have been some truth to
this, but a more likely explanation was the disruption in slave life caused by the
internal trade. Slaves accustomed to the freer, more open conditions of urban
slavery were now forced into the harsh conditions of plantation labor, and slaves
who had grown up in the north and northeast were ripped out of familiar sur-
roundings and sold away from family and friends. Not surprisingly, slaves re-
sponded to the violence of such changes with violence of their own.94
At the same time, slave resistance in the 1860s and 1870s showed clear differ-
ences from such resistance earlier in the century. By 1872 the national slave popu-
lation was over 90 percent Brazilian-born, and even the relatively few Africans
had lived in the country for 20 years or more. These slaves were familiar with
Brazilian law, culture, and politics, especially laws and procedures governing slav-
ery. They were more likely to appeal to the law in defense of their rights, and even
to obtain freedom, as hundreds were able to do in São Paulo during the 1860s and
1870s when they proved that they had been brought to Brazil illegally—in viola-
tion of the country’s anti-slaving treaties with Great Britain—from Africa
decades before.95
Changes in the law, and Creole slaves’ greater ability to learn about and take
advantage of those changes, produced some surprising new developments in
slave criminality. Earlier in the century, when slaves had attacked masters or
overseers, they invariably fled into the forests in an effort to escape. Now, the
governor of São Paulo observed in 1878, slaves who had attacked their masters
“neither hide nor try to conceal the proofs of their crime—placidly and tran-
quilly they seek out the authorities and offer themselves up to the vengeance of
the law,” convinced, as one such group of slaves argued in an 1861 murder case,
“that Justice is on our side.”96 Slaves willingly placed themselves in the hands of
the police,“telling all the facts of the case with the most admirable sang-froid,” as
a Rio de Janeiro newspaper reported in 1882 after a slave uprising near Camp-
inas, in São Paulo province. In this case, as in others, slaves justified their violent
actions as the only means of defending themselves against abusive masters and
overseers. Some pushed even further, asserting that masters’ abuses should enti-
tle slaves to freedom as compensation for their suffering. This was in fact a pro-
vision of Roman, Portuguese, and Brazilian laws governing slavery, but it was
virtually never enforced. From where, then, asked another Rio newspaper in
1882, “have [slaves] obtained these ideas of emancipation and government[?]
And it may not be amiss to inquire just how far these ideas have extended among
the slaves.”97
Very far indeed, concluded a committee of São Paulo planters in 1871. Gath-
ered to consider a case in which a slave had murdered his master and then sought
to justify his act by saying that “he did not know why he had to work all his life for
the exclusive benefit of a man who was his equal,” the planters focused on the fact
that slaves were now overwhelmingly native-born:
These bondsmen, born and raised among us, and consequently sharing our
temperament and customs . . . tend to have aspirations that are compatible
with their development, and thus tend to have freed themselves from that
passive subservience characteristic of the Africans. Their intimate com-
munion with the free population . . . and their mixed racial nature, has made
them an intermediate type between the African and Latin races, and has
given them an ability to debate the right of property which is imposed on
them by law, and to question the legitimacy and origin of that right.98
Living under an electoral parliamentary system, Creole slaves “had absorbed

the rhetoric of egalitarianism and citizenship” and were using it to argue their
grievances and aspirations.99 Inevitably such rhetoric led to a larger questioning
of slavery itself, a questioning promoted by the small but vocal Brazilian aboli-
tionist movement. Under pressure from that movement, from Emperor Dom
Pedro II, and from recent events in the United States (the abolition of slavery in
1865) and Cuba (the Moret Law of 1870), the Brazilian Parliament finally passed
its own Free Womb law in 1871. As elsewhere in Latin America, this law spelled the
eventual extinction of slavery. But unlike the rest of Latin America, peace and po-
litical stability continued in Brazil, greatly reducing opportunities for slaves to
further undermine the institution by fleeing to join rebel armies or guerrilla
bands. In the absence of such pressures, it was conceivable that Brazilians might
continue to hold slaves in significant numbers through the 1920s and 1930s and
that slavery might not disappear from the country until the 1950s or 1960s.
Prospects for final abolition were further reduced by the Electoral Reform of
1881, which reinforced landowner control over elections by cutting the number of
Brazilians eligible to vote from somewhat over 1 million to 150,000.100 Faced with
the impossibility of achieving final emancipation through parliamentary means,
abolitionists now moved completely outside the political and legal system, engag-
ing in open civil disobedience and defiance of the laws governing slavery. In the
northeastern state of Ceará, black portworkers under the leadership of former
slaves Francisco do Nascimento and José Napoleão organized work stoppages
and refused to load slaves on cargo ships headed for the southeastern coffee
zones. In response to their campaign, slavery was abolished in the province in
1884. Meanwhile, radical abolitionists—led in São Paulo by white aristocrat An-
tônio Bento, in Rio de Janeiro by Afro-Brazilian journalist José do Patrocínio, and
in Bahia by Afro-Brazilian physician Luis Anselmo da Fonseca—organized net-
works of activists and agitators to circulate through the countryside, urging slaves
to flee the plantations. Here, finally, was the opening that the slaves had been
waiting for, and they immediately seized on it. By the end of 1887 some 10,000
runaways had made their way from the coffee plantations of São Paulo to the gi-
gantic quilombo of Jabaquara, outside the port city of Santos. Others took refuge
in the state capital or in smaller quilombos scattered around the province. During
the early months of 1888, mass flights spread to Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais,
Paraná, and Bahia.101
By May 13, 1888, when Parliament approved and Princess Regent Isabel signed
the Golden Law finally extinguishing Brazilian slavery, the institution had already
collapsed in most of the country. “Slavery ended because the slave didn’t wish to
be a slave any longer, because the slave rebelled against his master and the law that
enslaved him,” observed the São Paulo newspaper Rebate ten years after the event,
in 1898. “The May 13th law was no more than the legal sanctioning, so that public
authority wouldn’t be discredited, of an act that had already been consummated
by the mass revolt of the slaves.”102
❂
Just as in Spanish America, Brazilian slavery was overthrown in large part by the
slaves themselves. But while correctly pointing to “the mass revolt of the slaves,”
Rebate glossed over the fact that such revolts had occurred regularly throughout
Brazilian history, and with much greater intensity during the early 1800s, for ex-
ample, than during the 1880s. Yet none of those revolts produced any loosening of
the bonds of slavery. To the contrary: all were defeated and usually resulted in a
further tightening of owner and state vigilance over the slave population, not to
mention brutal punishment for the slave rebels themselves.
Closely guarded, hopelessly outgunned, and internally divided by differences
between African and Creole slaves, as well as among different African ethnic
groups, Latin American slave populations had no hope of overthrowing slavery
on their own. Only in Brazil and Cuba were their numbers large enough to raise
the possibility of a successful slave revolution. But especially after the experience
of Haiti, the very size of those populations strengthened masters’ and govern-
ments’ resolve to prevent such a revolution from starting.
Slaves could not hope to triumph against slavery until some larger political
crisis broke the unity of ruling elites and created “openings” through which slaves
could strike for freedom. In Spanish America, that crisis was the independence
wars, which undercut the ability of masters to control their slaves while at the
same time forcing Spain and the rebels into a bidding contest for slave (and free
black) political and military support. The wars erupted over questions of national
sovereignty, and the achieving of such sovereignty was certainly their most im-
portant political consequence. But as a result of slave initiative and bargaining,
they had unexpected and momentous social consequences as well: the ending of
the African slave trade and eventual emancipation for the slaves.
In Brazil the issue of national sovereignty was successfully negotiated in such a
way as to strengthen slavery rather than undermine it. The political crisis that en-
abled slaves to escape bondage in that country was thus of a quite different char-
acter and focused directly on slavery itself. During the first half of the century,
Brazilian whites and free blacks had actively opposed rebellions by African slaves
and had provided little if any support for slaves’ efforts to free themselves. But
after 1860, as the slave population became less African and more Brazilian, white
and free black abolitionists proved increasingly willing to reach out to slave allies
in their common struggle against slavery. It was the alliance between these two
groups that made possible the “mass revolt” of 1887–88.
A cross-racial, cross-class alliance of this sort, bringing together blacks and
whites, free people and slaves, could hardly have been predicted from the cen-
turies-long history of Brazilian slavery. Yet it happened. So did cross-racial, cross-
class independence movements in Spanish America that, after a decade or more
of struggle, finally defeated Spanish colonialism. By taking part in such move-
ments and alliances, Latin American slaves not only won their freedom but also
pushed on to join in the work of building new republics based on principles of
popular sovereignty and racial egalitarianism—the story to which we now turn.
❂ 3
“OUR NEW CITIZENS, THE BLACKS”
The Politics of Freedom, 1810–1890
In March 1888, as the last slave system in the Americas was collapsing amid the
mass flight of Brazilian slaves, a newspaper in Rio de Janeiro province published
a satirical poem about a planter’s efforts to hire newly freed libertos to work on
his plantation.
I went looking for blacks in the city
Who might want to rent themselves out.
I spoke to them humbly:
“Blacks,” I said, “do you want to work?”
They looked at me askance,
And one of them, ugly and crippled,
Said to me, gasping and panting,
“There are no more blacks, no:
All of us today are citizens.
Let the whites go work in the fields.”1
While this is a vision of post-emancipation bargaining as seen from the perspec-
tive of the former slave owners, it nevertheless does express black hopes concern-
ing the changes to be brought by emancipation.
The writer leaves no doubt of the damage done to these former slaves by slav-
ery: the liberto’s crippled condition, his shortness of breath. The author also
stresses his own efforts at correct behavior and “humility,” but then undercuts
those assertions by noting, first, that he was looking for workers willing “to rent
themselves out,” an expression drawn directly from slavery, and, second, that he
addressed them as negros, a term synonymous in colonial and nineteenth-century
Brazil with “slaves.” The planter was still operating under the assumptions and
mindset of slavery—which meant that his efforts to hire workers to replace his
former slaves were bound to fail. The people he was addressing had moved on to
figure 3.1. “I went looking for blacks in the city . . .” Bahia, ca. 1900. Credit: Pho-
tographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
a new set of assumptions. “There are no more blacks, no”—that is, there are no
more slaves.“All of us today are citizens.” Did he mean all of us blacks are citizens?
Or, an even more intriguing possibility, did he mean all of us Brazilians, planters
and former slaves alike, are citizens, and therefore equal?
Across Afro-Latin America, the independence and nation-building struggles
that ended slavery brought the Caste Regime to an end as well. At the same time
that slaves were using the openings created by the independence wars to pursue
freedom and emancipation, free blacks and mulattoes were capitalizing on
wartime conditions to strike down the colonial racial laws. Indeed, partly because
of the erosion of those laws during the final decades of colonial rule, and partly
because of their relatively advantaged legal status, free blacks and mulattoes were
able to push considerably further than the slaves. During the 1810s and 1820s, they
achieved both the complete abolition of the caste laws and the enactment of laws
and constitutions that, for the first time ever in the region’s history, offered peo-
ple of African ancestry full and equal citizenship in their respective nations. The
THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM, 1810–1890 87
result was two centuries of struggle over the terms of that citizenship and over
whether, and how, promises of equality would be honored in practice.
Independence
If rebel and Spanish commanders were initially uncertain whether slaves should
serve in their armies, they had no such doubts concerning free people of color.
Spain had actively recruited such troops into the colonial militia. And particu-
larly in Colombia and Venezuela, and perhaps in Argentina and Mexico as well,
independence was likely to be won or lost according to which side free black
troops decided to support. After spending the previous 200 years living under the
dictates of the Caste Regime, they would back whichever side made the clearest
commitment to striking down those laws and declaring full racial equality.
The first such declaration was issued in Mexico, where in September 1810 rebel
leader Miguel Hidalgo proclaimed the abolition of caste distinctions: “Indians,
mulattos or other castes . . . all will be known as Americans.” Following Hidalgo’s
defeat and execution early in 1811, José María Morelos, himself a person of mixed
African-Indian ancestry, assumed command of the rebellion. He confirmed the
revolution’s commitment to racial equality, which, along with land reform and
the abolition of slavery, became one of the cornerstones of the rebels’ social pro-
gram. Consistently preaching these reforms, Morelos recruited and trained a dis-
ciplined army of regulars drawn from the free black peasantry of the Costa
Grande, the Pacific coastal region west of Acapulco. Between 1812 and 1814 these
troops fought the Spanish to a standstill. Then in 1815 a reinforced Spanish army
succeeded in pushing the rebels back to their coastal redoubts, in the process cap-
turing Morelos and putting him to death.2
Morelos’s army, greatly reduced, continued a sporadic guerrilla war under the
command of Vicente Guerrero, another rebel commander of mixed African-In-
dian ancestry. Such a war had no prospect of victory, but Spanish troops proved
equally unable to root out and destroy the rebels. Finally, in 1821 the Mexican-
born commander of the Spanish forces, proposing to lead his majority-Mexican
troops in a surprise bid for independence from Spain, offered a compromise set-
tlement to Guerrero: neither the abolition of slavery nor the land reform pro-
posed by Morelos would be enacted, but the Caste Regime would indeed come to
an end: “All inhabitants of New Spain, without any distinction among Europeans,
Africans, and Indians, [will be] citizens . . . with access to all positions according
to their merits and virtues.”3 Guerrero agreed, and the caste laws were repealed as
part of the price of independence and peace.
Revolutionaries in Argentina also took an early stand against the caste system.
Free black militia units had played a crucial role in defeating attempted British in-
vasions of Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807. Seeking to enroll those units in the
newly formed rebel army, in 1811 the revolutionary junta in Buenos Aires declared
black and Indian soldiers and officers to be equal in all respects to their white
counterparts, and they repudiated the Caste Regime more generally: “The present
government . . . must especially direct its efforts against those prejudices that . . .
condemned until now a part of our population as numerous as it is capable of any
great enterprise.” Two years later, in 1813, the rebel government reminded author-
ities in the inland province of Córdoba of the need to seek out and promote tal-
ented officers and administrators, “even though their extraction and genealogical
descent may not be the most accredited.” All their efforts on behalf of the revolu-
tion would be in vain, rebel officials warned, “if the People do not experience the
good effects of the promises made by this Government” to end discrimination
and prejudice.4
Long-standing resentments and grievances among free blacks and mulattoes
in the coastal cities of Colombia and Venezuela, and their high levels of participa-
tion in the colonial militias, made the question of racial equality absolutely cen-
tral to independence struggles in those regions. In Cartagena, mulatto militiamen
led by Afro-Cuban artisan Pedro Romero forced local authorities to declare the
region’s freedom from Spain in 1811. Romero and his followers demanded “equal
rights for all the [racial] classes of citizens,” and the constitution of the following
year explicitly guaranteed those rights. But racial tensions persisted within the in-
dependence forces, leading to bloody fighting between white and mulatto militia
units in 1815. Fatally weakened by these internal conflicts, the destroyed and de-
populated city fell to the Spanish four months later and remained under Spanish
occupation until 1820.5
Although Venezuelan elites had vehemently opposed Spain’s relaxation of the
caste laws during the late 1700s, as they now prepared to strike for freedom
against Spain it was quite clear that they had no hope of victory without support
from the pardos. In their Constitution of 1811 the revolutionaries therefore abol-
ished all legal restrictions on free browns and blacks and even outlawed the use of
the term “pardo.”6 But such measures could not overcome the antagonisms be-
tween Afro-Venezuelans and the white elites. The caste laws had divided colonial
society into racial groups separated by anger, fear, envy, and resentments that,
under the turbulent conditions of war, now came boiling to the surface. Further-
more, as the pardos had fought back in the 1790s and early 1800s against the white
elites’ racism and intolerance, they had found their principal source of support in
the new laws and decrees emanating from Spain and enforced locally by the royal
appellate court established in Caracas in 1787.7 When given the choice between
throwing in their lot with the Creoles or opting for continued Spanish rule and
perhaps a chance to avenge themselves against their tormentors, many pardos
chose the latter. Shortly after the announcement of the new constitution, free
blacks and pardos in the city of Valencia rose in rebellion against the Creoles. Be-
tween 1812 and 1815 Afro-Venezuelan cavalrymen from the southern plains
formed the bulk of the royalist forces under José Tomás Boves that defeated the
rebel armies, retook Caracas, and drove Simón Bolívar and his supporters into
exile. Boves cemented his black troops’ loyalty with cries of “death to the whites”
and declarations that “the whites’ property belongs to the pardos.” As a result, re-
ported a Spanish official in the colony, it was “proverb[ial] . . . that the pardos were
faithful [to Spain] and the white creoles revolutionary.”8
During the second half of the 1810s, pardo support for the royalist cause began
to weaken. Responding both to the French invasion of 1807 and the independence
rebellions in the New World, in 1812 the Spanish Cortes produced Spain’s first
written constitution. That constitution granted citizenship to American-born
whites, Indians, and mestizos but explicitly denied it to Americans “who on either
side [maternal or paternal] derive their origin from Africa,” and it left in place the
caste laws governing blacks and mulattoes.9 Boves’s death in 1814, and the arrival
from Spain of a massive expeditionary force the following year, led to the breakup
of Boves’s army and the demotion and displacement of many of his pardo com-
manders. Amid growing fears that the pardo troops might constitute themselves
as an independent force, Spanish officers disbanded the Afro-Venezuelan units
and reassigned their members to the newly arrived Spanish regiments. The pardo
forces responded by deserting en masse and returning to their homes in the
plains, where they fought on as independent marauders and bandits only loosely
tied, if at all, to the royalist cause.10
Meanwhile the rebels continued their active courting of pardo support. They
had retaliated against Boves’s calls for race war against the whites with declara-
tions of a “war to the death” against all Spaniards, soldiers and civilians alike, who
failed to join the rebel cause. The policy specifically exempted the royalist pardos,
however: “Spaniards and Canarians, depend upon it, you will die, even if you are
simply neutral. . . . Americans, you will be spared, even when you are culpable.”11
The rebels continually reiterated the revolution’s commitment to racial equality
and promoted free blacks and pardos to positions of command in the rebel
forces.12
Changes in the caste laws were equally dramatic in Brazil, where the Constitu-
tion of 1824 declared the legal equality of all freeborn Brazilian citizens. (Libertos
freed from slavery possessed full civil and legal rights but were barred from serv-
ing as electors or holding public office.) Unlike the countries of Spanish America,
Brazil had avoided a prolonged war for independence and widespread mobiliza-
tion of its slave and free black populations. Nevertheless, Afro-Brazilians had
made abundantly clear their resentment of the caste laws: “Equal opportunity for
all without regard to race or color was their primary aspiration.” For free blacks
and mulattoes, “the fight for independence was first of all a battle against whites
and their privileges.”13
That battle had begun in Bahia in the Tailors’ Revolt of 1798, in which mulatto
soldiers and artisans had gathered to plot an uprising based on the principles of
the French and Haitian Revolutions. Their immediate grievances were the differ-
ential treatment of black and white soldiers in the city’s garrison, and the absence
of Afro-Brazilian officers in high levels of command. “Every soldier is a citizen,”
proclaimed placards posted around the city, “particularly the brown and black
men who are abused and abandoned. All are equal. There is no difference.” The
conspirators broadened their program beyond just military questions to include
full independence, the declaration of a republic based on electoral democracy, the
abolition of slavery, and full equality between blacks and whites.14
The revolt was repressed by Bahian police before it had even begun. But free
black desires for racial equality continued to simmer beneath the surface of colo-
nial political life, to explode once again in the republican uprising of 1817 in Per-
nambuco. Initially led by white planters and merchants angered at royal controls
over local commerce, the rebellion soon unleashed the pent-up aspirations of Re-
cife’s free blacks and mulattoes. A Portuguese observer caught in the city during
the revolt recalled how “the half-castes, mulattoes, and blacks went about in such
an insolent manner that they kept saying we were all equal.” Under pressure from
the free black population and its leading agitator, mulatto tailor José de Ó Bar-
bosa, the briefly installed revolutionary government condemned the caste laws
and declared itself in favor of racial equality. “Never can we believe,” it pro-
claimed, “that, by virtue of being darker or lighter, men lose their original condi-
tion of equality.” Following the defeat of the rebels, the Portuguese commander
devoted particular attention to restoring order among the free black population,
ordering “the public and bloody whipping,” noted another Portuguese observer,
“of free mulattoes, fathers of families, blacks, a few whites, etc.”15
Brazilian elites were perfectly aware of free blacks’ desire for racial equality.
They were aware as well of the need for free black support, not in the independ-
ence wars that never materialized but in the “state of domestic war,” as a royal ad-
visor put it in 1818, that existed between masters and their slaves.16 As more
Africans were imported into Brazil during the 1820s than in any other decade in
Brazilian history, the Haitian experience weighed increasingly on the minds of
slave owners and government officials. Nineteenth-century jurist Perdigão Mal-
heiro described slavery as “a volcano . . . a bomb ready to explode with the first
spark,” and slave rebellion was most likely, he noted, during periods when the free
population was divided by internal disputes and conflict.17 Keeping control over
Brazil’s slave population required that the free population maintain a united
front against them. Such unity could only be achieved if Afro-Brazilians were
granted full legal equality.
Thus by 1825 formal caste restrictions came to an end in Spanish America and
Brazil in much the same way that slavery had, through free blacks and mulattoes
exploiting moments of political crisis and instability to win major concessions

from newly established national governments. But while those governments
claimed to have embraced the principle of racial equality, in practice it proved
difficult to throw over racial attitudes, assumptions, ideas, and behavior that,
after three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese rule, had become deeply in-
scribed in the life of the region. In the same year that Brazilian elites approved
their new constitution, the Ministry of Justice handed down a decree mandating
punishments for “black capoeiristas” convicted of disorderly conduct. Respond-
ing to objections that the new law lumped together free blacks and slaves (as had
often been done in colonial decrees) and excluded whites from its provisions en-
tirely, the Ministry quickly amended the ruling to distinguish between slaves and
free blacks and to include whites as well. The following year, however, the Min-
istry issued new public order statutes that set two different curfew hours, one for
whites and the other for free blacks and slaves, and instructed local police chiefs
to repress any gathering that threatened public order, “especially gatherings of
blacks, slave or free.”18
Throughout Spanish America and Brazil, racial assumptions inherited from
the colonial period remained very much in force. Members of the white elites
and middle class sought to maintain the privileges of whiteness by openly flout-
ing government efforts to enforce racial equality and integration. Despite re-
peated decrees by the Brazilian government mandating the end of segregation
in Catholic brotherhoods, racial separation continued.19 Elite social clubs and
civic organizations remained almost exclusively white or fought to become so,
as in the case of the Sociedad de Amigos del País in Caracas, which in 1834 pro-
posed to bar pardos from membership and even argued for a restoration of the
caste laws.20
In all the new republics, education was theoretically open to blacks and mulat-
toes, a promise that was at least partially realized.21 But racial barriers continued
to restrict black access to learning. In Argentina the University of Córdoba admit-
ted only a handful of pardos during the 1820s and 1830s, and then it closed its
doors to them in 1844; not a single student of color was admitted to the University
of Buenos Aires. Elementary schools in Córdoba were opened to pardos in 1829,
but only two such students per year were permitted to enter the city high school.
Buenos Aires and Montevideo maintained segregation in the public schools by
creating separate institutions for white children and children of color.22
For two centuries free blacks and mulattoes had suffered the economic, social,
and psychological consequences of second- and third-class citizenship. Now that
that experience was over, they were insistent that it be completely over. “Equality
under the law is not enough in view of the [black and mulatto] people’s current
mood,” observed Simón Bolívar in 1825. “They want absolute equality on both
public and social levels”: equality in practice as well as in principle.23
Bolívar went on to express the fear that, as part of that drive for equality, “they
will demand that the darker skinned elements should rule. This will ultimately
lead to the extermination of the privileged class” and “pardocracy”: rule by the
pardos. Such fears of black vengefulness and lust for power were widely held
among white elites.24 Yet vengeance was not what most Afro-Latin Americans
were seeking. Bolívar had it right the first time: free blacks and mulattoes were de-
manding the full rights of citizenship. And in return for the promise of those
rights, they willingly accepted the obligations of citizenship, serving in provincial
and national armed forces and taking part in the contentious party politics of the
early republican years. In so doing they played a central role in shaping the new
republics and in defining the contours of national politics.
Black Liberalism
In every country of Afro-Latin America, those politics were organized around
struggles between “conservatives” and “liberals,” two labels that by the 1840s and
1850s had started to solidify into national party structures. Both parties drew
from the full spectrum of Latin American society, from wealthy landowners to
poverty-stricken peasants; and party allegiance was often determined more by
personal ties of kinship and friendship (to which party did one’s family, friends,
and patrons belong?) than by questions of ideology or program. But especially in
Spanish America, there was a clear tendency for traditional elites—powerful
landowners and merchants who had monopolized wealth and privilege under
colonialism and proposed to continue doing so under independence—to cluster
in the Conservative Party, which in turn stood for the preservation of as much of
the colonial heritage (Catholicism, social and racial hierarchy, large landed es-
tates) as possible.
Liberal Parties also drew support from elite landowners and merchants. But
their principal appeal was to social groups that had been excluded from positions
of power and privilege during the colonial period and who were now seeking to
make their way upward in the new, post-independence world. Liberalism thus
spoke to economic elites from outlying provinces far removed from centers of
power in the former colonial capitals. It spoke as well to middle- and lower-class
groups, and especially to middle- and lower-class nonwhites, who had suffered
social and political exclusion on the basis of both their class status and their racial
status. The explicitly egalitarian rhetoric of liberalism—which invoked the con-
cepts of civic equality, political democracy, and the rights of citizenship—
touched a powerful chord with these longtime victims of colonial absolutism and
social hierarchy. Liberalism offered the promise of overturning both evils and
ushering in the “absolute equality, on both public and social levels,” that free
blacks and mulattoes had fought for in the independence wars and continued to
fight for over the course of the 1800s.25
Time and again Afro-Latin Americans explained and justified their struggle
in terms of rights and citizenship. In Colombia, immediately after the 1811 dec-
laration of independence in Cartagena, free black men and women in that city
began to accord themselves the title of “citizen” as they recorded their names in
parish birth, marriage, and death registries. In language deriving in equal part
from the colonial-period rhetoric of slave rights and the post-independence
rhetoric of liberalism, a group of libertos writing to the governor of Cauca in
1852 described themselves as “inhabitants of the San Julián hacienda to which
once we belonged as slaves, before you [now] in the exercise of our rights as cit-
izens.” Petitioning the government in 1878, Afro-Colombian river boatmen de-
manded that “we . . . be treated like citizens of a republic and not like the slaves
of a sultan.” Afro-Panamanian Liberals denounced the “slow and imperfect” in-
tegration of blacks and mulattoes into national life following emancipation and
called for a “broadening of citizenship” to include nonwhites in full political
participation.26
The struggle for that broadened citizenship was carried out in part through
party and electoral politics.27 In much of Afro-Latin America, however, it also
took place through armed confrontation and civil war, with the result that, in
country after country, free blacks and mulattoes formed the backbone of liberal
rebellions, guerrilla movements, and armies. In many cases it was difficult for ob-
servers to determine whether an uprising was a racially motivated “black” rebel-
lion or the product of a broader liberal coalition. Given the anxieties and insecu-
rities of the day, such a distinction was fundamentally important to white elites.
Rebellions or other movements perceived as being too “black” in character ig-
nited fears of “caste war” (the local term for race war), another Haiti, and the pos-
sible “extermination of the privileged class.” Thus initial elite support for the 1817
republican rebellion in Pernambuco, Brazil, soon cooled in the face of massive
free black and mulatto support for the uprising. This was also the case seven years
later in anti-monarchical rebellions in Pernambuco, Bahia, and other northeast-
ern Brazilian states. In 1828, as Simón Bolívar prepared to suspend Colombia’s
liberal Constitution of 1822 and impose a centralist dictatorship, pardo Admiral
José Padilla led the black population of Cartagena in a federalist (anti-centralist)
rebellion. Padilla’s overtly racial appeals, and the open hostility of his followers to
local whites, had the “effect of rallying all the people of property and influence
around the person of General Bolívar” and alienating all white support for the
uprising, which was soon defeated. This sequence of events repeated itself in
Panama in 1830, when mulatto General José Domingo Espinar led black artisans
and urban laborers in a liberal, federalist uprising against the government in
Bogotá. Local elites soon turned on Espinar, and he was defeated by an army
raised by local hacendados.28
In 1829 Lima was briefly rocked by rumors of a conspiracy led by black artisan
Juan de Dios Algorta, the goals of which, according to a local newspaper, were to
“overthrow the government [of conservative President Agustín Gamarra] and as-
sassinate the whites.”29 Nothing came of that plot, but in Mexico that year free
black and mulatto militia units from the Veracruz and Acapulco coasts marched
on Mexico City to install former independence leader Vicente Guerrero, a man of
mixed African-Indian ancestry, and a radical liberal and federalist, in the presi-
dency. Guerrero and his supporters nourished bitter memories of the Spanish
caste laws, Spanish tax collectors, Spanish domination (largely enabled by the
caste laws) of wholesale and retail commerce, and the brutal Spanish repression
of the Morelos insurgency of the early 1810s. Once in power, Guerrero signed de-
crees expelling all Spaniards from Mexico, abolishing slavery, and barring im-
ports of manufactured goods that competed with those produced by local arti-
sans. Frightened and appalled by the overtly populist tone of his administration,
conservatives called for “death to the negro Guerrero,” overthrew him after less
than a year in power, and executed him by firing squad.30
Similar tensions festered in Brazil, where Portuguese merchants and artisans
had made free use of colonial caste laws against their black and mulatto competi-
tors and had celebrated their racial superiority by scornful references to Afro-
Brazilians as cabras (goats; a pejorative term for mulattoes) and macacos (mon-
keys). In turn, blacks and mulattoes mocked the immigrants’ racial pretensions
by ridiculing them as caiados, “whitewashed ones.” Following independence in
1822, urban mobs attacked Portuguese shops and stores and demanded their ex-
pulsion from the country. Crowds in Recife and Salvador jeered:
The sailors and the “whitewashed,”
All of them to hell,
For only blacks and browns
In this our land shall dwell.
In the national capital of Rio de Janeiro, mobs called for the deportation of
Portuguese immigrants and the replacement of Portuguese-born Emperor Pedro
I with his Brazilian-born son Pedro II, “a cabra like us.” The young Pedro was in
fact white, not a cabra, but the city’s poor were trying to claim him as one of their
own and to distinguish his Brazilian nationality from the “whitewashed” origins
of his father. As in Mexico, their agitation had its effect: partly in response to pop-
ular pressure, partly in order to attend to dynastic politics in Lisbon, Pedro I ab-
dicated in 1831 and returned to Portugal, leaving the Brazilian throne to his five-
year-old son.31
The temporary weakness of the monarchy following Pedro’s abdication

opened the door to a second wave (after the 1810s and 1820s) of anticentralist re-
bellions. These uprisings—the War of the Cabanos in Pernambuco (1832–35), the
Cabanagem revolt in Pará (1835–40), the Balaiada in Maranhão (1835–40), and the
Sabinada in Bahia (1837–38)—all followed a similar trajectory. Angered by com-
mercial, fiscal, political, or other forms of intervention in their affairs by the cen-
tral government, local elites launched insurrections aimed either at full secession
or at winning higher levels of local autonomy from the government in Rio de
Janeiro. Amid the turmoil unleashed by these rebellions, the free black, slave, and
Indian populations joined in with their own sets of demands. In the face of these
popular uprisings, local elites soon lost their taste for rebellion and defected to
the government side, passing leadership of the revolts to members of the middle
and lower classes.
Thus provincial authorities in Maranhão contemptuously dismissed the Bala-
iada rebels as “people of the lowest class of society” and their leaders as men
“without political influence, of plebian background, and colored” or, on another
occasion, as men “without fortune, without honor, and colored.” The rebels en-
tirely agreed with this characterization. Indeed, it was precisely their lack of
“honor,” fortune, and political influence that had moved them to rebel and to
speak on behalf of their plebeian followers. “The Citizens are the Whites and the
Rich,” proclaimed a rebel manifesto, “and all the people of Color, whom they ha-
bitually despise, suffer the heavy yoke of absolutism and slavery.” The rebels ac-
cused the government of having continued the discriminatory practices of the
Caste Regime in hopes of maintaining racial hierarchy and division. The elites
“want to take the blood of three men, one White, one Mulatto, and one Indian,
put it in one glass, and then show us their blood divided from each other. Brazil-
ians, look well on this division and disunion; just because they have lighter skin
they want to rob us of the rights that we all have under divine and human Law.”32
In their racial and class composition and political orientation, these Brazilian
rebellions were strikingly similar to liberal rebellions of the same period in
Spanish America, in which majority-nonwhite peasants and slaves confronted
majority-white elites to demand racial equality and the full rights of citizenship.
Only one of the Brazilian rebellions, however, expressed its goals and aims ex-
plicitly in the language of liberalism. This was the Sabinada revolt in Bahia, so
named for its principal leader, mulatto physician Francisco Sabino. Of the rebel-
lions of this period, it was the only urban-based one; and in Salvador, as in other
northeastern cities, “the most radical elements, those who imagined a republi-
can Brazil, or at least a federalist [decentralized] Brazil, were pardos from poor
or middling families.”33 It was those pardos who transformed what was initially
a barracks rebellion of disgruntled military officers—many of whom, along with
virtually all of the garrison’s enlisted men, were Afro-Brazilian—into a full-

blown secessionist movement.
Withdrawal from the nation-state was justified, the rebels argued, by the gov-
ernment’s failure to extend the full rights of citizenship to blacks and mulattoes
or to promote talented Afro-Brazilians in either the civilian or military adminis-
trations.34 The government is “warring against us because they are whites, and in
Bahia there must be no blacks and mulattos, especially in office, unless they are
very rich and change their liberal opinions.” Such language immediately alienated
white support for the rebellion and led most white inhabitants to flee the city,
leaving it “entirely colored,” according to the British consul.“Infuriated black and
mulatto mobs” attacked Portuguese immigrants and other foreigners and set fire
to the homes of wealthy whites. Government troops repressed the rebellion with
brutal ferocity, hunting rebel soldiers down one by one and shooting prisoners in
cold blood. Over 1,000 rebels were killed in the final assault on the city; govern-
ment casualties totaled 40.35
The provincial rebellions had been stimulated in part by a wave of liberal Par-
liamentary reforms in the early 1830s that reduced federal authority and weak-
ened the power of the monarchy. Having seen the destabilizing consequences of
such decentralization, the Brazilian Parliament embarked on a conservative Re-
gresso (“return”) that reversed the reforms of the 1830s by reasserting imperial
control over the armed forces, the police, the courts, and the provincial govern-
ments. This strengthening of the central government in turn strengthened the
ability of provincial elites to maintain social order and hierarchy in their locali-
ties. Liberals and Conservatives continued to flail away at each other, but through
a re-centralized political and electoral system thoroughly controlled and domi-
nated by landowning elites rather than through civil wars and armed uprisings.
Politics remained intensely competitive, and even occasionally violent. But the
competition was no longer based on class or ideology—indeed, in programmatic
terms, the two parties were virtually indistinguishable. Rather, parties repre-
sented competing clienteles of the great landowners. Neither was significantly
more conservative or liberal, more oligarchical or “popular” in orientation, than
the other. Both drew broadly from across the class and racial spectrum, and nei-
ther identified with any specific racial or class configuration.36
This had been precisely the goal of the Regresso: to produce a political system
in which neither race nor class formed a basis on which to mobilize political con-
stituencies. Landowning elites in Spanish America would have loved to have been
able to achieve this. But while Brazil had retained the instruments of central au-
thority intact through the independence and post-independence periods, in
Spanish America those institutions had been shattered and destroyed by decades
of warfare, and the mobilization of tens of thousands of men to take part in that
warfare. In Spanish America, armed struggle remained a principal currency of
politics. This was a currency that free blacks and mulattoes possessed in ample
measure; and first in the independence wars and then in the civil wars following
independence, they invested that currency in the leaders and movements whom
they saw as most likely to advance their political interests. Most of those leaders
and movements were liberal in character.
More than any other Spanish American country, Venezuela had lived through
the 1820s and 1830s in fear of race war between blacks and whites. Violence by
slaves and free blacks had broken out repeatedly during those years, often under
the independence-war banner of “death to the whites.” Following the establish-
ment of the Liberal Party in 1840, these rebels expressed themselves in the lan-
guage of radical liberalism, demanding “free land and free men” (land reform and
abolition), open and honest elections, and an end to landowner and government
abuses of peasants and farmworkers.37 These demands reached a climax in the
conflagration of the Federal War (1858–63), in which armies of black and mulatto
peasants and ex-slaves eventually triumphed against government forces, bringing
the Liberals to power. Conservatives denounced the victors in openly racial (and
racist) terms: “It is three quarters of Venezuela that conspires against the few good
that there are in this unfortunate land. It is the blacks against the whites: the vi-
cious and the idle against the honest and industrious—the ignorant against the
learned.” Conservative President José Antonio Páez, driven into exile at the end of
the war, described it as “a revolution . . . among the colored population; a class
which until then had been the most peaceful and submissive, but since perverted
to such a degree as to require all the energies and resources of the white race to
save itself from utter ruin and degradation.”38
In Peru, liberal montoneros (mounted armed bands) and guerrillas harassing
conservative hacendados outside Lima were drawn heavily from runaway slaves
and free blacks.39 Afro-Peruvians provided support for Ramón Castilla’s success-
ful 1853 uprising against conservative President Echenique (during which Castilla
declared the final abolition of slavery) and for populist Nicolás Piérola’s 1894 up-
rising and subsequent presidency. Piérola began his revolt, in fact, in the sugar-
plantation zone of the Chincha Valley, with backing from the region’s black guer-
rillas and montoneros.40
In Mexico, as we have seen, mulatto militia units from the Veracruz and Aca-
pulco coasts installed liberal populist Vicente Guerrero in power in 1829. Follow-
ing Guerrero’s death in 1831, those units transferred their allegiance to his ideo-
logical successor, populist Liberal Juan Alvarez, whom they helped propel to
national power in 1855. Alvarez’s presidency initiated the process of Liberal re-
form that culminated in the writing of the Constitution of 1857, and the Liberal
hegemony in Mexico that lasted from the late 1860s until the Revolution of 1910.41
In Ecuador, Liberal President José Urbina, after decreeing abolition in 1851,
formed an elite Afro-Ecuadorian presidential guard, the Tauras, that was a main-
stay of his regime until the Conservatives took power in 1860. After 35 years of
Conservative rule, the Liberals returned to power in 1895 through an uprising led
by caudillo Eloy Alfaro. Alfaro drew his political and military support from the
provinces along the Pacific coast, including the majority-black province of Es-
meraldas. After Alfaro’s death in civil violence in Quito in 1912, black troops loyal
to him retreated to Esmeraldas and continued guerrilla resistance against the
government until 1916.42
Liberal ties to the black population, and black identification with the Liberal
Party, were strongest of all in Colombia. In the Cauca Valley, free blacks and
slaves formed the bulk of Liberal forces in the civil war of 1839–42. After a Liberal
administration was elected to power in 1849, it abolished slavery in part as repay-
ment for black support. A rebellion of Conservative landowners protesting
emancipation confirmed Afro-Colombians’ belief that, if ever returned to
power, the Conservatives would reinstitute slavery. Conservatives further fanned
such fears by denouncing Liberals in barely coded racial terms, as “bands of bar-
barians . . . preach[ing] insubordination to authority, communal property, impi-
ety in religion, and party hatred to the ignorant masses” and proclaiming that
the only way to handle the “democratic trash” was with a whip—a clear reference
to slavery.43
Afro-Colombians responded by angrily reaffirming their commitment to the
party. As Conservative-Liberal tensions heightened during the 1870s, hacendado
Alfonso Arboleda wrote to his father that “in the last session of the local Demo-
cratic Club, mainly attended by blacks, they were saying that the aim of the Con-
servatives is to make a new revolution in order to re-enslave all the blacks. The
Conservatives are believed to be saying ‘Slavery or the gallows for all Blacks.’” Re-
ported the young Arboleda, “I heard a Black saying ‘ . . . we’ll put the noose to
their [the Conservatives’] necks, apply the lash . . . and then leave them to
hang.’”44 When civil war broke out in 1876, Afro-Colombian Liberal militias
sacked the city of Cali and rampaged through the Cauca region, repeating the
bloody deeds of the independence wars. By the end of the war, reported a Ger-
man visitor in 1880, the valley was in ruins, the majority of landowners bank-
rupt: “They lack the capital to rebuild what has been destroyed, and most of
them, after fighting for many years against the destructive fanaticism of the
blacks, have given up and have no wish to start all over again.” The blame for this
situation he laid squarely at the door of “the Liberal party, or what in the Cauca
is the same thing, the black population.”45
Needless to say, not all Liberals were at ease with this kind of racial politics. In
the Cauca and elsewhere in Colombia, the party split in the 1870s into opposing
groups of radical Liberals closely tied to the black population, and centrist Inde-
pendents allied to the Conservatives.46 The French consul in Panama noted the
presence there of not one but two Liberal parties: a white faction composed of
well-to-do local merchants, and a “black Liberal party” comprising urban arti-
sans and laborers. Late in the century the latter succeeded in winning electoral
control of Colón, one of the two principal cities of the isthmus, creating a black
municipal administration and bureaucracy that U.S. officials found more than a
little disconcerting to deal with when they began construction of the Panama
Canal in 1904. For U.S. administrators, black officials were barely tolerable at the
municipal level; when mulatto Liberal Carlos Mendoza succeeded to the Pana-
manian presidency in 1910, U.S. authorities refused to countenance a “Negro”
chief executive in the new republic and forced him to resign.47
Not all free black mobilization during this period was liberal in character.
Throughout the plantation zones, conservative landowners recruited black peas-
ants and farm workers into their patron-client networks, drawing on them for
military and electoral support. In Peru, conservative politicians cultivated rela-
tions with the black artisan guilds of Lima, lending them money, serving as god-
parents to members’ children, bailing them out of jail, and calling for protection-
ist tariffs on imports that competed against their products. In return, the guilds
were expected to turn out their membership at election time and, their liberal op-
ponents charged, use violence and intimidation to prevent other voters from
coming to the polls.48
The best-known case of a conservative politician successfully courting black
support was that of Argentine caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas. Rosas’s success
with the black population owed more to his systematic murdering and repression
of the liberal opposition than to any concessions or benefits that he offered Afro-
Argentines. Not only did he reopen the slave trade between 1831 and 1838, but also
his demands on the black population to fight the civil, foreign, and Indian wars in
which his government was constantly embroiled badly disrupted black family
and community life. Following the dictator’s fall in 1852, the black press (which,
significantly, only came into existence after his departure) strenuously de-
nounced “that barbarous and savage tyranny of twenty years” that had kept Afro-
Argentines “in a state of barbarism, or absolute ignorance . . . shut up in the [mil-
itary] encampments and made the principal and unwitting instrument of his
power and domination.”49
Wherever in Spanish America competitive two-party systems were allowed to
function, most politically active blacks and mulattoes identified with liberalism,
with major consequences for the region’s political history. Black support con-
tributed materially to liberalism’s eventual triumph throughout Spanish Amer-
ica; in return, liberalism brought to power almost all of the black and mulatto
presidents who held office in Spanish America during the 1800s: Bernardino Ri-
vadavia in Argentina (1825–27), Vicente Guerrero in Mexico (1829), Vicente Roca
(1845–49) in Ecuador, Joaquín Crespo (1884–86, 1892–97) in Venezuela, and Ulises
Heureaux (1882–99) in the Dominican Republic.50 But when liberalism did come
to power, it was in a form that few black liberals would have foreseen or approved.
As the cases of Colombia and Panama suggest, in most of the region liberalism as
a political movement had two currents that coexisted with each other in a tense,
deeply ambivalent relationship. One current was conservative and elite-domi-
nated; the other was “popular,” stood for radical political and social reform, and
provided the bulk of the military and electoral manpower that supported liberal
parties and governments. But when those parties and governments took power in
the second half of the 1800s, it was in the form not of “popular liberalism” but of
liberalism dominated by landowner and elite interests. And those governments
promptly proceeded to enact social and economic policies that undercut the po-
sition of the very peasants and workers who had brought them to power.51
Despite this outcome, the black liberals’ struggles were by no means in vain.
They created a tradition of anti-oligarchical political mobilization that later
helped create the most important political movement in twentieth-century Latin
America: labor-based populism.52 And in the shorter term, the challenge to elite
interests posed by popular liberalism kept Spanish American landowners in a po-
sition of vulnerability and weakness through much of the first 50 years of inde-
pendence. This in turn opened real possibilities for newly free libertos and free
black peasants to redefine conditions of life and work in the plantation zones of
Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and elsewhere.
Citizens, Workers, Peasants

Let us return to the Brazilian planter and libertos whom we met at the beginning
of this chapter. As you recall, the former had gone
looking for blacks in the city
Who might want to rent themselves out.
I spoke to them humbly:
“Blacks,” I said, “do you want to work?”
To which the libertos responded:
There are no more blacks, no:
All of us today are citizens.
Let the whites go work in the fields.
This was a fictitious, semi-humorous poem, almost certainly not written by a
slave. Yet its portrayal of post-emancipation labor relations is borne out by abun-
dant evidence that, once emancipation had been enacted, former slaves sought to
put as much distance as possible between themselves and their former status as
unfree workers, and that their efforts to do so had major consequences for plan-
tation agriculture throughout Afro-Latin America. So strong was this determina-
tion that it persisted years, decades, and even a century or more, after slavery had
ended. Visiting Peru in 1880, Frenchman Charles Wiener found Afro-Peruvians
still tormented by “that evil memory, that nightmare, of slavery, slavery that has
not existed for a quarter of a century, but the memory of which does not seem to
be able to disappear. . . . They say so frequently that they are free that one senses in
them a barely repressed anger against a past from which they have been re-
deemed, but that nothing can erase.”53 In Brazil, black civic organizations (many
of them named after May 13, the day on which slavery was finally abolished) cele-
brated Abolition Day with clockwork regularity all through the 1900s. Anthropol-
ogists doing fieldwork among rural Afro-Latin American populations in the
1970s and 1980s found that their informants still retained powerful feelings con-
cerning slavery and a burning determination to avoid conditions of work that
were at all reminiscent of servitude.54
The first step in escaping plantation slavery was, logically enough, to leave the
plantation. While most former slaves remained in the countryside, others opted
to leave rural life behind and head for nearby towns and cities. (This is why,
when the planter in the poem needed farm laborers, he “went looking for blacks
in the city.”) Slaves had always seen urban employment as preferable to working
on a plantation, and many now seized the opportunity of freedom to seek such
employment.
Or to not seek such employment. Once at liberty in the cities, libertos joined
with free blacks, poor whites, Indians, and mestizos in the construction of a “ple-
beian culture” that was in many ways the reversal of slavery. Where slavery had
forced workers to labor under harsh and often brutal discipline, “plebeian cul-
ture” rejected the notion of workplace discipline and insisted on workers’ right to
refuse work whenever and wherever they wished.55 Where slavery had severely re-
stricted worker leisure,“plebeian culture” valued parties, festivities, and collective
celebrations. And where slavery had limited workers to minimal food and cloth-
ing, of poor quality and grudgingly given, “plebeian culture” valued free, unlim-
ited consumption of food, liquor, and stylish clothing.56
Not surprisingly, such values, goals, and pursuits generated immediate tension
and conflict between urban elites, authorities, and middle classes, on the one
hand, and plebeians on the other. Throughout Afro-Latin America, that tension
assumed a harsh racial edge. “How long,” a letter to the Lima newspaper El Com-
ercio in 1855, the year after emancipation, demanded to know, “will we suffer the
impudence, the insults, the outrages of our new citizens, the blacks? . . . Are the
police sleeping, or just closing their eyes to these gatherings of drunkards, that
serve only to insult and threaten white citizens?” The Conservative Colombian
newspaper Ariete in 1850 drew an even sharper racial line, contrasting “the black,
the rogue, the vagrant, the stupid, and the criminal” with “the white, the honor-
able, the hard worker, the talented, and the virtuous” and concluding that “never
will the color black be equal to the color white.” When French merchants and
businessmen in Panama City petitioned their consul in 1859 for increased police
protection, they described crime in the city as “the war of blacks against whites,
the war of those who have nothing and wish to live without working against those
who possess something and live honorably from their labor.”57
Towns and cities enacted vagrancy and “public order” statutes, including
tightened restrictions on black street dances and other public festivities, but weak
and understaffed police forces found these ordinances difficult to enforce. Some
municipalities, recognizing the impossibility of maintaining order through offi-
cial force alone, sought to enlist plebeian institutions in their efforts. Authorities
in Peru turned to the artisan guilds to “discipline . . . and control Lima’s unruly
and frightening dark-skinned plebes.” In Buenos Aires, the African national soci-
eties were required by law to inform the police of any criminal activity among
their members. The societies, however, simply shrugged off police supervision,
turning in only a single accused criminal between 1820 and 1870, and functioning
for the most part completely free of police interference.58
In the end, it was less official controls and repression than the imperious ne-
cessity of physical survival that reimposed labor discipline on the libertos. Con-
sumption could not be sustained without income, and income could not be
earned without work. In the towns and cities this work was primarily wage em-
ployment: women working as domestic servants, laundresses, cooks, and street
vendors; men working as day laborers, servants, or in jobs in light industry.59 Es-
pecially in the war-torn conditions affecting much of Spanish America at mid-
century, none of these occupations made possible the material abundance that
was the antithesis of slavery. Even artisans, historically the most prosperous and
successful segment of the free black work force, found themselves struggling.
Many black artisans and businessmen and women lost property and savings in
the turmoil of the independence and civil wars; all surely found it difficult to op-
erate under unsettled political and economic conditions. Artisans also faced dev-
astating competition from British imports from which they had been largely pro-
tected during the colonial period. Their precarious economic position during the
early and mid-1800s, and their efforts to defend themselves against the forces un-
dermining that position, were yet another reason for Afro-Spanish Americans’
high level of participation in the politics of the period.60
While war and political turmoil undercut the economic position of urban
wage-laborers, they had different and in some ways more positive consequences
for black peasants and libertos who remained in the countryside. Here, too, the
first priority for libertos was to redefine their living and working conditions in
such a way as to negate and obliterate the experience of slavery. Here, too, libertos
sought new forms of work, leisure, family life, and consumption. But in pursuing
those goals, libertos and peasants in the countryside had access to a resource that
was largely absent in the cities and that gave them far greater leverage in their bar-
gaining with former masters and current employers. That resource was land.
Access to land, in the form of garden plots, had been a central and recurring
point of contention between masters and slaves before emancipation. The first
priority of the newly freed was to acquire smallholdings on which to support
themselves and their families.61 And in a number of ways, the turmoil and disor-
der of the post-independence years favored their quest. Facing the destruction of
much of their physical and financial capital during the independence wars, the
loss of many of their slaves, and the threat of further losses in the continuing civil
wars, many landowners in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and other countries cut
back on cultivation, leaving part or all of their land to go fallow. Free blacks and
newly freed libertos promptly moved in to squat on such lands. Landowners and
their administrators sought to negotiate rental arrangements with the squatters,
but in a situation of abundant land and scarce labor, as a local official in Colom-
bia’s Cauca Valley reported in the 1850s, libertos were opting to settle on estates
“that offer them the greatest advantages, so that . . . today one can say that [the lib-
ertos] set the price for land rentals. . . . Even when it is certain that there exist
marked tendencies for some landowners to aggressively confront the libertos, im-
posing high rents . . . they have been forced to accept the counter-proposals made
by their former slaves.”62
Further weakening the bargaining position of landowners was the availability
of vast tracts of unoccupied state lands. These tierras baldías had formerly be-
longed to the Crown and following independence passed into the possession of
the newly independent republics. During the second half of the 1800s, as national
economies recovered and plantation agriculture began to expand, these public
lands would be taken over by landowners looking to increase their holdings. But
during the first half of the century, planters possessed neither the capital nor the
incentive—nor, for that matter, the labor—to acquire and develop such lands.
Thus the tierras baldías lay free, open, and largely unpoliced.63
These public lands drew peasants and libertos like a magnet. In the Barlovento
region of Venezuela, libertos and free blacks carved out small farms on state
lands, growing cacao, bananas, manioc, corn, and other crops for their own con-
sumption and for sale in nearby towns.64 In Colombia, black peasant and liberto
families moved on to public lands to which, not content with squatting, many of
them petitioned the government for formal title.65 Very few of these petitions
were granted, but in the absence of any concerted effort to remove them from the
land, black smallholdings proliferated, taking different forms in different parts of
the country. In the sugar-growing Cauca Valley, peasant families settled in ham-
lets and small villages, where they practiced subsistence agriculture and grew
small surpluses of crops for sale in urban markets. In a region dominated during
the colonial period by plantation and hacienda agriculture, these autonomous
communities of black peasants “formed a new social class that stood outside
[plantation] society.”66
In the Pacific rainforests, insects and other pests made it more difficult to cul-
tivate subsistence crops and to store food for sale or future consumption. The for-
est offered other resources, however, including abundant fish and game, other
forest products, and gold from the region’s rivers. Libertos and free blacks living
in the rain forest therefore fanned out more thinly, settling in small family en-
campments along the riverbanks. These extended families, or troncos (trunks),
claimed landholdings that were held in common by all members and on which all
members had rights to farm, hunt, gather forest products, and pan for gold.67
Family structures determined not just the ownership of land but the organiza-
tion of work as well. Colombian liberto families refused to send women and chil-
dren to the plantations to work for wages. Only men undertook wage labor, and
then only for limited periods of time. And it was access to land and to family labor
that made such resistance to wage employment possible, noted a visitor to the
Chocó region in the late 1800s: “Every black has his placer or little mine, where he
works several days a week (when he urgently needs to) with his family[. H]e
prefers to earn little but to be free and work on his own account; rarely does he
endure a permanent job.” The importance of family labor in these communally
owned mines emerges clearly in the Colombian census of 1867, in which almost
half the region’s miners were female.68
Family labor was retained for use on family land. And while field labor contin-
ued to be harsh and demanding, it took place at a more human pace than under
slavery, as it was supervised by parents and other family members. Peasant fami-
lies were able to slow their work rhythms in part because the product of their
labor was no longer being expropriated by masters and in part because their
highly diversified subsistence agriculture required less labor than the monocul-
ture of the plantations. In the 1970s, visiting Afro-Colombian peasants who still
cultivated their smallholdings using traditional methods, anthropologists Nina
de Friedemann and Jaime Arocha found them growing bananas, cacao, coffee,
medicinal herbs, and other crops “in what appeared to be the most complete dis-
order. Nevertheless, the system functioned very well.” Coffee and banana trees
provided shade and shelter for lower plants, and their fallen leaves formed mulch
that kept weeds down and provided nutrients. Crop diversity also reduced the in-
cidence of diseases and insect pests that plagued neighboring haciendas practic-
ing sugar (and, by the 1960s and 1970s, soybean) monoculture, and spread labor
and harvesting demands more evenly through the year rather than concentrating
them in a single season.69
Lower labor demands meant greater leisure time, which could be spent at rest
or in the many ritual activities that organized the cultural and spiritual life of the
black villages. The synthesis of African and European religion that had taken
place under slavery was now complete, producing forms of folk Catholicism that,
while following the Catholic religious calendar and acknowledging the authority
of the church, were powerfully African in content—so much so that tension and
conflict continued between priests and parishioners over the proper forms for re-
ligious observance. Drumming, dancing, and music played on African instru-
ments were necessary parts of such observance for black worshippers, and over
time the church grudgingly accepted these aspects of black religiosity.70
What the church could not accept was the African practice of “bringing down”
the saints through ritual trance and possession. To be sure, this practice bypassed
the authority of the priests by giving lay people direct access to the gods and
saints. Even worse, it gave profound spiritual authority to women, since it was
mainly they who served as conduits or channels for the holy spirits. Rejecting the
practice of spirit possession as devil worship, the church tried actively but unsuc-
cessfully to stamp it out. Instead, peasants held their velorios (acts of devotion) in
private homes, where parishioners gathered to worship the Virgin, St. John, St.
Anthony, and other popular saints.71
Women had primary responsibility as well for another all too frequent ritual
observance in the black villages: the funerals of babies and newborns. Under free-
dom, both black birth rates and the size of black families seem to have increased
during the first half of the 1800s. But infant mortality remained extremely high,
and burials of angelitos (little angels) were a common occurrence of village life. In
the black communities of the Chota Valley in Ecuador, for example, it was local
custom for mothers to rest for 44 days after giving birth, during which they ate a
specially nourishing diet, did no work, and did not leave the house. A party was
then held to celebrate the mother’s “recovery” from the birth, at which the child
was often baptized. Yet despite such precautions to protect the mother’s and in-
fant’s health, many children died during their first year of life, both in the Chota
region and elsewhere. Child funerals were so common in the Esmeraldas rainfor-
est of Ecuador that to this day rezanderas (prayer women) hold an annual service
on December 24 in which the dead Baby Jesus is sung into heaven, in memory of
all the other angelitos who have joined him there.72
The funerals of the angelitos were exemplary of the changes wrought by free-
dom. Unlike on the colonial plantations, where the deaths of slave infants seem to
have gone largely unmarked, libertos and peasants were now at liberty to leave
work in collective remembrance of a deceased child and to celebrate the angelito’s
entry into paradise with festive eating and drinking. They were at liberty as well to
construct the networks of family, friends, and villagers within which the death of
a child was not just an isolated event but an occasion for the communal expres-
sion of joy and sorrow.
In the plantation zones of mainland Spanish America, libertos and black peas-
ants had succeeded in transforming the structures of their daily lives by making at
least partially real the threat of the destruction of the plantation economy. While
stopping well short of complete revolution, the combination of abolition, the
continuing economic and political disruptions of the civil wars, and the anti-oli-
garchical content of radical liberalism, all came together to produce a dramatic
realignment of the balance of power among landowners, slaves, libertos, and
peasants. That realignment made it possible for Afro-Spanish Americans to bar-
gain with former masters, current employers, and state officials from a stronger
position than had ever been the case before or has ever been the case since. As a
result, between 1820 and 1870 they were able to redefine conditions of life and
work in the plantation zones and to construct the lives that they had been denied
under slavery.73
Black Middle Classes

While war and civil violence battered the societies and economies of mainland
Spanish America, peace and stability created conditions for the continued expan-
sion of plantation economies in Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Based on the op-
pression of between 2 and 3 million slaves,74 those economies paradoxically gen-
erated significant opportunities for free black upward mobility and the growth of
black middle classes.
Fueled by ever-increasing sugar exports, Cuba may well have been the fastest-
growing economy in Latin America during this period. By 1850 it had the second-
highest level of exports per capita in the region, exceeded only by Uruguay;
Puerto Rico had the third highest. Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar competed di-
rectly with sugar production in Brazil. As a result, after substantial increases in the
early 1800s, Brazilian sugar exports only doubled in value between 1820 and 1870,
a relatively slow rate of growth. Brazil’s coffee exports exploded during the same
period, however, rising in value from 7 million pounds sterling in the 1820s to 50
million in the 1850s and 113 million in the 1870s. This was sufficient to produce
“modest but steady” growth in the national economy as a whole, and consider-
ably more than that in the coffee-growing southeast (Rio de Janeiro, Minas
Gerais, and São Paulo).75
In all three countries, the great bulk of export earnings went to landowning
and merchant elites and, through taxes, the national (or in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
the colonial) government. That wealth tended to concentrate and be spent in
urban areas, especially port cities and provincial and national capitals. As export-
based wealth increased, so did the demand for goods and services provided by
free black artisans and shopkeepers. Of the free black and pardo males canvassed
in the 1834 census of Rio de Janeiro, almost 40 percent were registered as artisans.
In Salvador, artisans sustained the Afro-Catholic religious brotherhoods and in
1832 created what was destined to become the city’s longest-lasting workers’ mu-
tual aid society, the Sociedade Protetora dos Desválidos.76
In Cuba, Spanish officials in 1843 described a substantial segment of the free
black population that lived “comfortably and, as they say, wears a clean shirt every
day. . . . Most of them know how to read and write and carry out the skilled trades,
and there are many who are owners of considerable amounts of capital.”77 An
1828 manifesto by Havana’s black militia officers conveys these upwardly mobile
Afro-Cubans’ collective sense of themselves. Describing themselves as “Spanish
Mulattoes and Blacks of Havana,” the officers drew a clear line between them-
selves and the city’s Africans and claimed a place in the “Spanish” sphere of colo-
nial society. They then specified the achievements on which that claim was based:
Mulattoes and blacks, we are the ones who practice the mechanical arts to
the highest degree of perfection, to the admiration and wonder of profes-
sors from other enlightened nations. We own property—houses that we live
in with our families, workshops, and buildings to rent out to those who
need them. We have farms and slaves in the same proportions as those other
members of the people of Havana who possess such property. 78
These militiamen, and other successful black artisans and businesspeople,
measured themselves by the standards of white society and demanded recogni-
tion and acceptance by that society. But Cuban elites and Spanish officials refused
to grant such acceptance. While caste laws restricting black upward mobility were
being struck down in Brazil and mainland Spanish America, they remained very
much in effect in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuban elites in
particular followed the disastrous lead of their Venezuelan (and Haitian) coun-
terparts during the late colonial period by insisting on the continued enforce-
ment of white racial privilege. As a result, “boundaries between whites and free
people of color became much more rigid” during the 1820s and 1830s, as Afro-
Cubans encountered “new discriminatory barriers . . . [and] a color prejudice
more virulent than they had known before.”79
Heightening prejudice and the continued enforcement of the caste laws drove
small groups of free black conspirators to join with the slave population in plot-
ting rebellions aimed at overturning slavery and the Caste Regime. Free blacks
helped plan and carry out major slave uprisings in 1812, 1825, and 1835. They also
sought out international allies, including British abolitionists operating on the is-
land during the 1830s and early 1840s, and anti-slavery forces in Haiti.80
As the rhythm of slave insurrection accelerated in the 1830s,81 Spanish officials
became increasingly concerned that free blacks could serve as a potential link be-
tween the colonial state’s internal and external enemies. In an effort to prevent
their making contact with those enemies, officials imposed new restrictions on
free blacks. In 1837 the prohibition against the entry of Haitians into Cuba was ex-
tended to free black foreigners from any country, as well as to black sailors, who
were required either to remain on their ships while in port or be arrested and held
in jail until their ships left. In 1839, following the arrest of several black militia of-
ficers and enlisted men for participation in an antigovernment conspiracy, the
Crown ordered “the most active vigilance over the colored militia” and the dis-
banding of any units that “strayed from the path of loyalty.” In 1841 the Spanish
governor abolished the only all-black town council in the island, that of Santiago
del Prado,“a town council of people of color, unique in its kind and the scandal of
this island.” In 1842, to limit their contact with the slave population, free blacks
were barred from carrying swords or firearms and from working as overseers or
bookkeepers on plantations.82
But still the slave rebellions continued, reaching a climax in the spring and fall
of 1843. That March, 1,000 slaves escaped from plantations and railroad construc-
tion camps in the Cárdenas region of Matanzas. Marching through the country-
side “in military order, clad in their holiday clothes, colors flying, and holding
leathern shields,” they were attacked and dispersed by Spanish troops, with heavy
loss of life. Many slaves committed suicide by hanging themselves in the woods to
avoid capture; others escaped to local cimarrón encampments. A second wave of
uprisings then broke out on several Matanzas plantations in November. Again
they were put down.83
Convinced that these rebellions were the product of an islandwide free black
conspiracy, in early 1844 the colonial government unleashed a massive campaign
of terror and repression against Africans and Afro-Cubans. All black militia units
were disbanded, free blacks were forbidden to enter plantations without written
authorization, and plantation owners were granted expanded powers of punish-
ment over their slaves. At least 2,000 free people of color and 800 slaves were ar-
rested and interrogated, most of them under torture. (This bloody chapter of
Cuban history is known as La Escalera, after the ladderlike device to which vic-
tims were strapped before being tortured.) Untold hundreds died in custody; 600
free blacks and 550 slaves were sentenced to prison terms, 430 free blacks to ban-
ishment from the island, and 38 free blacks and mulattoes and 39 slaves to death.
More than 700 Afro-Cubans fled the island in fear for their lives.84
Some historians have argued that there was no conspiracy among either the
free black or slave populations at this time and that the government’s actions were
the product of unfounded hysteria.85 More recent research suggests the presence
of multiple, overlapping groups of plotters among both the free black population
and the slaves, though the precise nature of the contacts among those groups re-
mains unclear.86 Beyond question is the savage brutality of the Spanish response
and its effectiveness in repressing further slave and free black resistance. Large-
scale slave rebellions in the island simply ceased after 1844. A Spanish visitor to the
island in the late 1840s found that even prosperous free blacks had been reduced
to a state of submission quite close, in some ways, to that of the slaves: “Always the
black, whether slave or free, is obligated to respect the white, to whom the law
grants a superiority which has as its object conserving the moral force required to
keep in submission those of the black race.”87
That “moral force” was difficult to maintain in the face of the free blacks’ con-
tinuing economic advance. Despite the decimation of the Afro-Cuban elite in
1844 and the confiscation of property suffered by many well-to-do people of
color, the black middle and upper-middle class soon rebuilt itself. The Spanish
visitor who commented on free blacks’ state of submission was struck by the dis-
parity between their lowly social status and their undeniable economic achieve-
ment. “They can own property and even slaves, and many earn their livelihood in
this way.” The governor of Havana noted in 1854 the continuing “ambitious pre-
tensions” of the free blacks and “the propensity of this race to excel the white” in
economic and professional achievement. The result, he noted, was widespread
“displeasure” and “discontent” among the whites, resulting in continued de-
mands that, in the words of two such individuals, the government reinforce “the
power that the white race has over the black one” and prevent “the awakening in
an inferior and degraded class of the idea of equality.” Spanish governors contin-
ued to invoke “the indispensable subordination and respect with which the col-
ored class must regard the white” and the imperative need to prevent any “slack-
ening of the links of obedience and respect which the colored race should
entertain for the white and on which the tranquility of this territory largely de-
pends.” In 1864 the Spanish administration even began to enforce long-disre-
garded legislation outlawing cross-racial marriage.88
Upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians also had their complaints and grievances
during this period, which found expression in the republican uprisings of the
1820s and 1830s and in demands in the “mulatto press” of Rio de Janeiro for in-
creased black representation at the highest levels of government.89 The govern-
ment might easily have responded to these outbursts with renewed controls
and restrictions on the free black population, as in Cuba. Instead, after putting
down the provincial rebellions and reestablishing central authority, the monar-
chy reconfirmed its commitment to racial equality and, in 1850, took the first
step toward the eventual abolition of slavery by finally outlawing the African
slave trade.
This commitment to racial egalitarianism, combined with continuing eco-
nomic growth and the ending of the slave trade, created significant opportunities
for black economic advancement. Planters started filling their labor demands by
buying urban slaves and transporting them to the countryside, resulting in im-
proved bargaining and labor market conditions for urban free blacks. In the
countryside, growing urban demand for foodstuffs created opportunities for free
black smallholders to produce corn, beans, manioc, livestock, and other crops for
sale in nearby towns and cities.
Nor were opportunities limited to manual occupations. Though no racial sta-
tistics are available on university enrollment, nineteenth-century intellectual
Sílvio Romero estimated that “hundreds” of mulattoes had graduated from the
newly established law and medical schools by the mid-1800s. “Mulatto doctors,
lawyers, and professors were numerous,” agrees historian João Reis.90 Black entry
was even more rapid into professions not requiring a university degree, such as
teaching, journalism, and the arts. By the 1870s and 1880s, the majority of elemen-
tary school teachers in Salvador and its environs were black. Black and mulatto
writers were common, including the country’s very best: Antônio Gonçalves
Dias, Tobias and Lima Barreto, João da Cruz e Sousa, and the greatest Brazilian
author of all time, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, founder and first president
of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.91
Especially striking to foreign visitors was the ability of nonwhites to take part
in national politics. “One finds colored men in all branches of administration, in
the holy offices, in the army, and there are many of excellent family,” reported
French traveler Maurice Rugendas in 1835. “If a man has freedom, money, and
merit, no matter how black may be his skin, no place in society is refused him,”
concurred an American observer in 1857.92 Two of the most prominent Conserv-
ative politicians of the 1800s—Francisco de Sales Torres Homem, Viscount of In-
homerim; and João Maurício Wanderley, Baron of Cotegipe—were men of color,
and Afro-Brazilians were to be found in the national Parliament, in state legisla-
tures, and in high appointed positions as well. In Brazil, enthused French physi-
cian and naturalist Louis Couty, who lived in the country from 1878 to 1884, “race
prejudice does not exist. . . . Free blacks and mulattoes mix completely with the
white race. . . . Not just at table, in the theater, in the salons, in all public places;
also in the army, in the government, in the schools, in the legislative assemblies,
one finds all colors mixed together on a basis of equality and the most complete
familiarity.”93
More than any other Latin American country, Brazil had succeeded in defus-
ing the racial tensions of the post-independence years and in laying the founda-
tion for its future “racial democracy.” What had made this achievement possible?
Certainly one reason was the extension of legal and civic equality to free blacks
and mulattoes. But this had also been done in Spanish America yet had not, in it-
self, been sufficient to bring peace to the region. Indispensable to the achievement
of racial and political peace was the government’s ability to repress the republican
uprisings of the 1830s and with them the “popular” wing of Brazilian liberalism.
Those rebellions failed in large part precisely because of their “blackness.” In a so-
ciety obsessed with the dangers of “Haitianization,” the majority-black composi-
tion of those radical movements was a key factor in alienating white support and
weakening the republicans in their confrontations with the central state. Thus
while anti-oligarchical “popular liberalism” continued to roil national politics in
much of Spanish America, by the 1840s its Brazilian counterpart had been largely
repressed and discredited. In the absence of that radical wing, Brazilian liberalism
became a party and a movement dominated by landowners and indistinguish-
able, in ideological and programmatic terms, from conservatism.94 The resulting
removal of class and racial tensions from Brazilian politics made possible not just
the functioning of political democracy (by 1870 suffrage in Brazil extended to an
estimated 50 percent of the free male population, a relatively high proportion by
European standards of the time) but the functioning of racial democracy as well.
Or at least in the eyes of foreign visitors. Brazilians themselves knew better.
Even sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the originator and most articulate exponent of
the concept of Brazil as a racial democracy, readily conceded the “dissatisfaction”
of those “mulattoes who after graduating from the University of Coimbra or the
Imperial academies never felt themselves wholly adapted to the society of their
day, with its racial prejudices, less marked than in other countries, but not to be
ignored.”95 Those prejudices were given vivid expression in a classic Brazilian
novel of this period, Aluísio Azevedo’s Mulatto (1881). The book’s central charac-
ter, Raimundo da Silva, is a young mulatto graduate of Coimbra. Despite his edu-
cation and accomplishments, he meets racial scorn and rejection from local elites
when he returns home and tries to begin a legal career. Perhaps his greatest of-
fense against local society is his romantic pursuit of a beautiful young white
woman, daughter of a Portuguese merchant. “Surely, they are carrying this busi-
ness of blood to great extremes!” he reflects, just before being murdered by a jeal-
ous rival in love.96
Though the caste laws were gone, their spirit lived on in the barriers of dis-
crimination and prejudice that continued to impede black advancement.97 In
order to overcome those barriers, upwardly mobile blacks and mulattoes de-
pended, even more than their white compatriots, on that archetypal figure of
Brazilian life, the powerful patron. All of Brazilian society was organized around
ties of patronage and clientelism: “Politicians did not succeed in their careers,
writers did not become famous, generals were not promoted, bishops were not
appointed, entrepreneurs were not successful without the help of a patron.”98
When even such prominent personages required assistance from powerful pro-
tectors, how much greater was the dependence of blacks and mulattoes, whose
racial status was a constant source of vulnerability and weakness?
The answer can be found in the novels of Machado de Assis, himself a person
of mixed African ancestry. Like his fellow Afro-Brazilian author Tobias Barreto,
Machado almost never commented in his novels on racial matters. Rather, his
books are wry meditations on the subtleties, ambiguities, rewards, and betrayals
of ties between the powerful and the weak. From the highest levels of the Afro-
Brazilian population to the lowest, black advancement depended on these ties,

which proved even more effective than military force in maintaining political and
racial order in Brazil. By tying talented blacks and mulattoes to white patrons,
and simultaneously repressing radical political alternatives, Brazilian elites en-
sured both the quiescence of the black middle class and the maintenance of a
larger structure of class and racial inequality that preserved wealth and power in
their hands. This was the true meaning of racial democracy, and of Brazilian po-
litical democracy as well.99
The complexities and contradictions of those two systems, and of the patron-
client ties by which they were maintained, were poignantly embodied in Brazil’s
Emperor, Pedro II.“A cabra like us,” Pedro enjoyed a popularity among slaves and
free blacks that grew steadily over the course of his long reign (1840–89). Com-
mitted to the eventual abolition of slavery, he was instrumental in bringing the
slave trade to an end in 1850 and then in pushing the Free Womb law through Par-
liament in 1871.100 It was the emperor’s justice to which slaves appealed when they
petitioned for their freedom or sought protection from abusive masters. A com-
mitted racial democrat, Pedro drew no racial distinctions among his subjects,
mingling freely and easily with Afro-Brazilian politicians and intellectuals and
even receiving the poverty-stricken Prince Obá II, self-proclaimed monarch of
Rio de Janeiro’s African population, with the same respect and courtesy that he
showed ambassadors from Europe.101
Pedro’s abolitionist stance, and especially his support for the Free Womb law,
provoked growing anti-monarchical sentiment among the coffee planters of the
southeast, who joined together in 1871 to create a Republican Party calling for an
end to the monarchy. For these diehard slavocrats, the final abolition of slavery in
1888—and Pedro’s support for a land reform program to benefit the newly freed
libertos—was the last straw. Republican demonstrations and political agitation
intensified in 1888 and 1889. In response, libertos, capoeiras, and other Afro-
Brazilians under the leadership of mulatto abolitionist and journalist José do Pa-
trocínio formed the Black Guard, a citizen militia with the stated goal of “oppos-
ing and resisting any revolutionary movement hostile to the institution that has
freed the nation [i.e., the monarchy].” “Our goal is not to pit colored men against
whites, but to restore to the former the right that was stolen from them, to take
part in public affairs”—almost certainly a reference to the Electoral Reform of
1881, which had been aimed specifically at the liberto population and had drasti-
cally reduced national suffrage.102 The guard’s violent assaults on Republican
meetings and parades further discredited the monarchy in the eyes of the planters
and helped precipitate its overthrow in November 1889. Accompanying the em-
peror into exile was his close friend and adviser, and archetypal member of the
black middle class, engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças. Neither man
would ever set foot in Brazil again.103
With the fall of the emperor, Afro-Brazilians lost their most powerful patron
and their most effective protection against the power of the planters. Even more
than the Empire, the Republic established in 1891 would be a political system in
which planter interests reigned supreme. Suffrage was limited to literate males, a
decentralized federal system allowed landowning elites full control over state and
local politics, and the planter-dominated Republican Party ruled with little or no
opposition. Under these conditions the hopes and euphoria of 1888, when slaves
had rushed to claim their citizenship, soon evaporated. As a Bahia newspaper ob-
served in 1890, in an unintended but deeply ironic counterpoint to the poem
quoted at the beginning of this chapter,“in 1888, everyone said: we are all citizens,
there are no more slaves. Today, in a low voice that trembles with terror, everyone
repeats to himself, or to his interlocutor: ‘in Brazil there are no more citizens: we
are all slaves!’”104
Cuba too was being torn by political struggles between monarchy and repub-
licanism, though in this case the struggles were overlaid by the question of colo-
nialism and the war for independence. As in Brazil at the same time, and main-
land Spanish America 60 years earlier, slavery and race had central roles in those
conflicts. Spain’s refusal to concede racial equality to free blacks created a perfect
opportunity for Cuban rebels to recruit black support. At the outbreak of the Ten
Years War in 1868, one of the rebel government’s first decrees was a declaration of
full racial equality and an end to the caste laws. Free Afro-Cubans flocked to join
the rebel forces, which soon became majority black; and though white officers
predominated at the upper levels of the army, Afro-Cubans were well represented
at the middle and lower levels of the officer corps. The general commander of the
rebel forces, Antonio Maceo, was Afro-Cuban, as were many of his most trusted
subordinates.105
During the war years Spain sought, with considerable success, to divide
Cubans along racial lines by portraying itself as the defender of white “civiliza-
tion” and the rebels as black barbarians pursuing the goal of an Africanized,
Haitianized Cuba.106 Once the rebels had been defeated, Spanish policy changed
direction, making an open bid for Afro-Cuban support by gradually repealing
the caste laws. Spanish officials did not act spontaneously but, rather, under
pressure from a well-organized civil rights movement based in the social clubs,
mutual aid societies, and civic organizations of the Afro-Cuban middle class.
Under the leadership of journalist and political activist Juan Gualberto Gómez,
in 1887 these organizations formed an islandwide Directorio Central de las So-
ciedades de la Raza de Color to coordinate the civil rights struggle. Between 1878
and 1893 Afro-Cuban activists obtained government edicts outlawing restric-
tions on interracial marriage; segregation in public education and public serv-
ices; and the keeping of official birth, death, and marriage records in volumes
separated by race.107
This was late in the game, however, for Spain to be reversing course. By the
1880s and 1890s caste legislation had lasted 70 to 80 years longer in Cuba and
Puerto Rico than in the rest of Spanish America and had left a powerful legacy
that would not be easily overcome. Race “prejudice had become normative” in
Puerto Rico,108 and to judge by the reactions of white Cubans to the antidiscrim-
ination edicts of the 1880s and 1890s, this was the case in Cuba as well. Private
schools simply ignored legislation mandating equality in education. Towns and
cities forced to open their parks and squares divided them into separate areas for
blacks and whites. And while many hotels, restaurants, and theaters accepted the
new laws, others continued to exclude black customers. As a result, most politi-
cally active Afro-Cubans remained committed to independence. The Directorio
Central served as a conduit for communication between exiled rebel activists in
the United States and organizers on the island. When a third independence war
erupted in 1895, most of the Directorio’s constituent societies closed their doors
as their members marched off to join the rebel forces. As in the two earlier wars,
those forces were again majority black and mulatto.109
❂
Independence wars against Spain, and then civil wars among competing political
forces, created the conditions for black emancipation throughout Spanish Amer-
ica.110 Under conditions of war, slaves and free blacks were able to overturn colo-
nial-era restrictions on their freedom and produce the first great wave of social
and political reform in Latin American history. War also reduced the ability of
landowners and governments to control black workers and peasants who were
now legally free. Afro-Spanish Americans seized this opportunity by joining with
other lower- and middle-class groups to forge an alternative to conservative, oli-
garchical politics—“popular liberalism,” based on radical doctrines of broad-
based democracy and social and racial equality. In the countryside, libertos and
free black peasants obtained land, redefined working conditions, created families,
and constructed a rich cultural and social life.
Afro-Brazilians also fought to create “popular liberalism” and to broaden the
terms of their political and economic participation in the life of the nation. But in
Brazil a stronger, more consolidated national state was able to defeat the rebel-
lions of the 1830s and 1840s and to repress radical political movements. That state
also followed racial policies quite different from those in effect in Spanish Amer-
ica. Everywhere in Spanish America—in the first half of the 1800s on the main-
land, and during the second half in Cuba and Puerto Rico—slaves and free blacks
made the transition toward freedom more or less in tandem. In Brazil, by con-
trast, over the course of the 1800s free blacks won legal equality while slaves re-
mained as oppressed as ever, and in larger numbers than ever, by slavery. This was
also a period of increased Africanization of the slave population, further dividing
slaves from free blacks. Africanization took place in Cuba as well, and is a con-
tributing reason why those two countries were the last in the Western world to
abolish slavery.
Yet even if at different times and by different routes, by the end of the century
all the societies of Afro-Latin America had abolished the legal structures of colo-
nial racism: slavery, the slave trade, and the caste laws. Blacks and pardos had won
freedom and legal equality with whites. Those advances offered the hope that, in
the words of Cuban independence leader José Martí, the 1900s in Afro-Latin
America would be “not the century of the struggle of races but of the affirmation
of rights.”111 His prediction proved unduly optimistic. Race struggle continued
in Afro-Latin America, shaped partly by the historical legacy of the colonial pe-
riod and partly by the new conditions of twentieth-century modernity. Societies
that during the 1800s had accepted and acknowledged, even if uncomfortably,
their racially mixed, miscegenated character now sought to remake and trans-
form themselves. It was to be a new age: the age of “whitening.”
❂ 4
“A TRANSFUSION OF NEW BLOOD”
Whitening, 1880–1930
Between 1800 and 1900 Afro-Latin Americans transformed the terms of their par-
ticipation in national life and in so doing helped build nineteenth-century na-
tions and societies. Their struggles for citizenship and economic and social ad-
vancement continued into the 1900s, but under new and different structural
conditions.
The first such condition was economic: the turn-of-the-century “export
boom.” As Western Europe and the United States entered the Second Industrial
Revolution, and as their national populations became increasingly urbanized,
their demand for Latin American raw materials and foodstuffs grew accordingly.
Meat and cereals from Argentina and Uruguay; sugar from the Caribbean; coffee
from Brazil, Colombia, and Central America; rubber from Brazil; oil from Mex-
ico and Venezuela—these and other commodities were being consumed in the
industrialized countries in quantities greater than ever before. Between 1870 and
1912, the annual value of Latin American exports almost quintupled, from $344
million to $1.6 billion. By 1912 six Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile,
Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay—were exporting more goods per
capita than the United States.1
A second important change was political, and a direct consequence of the ex-
port boom. Strengthened by the tax revenues generated by the export trade, na-
tional governments were able to bring civil wars to an end and impose central au-
thority on their recalcitrant societies. Whether those governments ruled through
fraudulent, controlled elections (as in Argentina and Colombia), through open
dictatorship (as in Venezuela), or through some combination thereof (as in Mex-
ico), they ruled in the name of national elites enriched and empowered by the ex-
port trade. Even in Brazil, where monarchical rule had provided stability and
order since 1840, coffee planters angry over abolition and desiring a greater voice
in national policymaking joined with military officers in 1889 to overthrow the
monarchy and replace it with a new republican regime thoroughly dominated by

landowning interests.
Bankrolled by export wealth, these oligarchical regimes no longer had to make
concessions to ex-slaves and free blacks demanding freedom, land, and the rights
of citizenship. They did not rescind the emancipation and anti-caste-law decrees
of the independence period, and some even continued to invoke racial equality as
one of the cardinal virtues of republican life. But as the balance of power shifted
from the “popular,” mass-based movements of midcentury to export-based elites,
official commitments to racial egalitarianism eroded accordingly, undermined by
the third important change of the export years: the arrival in Latin America of
new bodies of racial thought cloaked in the prestige and power of European and
North American science.
These were the years of scientific racism and social Darwinism in Europe and
North America, of Jim Crow segregation in the United States South, and of the
beginnings of apartheid in South Africa.2 At a time when the burgeoning export
trade was tying Latin America ever more closely to Europe and the United States,
these international currents of racist thought and practice could not fail to have
powerful influences on the region. Scientific racism was immediately embraced
by turn-of-the-century elites confronting the challenge of how to transform their
“backward,” underdeveloped nations into modern, “civilized” republics. Such a
transformation, they concluded, would have to be more than just political or eco-
nomic; it would have to be racial as well. In order to be civilized, Latin America
would have to become white.
The War on Blackness

In all the countries of the region, writers, politicians, and state planners wrestled
with the problem of Latin America’s racial inheritance. As firm believers in racial
determinism, they had no doubts that the historical trajectories of individuals,
nations, and peoples were irrevocably determined by their “racial” ancestry.
There could be no disputing the findings of European science, especially when
those findings conformed to Latin American elites’ own unshakable belief, de-
rived from 300 years of colonial slavery and the Caste Regime, in the innate infe-
riority of their black, Indian, mestizo, and mulatto compatriots. How then to
overcome that inheritance to create the social and cultural conditions necessary
for entering the community of “civilized,”“progressive” nations?3
The Latin American response to this dilemma was a bold, visionary, and ulti-
mately quixotic effort to transform themselves from racially mixed, predomi-
nantly nonwhite societies into “white republics” populated by Caucasians and
their descendants. “Venezuela has no salvation unless it resolves how it will be-
come a Caucasian country. This is the key to the future,” proclaimed Venezuelan
WHITENING, 1880–1930 119
intellectual Rufino Blanco Fombona in 1912. “We are two steps from the jungle
because of our blacks and Indians; . . . a great part of our country is mulatto, mes-
tizo and zambo, with all the defects which [British philosopher Herbert] Spencer
recognized in hybridism; we must transfer regenerating [Caucasian] blood into
their veins.”4
Cuban elites were thinking in virtually identical terms. “One can see the dan-
ger that exists for the white race if [European] immigration is interrupted,” cau-
tioned the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina in 1900, “and the need to pro-
mote such immigration on a much larger scale than up until now, so as to
definitively overcome that danger.” Young intellectual Fernando Ortiz, later to
distinguish himself for his research on Afro-Cuban history and culture, began
his career with impassioned appeals for white immigration.“Race is perhaps the
most fundamental aspect that should be considered in the immigrant,” he ar-
gued in 1906. And since the “black race” has proven itself to be “more delinquent
than the white situated in the identical social position . . . white immigration is
what we should favor.” Such immigration will “inject in the blood of our people
the red blood cells of which tropical anemia robs us, and sow among us seeds of
energy, of progress, of life . . . which today seem to be the patrimony of colder
climates.”5
State legislators in São Paulo also saw the question as one of blood. Exhorting
his colleagues to appropriate state funds to subsidize European immigration, leg-
islator (and coffee planter) Bento de Paula Souza argued that “it is necessary to in-
ject new blood in our veins, because ours is watered down,” to which his listeners
responded with cheers of “hear, hear, a transfusion of new blood.” Even Afro-
Brazilian intellectuals such as Raimundo Nina Rodrigues and Francisco José de
Oliveira Viana promoted the new orthodoxy. While acknowledging that “we
know blacks or colored men of undoubted merit, deserving of esteem and re-
spect,” Rodrigues concluded that “this fact cannot hinder the knowledge of this
truth: that up until the present blacks have not been able to constitute themselves
as civilized peoples.” This was why the country had to reconstruct itself through
European immigration, a process that Oliveira Viana documented in an influen-
tial and widely circulated report on “Racial Evolution” that was published as part
of the national census of 1920.6
Immigration was only the first step in whitening and Europeanizing Latin
American societies, however. Not only did those societies have to be whitened
racially and demographically; they had to be whitened culturally and aestheti-
cally as well. One form that such whitening took was the physical transformation
of the major cities of the region, the downtown areas of which were torn down
and rebuilt in modern European style. Narrow colonial streets were widened into
sweeping boulevards. Modern infrastructure—sewage and water systems, electri-
cal power, trolley lines and subways—was installed. And one- and two-story colo-
nial structures were demolished and replaced with multistory office and apart-
ment buildings modeled on those of Paris and London.7
“Urban reforms” of this sort were aimed not just at modernizing cities’ infra-
structure but at transforming their class and racial composition. Over the course
of the 1800s, workers had crowded into decaying colonial-era mansions and
houses that had been subdivided into tenements that went by different names in
different countries: conventillos (little convents) in Argentina and Uruguay; cor-
tiços (beehives) and cabeças de porco (hogsheads) in Brazil; solares (mansions) in
Cuba. As the export boom attracted growing numbers of migrants to the region’s
cities, these urban slum communities grew as well. Their overcrowding and crude
sanitary conditions contributed to high urban death rates, crime, and occasional
outbreaks of epidemic disease that threatened all city dwellers. And throughout
Afro-Latin America, they were heavily black and mulatto. In Brazil and Cuba,
where thousands of recently freed libertos sought to escape their recent servitude
by moving to the cities, they were overwhelmingly so. Surveys of Havana slums
found that 95 percent or more of their inhabitants were black and mulatto.8 In
Rio de Janeiro, black migrants from Bahia streamed into the center-city neigh-
borhood next to the docks, which became known as Little Africa. As that neigh-
borhood filled up, other Bahian migrants built Rio’s first favela, a community of
makeshift huts and shacks on a hill behind the Ministry of War. Over the course
of the 1900s, favelas spread throughout the city and become a ubiquitous form of
housing for the poor, who, as at the turn of the century, were predominantly
Afro-Brazilian.9
It was largely in order to remove poverty and blackness from the city center
that the federal government demolished and rebuilt much of Rio’s downtown in
the early 1900s, expelling the cortiços’ inhabitants to squalid, remote suburbs
along the railroad line north of the city. Center-city residents fought back with
the Vaccine Revolt, a week of urban riots in 1904. The immediate cause of the re-
bellion was a government campaign to vaccinate the population against small-
pox, in which health officials entered working-class homes, often without per-
mission, and inoculated every member of the family. Poor families reacted
angrily to this aggressive state intrusion into the home, and they protested as well
the destruction of inner-city neighborhoods that had provided affordable hous-
ing near their places of work. Many, perhaps most, of the rioters were Afro-Brazil-
ian. As one such protestor was carried off to jail, he shouted to the crowd that he
was fighting “to show the government that it can’t put its foot on the people’s
neck. . . . Every now and then it’s good for black folk to show that we know how to
die like men!”10
Federal troops and police easily put down the Vaccine Revolt, and the govern-
ment pushed on with its program of urban renewal. Ultimately, however, Latin
American governments’ ability to rebuild their urban centers was limited. While
WHITENING, 1880–1930 121
some urban slums were destroyed, most remained, providing the locus not just
for the ills of urban life but for some of its joys as well. In the cities of Afro-Latin
America, one of the principal such joys was the creation of a vibrant, African-
based popular culture that had started to take form under slavery and that now—
as a result of freedom, migration, and accelerating urbanization—flowered into
new and ever more creative forms. This flowering was most visible (and audible)
in music and dance. Even in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where the black pop-
ulation was numerically overwhelmed by a flood of European immigrants, the
music and steps of the African-based candombe were incorporated into new mu-
sical forms, milonga and tango, that dominated the bars and dance halls.11 And in
Brazil and Cuba, where blacks and mulattoes formed either the majority of the
population (Brazil) or a large minority (Cuba; see table 5.1), and where Africans
had continued to arrive in significant numbers through the middle of the 1800s,
popular music and dance remained overwhelmingly African-based.
In Cuba the two main genres of such music were rumba and son. Both were
developed by Afro-Cuban musicians during the first half of the 1800s, rumba in
the western provinces of Havana and Matanzas, son in the eastern province of
Oriente. During the 1890s and early 1900s musicians from Oriente began moving
to Havana, where son found a large and receptive audience in the city’s working-
class neighborhoods. Meanwhile, a similar process was taking place in Rio de
Janeiro, where migrant drummers and musicians from Bahia joined with locally
born Carioca (natives of Rio) musicians to create a completely new musical and
dance form, samba. Brazilian samba and Cuban rumba have common origins in
West African-based religion: rumba derived in part from the rhythms and music
of Santería and Abakuá, and samba from Bahian Candomblé, mixed with Carioca
Macumba. The result was several general points of similarity between the two
musics: their insistent 2/4 beat; their call-and-response singing over “batteries” of
percussion; and their dancers’ fluidity and looseness in the knees, hips, and upper
body, combined with rapid, intricate footwork.12
They were similar as well in being opposed and rejected by Brazilian and
Cuban elites, who saw in them the antithesis of the European civilization and
progress that they were trying to impose on their unruly societies. Civilization
and modernity were based on order, rationality, discipline, and control. To turn-
of-the-century elites, these dances, and African-based culture more generally,
represented the complete negation of those values. Echoing the scientific racism
of the day, elites and state authorities constantly invoked the alleged dichotomy
between European civilization and African barbarism and called for the suppres-
sion of African-based popular culture in almost all its manifestations.
In Cuba such suppression was initially aimed at the cabildos afrocubanos,
“whose special goal and characteristic,” the government complained in 1881,“is to
preserve the dances, costumes, and customs of the savage African tribes.”13 The
organizations were ordered to divest themselves of their African names, para-

phernalia, and rituals and to reconstitute themselves as Spanish-style mutual aid
societies or social clubs. Even on paper, this effort to transform and “Hispanize”
the cabildos was only partially successful. Many retained their African names,
membership, and structure, simply adding the obligatory “Recreational Society”
or “Mutual Aid Society” to their title. Spanish authorities therefore pressed fur-
ther with their campaign, first banning the black societies from dancing, drum-
ming, or parading publicly on religious holidays (1884), and then trying to break
the long-standing links between the cabildos and the African-based religions of
Abakuá, Santería, and Palo Monte. During the independence war of 1895–98, over
500 members of Abakuá lodges were arrested and deported to prisons in Spain’s
African colonies, where many of them died.14
Brazilian authorities undertook a similar war against capoeira, which was out-
lawed by federal statute in 1890. In Rio de Janeiro, police arrested more than 600
suspected capoeiristas and sent them to the penal colony on the far offshore is-
land of Fernando de Noronha. Organized capoeira gangs were eliminated from
the capital, and from all Brazilian cities except Salvador, where police repression
continued through the 1920s and 1930s. According to elderly practitioners of the
sport, the police would tie captured capoeiristas to horses and drag them through
the streets at full gallop back to police headquarters. As a result, they jokingly re-
call, they always practiced near police stations so that, if arrested, they would be
dragged a shorter distance.15
African-based religions were also targets of police repression. Between 1900
and 1920 newspapers in Cuba reported a series of incidents in which white women
and children were allegedly abducted and murdered by members of Afro-Cuban
cults, who supposedly used their blood in initiation or other rituals.16 Ultimately
more worrying to authorities and elites, however, were not the African religions’
supposed aggressions against whites—which upon investigation proved to be al-
most entirely illusory—but, rather, their attraction and appeal to whites. While the
priests and priestesses of Santería, Candomblé, and Macumba remained almost
entirely black and mulatto, their followers included numerous whites seeking spir-
itual solace and practical help in daily life. As in the analogous (to Fernando Ortiz)
case of European settlers in Africa, “black superstition attracts them, producing in
them a type of vertigo, and they fall from the heights of civilization . . . and return
to the primitive.”17 This was particularly the case, Ortiz argued, with members of
the white working class, because of their often-tenuous ties to European civiliza-
tion and their “psychic proximity” to African primitivism. Brazilian writers agreed
that poor whites were vulnerable to Africanization and that even the middle and
upper classes were by no means immune. Bahian physician and anthropologist
Nina Rodrigues diagnosed African “fetishist animism” as “a contagious psycholog-
ical state [that] could pass to the weakest among the upper classes, who are con-
WHITENING, 1880–1930 123
stantly in danger of ‘turning black.’”18 Journalist Paulo Barreto reported in 1906

that Rio de Janeiro’s middle class
lives in thrall to Witchcraft, to that mob of black men and women, of priests
and priestesses[;] we are the ones who finance its existence, with all the af-
fection of a businessman for his showgirl mistress. Witchcraft is our vice,
our pleasure, our degradation. It demands, we give; it exploits, we let our-
selves be exploited[.] It is the master extortionist, the assassin, the thief, al-
ways free and strong through the life that our money lends it.19
In its overwrought, feverish quality, Barreto’s language vividly conveys the
fears that gripped turn-of-the-century elites. Blackness was not something dis-
tant, alien, and far removed. To the contrary: as upper- and middle-class whites
left their mansions and townhouses each morning to enter the teeming world of
the street,“Africa began at their doorstep.”20 Just as modernizing elites undertook
urban renewal, public health, and sanitation campaigns aimed at removing crime
and disease from their societies, so did they launch campaigns of repression
aimed at eliminating African-based religion from national life and bringing those
nations into twentieth-century modernity.21
In addition to attacking African religions, Brazilian and Cuban authorities
sought to eliminate the African content of Carnaval, the annual “festival of the
flesh” that precedes Lent. Throughout Afro-Latin America, these festivities had
deep African roots. During the first half of the 1800s, slaves and free blacks in
Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Cartagena, Havana, and
other cities gathered for riotous dancing and drumming contests in which each
African nation sought to demonstrate its superiority. Carnaval was also an occa-
sion through which members of the lower class could briefly turn the tables on
their social betters by pelting them with eggs, balloons, and other small missiles
filled with water, flour, honey, or cruder substances.22
So enthusiastically did poor and working-class celebrants embrace this op-
portunity to upend the social hierarchy that by the 1840s and 1850s many munic-
ipal governments had banned or placed severe limits on Carnaval. During the
second half of the century, as African national organizations gradually faded
away, those governments, in alliance with upper-class social clubs and civic or-
ganizations, sought to further “civilize” Carnaval. During the late 1800s and early
1900s the focus of the event shifted from unruly street parties to public and pri-
vate occasions organized and sponsored by local elites: parades of cars and floats
representing elite clubs and comparsas (groups organized specifically to partici-
pate in Carnaval), and formal balls and dances held at the major social clubs and
hotels.23
These “civilized” manifestations of Carnaval dominated newspaper coverage
of the annual event, but that coverage simultaneously revealed the continued
presence of black street celebrations. “If someone from outside were to judge
Bahia by its Carnaval,” complained a Salvador newspaper in 1903, “they could not
fail to place us on a par with Africa.” When the city’s chief of police began to crack
down on black comparsas in 1904 and then banned them completely the follow-
ing year, the relief of the Bahian elite was palpable: “Although the horrible exhibi-
tions of African drumming and dance have not completely disappeared, they
have diminished greatly. . . . The failure of many of these groups to appear [this
year] constituted a great service to civilization. . . . No one has the right to dis-
credit the setting in which they live, by reviving African customs.”24
Cuban elites were equally vehement in their condemnation of African-based
Carnaval:
Every year during Carnaval, we witness scenes that disgrace our culture and
that make one suppose that one part of our population is still influenced by
atavisms that conflict with civilization. The spectacle is . . . repugnant: men
and women, all sense of shame lost, parading tumultuously through the
streets to the sound of African music, singing monotonous choruses and re-
producing in their movements gestures that may be appropriate in savage
Africa but that make no sense in civilized Cuba.25
In 1913 the mayor of Havana declared that comparsas would be permitted to
parade through the streets only if they left their “African” instruments at home
and agreed not to perform African dances. Black Carnaval groups sought to evade
the legislation by using snare drums and other percussion instruments borrowed
from military marching bands, but in 1916 the city government tightened restric-
tions further, making it virtually impossible for the black comparsas to perform.
In 1925 President Machado extended to the entire country Havana’s ban on
“drums or analogous instruments of African nature” and “bodily contortions
that offend morality.”26
Black Middle Classes

The war on African-based culture was applauded not just by whites but by the
black middle class as well. Upwardly mobile blacks and mulattoes were struggling
to cross the great divide separating the world of working-class poverty from that
of middle-class respectability. African-based culture was powerfully identified
with precisely that working-class world of slums and favelas that this “talented
tenth” was trying to escape. Admission to the world of the middle class therefore
required the complete rejection of that culture and the wholehearted embrace of
European models of civilization and progress.
Members of the white upper and middle classes worried constantly about the
subverting, “contaminating” effects of “Africanization” on their societies, but in
WHITENING, 1880–1930 125
keeping with the racial determinism of the times they could always claim a kind
of inherited immunity to the encroaching menace of blackness. Upwardly mobile
Afro-Latin Americans could make no such claim. In societies that regarded race
as a biological fact, their skin, their hair, their facial features signified a direct an-
cestral link to African-based culture. In order to meet the requirements for ad-
mission into civilized society and the national middle class, their rejection of that
culture had to be even more emphatic than that of their white counterparts.
The black middle class’s anxious relationship with African-based culture is
vividly captured in Afro-Cuban journalist Rafael Serra’s ominous metaphor of
“Africanism” as an “enormous octopus of innumerable and immeasurable tenta-
cles that stretches out completely and increasingly over all our social body.” Strug-
gling to escape those tentacles, Serra insisted that “we, who are born in [Cuba] . . .
owe absolutely nothing to Africa” and reject “everything that clashes with culture,
civic awareness, and love of good and beauty.”27
This rejection extended as well to any reminder of the slave past, equally
shameful and contaminating. Reporting on the Carnaval celebrations of 1893, the
Afro-Cuban newspaper La Igualdad (Equality) attacked black comparsas whose
members had dressed as plantation slaves, displaying “the garments and customs
of times that were our disgrace . . . the sinister time of slavery when our race lived
in backwardness. This sight causes us much sorrow.” Nor were such sentiments
confined to Cuba. Following the Buenos Aires Carnaval of 1882, the Afro-Argen-
tine newspaper La Broma (The Jest) described the “shameful way” in which
young black merrymakers “smear their faces with soot” and go off to perform
African songs and dances in the chic downtown Calle Florida, “which we have
had the disgrace of having to endure this year.” In Montevideo, the Afro-
Uruguayan newspaper La Conservación railed in 1871 against African-based reli-
gions and called for “doing away, once and for all, with these farces that are not re-
ligions, with these practices that follow no logical principle and serve only to
mark the meeting places where the black element gathers.”28
With only a few exceptions, the Afro-Brazilian press was unanimous in its re-
jection of Africa and African-based cultural practices, regardless of whether in-
dividual writers or papers favored or opposed the more controversial goal of na-
tional whitening. Blacks and mulattoes who supported whitening could logically
and consistently reject any possible connection between Afro-Latin Americans
and Africa. “Let us seek not to perpetuate our race,” argued the Afro-Brazilian
newspaper O Bandeirante in 1918, “but yes, to infiltrate ourselves into the bosom
of the privileged race, the white race, because, we repeat, we are not Africans but
rather purely Brazilian.” But speaking from an opposing position of black pride
and self-determination, O Getulino (1924) was equally emphatic in its rejection
of any tie between Afro-Brazilians and Africa: “Africa is for the Africans, my
friend. It was for your great-grandfather, whose bones have returned to the earth
and returned to dust. . . . Africa is for whoever wants it, but not for us, not for the
blacks of Brazil, who were born in Brazil, raised in Brazil, and have multiplied in
Brazil.”29
Yet as upwardly mobile Afro-Latin Americans turned their backs on Africa
and embraced their societies of origin, those societies did not always return the
embrace. Export-led economic growth, and racial ideologies (and behavior)
based on scientific racism and the concept of whitening, combined to produce a
tortured, contradictory situation for educated, ambitious blacks and mulattoes.
An expanding economy offered significant opportunities for social and economic
advancement. But as they sought to seize those opportunities, Afro-Latin Ameri-
cans found themselves running headlong into racial barriers that took multiple
forms: refusal of admission to restaurants, theaters, barbershops, hotels, and
other public facilities; private (and occasionally, prestigious public) schools’ re-
fusal to enroll their children; social clubs’ refusal to admit them; and, most dam-
aging of all, open or veiled job discrimination.30
None of these forms of discrimination were applied with the iron consistency
of state-imposed segregation in the United States, leading some African-Ameri-
can visitors to Latin America during this period to conclude that the region was
blessedly free from prejudice and discrimination.31 Yet it was precisely because of
such discrimination and prejudice—along with upwardly mobile Afro-Latin
Americans’ sense of themselves as a group set apart both from the white middle
class and from the black proletariat—that this period witnessed such a burgeon-
ing of black middle-class cultural and social institutions. From Havana to Buenos
Aires, Afro-Latin Americans excluded from white social and civic organizations
joined together to create a parallel universe of such entities. These included elite
social clubs, such as El Progreso (Santiago, Cuba), Club Atenas (Havana), La Perla
Negra (Santo Domingo), Kosmos (São Paulo), and others; less prestigious, but
more numerous, “recreational societies” (Cuba, Uruguay) and “dancing clubs”
(Brazil); athletic associations such as Alianza Lima (Lima) and Associação
Atlética São Geraldo (São Paulo), which sponsored soccer teams, track competi-
tions, and other events; and civic organizations such as the Federação dos
Homens de Cor and the Centro Cívico Palmares in Brazil, and the Directorio
Central de las Sociedades de Color in Cuba. At the boundary between the lower
levels of the black middle class and the upper levels of the black proletariat, there
were mutual aid societies such as the Centro de Cocheros (Havana), the So-
ciedade Protetora dos Desválidos (Salvador), and La Protectora and the Centro
Uruguay (Buenos Aires). And in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay (and per-
haps other countries as well, where extensive research on turn-of-the-century
black organizations has yet to be done), an active black press chronicled the activ-
ities of these groups.32
WHITENING, 1880–1930 127
figure 4.1. The black middle class: Buenos Aires, 1904. Credit: Archivo General de la
Nación, Buenos Aires.
The elite social clubs were probably the most visible of the black organiza-
tions, if only because they were the ones most likely to attract the favorable atten-
tion of white elites and the establishment press. The Buenos Aires illustrated
magazine Caras y Caretas reported on several such clubs in 1905, “where instead
of the grotesque candombe or semba [African-based dances] . . . they dance in
modern clothes in the manner of Louis XV.”33 This was the ultimate accolade:
Afro-Latin Americans had proved themselves as successful as Euro-Latin Ameri-
cans in producing a simulacrum of European culture in the New World. And in-
deed, this was precisely the point, as the most prestigious of all the Afro-Cuban
social clubs implicitly acknowledged in its choice of name, Club Atenas (Athens
Club). “We are an institution,” its charter members declared in 1917, “that reflects
the degree of culture, spiritual elevation and intelligence of the elements that we
represent, as well as their aspirations toward constant progress.” For these indi-
viduals—merchants, lawyers, journalists, students, property owners—the most
potent symbol of the European-derived culture and progress that they sought
was classical Greece.34
Some of the black social clubs attempted to ignore the realities of discrimina-
tion and prejudice, constructing (in the words of Kosmos, a club in São Paulo) “a
miniature nation, of which we are valiant inhabitants and ardent patriots,” “a
boat on the immense ocean, gliding over tranquil seas.”35 Members often found
discrimination impossible to ignore, however, and denunciations and protests
of racial barriers in theaters, restaurants, schools, parks, and other public facili-
ties appeared frequently in the clubs’ activities and discourse. This was even
more the case in the black civic associations, which were explicitly devoted to
racial uplift. In Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay, three of the countries most power-
fully affected by European immigration, these organizations eventually gave rise
to black political parties.
Not surprisingly, immigration—and the problems that it had created for the
black population—was one of the principal issues addressed by all three parties.
Shortly after its founding in São Paulo in 1931, the Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazil-
ian Black Front) announced “a hard nationalist campaign, against the foreign or
semi-foreign slime” that had entered the country during the previous 40 years,
and called on the federal government to “close the doors of Brazil [to foreigners]
for 20 years or more” to give black people the chance to recover from the damage
done them by European immigration.36
The ending of the Republic and one-party rule in 1930 opened the way for
multiparty electoral competition, and the Frente’s goal was to create a vehicle to
represent Afro-Brazilian interests in that competition. Local chapters formed
throughout São Paulo; in the neighboring state of Minas Gerais; and in Espírito
Santo, Bahia, and Rio Grande do Sul. The Frente’s example even spread beyond
Brazil, prompting the creation of the Partido Autóctono Negro in Uruguay in
1937. The Frente and the Partido Autóctono campaigned intensively for their can-
didates, but in both cases the black vote simply failed to materialize. Or rather,
when it did, it went not to black parties but to the mainstream “establishment”
parties. Despite the Partido Autóctono’s charge that those parties “will never be
able to understand the genuine reality of the [racial] problem,” when it came time
to vote, recalls a former member, “the [black] race was either Blanco or Colorado
[the two main parties in Uruguay], and they weren’t interested in anything else.
We ran a massive campaign, from the interior of the country to Montevideo, but
it didn’t make any difference.” Of 375,000 votes cast in the national elections of
1938, only 87 went to the Partido Autóctono. Results were equally disappointing in
Brazil, where Frente Negra candidates in São Paulo, Salvador, and other towns
and cities received just a handful of votes, and not a single one was elected.37
This was also the case with the other black political party of this period, the
Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) in Cuba. The PIC was the product of a half
century of political mobilization among Afro-Cubans: as soldiers and officers in
the three independence wars, as members of the mainstream political parties
(Moderates and Autonomists under Spanish rule, and Liberals and Conservatives
following independence), and in the “colored societies” that joined to form the
Directorio Central. Though the Directorio closed its doors in 1894, local societies
continued to exist and were joined by other organizations during the early 1900s
as the black middle class continued to expand.38
This level of organization, the relatively large size of the Afro-Cuban middle
class, and the enactment of genuinely universal male suffrage in post-independ-
ence Cuba all made the Afro-Cuban population a political force to be reckoned
WHITENING, 1880–1930 129
with. Prominent politicians, including national presidents, cultivated relations

with the black societies and appeared regularly at their functions. And solidly “es-
tablishment” newspapers, including the voice of Cuban conservatism, Havana’s
Diario de la Marina, ran weekly columns in which black journalists and contrib-
utors discussed issues of concern to Afro-Cubans.39
Still, resentments and grievances lingered. Black participants in the independ-
ence movement had believed that they were forging, in the words of independ-
ence leader José Martí, a racially egalitarian republic “with all and for all,” offering
full participation to blacks and whites alike.40 Instead, the new political order
seemed to channel most of the benefits of independence to white Cubans, and
even to Spanish immigrants, rather than to blacks. As part of its campaign to
“whiten” the island’s racially mixed population, the republican government of
the early 1900s actively promoted Spanish immigration. Once arrived in Cuba,
Spaniards received overt hiring preferences from public (government) and pri-
vate employers. Afro-Cuban veterans, including officers with distinguished
records of service to the independence cause, found themselves passed over for
government jobs, while Spaniards and Cuban whites who had played no role in
the struggle, or even opposed it, received lucrative positions and appointments.41
As in other Spanish American countries, politically active Afro-Cubans
tended to identify with the Liberal Party. Black veterans and politicians pres-
sured the party through the Action Committee of Colored Veterans, formed in
1902, and joined in the (unsuccessful) Liberal rebellion of 1906. But by the end of
the decade, a number of veterans and activists were calling for the creation of a
new, racially defined party. After a series of public meetings in towns and cities
around the island, the Partido Independiente de Color was established in Ha-
vana in 1908.42
The party only competed in a single election, that of 1908, and its performance
was marginal. In congressional races in which Conservative and Liberal candi-
dates polled anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 votes, no PIC candidate re-
ceived more than 116.43 Despite this poor showing, Liberals viewed the upstart
party as a potential threat to their control over the black vote. Early in 1910, the
Cuban Congress passed an amendment introduced by Afro-Cuban Senator
Martín Morúa Delgado to outlaw parties composed of members of a single race.
PIC leaders lobbied Congress (and, recognizing its considerable power in Cuban
politics, the U.S. State Department) to overturn the bill as unconstitutional. But
neither institution budged. Over 200 party members were arrested during the
spring and summer and imprisoned until the fall elections were over.
In the face of this repression, hundreds of members and activists withdrew
from the party. Those remaining, determined not to be barred from the elections
of 1912, planned an “armed demonstration” for May to demand the overturning
of the Morúa Amendment. In Cuba as in other Spanish American countries dur-
figure 4.2. The black middle class: Senator Martín Morúa Delgado and his family,
Havana, 1909. Credit: Collection of Alejandro de la Fuente, Pittsburgh, Penn.
ing the early years of independence, armed actions of this sort were a standard
feature of political competition, but in this instance the government response was
far from typical. Instead of arresting and imprisoning party members, the gov-
ernment launched a campaign of extermination that killed most of the leader-
ship, much of the rank and file, and several thousand Afro-Cubans who had no
connection whatsoever with the party.
Why did the government respond with such excessive force? Certainly one
motive was the desire of the ruling Liberal Party to remove a potential source of
electoral competition—though by so murderously repressing the PIC, the Liber-
als may have done themselves more harm than good. Through the rest of the
1910s and into the 1920s, the Conservatives made considerable political capital of
WHITENING, 1880–1930 131
the massacre, denouncing former Liberal President José Miguel Gómez as “the
one who machine-gunned the colored race” and urging black voters to “remem-
ber the great slaughter of May [1912].” It is impossible to know for certain what ef-
fect these appeals had, but the Liberals were voted out of power in the fall of 1912
and did not regain the presidency until 12 years later.44
The spectacle of an armed black political movement triggered deep-seated
fears in Cuban society of “Haitianization” and “Africanization”: the possibility
that rebel forces might take over the island and turn it into a black republic. Those
fears clearly played a role in the massacre, just as they did in the government of-
fensive against African-based religion and music. But it is important to note that
the killings were confined almost entirely to the eastern province of Oriente, the
principal area in which the rebellion, originally planned to be islandwide, actually
materialized. Explaining why the rebellion erupted only in that province, and
why government repression was so extreme, points us toward yet another source
of conflict during the export years: continuing struggles over land.
Land
As Europeans and North Americans consumed ever-greater quantities of sugar,
coffee, bananas, cacao, and other plantation-based crops, export earnings poured
into Afro-Latin America, providing landowners with both the capital and the in-
centive to expand and develop their landholdings. Black peasants with legal title
to their land had some chance of resisting landowners’ encroachments and even
of profiting from increased demand for their products.45 But those who had
squatted on public or abandoned private lands were vulnerable.
Export earnings enriched national governments as well, enabling them to cre-
ate the armed forces required to restore “order” to the countryside and bring the
nineteenth-century civil wars to an end. This extension of state authority into
rural areas gave landowners the means to reestablish control over lands that, ear-
lier in the century, they had been forced to cede to squatters and tenants. It also
permitted national governments to reassert control over publicly owned state
lands, vast tracts of which were now handed over to private investors through
land grants or sales. In Mexico the distribution of state-owned lands during this
period struck directly at Indian and mestizo peasants, creating the massive dis-
possessions that set the stage for the Mexican Revolution. In the countries of
Afro-Latin America, the privatization of public or communally owned lands had
similarly negative effects on peasants who found themselves pushed off their sub-
sistence farms and losing the investments that they had made in buildings, coffee
bushes, fruit trees, and other crops.46
This process of enclosure was most intense and widespread in Cuba. Already
the center of New World sugar production during the 1800s, the island experi-
enced a massive infusion of American capital between 1890 and 1920, resulting in
the reorganization, modernization, and further expansion of the sugar industry.
Part of that reorganization was the subcontracting of cane production to small-
and medium-holder colonos, who grew cane either on their own land or on land
rented from the plantations. Some black farmers, particularly those who had ac-
quired land earlier in the 1800s, were able to take part in colono production. Nev-
ertheless, as early as 1900 the ranks of the colonato were overwhelmingly white
and became even more so as time went on.47
Withdrawing in the face of the plantations’ advance, many Afro-Cubans—es-
pecially those recently freed ex-slaves with no claims to land ownership—mi-
grated from the western sugar-growing zones of Havana and Matanzas to Ori-
ente, where large tracts of forest remained unsettled and available for cultivation
by squatters. But empty land attracted sugar companies as well as peasants. Dur-
ing the early 1900s a number of U.S.-owned firms opened operations in the
province, again driving smallholders off the land. The result was a state of con-
stant tension, violence and petty banditry in the Oriente countryside. It was
hardly surprising, then, that when the PIC called for armed action in 1912 to
protest being banned from the elections of that year, the province erupted in
rebellion.48
Nor, given Oriente’s recent history, was it entirely surprising that the govern-
ment resorted to such savage repression to put down the rebellion. From the run-
away communities of the early 1800s through the three independence wars, the
province had been a national center of black resistance, first to slavery and Span-
ish rule, now to land dispossession. And with the arrival of U.S. sugar companies,
the stakes at play in such rebellions were higher than ever before. Peasants in arms
threatened not just public order and security; by placing in jeopardy tens of mil-
lions of dollars in foreign investments, they directly threatened Cuban national
sovereignty as well. During the years of the export boom, the United States sent
troops repeatedly into Caribbean nations, including Cuba.49 The most frequent
justification for those interventions was the protection of American economic in-
terests, and a peasant rebellion aimed at U.S.-owned sugar companies obviously
endangered such interests. The Gómez administration therefore had to repress
the revolt immediately and remove the threat of future such uprisings.
Yet just as the repression of 1912 failed to maintain the Liberals in power, so too
did it fail to keep the United States from intervening in Cuban affairs. U.S. com-
panies fearing the destruction of their property appealed to Washington for pro-
tection, and U.S. Marines landed in the province the following week. Nor did the
repression prevent future such episodes. Five years later the Liberal rebellion of
1917 set off a renewed wave of looting, arson, and banditry by peasant rebels in
Oriente. This time both the number of rebels involved (10,000, according to the
local U.S. consul) and the level of destruction (100,000 tons of sugarcane burned
WHITENING, 1880–1930 133
in the northern part of the province, and tens of thousands more in other areas)
were far greater than in 1912. In 1912 the Marines had remained for only a month;
after 1917 they stayed in the province for five years. Even so, the peasant rebels
were never completely put down, and they continued to operate in the mountains
and forests of the Sierra Maestra. It was among the descendants of those rebels,
still living in their mountain redoubts, that Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara found
their first recruits when they arrived in Oriente in 1956.50
A similar process of expropriation took place in the Dominican Republic.
Here most agricultural land was owned not by individuals but in the form of ter-
renos comuneros, large tracts held in common by groups of ranchers or farmers.
Members of the group had rights to farm or graze animals on the land, but no
formal property rights over any specific portion of it.51 With the arrival of foreign
sugar companies (American, German, and Cuban) in the 1880s and 1890s, this
system of land tenure began to change. Buying up individuals’ rights in the ter-
renos comuneros, or paying surveyors and officials to find local titles invalid, the
companies acquired large holdings in the eastern part of the country, pushing
peasants off their lands and converting them into wage laborers. In 1880, Domini-
can writer and intellectual Pedro Bonó observed that the more foreign capital
that entered the sugar zones, “the poorer I see the black man of Sabana Grande
and Monte Adentro, and if it continues, the day is not far away in which all the
small-property holders who up until today have been citizens will come to be
peons or, more properly speaking, serfs, and Santo Domingo a little Cuba or
Puerto Rico or Louisiana.” Four years later, he pronounced the process of dispos-
session virtually complete:
I have seen the transformation of the East: the titles to its property trans-
ferred almost for free into the hands of new occupants wrapped in the dis-
guise of progress. Progress it would be, if it were a matter of the progress of
the Dominicans, if the old peasants of the Santo Domingo commons . . .
were in part the owners of the plantations and the refineries. . . . Although
poor and coarse, at least they were property owners, and today, poorer and
made more brutish, they have become proletarians. What progress does that
show?52
Under continuing pressure from the sugar companies, in 1911 the government
outlawed the system of communal land ownership entirely, requiring that the ter-
renos comuneros be surveyed and partitioned into individual holdings that could
be bought and sold on the open market. This measure was further confirmed by
the Land Registration Law of 1920, passed during the U.S. occupation of the
country (1916–24). Under these laws, peasant lands became ever more vulnerable
to purchase or expropriation by the sugar companies, and the process of dispos-
session continued.53
The growth of sugar exports was most strongly felt in Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, and Puerto Rico, but even in secondary areas of sugar production, such
as Colombia’s Cauca Valley, dispossession of the black peasantry proceeded
apace. During the first 50 years after independence, war, economic dislocation
and abolition had combined to place Cauca landowners in a position of unaccus-
tomed weakness vis-à-vis their former slaves. In negotiating tenancy contracts
and terms of employment, libertos moved freely from hacienda to hacienda,
playing employers off against each other. Many Afro-Colombians withdrew from
wage labor almost entirely, carving out smallholdings on state-owned public
lands or hacienda lands abandoned by their owners.
The Conservative Party takeover of power at the national level in the 1880s,
and the strengthening of the national government through rising coffee earnings,
gradually shifted the balance of power between landowners and peasants. Hacen-
dados began to reassert control over their lands, ejecting squatters and forcing
new labor contracts on those who remained. Black Liberal caudillo Cenecio Mina
led guerrilla resistance to the land takeovers. But Conservative victory in the last
of the nineteenth-century civil wars, the War of the Thousand Days (1900–3),
ended armed Liberal resistance. As the process of dispossession accelerated, peas-
ant communities were forced off land that they had farmed for decades.54 The
wave of enclosures intensified further after 1914, when the completion of a rail-
road from Cali to the Pacific coast (in conjunction with the opening of the
Panama Canal that year) opened new export opportunities. During the 1930s ha-
ciendas spread south from the Cauca into the Patía Valley, as the new Pan-Amer-
ican Highway tied that region of black towns and palenques into the national
transportation network.55
In Brazil, once the center of world sugar cultivation but now surpassed by
more highly capitalized producers of cane sugar in the Caribbean, dispossession
proceeded at a slower pace. Lacking the wherewithal to invest in more mecha-
nized forms of production, and facing the loss of their slave labor forces after abo-
lition in 1888, Brazilian sugar planters encouraged ex-slaves to remain on the es-
tates as sharecroppers or labor-tenants, growing their own crops for subsistence
or sale. In Rio de Janeiro, Afro-Brazilian tenants producing corn, beans, and man-
ioc for sale in the capital enjoyed “a high degree of autonomy in relation to the ad-
ministrators of the plantation” and were able to construct lives and communities
largely of their own making.56 Conditions were more difficult in the sugar zones
of the northeast, where urban markets were smaller and poorer and the region
was buffeted by multiyear droughts. Even (or especially) under these conditions,
however, tenancy represented a means to escape large-scale dispossession, which
did not occur in the northeast until the second half of the 1900s.57
Slow growth, or even economic stagnation, in the sugar zones thus sheltered
black peasants somewhat from the rigors of the market. The situation was utterly
WHITENING, 1880–1930 135
different in the booming coffee-growing regions of the southeast. The coffee

zones of São Paulo were one of the most dynamic areas of Latin American export
production, and as plantations spread, ex-slaves were systematically removed
from agricultural land. This was the case even in the older parts of the coffee
zones, where cash-starved planters trying to coax yields from aging trees and
badly eroded land were forced to cede sharecropping and tenancy rights compa-
rable to those granted to workers on the sugar plantations. Under these condi-
tions, coffee cultivation was barely profitable, and during the early 1900s planters
increasingly turned their land over to cattle grazing, dispensing with most of their
tenants. Those workers had little recourse but to move to nearby towns in search
of work, or to the national capital of Rio de Janeiro, where they joined the rapidly
expanding urban proletariat.58
In the newer areas of coffee cultivation, in central and western São Paulo, the
dispossession of black workers began almost immediately after emancipation.
Here the form of labor relations that replaced slavery was the colono contract,
under which planters hired entire families (wives and children, along with male
heads of household, were bound by the terms of the contract) to care for parcels
of several hundred coffee trees. Families received cash salaries, housing, and the
right to plant wheat, corn, and other crops in the rows between the trees. Growing
their own crops for subsistence and sale enabled colono families to escape com-
plete proletarianization. By the 1920s and 1930s many had accumulated sufficient
savings to buy small- and medium-holdings of their own.59
The coffee boom thus generated a substantial rural middle class in São Paulo,
but very few of these new smallholders were black. As in Cuba, coffee planters
opted to keep the colonato white and to deny such employment to their former
slaves. In part this decision was a reaction to ex-slaves’ insistence on not subject-
ing women and children to agricultural field labor. Planters and ex-slaves both
viewed female and child labor as an integral component of the recently abolished
institution of slavery. Planters were determined to maintain this practice, and ex-
slaves were just as determined to do away with it. The planters prevailed, mainly
by importing immigrant workers who, having no history of plantation slavery,
were willing to include women and children in the colonato contract. Italian,
Spanish, and other European families replaced Afro-Brazilians on the great es-
tates, with devastating consequences for long-term black upward mobility in São
Paulo.60
Immigration
In addition to losing access to land, Afro-Brazilians’ experience in São Paulo sug-
gests a second negative consequence of the export boom: racialized labor migra-
tion. Whitening through immigration had been a dream of Latin American gov-
ernments since the early 1800s. During the 1840s and 1850s, Brazil, Peru,
Venezuela, and other countries allocated state funds to help pay the transatlantic
passages of Europeans. Colombia offered tax exemptions and a 20-year immu-
nity from military service for immigrants and their children. But none of these
programs yielded significant results, and European migration to Latin America
remained minimal through the 1870s.
This changed with the coming of the export boom. Economic growth gener-
ated greatly increased job and business opportunities, as well as tax revenues that
Latin American governments could use to recruit and subsidize European immi-
grants. And by 1888 slavery had finally been abolished everywhere in Latin Amer-
ica, so that immigrants no longer had to compete for jobs against a slave labor
force. Facing insistent demands from their former slaves for new work regi-
mens—shorter and more flexible hours, no work for women and children, in-
creased autonomy and freedom from direct supervision—employers responded
by seeking out alternative sources of workers. These could easily have come from
within Latin American societies themselves, but the dictates of scientific racism,
combined with the availability of millions of European workers ready and willing
to leave their native lands, led governments to invest state funds not in locally
born nonwhites but in European immigrants.
Despite those investments, it was not easy to get the immigrants to come. Most
Europeans favored the United States and Canada, or Australia and New Zealand,
over the poorer, less developed countries of Latin America.61 Bypassing countries
like Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, they headed instead for Argentina,
Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay, which received over 90 percent of the 10 to 11 million
Europeans who arrived in the region between 1880 and 1930.62 Within Brazil, Eu-
ropean immigrants shunned the economically stagnant northeast and poured
into the southeastern and southern states. Among those states, São Paulo, with its
program of public subsidies for immigrants (the state paid for steamship trans-
portation from Europe for qualifying families) funded by abundant coffee earn-
ings, proved to be the most powerful draw. Of the 3.5 million Europeans who en-
tered the country, over half (2.0 million) came to São Paulo, a figure exceeding the
entire 1890 population of the state (1.4 million).63
Most Latin American countries failed to attract European immigrants in the
numbers required to whiten their national populations or to resolve their per-
ceived labor shortages. In these countries the need for workers ultimately drove
employers to solutions that were diametrically opposed to the national goal of
whitening: the importation of nonwhite workers from Asia and the Caribbean.
The freeing of Peru’s few remaining slaves in 1854 and the ending of the African
slave trade to Cuba in the mid-1860s led those two countries to contract some
200,000 Chinese laborers between 1850 and 1874, mainly to work on sugar planta-
tions and railroad construction. British pressure on China to end the “coolie
WHITENING, 1880–1930 137
trade” greatly reduced Chinese labor migration to Latin America after 1874 and
frustrated Brazilian efforts to obtain Chinese laborers to work on the coffee plan-
tations. During the 1880s and after, Brazilian planters turned their attention to
Europe, but beginning in 1908 São Paulo began to recruit Japanese immigrants as
well. As European immigration slowed during World War I and thereafter, immi-
grants from Japan increased sharply. By 1930, 125,000 Japanese had arrived in
Brazil. When the São Paulo state government ended its program of transporta-
tion subsidies for European immigrants in 1927, it left such subsidies in place for
the Japanese.64
Even more problematic for the national goal of whitening was black immigra-
tion. Yet between 1900 and 1930, hundreds of thousands of black workers from
the French and British West Indies—Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, and other is-
lands—came to work in Spanish American countries. The largest migratory
streams went to Cuba, where slightly more than 300,000 West Indians entered the
country during those years, Venezuela (200,000–300,000), and Panama
(150,000–200,000).65
All three countries were undertaking immense projects of infrastructural de-
velopment, requiring massive labor forces. In Cuba, West Indians came to work in
the expanding sugar industry; in Venezuela, in the new oil industry; and in
Panama, on the building of the Panama Canal and on banana plantations along
the Caribbean coast. Each of these projects was undertaken by corporations
based in the United States: in Cuba, by U.S.-owned sugar companies; in
Venezuela, by Standard Oil and other firms; and in Panama, by the Panama Canal
Company and the United Fruit Company. Latin American elites and govern-
ments, committed to the whitening of their national societies, were strongly op-
posed to black immigration, but U.S.-owned firms had no interest in the racial
“improvement” of the countries in which they operated. Indeed, from the point
of view of most American executives, racially mixed Hispanics and black West In-
dians occupied equally low positions on the racial scale. Meanwhile, the islands
offered cheap, abundant workers, many of whom offered the additional advan-
tage of speaking English.66
U.S. sugar companies opening new plantations in eastern Cuba began import-
ing thousands of Haitian and Jamaican laborers in the 1910s. Cuban nationalists
bitterly protested this “Africanization” of the island, but the government was un-
able to withstand the companies’ demands and authorized the entry of black
workers.67 The same was true in Venezuela and in Panama, where by 1913 and 1914
some 45,000 to 50,000 men were on the Panama Canal Company payroll, in a
country of fewer than half a million. Of those workers, the great majority were
West Indian.68 This was also the case on the banana plantations of the United
Fruit Company, built along the sparsely settled Caribbean coast of Panama, Costa
Rica, and Honduras. Costa Rica’s coastal province of Limón, for example, had a
figure 4.3. West Indian migration: the S.S. Ancon arrives in Panama with laborers
from Barbados, 1909. Credit: Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.
WHITENING, 1880–1930 139
total population of less than 8,000 in 1892; between 1900 and 1913 United Fruit
imported over 20,000 West Indians into the province.69
In countries with relatively small populations, this volume of immigration
had an enormous impact, even more so when it was a direct consequence of the
massive influx of American capital into the region. Caribbean and Central Amer-
ican elites, unwilling to risk alienating the American firms and officials on whom
they now depended, and at the same time deeply resentful of that very depend-
ence, vented their anger on the West Indians as the most tangible expression of
the “denationalization” of their countries. “Is It Already the Beginning of the
End?,” asked the Costa Rican magazine Reportorio Americano in 1923. Reporting
on United Fruit Company plans to bring more West Indian workers to its planta-
tions in Honduras, the magazine protested that “Honduras will be buried be-
neath a Haitian republic. . . . Instead of 700,000 light-colored Hondurans, we will
have 4,000,000 dark Antilleans . . .[,] the Atlantic coast will be transformed into a
solid mass of soot, and the Caribbean Sea into a Charcoal Sea.” By 1930 the maga-
zine was even blunter: “What Do We Want Costa Rica to Be: White or Black?” It
was bad enough, the writer complained, that the Atlantic coast was overrun by
West Indians. Now, as United Fruit proposed to build new plantations on the Pa-
cific Coast, Costa Rica faced the movement of West Indians into the central part
of the country, as well as the loss of one of the principal causes of the country’s
prosperity and progress: “the homogeneous racial composition of its inhabitants . . .
As a human being, I don’t hold anything against anybody, whether they be white,
Chinese, or black. . . . But this is a problem into which sentimentality cannot
enter, because it’s biological, or more concretely, eugenic. The right to defend
ourselves when we’re threatened by danger is . . . fundamental.”70
Hispanic Costa Ricans did take steps to “defend themselves.” It was widely be-
lieved in Costa Rica that federal law forbade the travel of West Indians from the
Atlantic coast to the central highlands. In fact no such law existed; nevertheless, it
was rare for West Indians to travel inland from Limón. West Indian train crews on
the Limón to San José railway traveled only halfway to the national capital, stop-
ping at Turrialba, at which point Hispanic crews took over and the black crews re-
turned to Limón. And as Costa Rican officials negotiated the conditions for
United Fruit’s new Pacific Coast plantations in the 1930s, they insisted on a provi-
sion barring the employment of black labor on those plantations. Unlike at-
tempted governmental restrictions on West Indian labor in other countries, this
one was actually enforced. Elderly West Indians interviewed in the 1970s recalled
traveling to the Pacific Coast plantations in the 1930s and being denied jobs there
“because it’s against the law.”71
Anti-West Indian sentiment was even stronger in Panama, where the volume
of black immigration was greater than in Costa Rica, both in absolute terms and
in relation to the preexisting national population. Also, rather than being concen-
trated in a remote, relatively uninhabited part of the country, in Panama West In-
dians poured into the nation’s two principal cities (Panama City and Colón) and
took the bulk of jobs in building and operating the country’s most important rev-
enue-producing facility, the Panama Canal.
Panama’s delegate to the 1919 meeting of the International Labor Organization
protested bitterly the presence of “tens of thousands of Antilleans who are intel-
lectually and racially inferior to the Panamanians, whose religion and customs
differ from ours, speaking a language different from ours.” Five years later, Or-
lando Alfaro’s El peligro antillano en la América Central (The West Indian Danger
in Central America) appealed to the other Latin American nations to help
Panama prevent the formation, “in the heart of Latin America,” of “a powerful
nucleus of a race that is foreign and strange, in almost all of its manifestations.”
Two years later, in 1926, the Panamanian Congress outlawed the immigration of
non-Spanish-speaking blacks and required that the workforces of all Panaman-
ian enterprises be at least 75 percent native-born. Since Panama had no authority
over the Canal Zone, these restrictions did not apply to hiring there, and United
Fruit easily won exemptions for workers on its plantations. In the face of these re-
buffs, anti-West Indian sentiment continued to fester, leading in 1933 to the for-
mation of Panama for Panamanians, a nationalist civic organization whose
founder, former Panama City police chief Nicolás Ardito Barletta, approvingly
cited Nazi anti-Semitism as a model for how Panamanians should treat the
“hated West Indians.”72
Anti-West Indian feeling produced its most vicious outcome in the Domini-
can Republic. As the Dominican sugar industry began to grow during the 1880s
and 1890s, landless Haitian peasants came to work as wage laborers on the for-
eign-owned plantations. Thousands more came to farm smallholdings in the
lightly populated regions along the border with Haiti, with the result that by 1935,
claimed the Dominican government, 400,000 Haitians were living in the Repub-
lic. The real figure was probably closer to 200,000, but this still represented more
than 10 percent of the national population.73
As in Central America, Haitian immigration into the Dominican Republic
signified the negation of any national dreams of whitening—dreams that, given
the overwhelmingly mulatto character of the national population, and the coun-
try’s inability to attract European immigration, were already doomed to failure
but that, doubtless for those very reasons, were deeply cherished. “The Domini-
can Creole attributed great importance to the white component of his lineage,”
observes Dominican historian Enrique Ucko; and this attitude became even
more pronounced during the years of the export boom, as the entry both of for-
eign capital and of Atlantic racial ideologies heightened national sensitivity to
the question of race. In language recalling the colonial caste laws, Afro-Domini-
WHITENING, 1880–1930 141
figure 4.4. Employees of the Panama Canal Company at the time of their retirement,
1949. From left: Ethelbert Corbin (Barbados), John Brewster (Barbados), Charles Win-
ner (Antigua), Donald Braithwaite (Barbados), John Dunbar (Jamaica), Victor Em-
manuel (St. Lucia). Credit: Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Re-
search in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations.
can poet Juan Antonio Alix commented caustically on this tendency in a popu-
lar 1883 verse:
They take no notice of whiteness,
Those who are white and fine,
While he whose blood is impure,
Seeking whiteness, goes out of his mind.74
At the same time that Haitian immigration undermined elite dreams of
whitening, it posed economic competition to working-class Dominicans and
even to lower-level Dominican businessmen. Especially in the border areas, the
relative success of Haitian smallholders, traders, and businesspeople provoked re-
sentment among their Dominican competitors. Many attributed that success to
the Haitians’ relationship with the African gods of Voudoun (like Santería and
Candomblé, an African-based New World religion), alleging “a certain magic to
Haitian money that Dominicans could not share.”75
On all these grounds—racial, demographic, economic, cultural, even magi-
cal—Haitians supposedly represented a threat to the Republic. That threat
seemed to intensify during the 1930s, as a result of both the economic hardships
of the Great Depression and the purposeful promotion of anti-Haitianism by
dictator Rafael Trujillo. Seeking to forge a strong national state where none had
previously existed, Trujillo and his regime pointedly contrasted Dominicans and
Haitians as “two antagonistic races, one of Spanish origin, and the other
Ethiopian.” Voudoun was repeatedly denounced as a threat to Dominican
Catholicism, and local-level officials were instructed by the government to be
ever vigilant against “Haitianizing influences, whose consequences will always be
extremely fatal for Dominican society.”76
Official anti-Haitianism reached a climax in October 1937, when army units
along the Haitian border, acting under orders from President Trujillo, murdered
some 15,000 Haitian immigrants and native-born Dominicans of Haitian ances-
try. Soldiers rounded up their victims, supposedly for deportation back to Haiti,
and slaughtered them with machetes, clubs, and rifles. Bodies were transported in
army trucks to mass burial sites, leaving trails of blood along streets and roads.
Several months later, following protests by Haiti, the Trujillo regime acknowl-
edged its complicity in the killings and agreed to pay Haiti an indemnity of
$750,000, later reduced to $525,000—approximately $35 per victim. It is unclear
whether the amount was ever fully paid.77
Workers and Unions

No other twentieth-century Latin American government proposed or carried out
racial policies as murderous as those of the Trujillo regime. But the labor de-
mands of the export boom, the programs of racialized labor migration pursued
by employers and governments, and the arrival in the region of millions of Euro-
peans, West Indians, and Asians—all these factors combined to produce situa-
tions of enormous economic, social, and political tension and stress. Given the
racial ideologies of the age, and the explicitly racial character of government and
employer programs aimed at promoting labor immigration, these tensions in-
evitably asserted themselves along racial and ethnic lines and were felt particu-
larly strongly by black workers.
As Europeans arrived in the region, they displaced black workers in almost di-
rect proportion to their relative numbers: the greater the number of immigrants,
the more devastating the impacts on local black populations. Thus in Buenos
Aires, which by 1914 had 780,000 immigrants and fewer than 10,000 Afro-Argen-
WHITENING, 1880–1930 143
tines, the latter were virtually eliminated from the skilled trades, factory employ-
ment, and even street vending, in which they had been quite visible through the
1870s. By 1900, workers of color were confined almost entirely to domestic serv-
ice, occasional day labor, and low-level service positions in government offices.78
The displacement of black workers in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, where
by 1920 the immigrant population was 830,000 and Afro-Brazilians some
650,000, was almost as extreme as in Buenos Aires. In the state capital, by the early
1900s the labor force in construction and industry was 80 to 90 percent foreign-
born. Some Afro-Brazilians found regular jobs in factories or as laborers building
the city’s tramways and power grids, but most were relegated to domestic service
and informal day labor.79
More of an equilibrium was struck in Rio de Janeiro, where Afro-Brazilians
continued to outnumber Europeans and managed to retain a place in the wage
labor market as transport workers and dockworkers and in factory employment.
In commerce and the skilled trades, however, Europeans were strongly preferred,
and within the industrial sector there were clear disparities between the two
groups. Afro-Brazilians were most likely to be found in the textile industry, the
most poorly paid industrial employment. European textile workers were far more
likely to be paid an hourly wage and thus to have higher earnings than Afro-
Brazilians, who were generally paid piecework rates.80
Much the same was true in Cuba, where Afro-Cubans retained employment
opportunities in construction and industry but complained of being relegated to
the least skilled, most poorly paid positions. A main area of conflict was the to-
bacco industry, in which Cubans formed the majority of workers but Spaniards
were favored for better-paid positions as cigar rollers. So marked was the prefer-
ence for Spaniards that many Cuban rollers left the island to seek work in the
United States, fueling the growth of the cigar industry in Tampa and Key West.
Spaniards were also favored for employment in cigarette factories, where wages
ran some 30 percent higher than in the cigar factories.81 They completely domi-
nated employment in commerce, as well as technical positions in industry, in-
cluding the all-important sugar industry. At the level of field workers, seasonal
migrants came from Spain every fall to work in the sugar harvest, returning home
in the spring with their earnings; their presence formed a formidable obstacle to
black cane-cutters’ efforts to bargain for higher wages. Not for nothing did the
Afro-Cuban newspaper column “Ideales de una raza” complain in 1929 of blacks
being caught between “two great evils: foreigners in the cities and foreigners in
the countryside.”82
Why were European workers so consistently able to push Afro-Latin Americans
aside in the competition for jobs? Part of the answer lies in the racialized images
that employers held of European and Afro-Latin American workers: the former as
industrious, reliable, and responsible; the latter as lazy, recalcitrant, and irrespon-
sible. Both images corresponded to the racist ideologies of the period. The image
of black workers was further grounded in employers’, and especially landowners’,
experience with black laborers’ resistance to, and intensive bargaining over, work-
ing and living conditions, first under slavery and then during the post-emancipa-
tion years. Ex-slaves and their descendants were determined to avoid work regimes
or employment that violated their understandings of freedom. For many employ-
ers, this made them deeply problematic as potential employees.83
Once arrived in the region, European workers proved no more submissive
than their black counterparts to local forms of labor discipline. In Argentina,
Brazil, Cuba, and elsewhere they took a prominent role in labor mobilization and
work stoppages. As many as half of the Europeans who came to Latin America ei-
ther returned home or moved to the United States rather than submit to em-
ployer demands.84 Nevertheless, they remained much sought after and continued
to receive preference for employment throughout the export period. Racial doc-
trines of the time were partially responsible, but equally important were kinship
and ethnic ties among immigrant workers, and between immigrant workers and
employers. While most Europeans worked as laborers, a number succeeded in es-
tablishing themselves as small tradesmen and shopkeepers. In Buenos Aires in
1914, some 80 percent of shopkeepers and owners of workshops and small facto-
ries were immigrants. Europeans were similarly overrepresented among employ-
ers in Cuba, Uruguay, and São Paulo. Immigrant proprietors showed a strong ten-
dency toward ethnic solidarity in their hiring practices, and immigrant workers
capitalized on that tendency by bringing in their relatives, friends, and neighbors
to apply for jobs at the firms where they worked.85
Black peasants and libertos were in a sense doubly dispossessed by the devel-
opments of the export years: first pushed off land they had farmed as slaves, ten-
ants, or squatters, and then, as they sought wage employment on plantations or in
the cities, denied such employment on racial grounds. But racial preferences in
hiring could and did damage the interests of white workers as well. The presence
of a chronically unemployed or underemployed black labor force held wages low
for all workers, including whites. And in moments of confrontation between
white workers and their employers, the latter did not hesitate to exploit racial di-
visions within the labor force. In the Brazilian port of Santos, the city’s dock and
warehouse monopoly resorted to Afro-Brazilian strikebreakers, many of them
former slaves, to break immigrant-led strikes during the 1890s and early 1900s.
Textile firms in Rio de Janeiro threatened to replace restive Italian and Spanish
workers with unemployed Portuguese and Afro-Brazilians. And in 1919 the São
Paulo Tramway Company broke a strike of white conductors and drivers by pro-
moting black workers who previously had been confined to laying track.86
In each of those cases, black strikebreakers were used against white strikers,
but racial divisions could just as easily be used against black strikers. During the
WHITENING, 1880–1930 145
first decades of the 1900s most port workers in Havana were Afro-Cubans organ-
ized not by unions but by the Abakuá lodges, which controlled the docks and ne-
gotiated contracts with dock and warehouse companies. When the port workers
joined the general strike of 1935, the companies brought in 900 strikebreakers,
most of them native-born white peasants from southern Havana province. Fol-
lowing the defeat of the strike, these replacement workers were retained in their
positions, creating a majority white workforce and breaking the Abakuá lodges’
control over hiring.87
Undoubtedly the most effective cultivator and exploiter of ethnic and racial di-
visions among its workers was the United Fruit Company. The company defeated
early strikes on its Costa Rican plantations by deftly exploiting conflicts among
groups of workers from different Caribbean islands. Following a second wave of
strikes in 1918 and 1919, it began to diversify the labor force further by hiring na-
tive-born Hispanics from the central highlands, producing a series of tense con-
frontations between black and “white” banana workers. In Honduras, Hispanic
labor organizers sought to mobilize workers along explicitly racial lines, identify-
ing as their principal enemy not United Fruit but the “ruinous competition” posed
by the West Indians. This was a potentially explosive strategy: in 1924, more than
1,000 West Indians had to be evacuated by steamship from Puerto Trujillo when ri-
oting Hispanic workers threatened to kill them. A similar confrontation in 1929
was narrowly averted when the company closed down its railroad, thus preventing
angry Hispanic workers on inland plantations from traveling to the port.88
In Costa Rica, 500 native-born workers in Limón petitioned the Costa Rican
Congress in 1925 to bar United Fruit from hiring West Indians as office workers
and salesmen or in other white-collar or supervisory positions. In 1933 another
group of almost 600 workers again wrote to Congress to protest
the black problem, which is of transcendental importance, because in the
province of Limón it constitutes a situation of privilege for this race and of
manifest inferiority for the white race to which we belong. It is not possible
to get along with them, because their evil ways do not permit it; for them the
family does not exist, nor does the honor of the woman, and thus they live in
an overcrowding and a promiscuity which is dangerous for our homes,
founded in accordance with the precepts of religion and the honorable cus-
toms of the Costa Ricans. . . . We beg the Sovereign Constitutional Congress
. . . to remedy this humiliating situation in our own Fatherland by a race in-
ferior to our own, which has no right to invade our countryside, our cities,
and our homes. . . . The sovereignty of our nation is at stake.89
Communist Hispanic organizers fought hard to overcome such prejudices
and to forge a cross-racial labor movement on the banana plantations, but divi-
sions between Hispanic and West Indian workers proved too strong. As a result,
the principal confrontation between United Fruit and its workers, the general
strike of 1934, was carried out almost entirely by Hispanics and foundered in large
part because of West Indian abstention.90
In Brazil, ethnic and racial tensions were visible in workplaces, in confronta-
tions in bars and on street corners, and occasionally in full-fledged riots. Italy’s
invasions of Abyssinia, first in 1895 and again in 1936, provoked fighting in São
Paulo between blacks and Italians. Competition between black and Italian Car-
naval clubs in working-class neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro erupted in “consid-
erable violence,” leading Italians to appeal to their consul for protection. And on
May 13, 1908, the twentieth anniversary of emancipation, fighting broke out be-
tween black and Portuguese members of the Rio port workers’ union after two
Portuguese candidates were elected president and treasurer of the historically
black union. In the weeks following the altercation, the organization collapsed,
losing almost all of its 4,000 members.91
The League of Cuban Workers was founded in Havana in 1899 specifically to
defend its members from Spanish competition. Calling for national legislation
that would require a minimum of 75 percent native-born workers in every enter-
prise, the league centered its efforts on the tobacco industry, where in 1902 Cuban
workers struck to demand equal access to apprenticeships “without distinctions
of race.” Despite mediation by a blue-ribbon committee of black and white inde-
pendence-war commanders, the strike failed and the league collapsed shortly
thereafter. It left in its wake a counterorganization of Spanish anarchists, the
Workers Alliance, which accused the league of aggravating ethnic and racial ten-
sions in the labor movement. Cuban activist Carlos Baliño replied with angry de-
nunciations of the anarchists’ complicity with employers’ racial preferences.
“There are guilds where work is so monopolized by Spanish workers that few
Cubans work in the trade,” he bitterly observed, “and not one black.”92
To the workers who experienced them, these racial and ethnic conflicts were
deeply and sincerely felt. Far from being the illusory product of “false conscious-
ness,” they corresponded to black and white, native-born and foreign workers’
lived experience, and to their perceptions of each other as different in real and im-
portant ways. These conflicts were then further aggravated by racialized immi-
gration programs and employers’ overt hiring preferences, which structured the
intense labor-market competition of those years along racial and ethnic lines.
Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that, throughout the region, racial
and ethnic divisions should have been a principal obstacle to workers’ efforts to
organize.93
What is surprising is that workers and organizers persisted in trying to over-
come that obstacle and in reaching across ethnic and racial divides to construct a
unified, pan-racial labor movement. The very fact that, for example, Afro-Brazil-
ian and Portuguese workers came to blows in the Rio dockworkers’ union in 1908
WHITENING, 1880–1930 147
reflects their attempt to join forces in a single, cross-racial organization. And

while that particular effort failed, others were more successful.
How were workers in Latin America able to come together to create the cross-
racial alliances that proved so hard to construct in the United States and else-
where? One reason was the laws and ideologies of racial egalitarianism that had
been forged during the independence period. Even if honored as much in the
breach as in the observance, these historical precedents made racial exclusion or
segregation legally and politically unacceptable even during the “whitening”
years. Though such exclusion and segregation were in fact common in elite and
middle-class circles, they were always explained and justified in terms of class
rather than race. Within the working class, no such explanation was possible,
with the result that, even during a period of white supremacist ideology
throughout the Atlantic world, the strong tendency in Latin American labor
movements was to reject racial preferences of any kind and to push for inclusive,
cross-racial mobilization.94
This was partially a matter of practicality. Except in Argentina and Uruguay,
no Latin American labor movement could hope to be successful unless it in-
cluded that majority (or in Cuba, large minority) of the population that was
nonwhite and that had long formed the bulk of the region’s work forces. The
massive European immigration of the export years undercut that numerical
dominance in some areas of Afro-Latin America, but especially in Brazil and
Cuba immigrant activists soon realized that it was suicidal to confront employ-
ers who could call on large “reserve armies” of unemployed blacks and mulat-
toes. Far better to face employers and the state as one unified movement than as
separate, divided racial groups.
A final factor that promoted cross-racial mobilization was the long history of
such organization among Afro-Latin Americans themselves. Slaves and free
blacks had carried out some of the earliest strikes in Latin American history, and
blacks and mulattoes had been intimately involved in the artisan guilds that
played a prominent role in nineteenth-century politics. Black involvement in
labor mobilization continued unabated during the years of the export boom.
Though immigrant activists predominated in São Paulo and the southern
states of Brazil, Afro-Brazilians played an important role in the labor movement
in Rio de Janeiro and even more so in the northeast. Mulatto activists Luis da
França e Silva and Gustavo de Lacerda were instrumental in the creation in 1890
of Brazil’s first labor-based political party, the Partido Operário, and the conven-
ing of Brazil’s first socialist labor congress two years later. A chapter of the party
also opened in Salvador, where it succeeded in electing Afro-Brazilian journalist
Manuel Querino to the city council. Visiting the northeastern city of Recife in the
1910s, São Paulo activist Everardo Dias was startled to find that, despite the ab-
sence of “the foreign element,” “the labor associations are well established and
figure 4.5. Union meeting, Panama Canal, 1940s. Credit: Photographs and Prints Di-
vision, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
have suitable headquarters. . . . . This very Brazilian [read ‘Afro-Brazilian’] work-

ing class demonstrates more class consciousness and more enthusiasm than São
Paulo’s ‘foreign’ proletariat. This, for me, was a revelation.”95
Afro-Brazilians were responsible for one of the most dramatic outbreaks of
labor conflict under the Brazilian First Republic: the naval mutiny of 1910 in Rio
de Janeiro. In what became known as the Revolt of the Whip, sailors on four war-
ships in the Rio harbor took over their vessels and deposed their officers. While
those officers were entirely white, an estimated 80 percent of the crewmen were
Afro-Brazilian, including their leader, veteran seaman João Cándido. The mutiny
was sparked by the particularly brutal (250 lashes) whipping of a shipmate. In pe-
titions and open letters to the Brazilian authorities and public, the sailors de-
manded the ending of corporal punishment (which had recently been abolished
in the British navy) and the enforcement of their full rights as “sailors, Brazilian
citizens, and Republicans.” They insisted on being treated as “a navy of citizens,
not a plantation of slaves who receive nothing from their masters save the right to
WHITENING, 1880–1930 149
be whipped.” These demands touched a deep chord among Rio’s poor, who hailed
Cándido as the Black Admiral. Although the mutiny was put down within a week,
labor organizers and militants continued to invoke it years and decades later as a
heroic example of worker struggle.96
In Cuba, unlike the rest of Latin America, colonial caste laws remained in ef-
fect for most of the 1800s, leading Spanish artisans to try to maintain racial exclu-
sivity in their organizations. Most of the artisan mutual aid societies formed in
Havana during the first half of the century were exclusively white and majority
Spanish. When artisans from various trades joined together in 1857 to create the
first cross-guild society, its charter explicitly barred blacks and mulattoes from
membership. As a result of the independence struggle, many of the guilds then
dropped their racial barriers in the 1870s and 1880s, admitting Afro-Cubans to
membership. By the early 1900s, blacks and mulattoes were exercising leadership
positions in a number of Havana, Matanzas, and Santiago unions.97
The tendency toward cross-racial organization was even more marked in the
Cuban countryside, where the independence wars and the struggle against slav-
ery had initiated the beginnings of mobilization among sugar workers. By 1902
Spanish anarchists and Afro-Cuban independence-war veterans had joined to-
gether to lead a major strike of sugar workers in Santa Clara province, which they
coordinated from the headquarters of the local Centro Africano. Despite the de-
feat of this strike and others, Spanish and Cuban (both black and white) activists
continued to work together on the plantations, proving a formidable enough
threat that sugar companies decided to hire West Indian workers in part because
non-Spanish-speakers would be harder for unionists to recruit.98
The arrival of West Indian contract laborers greatly complicated labor and or-
ganizing conditions in Cuba, producing probably the most complex mixture of
race, nationality, and ethnicity to be found anywhere in Afro-Latin America.
Confronted by these obstacles, the labor movement might easily have foundered.
And in fact, as the sugar economy sank deeply into crisis during the 1920s and
1930s, many Cuban-born workers, both white and black, called for an end to
Spanish and West Indian immigration and the reserving of increasingly scarce
jobs in sugar and other industries for native-born Cubans.
Explicitly rejecting such appeals were the Communist-affiliated sugar worker
unions, which in 1932 joined together in a national federation that announced its
intention to organize and unite all field and mill workers “regardless of race, sex,
or national origin.” To judge by the prominent participation of Afro-Cuban and
West Indian sugar workers in the strikes and civil violence leading up to the over-
throw of the Machado dictatorship in 1933, this goal was realized. The Commu-
nist unions opposed the 1934 Nationalization of Labor Law and the subsequent
forced deportation of West Indian workers from the island, and they called for
racial employment quotas—“for every two workers hired, one should be
black”—and racially based affirmative action. They also briefly proposed that
part of the province of Oriente be granted administrative autonomy and made a
semi-independent black republic. During the 1930s a cadre of Afro-Cuban labor
leaders and politicians rose through the party’s ranks to emerge as figures of na-
tional importance during the 1940s and 1950s, including Blas Roca, secretary-gen-
eral of the party; Lázaro Peña, secretary-general of the National Labor Federa-
tion; Jesus Menéndez, national president of the sugar workers’ union; Aracelio
Iglesias, head of the dockworkers; and others.99
Black involvement in the Colombian labor movement was also substantial. As
in Brazil and Cuba, the dockworker unions in Cartagena and other ports were
predominantly black and mulatto; so were the unions of riverboat workers along
the Magdalena River.100 As the United Fruit Company developed banana planta-
tions along Colombia’s Caribbean coast in the early 1900s, it hired heavily among
the local black and mulatto peasantry. By 1925, the workforce of 25,000 had begun
to organize a network of worker committees on each plantation. As in other parts
of Afro-Latin America, this movement was multiracial, drawing not just on the
black majority but on mestizo migrants from the highlands who had come to
work on the plantations, and Indian laborers from the nearby Guajira region. It
was also, as Communist organizers from the highlands found when they arrived
in the banana zones in 1927, strongly identified with the “popular” left wing of the
Liberal Party.101
By the end of 1928, the banana workers were ready to confront the company
over issues of pay, medical care, housing, and other conditions. During Novem-
ber and early December, with support from local smallholders and Liberal arti-
sans and merchants in the towns of the banana zones, they brought the planta-
tions to a halt in a regionwide general strike. The strike ended on the night of
December 5, when Colombian troops opened fire on several thousand strikers
gathered in the town of Ciénaga. To this day no one knows how many workers
died. The officer in charge of the repression reported 9 workers killed that night
and 38 more in the weeks of repression that followed. Witnesses present insisted
that hundreds died. The total is impossible to determine because, as in the Hait-
ian massacre of 1937, government troops removed the bodies before daybreak and
buried them in unmarked graves.102
❂
The massacre of the banana workers epitomizes the multiple dramas and con-
flicts of the export years. Black peasants seeking wage employment left their
smallholdings to sign on with a foreign-owned corporation growing tropical
produce for export to the United States. Once in the company’s employ, those
workers combined long-standing traditions of negotiation, bargaining, and re-
sistance with new modes of labor mobilization to try to effect improvements in
WHITENING, 1880–1930 151
their situation. Company officials responded by calling in the armed forces of an

oligarchical regime supported by the revenues of the export trade and commit-
ted to the values of order, progress, civilization, and whitening. And in the name
of those values, government troops murdered an unknown number of striking
workers.
If the massacre was emblematic of the export years in its causes, it was em-
blematic as well in its consequences. The Colombian banana workers were part of
a wave of labor mobilization throughout Afro-Latin America that, along with
urban middle classes and dissident elites, formed a growing source of opposition
to landowner rule. As the export economies entered a period of crisis during the
1920s and then collapsed completely during the Great Depression, the conserva-
tive republics were swept aside in country after country, to be replaced by new
regimes based in large part on support from organized labor. In Colombia in par-
ticular, labor leaders refused to let the deaths of the banana workers pass unno-
ticed, demanding a congressional investigation that led in 1929 to the impeach-
ment of the Minister of War. The following year the Conservative Party was voted
out of power and a Liberal was elected president. This first Liberal president since
the 1880s was from the right wing of the party, but as the Depression continued to
deepen, the next Liberal president—Alfonso López, elected in 1934—was drawn
from the left wing of the party and enjoyed the full support of the nation’s labor
movement.
The Great Depression of the 1930s brought the export boom to an end and,
along with it, the oligarchical republics and their commitment to whitening.
Throughout Afro-Latin America, national societies turned to the task of con-
structing new economies, new systems of governance, and new visions of na-
tional identity and mission. As they did so, they sought inspiration not in the civ-
ilizations and cultures of Europe but in the multiracial political and cultural
movements created during the export years. Those movements were simultane-
ously profoundly modern and deeply rooted in the Afro-Latin American past.
And as during the independence wars 100 years before, they would now drive for-
ward a second great wave of social and political reform.
❂ 5
BROWNING AND BLACKENING, 1930–2000
For the nations of Afro-Latin America, the years since 1930 have been a period, no
longer of whitening, but of browning. By the end of the export boom, elite efforts
to transform Latin America into Europe had visibly failed, as had the political and
economic structures on which those efforts were based. These failures opened the
way for new experiments in nation-building: experiments in economic modern-
ization and industrialization, in new forms of mass-based political participation
and citizenship (political “browning”), and in the construction of new national
identities that, instead of denying and seeking to obliterate the region’s history of
racial mixing, embraced it as the essence of being Latin American (cultural
“browning”). Each of these three experiments was connected to, and reinforced,
the other two. Each was linked as well to the continuing process of race mixture
and demographic “browning” that has taken place in the region since 1930.
Demographic Browning
During the export years, every Latin American government had made it a tenet of
national policy to seek European immigration and “whiten” their national popu-
lations. Most countries lacked the conditions to attract European laborers and
their families. And in the handful of countries that did receive large numbers of
immigrants, whitening brought with it a host of new stresses and problems. Im-
migrants competed for jobs and advancement not just against native-born work-
ers but against members of the native-born middle class as well. As early as the
1890s, nativist “Jacobin” movements were forming in Brazil to protest immigrant
presence in the skilled trades and retail commerce. By the 1920s and 1930s, “patri-
otic” and “nationalist leagues,” and right-wing parties based on European fas-
cism, had formed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and other countries, embracing
anti-immigrant xenophobia as a key part of their popular appeal.1 Nor were em-
ployers and landowners altogether happy with the immigrants, who proved no
more accepting of local conditions than their Latin American counterparts and
who fought back against those conditions through strikes and labor movements.
Clearly European immigration was not the answer to the region’s problems.
As a result, during the 1920s and 1930s most countries quietly abandoned the ef-
fort to “Europeanize” their national populations. Cuba and the Brazilian state of
São Paulo both terminated their subsidies for European immigrants during the
1920s, and when the Depression hit, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay all im-
posed tight restrictions on immigration in an effort to preserve jobs for locally
born workers. Brazil and Cuba made this goal explicit by passing Nationalization
of Labor laws that required businesses to hire a minimum of 50 percent (Cuba in
1933) or two-thirds (Brazil in 1931) native-born employees.2
Although immigration resumed after 1945, never again did it attain the levels
of the export years. In the absence of continuous replenishing from Europe, the
white population of Afro-Latin America peaked as a proportion of the total in
1940 and then in subsequent decades declined slowly but steadily. Only in Brazil
and Cuba do we have census data documenting this process, but in both coun-
tries the trend is clear (table 5.1). European immigration did indeed “whiten” the
national population between 1890 and 1940, though with greater impact in
Brazil, where immigrants were more likely to come in family units and to settle
permanently in the country. Spanish immigrants to Cuba tended to be young
single males who came seasonally to work on the sugar harvests and then re-
turned home.
From 1940 onward the Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban populations grew
more rapidly than the white population. This was the consequence not just of re-
ductions in European immigration but also of higher growth rates among non-
whites. Since 1930, most of Latin America has experienced the “demographic rev-
olution” of sharp declines in mortality and, several decades later, accompanying
declines in fertility. Historically, these reductions in mortality and fertility have
occurred first among the urban upper and middle classes, and then later among
working-class and peasant families. Since in Afro-Latin America those upper and
middle classes are disproportionately white, and worker and peasant families dis-
proportionately black and mulatto, white fertility rates fell several decades earlier
than did black fertility.3
In Brazil, black and mulatto fertility rates slightly exceeded white rates from
1940 to 1960. Then between 1960 and 1984 white fertility fell by more than half,
from 6.2 children per woman to 3.0. Afro-Brazilian fertility fell as well, but more
slowly, from 6.6 children per women to 4.4, with the result that by 1984 Afro-
Brazilian fertility was almost 50 percent higher than Euro-Brazilian. In Cuba at
the same time, black and mulatto fertility also exceeded white fertility but by
much lower proportions: 4 percent higher among blacks, and 16 percent higher
BROWNING AND BLACKENING, 1930–2000 155
table 5.1. Racial composition (in percent) of Brazil and Cuba, 1890–2000
Mulattoes Blacks Whites Other Total (in millions)
Brazil
1890 32.4 14.6 44.0 9.0 14.3
1940 21.2 14.6 63.5 0.7 41.2
1950 26.5 11.0 61.7 0.8 51.9
1980 38.9 5.9 54.2 1.0 119.0
1991 42.4 5.0 51.6 1.0 146.8
2000 38.9 6.1 53.4 1.6 169.8
Cuba
1899 17.2 14.9 66.9 0.9 1.6
1931 16.2 11.0 72.1 0.6 4.0
1943 15.5 9.7 74.4 0.4 4.8
1953 14.5 12.4 72.8 0.3 5.8
1981 21.9 12.0 66.0 0.1 9.7
Sources: Andrews, “Racial Inequality,” 233; IBGE, Censo demográfico 1991, 162–64; www.ibge.
net/home/estatistica/populacao/censo2000/tabulacao_avancada/tabela_brasil_1_1_1.shtm
(20 June 2002); de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality,” 135.
among mulattoes. This relative equality can be traced to the post-1959 public
health and social programs of the Cuban Revolution, which by the 1980s had al-
most equalized demographic rates (including life expectancy) between blacks
and whites. Before those policies took effect, from 1950 through the late 1960s
black and mulatto fertility had exceeded white fertility by 20 to 35 percent.4
Black mortality was also higher than white mortality in both countries, but
not sufficiently so as to overcome racial differentials in fertility. Growth rates
among the black population were thus higher than among whites, with the result
that the Afro-Brazilian population grew from slightly over one-third (35.8 per-
cent) of the national population in 1940 to almost half (47.4 percent) in 1991.
Afro-Cubans grew from one-quarter (25.2 percent) of the national population in
1943 to one-third (33.9 percent) in 1981.
The Afro-Brazilian population then fell in relative terms during the 1990s, to
45.0 percent of the national population in 2000. The causes of this decline are as
yet unclear. The “Don’t Let Your Color Pass as White” campaign by black activists
and organizations in 1991, aimed at persuading Afro-Brazilians to report their
color as brown or black rather than white, may well have increased pardo re-
sponses in the census of that year.5 In the absence of such a campaign in 2000,
black and brown percentages retreated to their 1980 levels. White percentages,
while increasing between 1991 and 2000, remained lower than in 1980.6
With the exception of Puerto Rico, no other Latin American country has col-
lected census data on race with the same consistency and regularity over time as
have Brazil and Cuba. Most countries, in fact, have eliminated race as a category
of information from their national censuses; growth rates and demographic
characteristics of their various racial groups are thus impossible to determine.
Occasional official data and scholarly estimates do make clear, however, the con-
tinuing presence of large (7 million or more) black and mulatto populations in
Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, as well as smaller popula-
tions (0.2 to 1.3 million) in Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, and
Uruguay.7 These national totals produce a combined regional total of an esti-
mated 110 million people of African ancestry (table 5.2).
Seventy percent of all Afro-Latin Americans live in a single country, Brazil.
And in Brazil, as in every Latin American country, racially mixed “browns”
greatly outnumber blacks, by margins ranging from 2:1 in Colombia, Cuba, and
table 5.2. Population (total number above, percent below) of Afro-Latin America, 2000
Country Mulattoes Blacks Subtotal Whites Mestizos Indians Other Total
Census data
Brazil 66,017,000 10,402,000 76,419,000 90,647,000 701,000 2,032,000 169,799,000
39 6 45 53 >1 1 99
Cuba 2,464,000 1,344,000 3,808,000 7,391,000 11,199,000
22 12 34 66 100
Puerto Rico 416,000 3,065,000 13,000 315,000 3,809,000
11 81 >1 8 100
Uruguay 167,000 33,000 200,000 3,103,000 7,000 7,000 26,000 3,337,000
5 1 6 93 >1 >1 1 100
Estimates
Venezuela 8,097,000 2,417,000 10,514,000 5,075,000 8,097,000 483,000 24,169,000
34 10 44 21 34 2 101
Colombia 5,925,000 2,962,000 8,887,000 8,464,000 24,546,000 423,000 42,320,000
14 7 21 20 58 1 100
Dominican 6,129,000 924,000 7,053,000 1,343,000 8,396,000
Republic 73 11 84 16 100
Panama 914,000 400,000 1,314,000 286,000 914,000 228,000 114,000 2,856,000
32 14 46 10 32 8 4 2,856,000
Ecuador 632,000 632,000 1,897,000 5,058,000 5,058,000 12,645,000
5 5 15 40 40 100
Nicaragua 456,000 456,000 862,000 3,499,000 254,000 5,071,000
9 9 17 69 5 100
Note: Venezuela and Panama figures in italics indicate author’s estimate. Empty cells represent “no data.”
Sources: See Appendix.
Panama to 3–4:1 in Venezuela, 5:1 in Uruguay, and 6–7:1 in Brazil and the Domini-
can Republic. To an ever-greater degree, to be a person of African ancestry in
Latin America is to be “brown,” not black.“Brownness” is a racial category born of
race mixture, and as an intermediate social category between blackness and
whiteness, as many observers have noted, it can be a means of escape from black-
ness.8 Research on Brazilian census data suggests that of those individuals who
identified themselves as black in the national census of 1950, 38 percent reclassi-
fied themselves as brown in the census of 1980, which helps explain the marked
increase in the brown population during those years and the relative decline in
the black population.9
That research also suggests that not only were blacks reclassifying themselves
as brown, but a significant proportion of whites were as well: some 8 percent of
the individuals who identified themselves as white in the census of 1950 changed
their racial identification to brown in 1980.10 The possibility that one out of every
12“whites” was willing to exchange whiteness for brownness suggests that some
important changes in Latin American racial thought took place during the sec-
ond half of the 1900s. As with so many other post-1950 developments, those
changes began in the 1930s and 1940s.
Political Browning: The Rise of Populism

Beginning in the 1920s (and even earlier in Mexico), as the export economies of
the region entered a period of prolonged crisis so did the political regimes sus-
tained by those economies. This opened a period of intense political struggle in
which competing forces battled to determine the course of Latin America’s future
social, political, and economic development. Independence, and the subsequent
struggles surrounding the creation of new national governments, had been an
earlier such moment, when opposing forces’ need for popular support from
slaves and free blacks led to major social and economic reforms. Even though
grudgingly given and not always adequately enforced, those nineteenth-century
reforms produced real benefits for Afro-Latin Americans. The struggles of the
1930s and 1940s produced a second great wave of reform framed not in racial
terms, as during the independence period, but in terms of class.11
In Brazil, following the overthrow of the planter-dominated First Republic by
a military revolt in 1930, provisional president Getúlio Vargas sought support not
just from the military and from the urban middle class but from organized labor
as well. Ruling as provisional president from 1930 to 1937 and as dictator from 1937
to 1945, Vargas instituted a series of reforms unprecedented in Brazilian history:
the legalization of collective bargaining, a minimum wage, paid vacations, the
eight-hour workday, social security, state-provided health care, and federal in-
volvement in public education. Overthrown by the military in 1945, Vargas
founded the Brazilian Labor Party and was elected president on its ticket in 1950,
with overwhelming union support.12
In Cuba, the deepening of the depression led to the Revolution of 1933, the
overthrow of the Machado dictatorship, and the rise to power of military strong-
man Fulgencio Batista. A lower-class Afro-Cuban from Oriente province (he was
ten years old at the time of the PIC uprising in 1912), Batista was a leader of the
Sergeants’ Revolt of 1933, in which low-ranking officers and sergeants, many of
them Afro-Cuban, seized power and promoted themselves into positions of au-
thority. Batista himself became army chief of staff, from which position he dom-
inated national politics during the 1930s. As de facto ruler of the island, he under-
took a program of social and economic reform that included agrarian reform,
urban rent control, state-provided health insurance, and, as part of the Constitu-
tion of 1940, an unusually progressive labor code. Elected president that year,
Batista continued and expanded these programs during the 1940s.13
In Venezuela military governments retained power during the 1930s and con-
tinued to repress the oil workers’ unions, most notably in the general strike of
1936. Activists belonging to the Acción Democrática party (AD; founded in 1931)
worked to bring workers and members of the urban middle class into a cross-
class alliance in opposition to the military regime. In 1945, joining with junior of-
ficers in the armed forces, AD succeeded in overthrowing the government and re-
placing it with a civil-military junta that immediately undertook agrarian and
labor reforms and a broad program of social services paid for by oil revenues. The
rapid pace of these changes provoked a powerful conservative response: after
sweeping municipal, congressional, and presidential elections in 1947–48, Acción
Democrática ruled for less than a year before being overthrown and replaced by a
military dictatorship that lasted until 1958. When the country returned to civilian
rule, Acción Democrática was restored to power with the election of Rómulo Be-
tancourt as president.
Colombia was one of the few countries in the region in which the political
struggles of the 1930s and 1940s took place through constitutional electoral com-
petition. The onset of the Depression brought an end to almost 50 years of Con-
servative Party rule, with the election in 1930 of the first Liberal president since
the 1880s. As we have seen, the Liberals were divided between a “popular,” labor-
based left wing and a more conservative right wing. As the Depression deepened,
the left wing of the party succeeded in electing its presidential candidate, Alfonso
López, in 1934 and again in 1942. During his first term López was able to enact a
modest reform program, including the restoration of universal male suffrage, the
beginnings of social security, and a limited agrarian reform. Continuing struggles
between the party’s right and left wings weakened the Liberals’ ability to push
through further changes and ultimately cost them the presidential election of
1946. The following year, Jorge Gaitán, a former socialist, veteran labor lawyer,
and longtime leader of the Liberal left, was named head of the national party, sig-
naling the renewed ascendancy of the party’s left wing. His assassination in Bo-
gotá in 1948 set off a wave of urban riots and political violence that escalated
through the end of the decade and into the 1950s.14
These struggles in Colombia between left- and right-wing Liberals, and be-
tween Liberals and Conservatives, expressed themselves simultaneously in terms
of class and of race. Indeed, for many opponents of left-Liberalism, it was impos-
sible to separate the two. Businessmen in the Caribbean port of Barranquilla
complained in 1937 that union activists were fomenting “African hatreds, workers
against owners.” A Conservative observer in Cali charged that labor leaders were
fanning “racial and class antagonisms . . . between owners and workers.” When a
slate of left-Liberal union members was elected to the town council of Manizales
in 1933, the local leader of the Liberal Party scornfully dismissed them as “the
Council of Blacks.” The councilmen turned this intended insult back on its per-
petrator by pointedly embracing the term. Describing themselves both as “the
Council of Blacks” and “Sons of the Workshops and Fields,” they openly acknowl-
edged both the racial and the class identities of left-Liberalism.15
Racial epithets were used at the national level as well, where Conservatives la-
beled Jorge Gaitán, a dark-skinned mestizo, as “el negro Gaitán.” Like the council-
men of Manizales, Gaitán responded by using the term in his public appearances
and campaign propaganda, along with constant invocations of el pueblo (the peo-
ple) and its struggle against the oligarquía. At both the national and local levels,
racial and class identities served to cement the identification between left-Liber-
alism and its working-class base.16
This identification between blackness and labor-based populist movements
occurred throughout Afro-Latin America. Even in Argentina, one of the few
countries to have succeeded in its turn-of-the-century whitening project, fol-
lowers of Juan and Evita Perón were referred to both as descamisados (“shirtless
ones”), a class-based term, and as cabecitas negras, referring to the dark-skinned
mestizos from the inland provinces who had migrated to Buenos Aires and other
cities seeking work. In overtly racial terms recalling the association between
nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas and the black population,
anti-Peronists denounced Peronist rallies and demonstrations as a “new federal
candombe.”17
In Venezuela, Acción Democrática presented itself both as the representative
of the country’s peasants, oil workers, and urban laborers and as the champion of
middle-class blacks and mulattoes who historically had been barred from enter-
ing the country’s white elite. Afro-Venezuelans were prominent in the party’s
leadership: the most successful, Rómulo Betancourt, served as president of the
civil-military junta from 1945 to 1947 and as elected president of Venezuela from
1959 to 1964. During the party’s first brief period in power, it appointed more
black and mulatto civil servants than ever before in the country’s history, en-
abling President Rómulo Gallegos to announce in September 1948 that “now the
blacks are ruling.” Conservatives reacted angrily, denouncing Gallegos for pro-
moting “racial hatred” and division; his pronouncement may well have con-
tributed to the military coup that ended civilian rule two months later. But Ac-
ción Democrática’s strong identification with the black population continued
through the period of the dictatorship and after, while its centrist opposition, the
Christian Democrats, “never attempted to attract blacks to their ranks” and in-
stead allied themselves with the white middle and upper classes.18
In Costa Rica, populist politician José Figueres made similarly direct appeals
to the black population. A friend and protégé of Rómulo Betancourt, Figueres
initially called his movement Acción Democrática in homage to the Venezuelan
AD, but subsequently renamed it the Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN). Like
the Venezuelan AD, Figueres and his movement were liberal, socially reformist,
and avowedly anti-Communist. Following the banana workers’ strike of 1935
against the United Fruit Company, which failed in large part because of Commu-
nist organizers’ inability to mobilize the West Indians, Costa Rican Communists
essentially turned their backs on the West Indians and focused on organizing na-
tive-born Hispanics. This left the way open for the PLN to appeal directly to first-
and second-generation West Indians, and during the late 1940s and early 1950s
Figueres made numerous trips to Limón province to recruit support among the
black population. Aided by local politician Alex Curling, during the 1950s the
party undertook a voter registration drive that quintupled the number of regis-
tered voters in the province. Those voters turned out consistently for the PLN,
helping elect Figueres to the presidency in 1952 and 1970 and sending Curling and
other black politicians to Congress. In return for this support, Figueres struck
down the 1934 legislation barring blacks from working on Pacific coast banana
plantations, included Limón in the (greatly expanded) social programs estab-
lished by the PLN, and employed many second- and third-generation West In-
dian Costa Ricans in the (again, greatly expanded) state bureaucracies that ad-
ministered those programs.19
Getúlio Vargas, creator of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), was less direct than
the AD or PLN in his use of racial terminology and rhetoric, preferring to address
his appeals to “the people” or “the workers” rather than to Afro-Brazilians per se.
But Vargas’s cultivation of his image as “the Father of the Poor,” combined with
the concrete benefits extended to lower-class Brazilians by his governments’ poli-
cies of economic development and social provision, proved particularly effective
with the Afro-Brazilian population. Survey research carried out in Rio de Janeiro
in 1960 found that voter allegiance to the Labor Party was much stronger among
blacks than among whites. Even members of the black middle class favored the
PTB by margins only slightly lower than among black workers and significantly
higher than white workers.20 This was because many of those middle-income
black voters had only recently moved from the working class into the middle
class, as a direct and obvious result of Vargas’s policies. As in Costa Rica at the
same time, large increases in state employment between 1930 and 1960 greatly ex-
panded opportunities for Afro-Brazilians during a period in which, historian
Robert Levine notes, “hiring practices [in the private sector] openly excluded
non-Caucasians.” State-supported industrialization and economic growth
opened additional opportunities for black advancement. As a result, “many citi-
zens of color came to owe their higher economic status to the changes ushered in
by Vargas’s programs, . . . [and] he became a hero to many of them.”21 And even—
or especially—for that great majority of Afro-Brazilians who remained in the
working class, observed the black writer and former favelada (slum-dweller) Car-
olina Maria de Jesus, Vargas’s trabalhismo (literally, “laborism”) “changed the
rules of the game for workers. Salaries were better; they were now able to have
bank accounts and other benefits from the working-class legislation. A worker is
able to retire when he is old and be paid for full-time work. . . . His [Vargas’s] goal
is to make workers the beneficiaries.”22
Afro-Cubans were similarly identified with the Batista regime, during both
Batista’s term as elected president (1940–44) and his subsequent dictatorship
(1952–58). Batista’s two principal sources of support were organized labor and the
armed forces, both of which were heavily Afro-Cuban in their membership and,
in the case of the unions, their leadership. The revolutionary movement that
eventually overthrew Batista, Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, by contrast,
was drawn disproportionately from members of the island’s white middle class.
Nevertheless, upon landing in Oriente province in 1956 and establishing his guer-
rilla encampment there, Castro devoted great effort and attention to recruiting
support among the black peasants living in the Sierra Maestra. Following his
seizure of power in 1959, he broadened those efforts to the island as a whole, tar-
geting workers and peasants as the primary source of support for his regime. As
with Vargas in Brazil, his appeals to those constituencies were couched almost en-
tirely in terms of class rather than race. But the revolutionary government also
emphasized its commitment to eradicating racial discrimination and inequality
in the island, with the result that opinion surveys conducted by U.S. sociologist
Maurice Zeitlin in 1962 found that “Negro workers are more likely to favor the
revolution than the white workers.” Among the 350,000 Cubans who left the is-
land during the 1960s, only 13 percent were black or mulatto, a proportion much
lower than their representation in the population as a whole.23
Some observers have argued that black identification with and support for
labor-based populist movements was simply a continuation of the long-standing
Afro-Latin American strategy of attaching themselves to powerful patrons, who
provide favors and protection for their clients in return for obedience and sup-
port.24 While there is some truth to this argument, it ignores or understates the
degree to which the “favors” conferred by populism actually materialized and
benefited not just a small clientele but the black and working-class population as
a whole. Populism represented an opening of political, economic, and social
doors to the black population to a degree that had not been seen since the period
of independence and emancipation. Politically, populism espoused electoral
democracy based on a broad and inclusive suffrage, and an expanded role for
workers and the poor in national politics. Economically, it proposed to extricate
Latin America from its dependence on primary-commodity exports through
state-directed programs to industrialize and diversify national economies—pro-
grams that would directly benefit populism’s working-class base. Populism also
proposed to redistribute national income through state-directed programs of
public health, education, and social provision and through the continued promo-
tion of unionization and worker mobilization. And finally, populism stood not
just for greater class equality but for full racial equality as well, and the expanded
social, economic, and political participation of minorities previously excluded
from national life.
None of the populist regimes was able to fully realize these promises, but most
carried through to at least some degree. As a result, for most of the countries of
the region, the period from the 1940s through the 1980s was one of substantial in-
creases in national industrialization, in the size of the urban working and middle
classes, and in state-provided social services.25 Especially when combined with
populism’s commitment to racial egalitarianism, each of these developments
generated significant opportunities for Afro-Latin Americans to improve their
social and economic position, which many of them eagerly pursued.
The classic route to upward social mobility is education, particularly higher
education; and as university systems expanded during this period in much of
Afro-Latin America, so did black enrollment. In Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay the
growth in the number of blacks and mulattoes enrolled in, and graduated from,
institutions of higher education was dramatic—though in Brazil and Uruguay
that growth was considerably inflated by the shockingly low base of black educa-
tional achievement at midcentury. By 1950, out of a total Afro-Brazilian popula-
tion of almost 20 million, only 51,000 blacks and mulattoes had graduated from
high school and 4,000 from college. By 1991, those numbers had exploded to 3.3
million and 600,000, respectively, out of a total Afro-Brazilian population of 70
million. Another 1.5 million Afro-Brazilians were enrolled in high school and col-
lege, promising more graduates in the near future.26
Midcentury rates of black high school and college graduation are not available
for Uruguay, but at that time the nation’s largest university, the Universidad de la
República, had produced only five black graduates in its entire history, and a mere
handful of Afro-Uruguayans worked as college-trained professionals. By 1996, 7.5
percent of Afro-Uruguayans had graduated from high school and 2 percent from
college—rates considerably higher than those registered in Brazil.27
Black educational advancement was most impressive in Cuba, where Afro-
Cubans capitalized on the opportunities created by the post-1959 revolutionary
government to such a degree that racial disparities in education almost disap-
peared. By 1981 a total of 11 percent of blacks and 10 percent of mulattoes were
high school graduates, compared with 10 percent of whites. In addition, 3.5 per-
cent of blacks and 3.2 percent of mulattoes held university degrees, compared
with 4.4 percent of whites.28
Statistics on enrollment and graduation rates by race are not available for
other Latin American countries, but anecdotal evidence makes clear the substan-
tial increases in black educational achievement during this period. In Costa Rica,
second- and third-generation West Indians began to enroll at the national univer-
sity in San José during the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s they were a sufficiently
large presence to organize a groundbreaking national conference in 1978 on the
“Situation of Blacks in Costa Rica.”29 In Venezuela, observers described the mas-
sive entry of black and brown students into the state universities during the 1970s
and 1980s. Anthropologist Angelina Pollak-Eltz estimated in 1993 that the student
body at the country’s largest university, the Universidad Central de Venezuela,
was majority Afro-Venezuelan.30
Having obtained the education required to make their way upward in Latin
American society, these newly minted high school and college graduates sought
admission to the region’s burgeoning middle classes.31 Post-World War II eco-
nomic growth was generating millions of new white-collar, professional, and ad-
ministrative positions, and the official rhetoric, not just of populism but of all
electoral political parties during this period, promised the ending of racial prefer-
ences and discrimination in the awarding of those jobs. And to a truly surprising
degree (in comparison to the racial exclusion of the export years), the long-de-
ferred dream of entering the middle class was actually realized. By 1987 some 1
million Afro-Brazilians were working in white-collar professional or technical
jobs, and almost 2 million held administrative positions (a broad census category
that includes executives, managers, and office workers). These were considerably
smaller numbers than the 3 million whites working as professionals or techni-
cians and the 6 million whites working in administration. Nevertheless, they con-
stituted a significant proportion both of the Afro-Brazilian work force and of the
total white-collar labor force. One out of nine (11.2 percent) Afro-Brazilian wage
earners were white-collar workers, and those black white-collar workers consti-
tuted almost one-quarter (23.5 percent) of the total white-collar labor force.32
In Cuba, again the egalitarian policies of the Revolution produced an enor-
mous wave of black upward mobility and a situation very close to vocational par-
ity between whites and blacks. By 1981, 22 percent of whites and blacks and 23 per-
cent of mulattoes worked as white-collar professionals. Even in the area of retail

commerce, throughout Latin America an area of the labor market notoriously re-
sistant to black entry, blacks, whites, and mulattoes had attained equality, with 6
to 7 percent of each group working in shops and stores.33
In Uruguay, by the late 1990s some 9 percent of black wage earners were work-
ing in professional, technical, or administrative positions, and another 9 percent
were white-collar office workers. A 1973 analysis of the racial and class structure of
Cartagena, Colombia, found that the majority of the city’s middle class (which
accounted for more than a quarter of the city’s population) was black and mu-
latto. And in Costa Rica, observers noted the rise in the 1970s of a “new generation
of black professionals” based in San José and Limón. At a somewhat lower level of
employment, children of black farmers and smallholders in Limón province
flocked to the provincial and national capitals to pursue white-collar office work:
“Typically, among Afro-Costa Ricans, almost any clerical occupation is rated
higher than a manual occupation—even if the remuneration is less.”34
Afro-Latin Americans wishing to move upward in the social scale usually had
to move to urban centers, first to obtain an education and then to compete for
urban-based white-collar jobs. This was true as well for Afro-Latin American
peasants and agricultural workers seeking to educate themselves and their chil-
dren, avail themselves of other state-provided social services, and enter the ex-
panding industrial working class. The result was the migration, from the 1940s
and 1950s through the present, of millions of black peasants from the countryside
to the cities. The largest such movement was that of Brazilian nordestinos (north-
easterners) and mineiros (natives of Minas Gerais) to the industrial zones of Rio
de Janeiro and São Paulo. Over 2.6 million in-migrants from those two regions
lived in São Paulo by 1970, the majority of them Afro-Brazilian. (Among those
millions of migrants were the soccer superstar Pelé, Edson Arantes do Nasci-
mento, whose parents brought him to São Paulo in 1946; and Carolina Maria de
Jesus, whose diary of her life in a São Paulo favela, Child of the Dark, became an
international best-seller during the 1960s.35) Their arrival in the state provoked a
wave of anti-nordestino sentiment, but the continued expansion of São Paulo’s
booming industrial economy was dependent on constant new arrivals of workers
from the northeast, and the migration continued unabated.36
Comparable, if smaller, streams of black migration were visible throughout
Afro-Latin America during those years. In Venezuela, peasants left the plantation
zones in Barlovento to pursue opportunities in Caracas, the industrial city of Va-
lencia, or the oil wells of Maracaibo. In the eastern part of the country, migrants
from Cumaná and the southern llanos traveled to the new industrial city of Ciu-
dad Guayana, on the Orinoco River. Afro-Colombian forest dwellers from the
Chocó sought work in the factories of Medellín. In Puerto Rico, new factories
brought to the island by Operation Bootstrap attracted in-migration from the
countryside to San Juan and Ponce. And in the 1970s and 1980s, as the Brazilian
government sought to reduce the concentration of industry in São Paulo by
sponsoring new industrial projects in the northeast—gasohol refineries, a petro-
chemical complex in Salvador, hydroelectric and mining projects in Maranhão
and Pará—black migration flowed to those regions as well.
Once in the cities, black migrants who no longer had to compete against Euro-
pean immigrants were absorbed into the industrial proletariat. Both in 1950 and
in 1987, Afro-Brazilian industrial workers represented about the same proportion
of the industrial labor force as their representation in the total working-age pop-
ulation. Meanwhile, their numbers had more than quintupled, from 1 million in
1950 to 5.5 million in 1987.37
This massive entry of black and brown workers into the industrial proletariat
represented upward mobility in various senses: higher wages than in agriculture,
more regularly paid; access to state-provided social services tied to employment
and union membership; access as well to union representation in disputes with
employers; and access to other social services, especially health care and educa-
tion, concentrated in urban areas. All of these changes, combined with the entry of
Afro-Brazilians into white-collar employment, translated into marked improve-
ments in the most basic measure of a population’s well-being: life expectancy. Be-
tween 1950 and 1991 black life expectancy in Brazil increased by 60 percent, from
40.1 years to 64.0, while average white life expectancy increased by 50 percent,
from 47.5 to 70.8. The gap between black and white life expectancies thus fell from
7.4 years in 1950, when whites lived on average 18 percent longer than blacks, to 6.8
years in 1991, at which point whites lived 11 percent longer.38
Cultural Browning and Racial Democracy

Just as important as these social and economic changes was the redefinition of
national and regional identities that took place under populism. The “whitening”
projects had represented Latin American elites’ best effort to obliterate their na-
tional identities and recreate them in the image of Europe. As both the export
economies and the oligarchical regimes collapsed in the economic crisis of the
1930s, policymakers, intellectuals, and common citizens responded to the failure
of whitening by sharply shifting course. Instead of ignoring and rejecting the re-
gion’s African and Indian heritage and its history of race mixture, Latin Ameri-
cans acknowledged both and even went so far as to propose them as the founda-
tion on which to construct new national identities. And those identities would be
based as well on a new ethic of egalitarianism and inclusion, replacing the oli-
garchical republics of the export years with political and racial democracy.
From its very beginning, the ideology of racial democracy, as it came to be
called, was closely associated with the rise of labor-based populism. The first
major statement of racial-democracy thought, José Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic

Race (1925), appeared in Mexico shortly after the decade-long revolution that
overthrew the Díaz dictatorship and replaced it with the beginnings of a mass-
based electoral regime. Seminal racial-democracy manifestos—Gilberto Freyre’s
Masters and Slaves (1933) and Mansions and Shanties (1936), and Fernando
Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1940)—followed the Revolu-
tions of 1930 and 1933 in Brazil and Cuba, respectively; Carlos Siso’s Formation of
the Venezuelan People (1941) followed the ending of the Gómez dictatorship
in 1935.39
On its surface, racial democracy represented a rejection of Europeanization
and whitening and a rehabilitation, acceptance, and embrace of Latin America’s
own racial past. Latin America was neither Europe nor European, these writers
argued, and never could be. Rather, its societies and civilizations were something
completely new in world history. Here Europeans, Africans, Amerindians, and (in
recent years) Asians had come together to produce genuinely multiracial and
multicultural societies. And owing to the region’s unique historical experience,
they had done so on terms of unusual cordiality, egalitarianism, and convivencia
(harmonious coexistence) among racial groups. Some writers attributed this out-
come to the allegedly benign, easygoing character of Latin American slavery. Oth-
ers stressed the “leveling” aspects of the independence and nineteenth-century
civil wars, in which blacks, whites, and browns fought side by side to tear down
the colonial order. Whatever the reasons, the result was new “mestizo” societies
based on race mixture: in Mexico, according to José Vasconcelos, a “cosmic race”
based on widespread miscegenation; in Cuba, “a vast blend of races and cultures”
producing a completely new culture and people; in Brazil, a “meta-race” in which
the archetypal figure, “in the sense of corresponding more closely to the Brazilian
milieu and . . . its interests, its tastes, its needs,” was “the half-breed, the mulatto,
or, to put it more delicately, the dark-complexioned person.”40
Instead of holding up whiteness as the national ideal, racial-democracy
thought exalted brownness. And this was the case not just in concepts of national
racial identity but of national cultural identity as well. During the export years,
regional elites had sought to hide and repress African-based music, religion, and
dance, but African-based popular culture proved impossible to stamp out. Dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s, Latin Americans began to reevaluate that culture and to
undertake a cultural transformation as momentous, in its way, as the political
transformation of populism. From their previously marginal, repressed, shame-
ful position, African-based cultural forms became central symbols and expres-
sions of national identity.
This was most clearly the case with African-based music and dance, which
were now held up as the most “authentic” expressions of national uniqueness. In
Argentina and Peru, where over time the black population had been reduced to a
minimal proportion of the national total, the African content of these dances was
at best partial and considerably attenuated by European and Indian additions—
indeed, it was precisely this process of mixture and synthesis that made these mu-
sical forms appropriate expressions of racially mixed societies. But these dances
still had clear origins in earlier African and Afro-Latin American musical forms:
in Peru, the marinera descended directly from the Afro-Peruvian zamacueca; and
in Argentina and Uruguay, the tango and milonga descended from, and incorpo-
rated elements of, the nineteenth-century candombe.41
Brazilian samba, Cuban rumba and son, and Dominican merengue all had
clearer African antecedents and thus were more problematic for local elites and
middle classes. In each case, however, a combination of commercial pressures
and state support transformed these genres from black street music into icons of
national popular culture. The arrival in the region of radio and recording tech-
nologies in the early 1900s led to the beginnings of a mass-market music indus-
try and a resulting search for artists and genres that would appeal to that mass
market. In each country African-derived musical forms proved to be the answer
(as of course in the United States at the same time, with Dixieland and jazz). In
Brazil, one of the first sambas ever recorded, “Pelo telefone” (“On the Tele-
phone,” 1917) was the runaway hit of the late 1910s, opening the way for a flood of
subsequent recordings (and hits) in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Son followed the
same path to respectability in Cuba, getting wide airplay and racking up strong
sales during the 1920s. Rumba, even more closely associated than son with black
street life and African traditions, was initially a harder sell. But the “rumba
craze” of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the United States finally persuaded
Cuban listeners of the music’s value (much as the European and U.S. “tango
craze” of the 1910s had legitimated the dance in Argentina). During the 1920s
and 1930s Afro-Cuban groups such as Sonora Matancera, the Septeto Nacional,
the Septeto Habanero, and many others once barred from the better hotels, the-
aters, and restaurants now developed new “crossover” styles of son and rumba
that retained those musical forms’ rhythmic and chordal energy while smooth-
ing some of their rougher edges. This in turn initiated a process of musical
growth and evolution that has continued all the way down to the present, as son
in particular gave rise to two subsequent genres, mambo and salsa, that have
won mass audiences throughout Latin America, Europe, the United States,
and Japan.42
Very much in need of new symbols of national unity during a period of eco-
nomic and political crisis and rising class conflict, populist regimes actively
sought to attach themselves to these new symbols of popular culture. Shortly
after his election in 1925, Cuban President Gerardo Machado issued a public
statement in support of son, endorsed the first public festival of the music, and
invited the Sonora Matancera band to play at his birthday party. As part of his
own campaign of nation-building, dictator Rafael Trujillo declared merengue the

“national music” of the Dominican Republic. All dance bands, including those in
elite social clubs, restaurants, and hotels, were required to play merengue, and
upper-class Dominicans were required to dance it, much to the glee of lower-class
onlookers. Trujillo’s brother Petán headed the nation’s foremost band, as well as
the country’s largest radio station, which broadcast 12 hours of live dance music
daily, including more than 300 merengues composed in Trujillo’s honor.43
In Brazil and Cuba, the post-1930 populist regimes expressed their connec-
tion to Afro-Latin American culture by reversing position on one of the most
controversial aspects of that culture: the annual Carnaval celebrations preceding
Lent. Previously outlawed or tightly controlled by restrictive legislation, in the
1930s the African-based comparsas (reorganized in Brazil into escolas de samba,
“samba schools”) were granted official recognition and state subsidies, and al-
lowed—indeed, strongly encouraged—to parade at Carnaval and on other reli-
gious and national holidays.44 Legitimated and supported by the state, both
financially and politically, the comparsas and samba schools brought rhythm,
color, movement, and alegría (joy, happiness) back into the streets and neigh-
borhoods of Afro-Latin America—but at a price. The comparsas were required
to accept state supervision and control, including over the content and form of
their parades, music, and songs. Cuban authorities allowed comparsas to parade
only under police supervision and sought to produce, in their own words, more
“purified,” “elevated” and “perfected” shows that would appeal both to Cubans
and to tourists from the United States. Much the same process occurred in
Brazil, where the National Tourist Commission was granted authority over the
samba schools in 1935 and began the decades-long process of shaping and trans-
forming Carnaval into the major tourist attraction and business enterprise that
it has become today.45
Even capoeira, banned in 1890 and ruthlessly repressed during the early 1900s,
was rehabilitated and transformed into a vehicle of national identity. The transi-
tion from outlaw marginality to national acceptance was led by the legendary
teacher Manoel dos Reis Machado (Mestre Bimba), who in Salvador in 1927
opened Brazil’s first “academy” offering formal instruction in the art. He claimed
to have developed a new, more “modern” form of capoeira oriented toward phys-
ical fitness and dance and away from actual combat. Machado dubbed this new
form capoeira regional (i.e., Brazilian capoeira, as opposed to African) and began
to market it to middle-class whites as a form of exercise and physical fitness. At-
tending a demonstration by Machado’s students in 1953, President Vargas de-
clared capoeira “the only truly national sport” of Brazil. As it spread throughout
the country, the Federal National Sports Council laid down rules and regulations
to “carry out [capoeira’s] definitive institutionalization as a Brazilian martial art.”
By the 1970s, when the Brazilian army adopted capoeira as a form of physical con-
ditioning, the sport had come full circle, from being the target of military repres-
sion in the late 1800s to a means of military training a century later.46
Even the African-based religions, in some ways the most subversive and op-
positional of the African-based cultural forms, were integrated into national
culture. As with capoeira, part of the initiative for this integration came from
Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban priests and priestesses themselves. As part of
their strategy for surviving the repression of the export years, leaders of the
African-based religions had cultivated clientelistic ties with middle- and upper-
class patrons who could protect them from the police and other forms of official
harassment. In the 1920s and 1930s, the ranks of these patrons expanded to in-
clude Brazilian and Cuban intellectuals interested in these native-born forms of
popular religiosity. Gilberto Freyre and Edison Carneiro invited Candomblé
priests and priestesses to participate in the Afro-Brazilian Congresses they con-
vened in 1934 and 1937. Carneiro helped create the Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects
in Salvador in 1937, a loose confederation and lobbying organization, and in Oc-
tober of that year the mayor of Salvador helped lay the cornerstone of the new
temple of Axé de Opô Afonjá, one of the city’s oldest and most important con-
gregations. During the populist Second Republic (1946–64), and even during the
period of military rule (1964–85), politicians actively sought relationships with
the more powerful priests and priestesses, offering jobs, favors, and other forms
of official patronage in return for the votes of the terreiros’ congregants. When
Mother Menininha, the most venerated of the Candomblé priestesses, died in
1986, politicians and intellectuals traveled from throughout Brazil to attend her
funeral.47
Even more popular than Candomblé was Umbanda. Just as capoeira regional
represented a “modernized” form of capoeira, Umbanda was a new, “Brazilian-
ized” form of Candomblé. First appearing in Rio de Janeiro in the 1920s and then
spreading to the rest of the country, Umbanda is a spirit-possession religion in
which the Yoruba orixás of Candomblé continue to preside over the spirit world.
But the gods rule from afar, taking no direct part in earthly affairs. Worshippers
seek divine assistance not from the Yoruba deities but from the spirits of native-
born caboclos (Indians), “old blacks” (pretos velhos), and the dead, all of whom
communicate with supplicants through the religion’s mediums.48
By the 1980s Umbanda had an estimated 20 million followers in Brazil, far
more than Candomblé or Macumba, and had spread into neighboring Uruguay,
Argentina, and Venezuela.49 Transnational expansion was also the case with
Cuban Santería, largely as a result of the Revolution of 1959. As a diaspora of
Cuban exiles fled the island and took up residence abroad, they brought Santería
with them. During the 1970s and 1980s the religion took root in New York, New
Jersey, Florida, and Puerto Rico. It also sank roots in Venezuela, where it won
thousands of adherents and also transformed the María Lionza cult, a popular
figure 5.1. Candomblé drummers, Bahia, ca. 1941–1942. Credit: Photographs and
Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
form of spiritism that, like Brazilian Umbanda, had appeared during the first half
of the century and worshipped spirits and deities with firm local roots: the Indian
goddess María Lionza, Indian chieftains from the colonial period, national heroes
such as Simón Bolívar, and various Catholic saints. During the 1970s and 1980s,
these local deities were gradually pushed aside and replaced in the cult by the
Yoruba orishas, who were worshipped through the Santería rites of drumming,
animal sacrifice, and divination.50
In a striking case of reciprocal cultural flow, Santería’s popularity in Venezuela
ended up strengthening the religion in Cuba itself. As Santería spread through the
Venezuelan middle and upper classes, growing numbers of Venezuelan worship-
pers traveled to Cuba to visit shrines and temples and to consult directly with
Santería priests. Eager for Venezuelan tourist dollars, in the late 1980s the Cuban
government began to encourage these visits and to make the Santería temples
part of official tourist itineraries—just as Brazilian and Cuban officials had done
with Carnaval in the 1930s. The controls and restrictions that had kept Santería
semiclandestine in the 1960s and 1970s were lifted, with both the government and
the temples profiting from the fees paid by foreign worshippers.51
In the insightful formulation of musicologist Robin Moore, black culture had
been “nationalized” by Latin American governments, in much the same way that
oil wells, tin and copper mines, and other strategic political and economic re-
sources were at the same time.52 Just as with the economic nationalizations, the
cultural “nationalization of blackness” brought immense benefits to the societies
involved. As Afro-Latin American religion, music, and dance were promoted and
diffused, not just within Latin America but on a global scale, they brought joy, re-
lease, enlightenment, and solace to untold millions. Official and commercial pro-
motion of black culture also provided livelihoods, and in a few cases fame and
fortune, to priests, musicians, dancers, composers, choreographers, and other
artists who, before 1930, would have practiced their arts in poverty, obscurity, and
near criminality.
The appropriation of black culture by national governments was such an im-
provement over its previous outlawing that most black cultural practitioners
were more than willing to accept “nationalization” as a condition for their being
allowed to emerge from the shadows and practice their arts openly. But when a
valuable resource is nationalized for the public good, its previous owners no
longer control it. As the decades passed and the limits and constrictions of official
control became increasingly apparent, a new generation of black artists, activists,
and intellectuals began to charge that something similar had happened to Afro-
Latin American culture. By the 1970s and 1980s, descendants of that culture’s
original creators were calling for a reappropriation, reimagining, and refashion-
ing of African-based cultural forms.
For many of these younger artists and activists, this reappropriation meant a
return to the African roots of black music, religion, and art, and a reimposition of
African forms and identities on these cultural media. Re-Africanization was visi-
ble throughout the region,53 but was probably most deeply felt in Brazil. In Sal-
vador, new Carnaval comparsas known as “Afro blocs” adopted African names
(Ilê Aiyê, Olodum, Muzenza), styles of dress, percussion, and narrative themes in
their songs, dances, and annual celebrations. The long-standing insistence on

African “purity” of ritual and observance in Bahian Candomblé spread to the ter-
reiros of São Paulo. And in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere, capoeiristas
seeking a more “traditional,” less Brazilianized form of the sport turned to
capoeira Angola as an alternative to capoeira regional.54
These re-Africanized cultural forms won wide audiences throughout Afro-
Latin America. They did not speak effectively to all black cultural consumers,
however, many of whom found claims to African authenticity either unconvinc-
ing or simply uninteresting. For some of these artists and audiences, black culture
could best be reappropriated not by searching for African roots but by experi-
menting with black cultural forms from the United States and the Caribbean.
During the 1970s and 1980s African-American soul and funk music, Hispanic-
American salsa, and Jamaican reggae had tremendous impacts on Afro-Latin
American music and dance. Salsa made particular inroads in Colombia and
Venezuela, where it spawned numerous local artists, including, most famously,
Afro-Venezuelan bassist and singer Oscar de León. Soul, funk, and reggae found
their widest audiences among third- and fourth-generation West Indians in
Panama and Costa Rica, and, somewhat curiously, in Brazil. Reggae took Sal-
vador by storm, spawning new musical forms, afro-reggae and samba reggae, that
remain important in the Bahian music scene to the present. Soul and funk were
even more popular, both in Salvador and in the urban Brazilian southeast. When
Radio Favela, a small community station in the slums of Belo Horizonte (capital
of Minas Gerais), first went on the air in 1979, the song it opened with was James
Brown’s “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud.”55 During the 1970s and 1980s,
crowds of teenagers and young adults adopted U.S. styles of dance, dress, and
blackness and flocked to “Black Soul,” “Black Rio,” and “Black São Paulo” (the
English terms were used) dances in the dance halls and recreation centers of the
periferia (poor, outlying suburbs). By the 1990s, hip-hop and rap had become the
music of choice at these events, as young black audiences continued to follow and
draw inspiration from their counterparts abroad.56
Believers in Brazilian racial democracy decried the Black Soul movement as
evidence of the hopeless alienation of young urban blacks from their national
culture and their historical roots. But as other observers noted, it was precisely the
cooptation and conversion of historically black culture into deracialized “na-
tional” culture that led young Afro-Brazilians to adopt foreign models of black-
ness. Samba, Carnaval, and other black cultural creations had been so thoroughly
and successfully converted into symbols of national identity and “racial democ-
racy” that those wishing to express opposition to the prevailing model of race re-
lations could only do so by reaching outside the national cultural repertory to
draw on alternative cultural forms from abroad.57
By the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Afro-Brazilians, and Afro-Spanish Amer-

icans as well, were seeking ways to express such opposition. As they did so, they
constructed a larger and compelling critique, not just of racial democracy and
other symbols of national culture but of the political movement that had so ac-
tively cultivated and promoted those symbols: labor-based populism.
The Limits of Populism

From the 1930s onward, Afro-Latin Americans were core supporters of the
Venezuelan AD party, Brazilian trabalhismo, Colombian left-Liberalism, the Costa
Rican PLN, Panamanian torrijismo, and other populist movements. By the 1970s,
however, those movements’ inability, or unwillingness, to deliver fully on their
promises to their black (and white) constituencies had become increasingly ap-
parent. Perhaps most important, Latin American populism proved unable to pro-
mote sufficient economic growth and development to satisfy the region’s im-
mense demand for adequately paying jobs or to eliminate long-standing racial
barriers to black upward mobility.
Throughout Latin America, populist movements placed at the top of their list
of priorities the promotion of national economic growth, ideally industrial
growth, and job creation. Yet even in Brazil, one of the most successful cases of
post-World War II economic development, where industrial growth averaged 9
percent per year from 1946 to the early 1980s, the rate of job creation fell far short
of demand. By 1987 some 5.5 million Afro-Brazilian workers had found industrial
employment, but 12.0 million black and brown laborers—fully half of the total
Afro-Brazilian workforce—continued to labor in the two areas of the national
economy historically associated with blackness: agriculture and service occupa-
tions, principally domestic service.58
The drawbacks of working in these two areas of the economy are enormous.
Both continue to be governed by systems of labor relations and race relations
that were powerfully molded by the heritage of slavery. In comparison to indus-
trial firms, agricultural and domestic employers retain a very high degree of di-
rect personal control over their employees. Workplaces tend to be relatively iso-
lated and closed off to intrusion by outsiders, and most agricultural and service
workers are poorly educated and unaware of their legal rights. Given these con-
ditions, even benevolent employers exercise high levels of paternalistic authority
over their employees, and more exploitative employers are able to achieve work-
ing conditions that are strongly reminiscent of slavery. The domestic servant
“has no rights,” explained Anazir Maria de Oliveira and Odete Maria de Con-
ceição, two maids struggling to organize a domestic workers’ union in Rio de
Janeiro in the early 1980s. “She belongs to the family she works for. She has no
work schedule, nothing at all” and can be called on to work at any time.59 Do-
mestic workers are also completely isolated in the home of their employers and
cut off from their fellow workers: “In a factory, for instance, fifty or a hundred
people work together; the domestic worker is by herself and under the influence
of her patroa [employer].”60
Work forces are larger on plantations and fazendas, but also more isolated
from urban-based state agencies. Especially in the north and northeast, landown-
ers retain almost total authority over the workers on their estates. During the
1980s and 1990s some took advantage of that authority to resurrect a modern
form of debt slavery in which workers and their families are held by the
landowner and forced to work off inflated “debts.”61 Only a small minority of
agricultural workers—as of the mid-1990s, estimates ranged from 25,000 to
85,000—labor under conditions of such extreme exploitation. But most agricul-
tural employers, like most employers of domestic servants, use their control over
workers to hold wages extraordinarily low: agriculture and the service sector are
the only areas of the Brazilian economy in which the average worker, white or
black, earns less than the nationally mandated minimum wage.62
As a result of Afro-Brazilians being disproportionately concentrated in those
two areas of the economy, black and brown poverty rates during the 1980s were
approximately double those of whites.63 As of 1987, one-quarter of Afro-Brazilian
wage earners earned monthly incomes of US$20 or less; another one-quarter
earned between $20 and $40.64 Needless to say, families earning incomes this low
are unable to provide themselves with the most basic necessities of life, beginning
with food and shelter. This is especially the case with recent migrants to the city,
who face higher prices for both commodities than in the countryside, and who
lack the earning power to pay those prices. Thus one product of the post-1945
rural-to-urban migrations has been the explosive growth of urban favelas and
periferias (peripheries), makeshift settlements constructed by the inhabitants
themselves and often lacking such basic infrastructure as piped water, sewage sys-
tems, and garbage disposal.65
In the poorest settlements, residents still face one of the horrors of slavery:
the daily, grinding struggle for food. During her years of research in a majority-
black favela in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, anthropologist Nancy
Scheper-Hughes found residents experiencing a form of “slow starvation” that
becomes “a primary motivating force in social life.”66 That force is given vivid
voice in Carolina Maria de Jesus’s famous diary of her life in a São Paulo favela,
nearly every page of which refers to the relentless, inescapable pressure of find-
ing enough to eat. “I think that when I was born I was marked by fate to go hun-
gry. . . . My problem is always food,” she reported. “The daze of hunger is worse
than that of alcohol. The daze of alcohol makes us sing, but the one of hunger
makes us shake. . . . What a surprising effect food has on our organisms. Before I
figure 5.2. Carolina Maria de Jesus, visiting her former home in the favela of
Canindé, São Paulo, 1960. Credit: Collection of Audálio Dantas, São Paulo.
ate [today], I saw the sky, the trees, and the birds all yellow, but after I ate, every-
thing was normal to my eyes. . . . Will there ever be a drama more beautiful than
that of eating?” Hunger, Carolina concludes, is “the real slavery,” a judgment that
is eerily confirmed when her daughter Vera asks to be sold to a neighbor “be-
cause she has delicious food.”67
The Afro-Brazilian poor, like the Afro-Latin American poor in other coun-
tries, respond to such poverty with a variety of strategies, each of which addresses
immediate needs while incurring high long-term costs. One strategy is to rely on
extended networks of relatives and friends who can provide material, psycholog-
ical, and other forms of support. Such networks are absolutely essential to family
survival, and the help that their members provide to each other is correspond-
ingly highly valued in community life. In the favela studied by Scheper-Hughes,
“there is no household so wretched that it will refuse hospitality to visiting or mi-
grating kin from the [countryside] or deny help to a neighbor whose basket is
completely empty.” Throughout the region, poor Afro-Latin Americans consis-
tently and pointedly contrast their own generosity of spirit to the selfishness and
greed of their social betters.68
The apparent warmth and solidarity of those networks is belied, however, by
their internal tensions and conflicts. These are networks of scarcity, not abun-
dance, in which resources are constantly being transferred from relatively suc-
cessful family members to the much more numerous poor. Those resources are
never sufficient to rescue poor families from poverty, but they do reduce the al-
ready very limited assets of the more successful members of the network, with the
result that the networks “act as a leveling mechanism on [black] upward mobil-
ity.” This leveling function is openly applauded by many among the black poor,
who “are very unhappy to see one of their class rise above his fellows. They have a
culture of equality that says that it is bad for any one individual to acquire more
than others.” But that culture of equality can pose yet another obstacle to the so-
cial and economic advancement of the black population as a whole.69
Just as poor families must exploit the resources of extended family networks,
so must they exploit those of the nuclear family as well, even (or especially) when
those resources are minimal. This need is particularly compelling for families
headed by women, whose earning power is even lower than that of their male
counterparts. Black female activists in Latin America complain bitterly of the
“double discrimination” that they suffer as blacks and as women. Research by so-
ciologist Peggy Lovell, based on Brazilian census data, demonstrates that, if any-
thing, the effects of gender discrimination on earnings are even greater than the
effects of racial discrimination, and for black women, the combined effects are
absolutely devastating.70
Those effects begin with the relegation of black women, even more than black
men, to the least rewarding areas of the economy. Despite the fact that educa-
tional attainment is slightly higher for Afro-Brazilian women than for Afro-
Brazilian men, as of 1987 almost 60 percent of Afro-Brazilian women worked in
agriculture and domestic service, versus only 45 percent of Afro-Brazilian men.
Nor is this situation unique to Brazil. A national survey of 1,000 Afro-Uruguayan
women carried out in 1997 found half of them working as domestic servants. In
the Colombian city of Medellín, 60 percent of female migrants from the Chocó
work as domestic servants, a “striking concentration” that is markedly dispropor-
tionate both to the role of domestic service in the city’s labor market and, as in
Brazil, to Chocoano women’s level of education, which is higher than that of
white domestic servants.71
Discrimination then continues with differential salaries paid for the same or
comparable work. In Brazil, in almost every area of the economy black male
earnings in 1980 exceeded those of black females by factors of 70 percent or
more. Black men working in agriculture and domestic service earned twice as
much as black women.72 These figures spell disaster for the numerous female-
headed households among the Afro-Latin American poor, and very hard times
even for those with male and female wage earners both present. “If I was a man,”
lamented Carolina de Jesus, “I would not let my children live in this miserable
hole,” referring to the favela in which she and her three children lived. But even
with male earnings, most poor families find it impossible to make ends meet,
forcing them to turn to the last family resource: the labor of their children. This
is an act of genuine desperation. In exchange for the pittances that their children
bring home, families sacrifice both the children’s long-term future and, all too
often, their immediate welfare. Yet it is a practice that is widespread among poor
families. As of 1990, an estimated 7.5 million children and teenagers, most of
them black or brown, worked on the streets of Brazilian cities as street vendors,
porters, and car washers or in other informal occupations. Former Senator
Benedita da Silva, herself a former favelada, recalls going to work at age seven as
a shoeshine girl and street vendor, and then years later sending her own children
to work at the same early age: “When [her son] Leleco was seven he was already
delivering bread at dawn, sometimes in the pouring rain. If he didn’t we’d go
hungry. . . . He was always very responsible, using his money to buy food and
other things for the family.”73
As a veteran of the streets, Benedita was all too aware of the perils that awaited
children there. One major risk was that of sexual abuse, to which Benedita herself
fell victim. Nevertheless, “I always resisted becoming a prostitute. . . . No matter
how bad things got, I would never sell my body,” even though, as she laconically
notes, “many women did.” So do many children, an estimated half million of
whom were working as prostitutes in Brazil in 1990. Thousands more worked as
petty thieves and small-time criminals, provoking murderous response from po-
lice forces, private vigilantes, and competing criminal gangs. And in Brazil’s “war
on children,” black children were the main target: of the more than 4.600 children
and adolescents murdered in Brazil between 1988 and 1990, many by public and
private security forces, 82 percent were Afro-Brazilian.74
Withdrawing children from school and putting them to work is yet another
“leveling mechanism,” with particularly vicious effect. Not only does it place
them in significant danger of abuse and even death, but also it consigns them to
continuing poverty and oppression in the future. When children go to work, they
usually end up dropping out of school, with results that can be seen in stark clar-
ity in the national census of 1991. While 3.9 million Afro-Brazilians had graduated
from high school or college, the number of Afro-Brazilians aged 10 or over with
no schooling at all, or less than one year, stood at 14.4 million. The number of
completely uneducated Afro-Brazilians was almost four times the number of
Afro-Brazilians with high school or college diplomas. One could hardly imagine
a more effective prescription for continued black poverty and subordination.75
Despite these overwhelming obstacles, black families, even the poorest, perse-
vered in their dreams of upward mobility. In the years since World War II, the
black middle class has grown remarkably throughout Afro-Latin America, in
large part as a result of the programs of economic development and social provi-
sion enacted by populist governments. Those programs were not sufficient in
scope to integrate all or even most of the black population into the mainstream of
national economic and political life. But they did help promote the creation of a
numerically significant black middle class in most of the countries of the region.
As the members of that new black middle class sought to take their rightful place
in national economies, societies, and political systems, however, they encoun-
tered populism’s second major failure: its inability to eliminate, either from the
workplace specifically or from society in general, the centuries-long heritage of
racial prejudice and discrimination.
This is not to say that populist administrations made no effort to combat
those social ills. During the late 1940s and 1950s, highly publicized incidents of
racial discrimination provoked national discussions of the problem of racism,
and the passage in Venezuela (1945), Brazil (1951), Panama (1956), and Costa Rica
(1960, 1968) of federal anti-discrimination statutes.76 However, none of these
laws was rigorously enforced. If anything, their passage signaled not the ending of
racial discrimination in those societies but its intensification at the middle and
upper levels of society as educated, ambitious Afro-Latin Americans strove for
admission to the burgeoning middle class.
The survival into present-day Latin America of anti-black stereotypes and
prejudices dating from the colonial period and slavery has been amply docu-
mented in survey research throughout the region.77 It is often asserted that these
stereotypes tend to be confined to the white middle and upper classes and thus
have only limited impact on members of the black working class. This research
makes clear, however, that anti-black stereotypes are widely held among mem-
bers of the working class as well, including by many blacks and mulattoes.78 And
since it is almost always members of the white middle and upper classes who
make the hiring and employment decisions that determine what kinds of jobs
Afro-Latin Americans hold, how much they are paid for them, and whether they
will be promoted, anti-black prejudices at that level of society in fact have major
impacts on black life-chances.
Those who believe in the racial egalitarianism of Latin American societies
argue that, especially at the working-class level, employers have little incentive to
practice racial selectivity. Their need for labor is sufficiently large, and the supply
of white workers in most of the region sufficiently limited, that it would raise
labor costs significantly to insist on hiring only white employees—especially
when organized labor and national governments are both formally committed to
racial equality and presumably would impose sanctions on any attempt to prac-
tice racial selectivity in hiring.
Such assertions appear to be borne out by the millions of blacks and mulattoes
hired into the Latin American industrial proletariat over the last 50 years—until
one begins to look more closely at how those workers fare once inside their firms.
Research on Afro-Brazilian industrial workers has found that they tend to be dis-
proportionately concentrated at the low end of the vocational spectrum, in terms

of both wage and skill level, to be fired and disciplined more frequently than
whites, and to have very low rates of promotion and advancement.79 Employers
insist that these racial differentials reflect differences in black and white workers’
levels of education, job experience, and actual job performance. Still, troubling
disparities persist. In the paper, rubber, and cement industries, the median educa-
tion of black and white workers is exactly the same, yet median white salaries in
those industries are almost 50 percent higher than black. In the clothing industry,
black workers actually have more years of education, on average, than whites, yet
black salaries lag behind those of white workers.80
If the role of discrimination in blue-collar hiring remains murky and unclear,
at the middle-class level it is strong and unambiguous. In country after country,
studies of hiring patterns have found employers very reluctant to hire nonwhites
for managerial, professional, or technical positions; for white-collar clerical jobs;
or even for low-level jobs in retail commerce and sales. In one such study of per-
sonnel managers in Venezuelan companies, every one of the managers insisted
that they did not take race into account when hiring employees. Yet when listing
the requirements for white-collar office jobs in those firms, those same individu-
als consistently specified “good appearance” as the most important requirement,
a term that is widely understood in Venezuela (as in most of Latin America) to
mean “white,” and that the managers themselves defined in terms of skin color
and hair. Furthermore, the researchers found,“in answering [our] questions, [the
managers] were unable to disguise their negative tendencies of rejection toward
black people. Apparently the emotional charge of prejudice overcame their desire
to present themselves as fair and open-minded.”81
In dealing with employment agencies, many Latin American firms explicitly
indicate that they will not accept nonwhite applicants for white-collar positions.
Despite laws in several countries prohibiting such practices, no employment
agency anywhere in the region has ever been known to refuse requests of this
sort, and some go considerably further, simply declining to list or refer black ap-
plicants, regardless of whether companies have requested such exclusionary
practices.82
These barriers help explain the findings of an Uruguayan journalist, Alicia
Behrens, who in 1956 set out to verify the numbers of blacks working in low-level
service occupations in Montevideo. In a city with a population that was between
5 and 10 percent black, and whose inhabitants pride themselves on their social
openness and egalitarianism, she found blacks completely absent from commer-
cial and service employment. Of 2,000 waiters and 500 hotel chambermaids be-
longing to the waiters union, not a single one was black or mulatto. Of 4,000 driv-
ers and ticket collectors at the city’s two largest bus companies, 10 were black. Of
1,600 employees at Montevideo’s three largest department stores, one was black.
And of 7,000 barbers and hair stylists, not a single one was Afro-Uruguayan. A
representative of the hairdressers’ professional association explained why: in
order to work as a hairdresser, one has to be “young, elegant, delicate. Go out and
look: I assure you that in no salon will you ever find a black.” Behrens concluded
by asking how, if even these lowly positions were closed to people of color, could
they possibly hope to rise in life?
Would a customer who won’t even let a black person cut his hair ever let that
person perform surgery on him? If he won’t let blacks serve him a meal, or
take his ticket in the bus, if he won’t accept them as policemen or buy fabric
from them in a department store, how will he ever accept them as hotel or
bank managers, as generals or Congressmen? If the doors of even these sub-
altern positions are closed to blacks, there must exist an entire long chain of
implicit prohibitions that prevent them from rising economically, from
prospering, from educating and developing themselves.83
Census data from Brazil suggest that, despite the passage of the federal anti-
discrimination law in 1953, discrimination in Brazilian workplaces actually in-
creased during the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers who analyze these data deter-
mine the differential between wages paid to blacks and whites doing similar work,
and then analyze how much of that differential can be statistically explained by
“compositional” differences in age, work experience, education, and so on be-
tween the two groups. They then attribute to discrimination any remaining salary
disparities not statistically accounted for by those factors. According to these
studies, in 1960 discrimination accounted for 16 to 17 percent of the differential
between earnings received by white and black male workers. By 1980 the propor-
tion of the wage gap attributable to discrimination had doubled, to 32 percent.
While black/white wage differentials had declined among blue-collar workers,
they had increased among clerical, managerial, and professional workers. In 1960
the average white male white-collar worker earned 70 percent more than his black
or brown counterpart; by 1980 that differential had increased to 80 percent. The
same was true of women workers: white women office workers earned on average
50 percent more than their Afro-Brazilian counterparts in 1960 and 60 percent
more in 1980.84
In the absence of comparable statistical data from other Latin American
countries, it is impossible to know whether discrimination and inequality were
following similar trajectories elsewhere in the region. Nevertheless, several indi-
cators suggest that racial barriers, if not actively worsening in the postwar pe-
riod, at the very least remained very much in place. One such indicator is the
previously discussed research on discriminatory hiring practices. Another is the
high concentration, throughout Afro-Latin America, of middle-class black em-
ployment in the state sector. Denied equal access to private-sector jobs, up-
wardly mobile Afro-Latin Americans have historically sought refuge in state

jobs. Even during the export years, in many ways the high-water mark of racial
exclusion in the region, state employment was a mainstay of the black middle
and working classes, whose members could sometimes barter votes and political
support for government jobs.85 With populism’s expansion of social services
and state intervention in the national economy, the number of such jobs grew
exponentially during the second half of the 1900s, and populism’s commitment
to racial egalitarianism, combined with the continuing need to cement electoral
support among its nonwhite constituencies, made state employment a mainstay
of the black middle class. In the Colombian Chocó region, the state bureaucracy
and the public schools provided virtually the only white-collar positions open to
Afro-Colombians. In the Costa Rican port city of Limón, the state-owned dock
company JAPDEVA proved so open to black jobseekers that white Costa Ricans
started referring to it disparagingly as BLACKDEVA (even though, in fact, only a
minority of the company’s employees were Afro-Costa Rican). In Uruguay, a
study of Afro-Uruguayan wage-earners during the late 1970s found that every
single one of the white-collar office workers interviewed was a state employee.
“For blacks,” one of them noted, “a state job is as important as a university de-
gree for the whites.”86
However, state resources alone have been insufficient to lift the black popula-
tion from working-class to middle-class status. And populist governments’ fail-
ure to root out and eliminate discriminatory practices from the private sector
means that formidable obstacles to Afro-Latin American advancement remain
very much in place. These obstacles in turn produce a third indicator of continu-
ing racial discrimination in the region: the thwarted dreams and frustrated ambi-
tions of Afro-Latin Americans who, through education and hard work, have pre-
pared themselves for social advancement but who then run into the barriers of
racial discrimination. This theme emerges repeatedly in interviews with educated
Afro-Latin Americans: either how they nearly gave up in the face of the obstacles
that faced them, or in fact did so. An Afro-Brazilian journalist recalls how “my
brothers and sisters, tired and resigned to the situation, never understood why I
worked in the mornings at the market and then went to study. Study for what? It
won’t get you anywhere, they said.” An Afro-Uruguayan woman interviewed in
the mid-1950s recalls how “I developed an inferiority complex among my col-
leagues at work. They knew that I was studying and they would say: ‘That negra
actually thinks she’s going to amount to something.’” Another Afro-Uruguayan
informant recalls a friend whose classmates constantly discouraged her from
continuing in school: “‘Look, it doesn’t make sense for you to go on. If you grad-
uate, you’ll only have problems. How are you going to pursue a profession, being
black?’ So often did they say this to her that ultimately she became discouraged
and abandoned her studies.”87
In the face of such obstacles, the achievement of those millions of Afro-Latin

Americans who succeeded in rising out of the blue-collar world and into the
world of white-collar employment becomes all the more impressive. The greater
the number of Afro-Latin Americans in a position to compete for middle-class
positions, however, the greater the number of white jobseekers threatened by
such competition, and the higher the level of white resistance, as Brazilian sociol-
ogist Florestan Fernandes observed in the late 1970s:
When blacks and mulattoes show that they are not only capable of compet-
ing, but are ready to compete, then the situation becomes more defined. It is
at that point that one sees that there is a very large proportion of whites who
behave in a genuinely democratic way and accept competition [with
blacks]. But there is also another type of white, who, in this confrontation,
assumes an attitude of panic, seeing a threat to himself and to civilization
more generally. . . . It is not such a small group as is generally thought, and it
creates serious problems for black and mulatto competition, finding vari-
ous ways to disguise its resistance.88
It was the beginnings of such black upward mobility in the 1940s and 1950s
that triggered the incidents that led to the anti-discrimination laws of those
years, but those laws had little visible effect on reducing white resistance to black
advancement. That was in large part because such resistance is very seldom open
and overt, and it is therefore very difficult to detect and punish. Indeed, the
effects and consequences of racial discrimination can be so elusive and hard to
pin down that many Afro-Latin Americans remain uncertain whether such dis-
crimination actually exists and whether they have been victims of it. But by the
1970s, enough upwardly mobile Afro-Latin Americans had run into the barriers
of white resistance for them to conclude that class-based populism was unlikely,
on its own, to overturn the centuries-old ills of prejudice and discrimination.
Rather, they believed, what was needed was a fourth and final indicator of con-
tinuing discrimination in the region: new “black” movements aimed at combat-
ing the racial barriers that prevented the full integration of black and brown
people into national life.
Blackening
“There are now quite a few of us black professionals,” observed Afro-Costa Rican
civil servant Garret Britton in 1974, “who by virtue of our ability and hard work
are beginning to compete for the best jobs, and we are beginning to feel the oppo-
sition” from whites wanting those same jobs. Britton called for the creation of an
“Afro-Caribbean professional association” that would represent the interests of
black university graduates and protect them from prejudice and discrimina-
tion.89 Not until 1991 was such an organization formed in Costa Rica.90 But in
other countries Afro-Latin American students and professionals did come to-
gether during the 1970s and 1980s to create Latin American analogues of the U.S.
civil rights movement.
This resemblance was no accident. Over the course of the 1900s, educated and
politically active Afro-Latin Americans tended to pay close attention to the state
of racial politics in the United States. When African-American civil rights organ-
izations began to dismantle segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, and then went on
to obtain the enactment of equal opportunity and affirmative action programs in
the 1970s, Afro-Latin Americans seeking ways to respond to what they saw as stiff-
ening white opposition to their advancement took notice.
This was particularly the case among English-speaking Afro-Costa Ricans and
Afro-Panamanians who, in studying or working in the United States during the
1960s and 1970s, had come into direct contact with the civil rights and Black
Power movements at the high point of those movements’ influence. In Panama
that contact was further reinforced by the presence of African-American soldiers
in the Canal Zone, who introduced Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the
Black Panthers into the local political lexicon.91 But even in other countries
where Afro-Latin Americans had little direct contact with the United States,
American movements were followed with great interest by local activists and
served as models for the creation of black political organizations during the
1970s.92
Black liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa and South Africa also in-
spired the Afro-Latin American movements of the 1970s, as did internal politi-
cal conditions in Latin America. In Brazil, rising opposition to the military dic-
tatorship, and the gradual return to civilian rule during the late 1970s and early
1980s, created an “opening” (abertura) for the mobilization of a wide variety of
oppositional movements, including a black civil rights movement. The same
was true in Uruguay, which ended its military dictatorship and returned to civil-
ian rule in 1985. In Panama, military populist Omar Torrijos, who took power in
1969 and then negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties of 1977 with the United
States, openly recruited political support among West-Indian Panamanians and
supported racially defined black mobilization. And in Colombia, efforts to ne-
gotiate peace with the country’s warring guerrilla factions in the 1980s and then
a restructured system of governance, embodied in the Constitution of 1991,
opened opportunities for Afro-Colombian groups to insert themselves into
those national discussions.
The result, in much of Afro-Latin America, was a dramatic upsurge in racially
defined black mobilization. The best-known cases of such mobilization were in
Brazil, where numerous organizations came into existence during the 1970s and
1980s. A directory prepared in the late 1980s listed 343 such groups, most of them
located in the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Bahia. Many
of them were samba schools, capoeira academies, and other cultural organiza-
tions that had decided to adopt a more politicized “black” identity and to join in
the struggle for black civil rights. Others were new organizations created in re-
sponse to the ferment of the 1970s and 1980s, and explicitly racial in their orienta-
tion. These included the Movimento Negro Unificado, a national-level political
movement founded in 1978; the “black groups” or “black commissions” associ-
ated with competing political parties; the Grupo de Consciência e União Negra, a
national organization associated with the left wing of the Catholic Church; cul-
tural and educational institutions such as the Centro de Cultura e Arte Negra in
São Paulo and the Instituto de Pesquisa das Culturas Negras in Rio de Janeiro;
and the blocos afros of Salvador, new Carnaval organizations that combined
music and merrymaking with a message of community uplift, self-reliance, and
rededication to promoting African and Afro-Brazilian culture.93
No other Latin American country produced an outpouring of black mobiliza-
tion as impressive as that of Brazil. But that is hardly surprising, given that no
other Latin American country has a black or mulatto population even close to the
size of Brazil’s and that the Latin American country with the strongest tradition
of black political mobilization, Cuba, was ruled during this period by a Commu-
nist party that refused to permit any political organizing outside official party
structures, especially any that might divide Cuban society along racial lines. Even
in Cuba, however, black study groups formed during 1974 and 1975 to discuss lit-
erature produced by African and African-American writers, scholars, and ac-
tivists. These groups were repressed by the police and never re-formed.94 In other
Latin American countries, where freedom to mobilize was much greater, Afro-
Latin Americans came together to create organizations similar to those in Brazil,
if fewer in number.
Second to Brazil, in terms both of numbers and political impact, was black
mobilization in Colombia. Here, too, black organizations formed during the
1970s: the Centro para la Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Negra, in Bo-
gotá; the Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Frantz Fanón, also in Bogotá;
Cimarrón, which began as a study group of black students from the Pacific coast
who were attending the university in the inland city of Pereira; and others. Dur-
ing the 1980s these urban-based entities were joined by regional and community
associations representing Afro-Colombian peasants and forest dwellers along the
Pacific coast. While the urban movements were primarily oriented toward issues
of discrimination and inequality, rural blacks sought to establish their property
rights to rainforest land that historically they had held in common, rather than
individually, and to which they usually did not hold formal title. As a result of
lobbying by these organizations, the Colombian Constitution of 1991 included
figure 5.3. Carnaval banner, bloco afro Ilê Aiyê, Bahia, 1995. This banner commemo-
rates the 300th anniversary of the destruction of the quilombo of Palmares (see upper-
left-hand corner), and the centuries-long history of “organizations of black resistance.”
Original is red, yellow, black, and white, about 3 feet by 4–1/2 feet. Credit: Author’s
collection.
provisions recognizing and protecting black land rights and the territorial and
cultural integrity of black peasant communities.95
Largely as a result of Panama’s ties with the United States, black mobilization
began in that country somewhat earlier than in Colombia. During the mid-1960s
a black activist of West Indian ancestry, Walter Smith, created the Movimiento
Afro-Panameño, explicitly modeled on the U.S. civil rights movement. In 1968,
Afro-Panamanian professionals created two middle-class organizations in Colón
and Panama City: the Unión Afro-Panameña and the Asociación Afro-
Panameña, respectively. By the early 1970s all three organizations had expired, to
be replaced by the Asociación Reivindicadora del Negro Panameño (ARENEP)
and the Asociación de Profesionales, Obreros y Dirigentes de Ascendencia Negra
(APODAN). Both entities were supported and encouraged by the Torrijos regime
and played an important part in mobilizing black support both for Torrijos and
for the Panama Canal treaties. They then fell victim to internal disputes and divi-
sions and were largely defunct by the time of Torrijos’s death in 1981. New organ-
izations created during the authoritarian Noriega regime in the 1980s—the Cen-
tro de Estudios Afro-Panameños, the Museo Afro-Antillano, and the three
National Congresses of Black Panamanians—tended to focus on cultural rather
than political issues. With the return to electoral democracy in the 1990s, these
organizations turned their attention again to thorny issues of racial discrimina-
tion and the role of antillanos (Antilleans—third- and fourth-generation descen-
dants of the West Indians who had come to Panama in the early 1900s to build the
canal) in the Panamanian national community.96
Even in countries with relatively small black populations, the 1970s and 1980s
were periods of racial ferment and agitation. In Peru the Asociación Cultural de la
Juventud Negra, the Instituto de Investigaciones Afro-Peruano, and the Movi-
miento Negro Francisco Congo sponsored research, lectures, courses, and public
discussions concerning Peru’s black population. That work continued in the
1990s with the Agrupación Palenque and the Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos
del Negro.97 In Uruguay, the principal black organization of the 1940s and 1950s,
the Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguay, remained active through the 1970s and
1980s and was joined in 1989 by the more politically oriented Mundo Afro.98 In
Costa Rica, university students and professionals in San José organized several
black study groups during the mid-1970s, and in 1978 the National Seminar on
the Situation of Blacks in Costa Rica, where scholars, intellectuals, politicians,
and even President Daniel Oduber, gathered to discuss the condition of the
nation’s black population. Several black consciousness groups were formed fol-
lowing the event, and the Costa Rican teachers’ union successfully lobbied the
Ministry of Education to create an annual Black Costa Rican Day, on which Afro-
Costa Rican culture and history are taught in the nation’s schools.99
In promoting and developing these movements, black activists appealed not
just to local constituencies but also to international audiences. Beginning in 1977,
black activists and organizers held a series of international meetings and con-
gresses—in Colombia in 1977, Panama in 1980, Brazil in 1982 and 1995, Ecuador in
1984, and Uruguay in 1994—at which they explored common obstacles that they
faced, along with tactics and strategies to overcome them.100 Out of those meet-
ings grew a realization that institutions outside the region could be an important
source of political and financial support. U.S. and European foundations com-
mitted to social and racial justice, and the Inter-American Development Bank as
part of its mission of promoting “social inclusion,” provided grants and loans for
black advocacy, cultural, and community development organizations. Seeking
closer ties with its black and mulatto members, and responding to internal pres-
sure from its “liberationist” left wing, the Catholic Church created Pastorales Ne-
gros (“black missions”) throughout the region, which worked closely with local
black organizations. Finally, regional black movements aligned themselves with
the anti-racism policies of the United Nations and used those policies to pressure
their home governments. A 1996 report by the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights on racial discrimination and inequality in Brazil was instrumental in per-
suading President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to add proposals for affirmative
action to his National Human Rights Program. A similar U.N. finding against
Uruguay in 1999 led the Battle administration to officially acknowledge the exis-
tence of discrimination in that country and, as in Brazil, to propose affirmative
action measures to combat it. The 2001 U.N. Conference against Racism, held in
South Africa, greatly energized black organizations around the region and placed
additional pressure on national governments. In Brazil, the Cardoso administra-
tion created the National Council to Combat Discrimination and enacted affir-
mative action programs in the Ministries of Agrarian Development, Justice, and
Foreign Relations. In Panama, Congress passed a federal anti-discrimination
statute.101
These governmental proposals and concessions mark the beginnings of a gen-
uine “paradigm shift” in how Latin Americans think about race. The racial
democracy writers of the 1930s and 1940s had assured their fellow citizens that
Latin America was racially egalitarian and free of the prejudice and discrimina-
tion that so deformed life in the United States. For several decades, Latin Ameri-
cans, including many black and brown Latin Americans, had believed and ac-
cepted this message. But as the evidence refuting it mounted and accumulated in
the lives of Afro-Latin Americans, they finally demanded that the societies of the
region acknowledge that racial democracy was in fact a myth.102
In Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Panama, black activists succeeded in
forcing their national societies to recognize the existence of anti-black racism and
discrimination and to at least start to take action against these social ills. This
process is most advanced in Brazil, as could be seen during the commemorations
marking the centennial of abolition in 1988. To a degree unprecedented in Latin
American history, state officials, universities, the national press, and the Catholic
Church all acknowledged the existence of gaping racial inequities in Brazilian so-
ciety and called for measures to bring the Afro-Brazilian population up to the
same socioeconomic level as the white population. A greatly strengthened anti-
discrimination law was incorporated into the Constitution of 1988, and local laws
were passed in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, and elsewhere. A new federal
agency, the Palmares Foundation, was created to channel federal resources to the
black population, and similar entities were created in several states and munici-
palities. In 1996, as part of his National Human Rights Program, President Car-
doso proposed the enactment of “compensatory policies to promote the social
and economic advancement of the black community,” including “positive dis-
crimination” and “affirmative action” aimed at increasing black access to educa-

tion and employment. Though those proposals were never acted on by Congress,
by 2001 individual government agencies, universities, and private firms were in-
stituting their own affirmative action programs by reserving positions for black
appointees, students, and employees.103
Yet if Brazil constitutes the most impressive case of attempted redress of racial
grievances, it simultaneously shows the limits of those efforts. The anti-discrimi-
nation law of 1988 generated a wave of court cases, but as of 1995 convictions
under the law could be “counted on the fingers of one hand.”104 The budgets and
staffs provided to the Palmares Foundation and other state and municipal agen-
cies for black affairs have proven inadequate for them to carry out their responsi-
bilities. And while President Cardoso’s proposals for “compensatory policies”
were widely discussed and debated in Brazilian society, and even adopted in
piecemeal form, public opinion remained strongly divided on this issue, among
both whites and blacks.105
If this was the case in Brazil, the site of the largest and most important of the
Afro-Latin American movements, what then of other countries where black
movements were weaker and less successful? As several Afro-Costa Ricans have
commented, what good does it do to have a Black Costa Rican Day when black
history and culture are still ignored on the other 364 days of the year? In Colom-
bia, black activists take pride in the achievement of constitutional protections of
black-owned lands (as well as federally mandated research and teaching on black
history and culture) but fear that, as economic development comes to the Pacific
lowlands, the laws will not be adequately enforced and black families will lose the
lands on which they have hunted, mined, and farmed for generations.106 And in
Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and other countries, activists cannot even point to laws
or programs comparable to those enacted in Brazil and Colombia.
Though the black civil rights movements succeeded in recasting the terms of
racial thought and debate in the region, for the most part they failed to achieve
the policy outcomes they sought. Nor were they able to significantly reduce the
inequality, prejudice, and discrimination that they arose to combat. These fail-
ures were in turn traceable to the movements’ inability to mobilize the black and
brown constituencies that they claimed to represent; and that inability is in turn
traceable to divisions of gender, race, and perhaps most important, class, within
those constituencies.
Though the black movements included and welcomed women in their ranks,
their leadership was overwhelmingly male. Women were seldom admitted to po-
sitions of authority or influence, nor, charged many female activists, did the
movements seriously address issues of most immediate concern to black women:
gender inequalities and power relations within black families; the pressing needs
of single mothers and their children; women’s health issues; and, most important,
the devastating “triple discrimination”—class, gender, and race—faced by almost

all women of color. Increasingly frustrated over the failure of the male-domi-
nated organizations to confront these issues, during the 1980s and 1990s many
women either withdrew from the black movements entirely or created their own
separate organizations: Geledés, Casa Dandara, Nzinga, and Criola in Brazil; the
Unión de Mujeres Negras de Venezuela; the Fundación Socio-Cultural Afro-
costarricense in Costa Rica; the Encuentro de Mujeres Negras in Panama; and
others. Paralleling the regional congresses of the male-dominated black organiza-
tions, these organizations held international Encuentros de la Mujer Negra in the
Dominican Republic in 1992 and in Venezuela in 1993.107
Race itself was a second obstacle preventing the black movements from
reaching their intended audience. By the late 1900s most Afro-Latin Americans
identified themselves as brown, or even white, rather than black. Afro-Latin
American activists insisted that this escape from blackness was purely illusory
and that browns were just as subject as blacks to racial prejudice and discrimina-
tion—a conclusion borne out, in the case of Brazil, by statistical research show-
ing that browns were only slightly less vulnerable than blacks to racial inequali-
ties in earnings, vocational achievement, life expectancy, and other social
indicators.108 Activists therefore called on all people of color to reject the lures of
brownness (and whiteness) and “assume,” to use the Brazilian term, their “true”
identity as negros.
Thousands of people of color proved willing to take this leap and to join in the
work of the black movements. Tens of millions, however, did not. To join the
black movements required a decision to embrace the often painful condition of
being black. And to agitate for civil rights and racial equality required one to con-
front and question the still-powerful ideology of racial democracy, which insisted
that such equality already existed. Indeed, charged the black movements’ critics, it
was not white employers and elites who were guilty of racism. Rather, by insisting
on the primacy of racial identities and by stirring up antagonisms and resent-
ments between blacks and whites, it was the black activists themselves who were
the true racists.
The final obstacle obstructing the black movements’ work was the class divi-
sions between the activists and those whom they sought to mobilize. Throughout
Afro-Latin America, the black activists tended to be either of middle-class back-
ground themselves or upwardly mobile individuals who had acquired high
school and, in some cases, university educations. Their target constituencies were
overwhelmingly poor and working-class. The prejudice and discrimination that
middle-class activists felt on an almost daily basis were much less salient in the
lives of lower-class blacks and browns, for whom immediate issues of survival—
food, work, medical care, crime, transportation, housing, water, and electricity—
were far more pressing. Abstract talk about the need to combat racism by em-
bracing their black identities was of little use or interest to poor blacks. They
needed assistance with the pressing problems in their lives, and they had learned
over time that the most likely sources of such assistance were not weak, counter-
hegemonic movements but strong, established authorities—local elites, parties
and politicians, the Catholic Church, labor unions—who would provide the con-
crete benefits of patronage in return for loyalty and support.109 The black move-
ments could provide no protection or benefits comparable to those offered by
powerful individuals or institutions. If anything, by possibly jeopardizing their
ties to powerful clients, joining or supporting the black movements had the po-
tential of actually worsening poor blacks’ situation rather than improving it.
For all these reasons, the black organizations’ target audience of poor and
working-class blacks and mulattoes overwhelmingly declined to join or support
the black movements. Rather, people of color continued to rely, as in centuries
past, on individual or family-based strategies of survival and upward mobility.
When they acted collectively, through larger movements or associations, those as-
sociations were more likely to be class-based (labor unions, or political parties),
geographically based (community or neighborhood associations), or faith-based
(religious organizations and movements) than racially based.
Far from being a negative development, this preference for nonracial, or cross-
racial, forms of organization is perfectly congruent both with Afro-Latin Ameri-
cans’ long-term historical experience and with current political and economic
conditions. People of color have had greater impacts on regional politics, econ-
omy, and society, and achieved far more in terms of social, political, and eco-
nomic reform, when they have acted collectively through cross-racial coalitions
than when they have tried to construct racially exclusive movements. The current
challenges facing Afro-Latin Americans demand such coalitions as never before,
and current political conditions offer unusually promising conditions for creat-
ing them.
❂ 6
INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
2000 and Beyond
This book has sought to show how Afro-Latin Americans responded to the chal-
lenges, dilemmas, ordeals, and opportunities created by large-scale processes of
economic and political development. In so doing, people of color helped forge a
history of nation- and state-building, democratization, and social and political
reform that transformed the life of the region. As we look toward the future, what
new challenges are likely to confront Afro-Latin Americans? And on the basis of
the record of the past two centuries, what might be their possible responses, both
individual and collective, to those challenges?
The Economic Challenge: Neoliberalism

From the 1930s through the 1980s, Latin American governments enacted policies
and programs that granted state agencies a central role in the planning and man-
aging of economic growth. By the 1980s, those policies and programs had entered
their own period of breakdown and crisis. State-led growth had reached its limits,
argued a new generation of economists and policymakers. It had saddled the so-
cieties of the region with massive public and private debt, bloated state bureau-
cracies, and grossly inefficient state-owned or -subsidized firms, resulting in eco-
nomic stagnation. The only hope for the region, according to these critics, lay in a
drastic reduction of the state role in the economy and the imposition of the ne-
oliberal, free-market reforms promoted by the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and other major lenders. During the 1980s and 1990s these re-
forms were implemented, to greater or lesser degree, in all of the countries of the
region, including even socialist Cuba. They produced increased foreign invest-
ment and the resumption of moderate economic growth in the 1990s after the
“lost decade” of the 1980s. Assuming, as those investors clearly do, that growth
will continue into the current century, what impact is it likely to have on the peo-
ples of Afro-Latin America?1
As we have seen over the course of this book, the impact will vary, depending
on what segment of the black population one is talking about. The consequences
of growth will be very harsh indeed for black peasants and smallholders who, in a
repeat of the export-boom experience, face the loss of their land to large, highly
capitalized, more “efficient” economic enterprises. Peasants who retain land have
the option of continuing to combine subsistence and “proletarian” strategies of
survival. Once having lost their land, peasant families lose this flexibility, with
often disastrous results. Wage labor becomes the only source of support and must
be accepted, no matter how low wages may be.
Especially in regions where large numbers of peasants have been removed
from their land and thrown into the wage labor market, wages can be very low in-
deed. This has been the case, for example, in the Brazilian northeast, where the re-
newed expansion of the sugar industry in the 1970s and 1980s “spelled the end of
a semiautonomous peasantry living in the crevices of plantation society,” and in
the Cauca Valley of Colombia, where sugar plantations expanded during the
1960s and 1970s at the expense of black peasants and smallholders. Further un-
dermining black smallholders in the Cauca was pressure from government and
international aid officials to make more productive use of their land by switching
from subsistence agriculture to the commercial production of soybeans. Farmers
who took this advice had to borrow large sums to buy the seeds, machinery, fertil-
izers, and pesticides required to grow the new crop. Heavily indebted, and unfa-
miliar with the techniques of soybean cultivation, many subsequently lost their
farms and joined the floating population of landless laborers living in the squalid
towns of the sugar zones. As in northeastern Brazil, hunger, malnutrition, and al-
coholism were epidemic.2
Capitalist agriculture is not the only force threatening the black peasantry.
Along the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador, lumbering and mining compa-
nies are taking over rainforest lands that have sustained black families for genera-
tions. This process is well advanced in the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas,
where timber companies first entered the region in the 1960s, clear-cutting lands
that white and mestizo “colonists” from the highlands then converted into farms
and plantations. White merchants and businessmen with greater access to capital
and credit also came from the highlands to set up stores and businesses that soon
displaced their local black competitors. In the Colombian Chocó region, mining
and timber firms have not yet penetrated as deeply into the rainforest. In recent
years, however, the Colombian government has proposed a series of infrastruc-
tural projects to open the region to development, including new highways, port
facilities, and widening and channeling one of the region’s rivers to create a wa-
terway that will link the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. These plans, if real-
2000 AND BEYOND 193
ized, will pave the way for the massive entry of new enterprises into the Chocó,
and a likely repetition of the events that took place in Esmeraldas.3
Along the Caribbean coasts of Colombia, Venezuela, and Costa Rica, the
tourist industry is the primary economic force driving black peasants off their
land. At first glance tourism can look like a godsend to depressed rural regions,
enabling peasants to sell their land for high prices and then go to work in the ho-
tels, restaurants, and other enterprises that service visitors to the region. But as
soon becomes apparent, tourism exacts a very high price from the localities that
depend on it. Overbuilding and poorly planned construction have led to serious
environmental damage in parts of coastal Colombia and Venezuela. The jobs gen-
erated by tourism are for the most part low-skilled and low-paid, and they do not
begin to cover the greatly increased cost of living in tourist zones. Higher wages
can be earned through paid sex or drug dealing, but with disastrous consequences
for black family and community life.4
Throughout capitalism’s long history, the process of transition from subsis-
tence to market economies has been a wrenching and painful experience. Most
Afro-Latin Americans have already made that transition, but many still remain in
the subsistence sector and now stand on the threshold of being abruptly cata-
pulted into the wage-labor market. Once in that market, they are likely to remain
at its lowest levels, prevented from moving upward both by their own lack of skills
and education and by the racial strictures that keep black workers in the lowest-
paying, most menial jobs. Indeed, observed anthropologist Norman Whitten
after having witnessed black families’ dispossession in the tropical lowlands of
Ecuador and Colombia, “it became quite clear [to me] that the more prosperous
a given area, the greater the black concentration in poverty zones.”“Black disfran-
chisement,” he concluded, took place not in spite of economic growth and devel-
opment but because of it.5
In an effort to slow or stop that transformation, black activists in Brazil,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Venezuela have called for state protection of
black peasant communities. Such protections were written into the Colombian
Constitution of 1991, and in Brazil the federal Palmares Foundation has helped a
number of peasant communities descended from nineteenth-century quilombos
to obtain collective title to their lands. Yet even with the benefit of protective leg-
islation and firm title to their lands, those communities suffer periodic invasions
by squatters; by landowners seeking pasturage for their cattle; by mining and tim-
ber companies; and, in the case of Colombia, by guerrilla and paramilitary forces.
In communities without such protections, as is the case in most of Afro-Latin
America, their prospects are bleaker still.6
What about the impacts of neoliberalism on those Afro-Latin Americans who
are already part of the wage labor market? Those individuals need exactly what
neoliberalism claims to offer: sustained economic growth and development, with
more jobs, income, and material well-being for all. State-led economic growth in
Latin America during the post-World War II period greatly expanded the size of
both the blue-collar and white-collar black labor forces; presumably, continued
growth in the current century would push forward that process of expansion and
full black integration into the capitalist economy. Even if the growth anticipated
by neoliberal planners and investors does take place, however, blacks and mulat-
toes are not likely to benefit from it to the same degree that whites will. Nowhere
in the world has neoliberal economic policy yet succeeded in reducing levels of
class inequality, as measured by wealth and income. In the United States, for ex-
ample, such inequalities are higher today, after two decades of neoliberal policy,
than they were in 1980.7 And the same is true in Latin America, where inequalities
of wealth and income are the highest in the world.8
This acute maldistribution of the region’s wealth severely limits opportunities
for people of color, who are disproportionately concentrated among the poor and
working class. Further reducing their ability to profit from economic growth are
the long-standing racial barriers that continue to channel black workers into the
least remunerative, lowest-paying areas of the economy. Those barriers are visible
in every country, including Cuba. Following the Revolution of 1959, the Cuban
government imposed full state control over hiring and by so doing almost com-
pletely eliminated racial differentials in hiring and promotion. With the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the end of Soviet aid, the Cuban government was
forced to open the island to foreign private investment and to permit the func-
tioning of a semi-legal, semi-clandestine free market in goods and services. By far
the most lucrative areas of that free market are those connected to tourism, both
because of strong tourist demand for services and because of the opportunity to
earn U.S. dollars (the Cuban peso is largely worthless as a medium of exchange).
Afro-Cubans have been systematically excluded from jobs in the rapidly growing
tourist sector. The same “good appearance” that is routinely cited in the rest of
Afro-Latin America as a prerequisite for jobs involving contact with the public is
now being invoked in Cuba as well. A white executive in the tourist industry re-
ports that “there is no explicit policy stating that one has to be white to work in
tourism, but it is required that one have a pleasant bearing and appearance, and
blacks don’t have it.”A black informant concurs.“The tourist enterprises look like
South African companies in the time of apartheid; you go there, they’re all white,
and I say to myself, ‘where am I, in Holland?’” In a survey conducted in Cuba in
1994, some 40 percent of whites and 41 percent of blacks agreed with the assertion
that blacks do not have the same opportunities as whites to work in tourism. In
addition, 71 percent of whites and 79 percent of blacks agreed that “prejudice is
rampant” in the island.9
Between 1959 and 1989, Cuban social and economic policy almost ended class
inequalities, and in so doing came very close to eliminating racial inequalities as
2000 AND BEYOND 195
well. Now, in the “special period” following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the
Castro regime has been forced to scale back its commitment to social equality and
permit the open functioning of a market economy. In the resulting scramble to
seize the opportunities created by that emerging economy, white racial solidarity,
and the exclusionary barriers by which whites maintain their preferred position,
have resurfaced in Cuba.
That resurgence is not limited to Cuba. During the 1990s, journalists noted
the rise of racist skinhead gangs in Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Comprised of middle- and upper-middle-class white youths, these gangs at-
tacked and occasionally murdered blacks and other nonwhites who had ven-
tured into well-to-do neighborhoods, restaurants, and night clubs where the
youths felt they did not belong.10 In northeastern Brazil, anthropologist Nancy
Scheper-Hughes found an increased willingness among middle-class whites “to
express . . . racist sentiments that were previously disallowed, at least publicly. . . .
Savage racist jokes abound,” up to and including “playful” proposals for the mass
elimination of the country’s black population. In Venezuela, anthropologist Al-
fredo Chacón observed that “racism has always had a broad presence . . . , and
today [1998] that presence in much more general and normalized. If racism has
varied at all during the last fifteen years . . . , it has become more acceptable, un-
conscious, and normal.”11
The essence of neoliberalism, and of capitalism in its “pure” form, is competi-
tion: competition for capital, for markets, for jobs. As the societies of Afro-Latin
America plunge into the swirling currents of twenty-first-century capitalist de-
velopment, their members find themselves struggling desperately to move for-
ward, or simply to remain afloat, using whatever resources they can mobilize. As
always, race is, for whites, one of the most potent such resources. Small wonder,
then, that its social force and importance remain undiminished during a period
of fluidity, instability, and, in many countries, crisis, or that it continues to ob-
struct advancement and equality for the region’s peoples of African descent.
Such a moment of heightened racial conflict would seem to augur for a resur-
gence of the black movements of the 1970s and 1980s. And in fact, in most coun-
tries of the region, racial activism continued unabated into the 1990s. In
Venezuela representatives of black peasant communities gathered in Barlovento
in 1994 for the first-ever Congress of Afro-Venezuelan Communities. In Ecuador
and Colombia, community organizations continued to form and agitate for pro-
tection of black-owned lands. Even in Cuba, despite government strictures on
political mobilization outside the Communist Party, a new black organization,
the Cofradía de la Negritud, formed in Havana in 1999.12
In Brazil a variety of organizations, both old (dating from the 1970s) and new
(dating from the late 1980s and 1990s) explored new strategies and approaches for
improving the position of the black population and reducing racial inequality. At
one end of the social spectrum, organizations such as the Center for the Articula-
tion of Marginalized Populations (CEAP) in Rio de Janeiro and the blocos afros in
Salvador took up the cause of the black (and white) street children, working to
provide them with food, shelter, and educational opportunities. At the other,
middle-class end of the spectrum, university students in Salvador created a pro-
gram to help prepare black applicants for their entrance examinations; in São
Paulo, students mobilized to demand affirmative action in university admissions.
In November 1995, on the 300th anniversary of the destruction of the quilombo
of Palmares, black organizations turned out thousands of members to march on
Brasília to demand expanded social and educational programs for the poor, gen-
uine enforcement of federal anti-discrimination legislation, and affirmative ac-
tion programs in education and employment. Immediately after that march,
President Cardoso appointed a group of black representatives from various cabi-
net ministries and black organizations to design the affirmative action proposals
that his administration incorporated into its 1996 National Human Rights Pro-
gram.13 In Panama, black organizations achieved comparable successes with the
enactment by Congress of a national Black Ethnicity Day (2000), the creation of
a municipal anti-discrimination office in Panama City (2001), and the passage by
Congress of a national anti-discrimination law (2002).14
Despite these achievements, as in the 1970s and 1980s, only a small minority of
Afro-Latin Americans opted to participate in racially defined movements. And
that rate of participation may very well have fallen during the 1990s, for several
reasons. First, the clear limitations and relative weakness of racial politics and
racially defined movements, amply demonstrated during the 1980s, provide little
incentive for joining such movements. Second, despite the continuation and pos-
sible intensification of racial barriers to black upward mobility, millions of Afro-
Latin Americans have in fact succeeded, through enormous effort, in surmount-
ing those barriers and entering the middle class. Their example suggests to other
millions of blacks and mulattoes that the most likely avenue to social advance-
ment is not collective mobilization but, instead, individual perseverance and
striving.
Rather than participating in racial movements, suggests one Afro-Brazilian
entrepreneur, “the best way to be a black militant is to be a success” in one’s busi-
ness or profession.15 And as in any upwardly mobile group, Afro-Latin Americans
who achieve such success want to enjoy its fruits. As the black middle class contin-
ues to expand, those of its members who wish to express their negritude have
tended to do so not through political action but rather through the pleasures of
consumption: more specifically, consumption of “black” (especially in Brazil, the
English word is frequently used) clothes, music, hairstyles, and art.16 This em-
phasis on individual achievement and consumption, perfectly in keeping with the
neoliberal tenor of the times, found its fullest expression in the launching of the
2000 AND BEYOND 197
magazine Raça Brasil in 1996. The first mass-market publication in Brazil aimed
exclusively at people of color, the magazine was conceived in response to market
research showing that 10 percent of Afro-Brazilian families supposedly earned
household incomes of US$16,800 per year or more, and that, in the words of
Roberto Melo, the magazine’s publisher, “blacks are voracious consumers. They
spend, for example, more money on clothes than whites do because they need to
signal clearly their social position. . . . Blacks want to see themselves as chic, suc-
cessful, rich.” The magazine sought to provide this self-image, with glossy layouts
on clothes, style, music, and black celebrities. This formula clearly found its mar-
ket, jumping immediately to a circulation of a quarter million copies per issue,
thereby signaling to the Brazilian publishing and advertising industries the dis-
covery of a new target audience.17
For blacks as much as for whites, consumption, not mobilization, is the hall-
mark of the neoliberal age. As the social and economic shortcomings of neoliber-
alism become more apparent, this may change in the future, but it is still unlikely,
I believe, to produce an upsurge in racially defined black political mobilization in
the region. This is because, while the economic and social conditions of neoliber-
alism can pose very difficult challenges for people of color, the political condi-
tions of neoliberalism provide exceptionally promising opportunities for Afro-
Latin Americans to help forge the multiracial coalitions that, over the last 200
years, have driven forward the region’s political evolution.
The Political Challenge: Democracy

Accompanying the rise of neoliberal economic policy, not just in Afro-Latin
America but throughout most of the world, has been an expansion and deepen-
ing of electoral democracy. Historically in Afro-Latin America, multiparty
democracy has proven to be the political system most open to black participation
and initiative. This was the case under the early republican regimes of the 1800s
and the populist democracies of the 1900s. As electoral democracy continued to
deepen its hold on the region in the 1980s and 1990s, parties and movements have
proven increasingly open to black participation, not just at the base but in the
leadership as well.
In Brazil, which returned to civilian rule in 1985 after a 21-year military dicta-
torship, there has been a steady stream of “unprecedented events,” in the words of
the nation’s largest newsmagazine, as Afro-Brazilian candidates have been elected
to high office. In 1990, for the first time ever, 3 (out of 27) state governors elected
that year were black (João Alves, Albuino Azeredo, and Alceu Collares); in 1994,
two black women senators (Benedita da Silva and Marina Silva); in 1996, the first
black mayor (Celso Pitta) of the nation’s largest city, São Paulo; and in 1996, long-
time black activist Abdias do Nascimento joined Benedita da Silva as Rio de
figure 6.1. Senator

Benedita da Silva, ca.
2000. Credit: Agência
Brasil.
Janeiro’s second black senator, making the state’s senatorial delegation majority
Afro-Brazilian (each state elects three senators). Afro-Brazilians remained woe-
fully underrepresented in Congress as a whole: as of 1999, only 3 percent of legis-
lators were black or mulatto, in a country that is almost half Afro-Brazilian. How-
ever, even that meager percentage represented almost a fourfold increase over
1987, when Congress had only five Afro-Brazilian members.18
Afro-Brazilian politicians advanced at the local level as well. In the city of Sal-
vador, 80 percent black and mulatto and often referred to as the capital of Afro-
Brazil, during the 1970s and 1980s Afro-Brazilians had never accounted for more
than 10 to 11 percent of city councilors. In 1992, black and mulatto candidates won
15 of the 35 seats on the council—still short of a majority, but a quadrupling of
their representation.19
2000 AND BEYOND 199
Nor were these advances in black political leadership limited to Brazil. After
serving as mayor of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital and
largest city, José Francisco Peña Gómez received his party’s nomination for the
presidency in 1990, 1994, and 1996. He is widely believed to have won the 1994
election, the results of which were suppressed and overturned by incumbent
president Joaquín Balaguer. Peña Gómez then narrowly lost the 1996 election, in
large part because of negative campaign ads focusing not on his blackness per se
but on his Haitian ancestry. Still, the fact that a black Haitian-Dominican could
overcome persistent anti-Haitianism to become a serious contender for the pres-
idency suggests a significant racial “opening” in Dominican politics.20
In Venezuela, continuing economic crisis during the 1990s badly eroded sup-
port for the two long-standing political parties, Acción Democrática and COPEI.
This opened the way for new faces on the political scene, a number of whom were
Afro-Venezuelan. In Caracas in the early 1990s, Aristóbulo Istúriz (from the left-
ist Causa Radical) and Claudio Fermín (AD) contested the mayoralty in the first
black-against-black election in the city’s history. After Istúriz’s victory, AD nomi-
nated “el negro Claudio” in 1994 as the party’s first black presidential candidate.21
This effort to reconnect with the party’s traditional electoral base was unsuccess-
ful, as both Fermín and his COPEI opponent lost to a third-party independent.
The two major parties lost again in 1998; this time the victorious independent and
new president was pardo military officer and populist Hugo Chávez, another de-
cidedly new face in Venezuelan politics.22
Open, fully competitive democracy is by far the most conducive setting for
black political participation.23 It is the most conducive setting as well for the con-
struction of the multiracial coalitions—independence movements, Liberal par-
ties, labor movements, populism—through which Afro-Latin Americans have
had the greatest impact on the region’s history. Assuming that electoral democ-
racy remains the norm in the region, I suspect that Afro-Latin Americans will
tend to mobilize not through racially defined movements but through parties,
unions, and other means of cross-racial coalition building. By taking part in such
coalitions, they will continue to drive the countries of the region toward the next
stage(s) of whatever their varied political trajectories prove to be.
This is not to say that racially based movements will cease to exist, or even that
they should cease to exist. Those movements have arisen over time in response to
specific historical conditions and real social, political, cultural, and economic
needs. Black cultural movements—religions, musical and dance forms, Carnaval,
capoeira—arose to provide systems of meaning, solace, rhythm, and beauty that
Africans and their descendants did not find, or did not find in the same way, in
cultural forms imported from Europe. And black political movements arose
in response to overtly racial forms of oppression: the quilombos and palenques in
response to slavery, the black parties of the 1910s and 1930s in response to the
racial exclusion of the export years, and the black movements of the 1970s and
1980s in response to the barriers confronting the black middle class.
Although none of those racially based movements achieved the goals they
were seeking, they were instrumental in creating the conditions for the social and
political advances documented in this book. The quilombos did not overthrow
slavery; but in the absence of the pressures created by those runaway communi-
ties, and their clear signaling of black aspirations, would independence leaders
have consented to the eventual emancipation of the slaves? Neither the Partido
Independiente de Color nor the Frente Negra Brasileira nor the Partido
Autóctono Negro ever succeeded in electing a single candidate to office; but what
would the doctrines of populism and racial democracy have looked like in the ab-
sence of their denunciations of “whitening” and Europeanization, and their de-
mands for the inclusion of black people in national life? The black movements of
the 1970s and 1980s were similarly unsuccessful in electing their candidates and
instituting the political changes that they sought. But in their absence, would the
societies of the region ever have started to question the myth of racial democracy,
or acknowledged the region’s enduring racial inequalities? Had there been no
black movements pressuring the parties in the 1970s and 1980s, would there have
been a new generation of black politicians to elect to office in the 1990s?
Racially defined movements arise in response to specifically racial forms of
oppression, and one hopes that the need for those movements will disappear in
the years and decades to come. The advances of the last two centuries provide at
least some cause for such optimism. It is noteworthy that, over time, racially
based movements have moved from being a mass-based, lower-class phenome-
non—quilombos and palenques—to a predominantly middle-class affair. While
the oppression of slavery was overtly racial in character, and demanded a racial
response, present-day poor and working-class Afro-Latin Americans no longer
see the problems that confront them as primarily racial. Consciousness of racial
oppression is articulated mainly by the black middle class, a relatively small mi-
nority in the larger black population.
Is this progress? In some ways, yes. It reflects both the sense, and to a signifi-
cant degree the reality, of racial equality and egalitarianism in Latin America’s
multiracial working classes. It reflects as well the substantial growth of the black
middle class over the last 50 years, and its members’ increasing ability to compete
for advancement and position in Latin American societies. But in other ways,
black workers’ relative indifference to racial questions reflects not so much the
racial egalitarianism of their lives as the immense weight of the daily problems
that they face—problems that appear to be “structural” or “economic” in charac-
ter, but that are also the direct result of the overrepresentation of black people at
the lowest levels of Latin American society. It is those lowest levels that class-
based movements, as opposed to racial movements, are most effective in helping,
2000 AND BEYOND 201
which is why populism, or socialism, or some other reformist movement, is a

more likely vehicle for working-class black political participation than the mid-
dle-class black movements.
But at the moment that members of the black working class start making their
way upward in society and competing for advancement, race starts to intrude. “If
you just remain among the masses, you won’t feel any prejudice, because you’re in
your own setting,” observes an Afro-Brazilian businessman. “But as soon as you
start to compete, then it gets tough, then you run into it head-on. . . . Then the
prejudice begins.”24 Black movements have forced Latin American societies to ac-
knowledge, confront, and begin to combat those prejudices; but in most of the
countries of the region this process of questioning and coming to grips with the
racial past and present is only just beginning.25 As Afro-Latin Americans con-
tinue to advance into the region’s middle classes, racially defined movements will
play a necessary role for years and decades to come. The centuries-long history of
black religious brotherhoods, social clubs, political parties, and civic organiza-
tions is far from over. Racial politics, so much a part of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, will be with us well into the twenty-first century, and perhaps be-
yond. Would that it did not have to be so.
❂
APPENDIX
Population Counts, 1800–2000
Statistical data on the racial composition of Latin American countries are scarce,
inconsistent, and of questionable reliability and accuracy. Several countries took
no censuses at all during the 1800s, and in the 1900s most national censuses either
did not gather racial data or did so in such a way as to make it impossible to deter-
mine the size of the black and mulatto population. The figures contained in tables
A.1, 1.1, and 5.2, and maps 1 to 3, should therefore be treated as, at best, rough ap-
proximations of the racial composition of the region.1
Given these problems, why try to work with statistical data at all? Because if we
do not, we cannot even hazard a guess at the relative size and distribution of black
populations in the region, or answer the question of which countries and subre-
gions form or have formed part of Afro-Latin America.
Not entirely surprisingly, statistical information on race in the region is much
more abundant for the year 1800 than for 1900 or 2000. Since race was one of the
basic principles by which colonial society was organized, colonial officials gath-
ered information on race, or “condition,” for their censuses, yielding the figures
compiled in table 1.1 and map 1.2
One of those censuses, the 1778–1781 population count in the Spanish
viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and
Venezuela), poses some complexities—or, rather, apparent simplicity that masks
complexity. Spanish officials in that viceroyalty aggregated the numbers they
gathered into four categories: whites, Indians, “libres” (free people), and slaves.
Who exactly were “libres”? Three historians who have worked intensively on
late-colonial censuses in New Granada—Michael Hamerly working on Ecuador,
John Lombardi on Venezuela, and Alfredo Castillero Calvo on Panama—all
equate “libres” with people of African ancestry: free mulattoes, blacks, and Afro-
Indian zambos. Hamerly treats the “white” racial category in the census as actu-
ally a white-mestizo category including both groups. So did a 1751 observer in
204 APPENDIX
Colombia, who reported on the diverse social group of “those called Spanish—
which includes whites, mestizos, light-skinned mulattoes, and cholos [His-
panized Indians].” In Venezuela, Lombardi finds that “mestizo” and “other less
common racial names . . . occur so infrequently” in late-colonial censuses as to
effectively remove those terms from consideration. And working on Panama,
Castillero Calvo (as well as historian Omar Jaen Suárez) treats “libres” as equiv-
alent to free blacks and mulattoes.3
In their own compilation of the 1778 count, Colombian historian Hermes
Tovar Pinzón and his colleagues discuss in detail the populations of whites, Indi-
ans, and slaves documented in the census.4 Curiously, they do not subject the li-
bres, by far the largest group in the census, to the same examination, or take up
the question of who constituted that group. As is the case with all other historians
of Colombia, their assumption seems to be that libres consisted of all racially
mixed people—mestizos, mulattoes, zambos, et cetera—and free blacks. Yet some
of the census’s own data contest this point and suggest that libres were entirely or
predominantly Afro-Colombian. While most of the census districts in Colombia
compiled their numbers in the requested four categories, officials in five districts
(two in Antioquia, and one each in Popayán, Riohacha, and Neiva), when report-
ing census figures in the late 1700s and early 1800s, divided the libres category into
mestizos and free blacks and mulattoes. In these five sets of returns, representing
28,485 people, whites and mestizos combined represented 26 percent of the total
count: exactly the same percentage as the “white” population count for Colombia
as a whole. Free blacks and mulattoes were 59 percent of the total population in
those districts, somewhat more than the libre representation in Colombia as a
whole (47 percent). And Castillero Calvo reports a similar case in the Panamanian
census of 1789, in which a Spanish official tallied the libre population of Veraguas
province (some 12,000 people) under the rubric of “negros libres.”5
Clearly the term “libre” is an ambiguous one. Euro-Indian mestizos were in-
deed “libres,” in the sense of being legally free, and not enslaved. But so were
whites, to whom the term was never applied—and for good reason: libre had its
most logical application, not to people whose free status was automatic and un-
questioned but to those whose freedom might very well be questioned and there-
fore had to be made explicit. These were people who had either been born free or
had acquired freedom through manumission, but whose visible African ancestry
continued to tie them to the slave past. Those who could not be enslaved—
whites, mestizos, and Indians—had no need to insist on their status as libres. To
the contrary: to identify oneself as libre was to acknowledge that the issue of one’s
freedom was potentially in doubt.
All of this suggests that, as in Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela, the libre cate-
gory in Colombia was either entirely or in large part a proxy for the free Afro-
Colombian population and that Euro-Indian mestizos tended to be counted not
APPENDIX 205
as libres but as whites. Still, to the best of my knowledge, no historian of Colom-

bia has ever drawn this conclusion or considers the libre population to be Afro-
Colombian. In the face of these contradictory data, I have taken the admittedly
arbitrary step of assigning two-thirds of the libre population to the free Afro-
Colombian category and one-third to the mestizo category. If anything, I suspect
that this probably undercounts the free black and mulatto population, and thus
this figure provides a conservative minimum estimate of its size as of 1800 (or, to
be more precise, ca. 1780).
Census data became much less available after independence in the early 1800s.
Several countries (the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Nicaragua) took no census
at all over the course of the century. Others that did either eliminated race from
their census forms (e.g., Argentina, Uruguay) or reported black populations too
small to qualify them as part of Afro-Latin America (e.g., Peru, 2 percent black as
of 1876).6 As a result, for 1900 we have census data on race for only five countries:
Brazil (1890), Colombia (1912), Cuba (1899), Panama (1909), and Puerto Rico
(1899). Nor do the Colombian and Panamanian censuses permit firm conclusions
concerning the size of their Afro-Latin American populations, since both used a
“mestizo” racial category that included all racially mixed people: mestizos, mulat-
toes, Afro-Indian mixes, and all combinations thereof.
The situation becomes even more difficult by 2000, by which point only four
Latin American nations were still gathering census data on blackness: Brazil
(1980, 1991, 2000), Cuba (1981, 2001), Puerto Rico (1980, 1990, 2000), and Uruguay
(1996). In the absence of such data, scholars have come up with widely, even
wildly, varying estimates of the size of the region’s black population. Estimates of
Cuba’s black and mulatto population vary from a minimum of 34 percent of the
national population to a maximum of 62 percent; for Venezuela, from 9 percent
to 70 percent; and in the Dominican Republic, the most extreme case, from 11 per-
cent to 90 percent.7
When faced with such variance, and an almost complete lack of reliable data,
one is forced to resort to desperate measures. In the interests of arriving at rea-
sonably consistent estimates of the black and mulatto population of each coun-
try, I used the following procedure. For table 5.2 and map 3, I first obtained esti-
mates of each country’s total population as of 2000 (or, in the case of Brazil and
Puerto Rico, the actual results of their 2000 censuses).8 For Brazil, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and Uruguay, I then applied the racial percentages derived from their most
recent censuses to the actual or projected population as of 2000, producing the
figures contained in table 5.2.9
For countries for which census data on race were unavailable, I used the na-
tional estimates of racial and ethnic composition contained in the Britannica
Book of the Year for 2002.10 In two cases, Panama and Venezuela, those estimates
employ a broad “mestizo” category (64 percent of the population in Panama; 67
206 APPENDIX
percent in Venezuela) that includes mestizos, mulattoes, Afro-Indian zambos,

and all combinations thereof. Panamanian scholar Winston Welch estimates that
half of the Panamanian mestizo group is of African descent;11 and Venezuela’s
colonial and nineteenth-century population history, plus my own visits to and
travels in that country over the years, persuade me that at least half of the
Venezuelan mestizo group, if not more, are of mixed African ancestry. (Where
else could all those black and mulatto students at the Universidad Central de
Venezuela—see chapter 5—have come from?) In both countries I therefore as-
signed half of the “mestizo” population to the mulatto category, leaving the other
half in the mestizo column.
I followed the same procedure—giving first priority to census data, then using
available plausible estimates for countries without such data—for 1900 (table
A.1). We begin with the five censuses available: Brazil (1890), Colombia (1912),
Cuba (1899), Panama (1911), and Puerto Rico (1899). The Colombia and Panama
censuses again employ a large—in both censuses it is the largest racial group—
“mestizo” category that includes all racially mixed people. In the case of Panama,
I decided to follow the same procedure I used with the 2000 counts, assigning half
of the “mestizos” to the mulatto category and leaving half in the mestizo category.
In the case of Colombia, I used the figures from the 1912 census in combination
with several estimates from the late 1800s compiled by T. Lynn Smith. The esti-
mate for Venezuela is from the 1910 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I did
not include table A.1 in the main body of the text, both because of the shakiness of
the data and because so many countries are missing. Map 2 is based partly on
table A.1 and partly on extrapolation between tables 1.1 and 5.2.12
The exercise of gathering, evaluating, and trying to draw workable conclu-
sions from these data was alternately frustrating, humbling, and enlightening. In
the face of genial assurances from “racially democratic” officials and intellectuals
in the region that race doesn’t matter, and that Latin Americans all belong to one
integrated, organic racial family, one feels brutally North American in insisting
that countries document their racial and ethnic composition and gather hard
data on racial disparities in health, education, income, and other social goods. Yet
without such data, how can governments and societies even begin to identify the
deep inequalities afflicting Afro-Latin Americans, Indians, other racial minori-
ties, and, in a very real sense, their societies as a whole?
If race truly did not matter—if it did not play a powerful role in determining
how much education one receives, what kind of job one works at, how much
salary one earns, even how long one lives—we would not need these data. But as
this book has sought to demonstrate, race has mattered, and continues to matter,
enormously in the life of the region and its inhabitants. This is why black activists,
aided by black and white scholars and intellectuals, lobbied intensively for the ad-
dition of racial data to recent Brazilian, Costa Rican, and Uruguayan censuses and
APPENDIX 207
table a.1. Population (total number above, percent below) of selected Latin American
countries, c. 1900
Country Mulattoes Blacks Subtotal Whites Mestizos Indians Other Total
Census data
Brazil 4,638,000 2,098,000 6,736,000 6,302,000 1,296,000 14,334,000
32 15 47 44 9 100
Cuba 271,000 236,000 507,000 1,052,000 14,000 1,573,000
17 15 32 67 1 100
Puerto Rico 304,000 59,000 363,000 590,000 953,000
32 6 38 62 100
Panama 96,000 49,000 145,000 46,000 96,000 3,000 290,000
33 17 50 16 33 1 100
Estimates
Colombia 1,250,000 500,000 1,750,000 600,000 2,225,000 400,000 5,000,000
25 10 35 12 45 8 100
Venezuela 932,000 266,000 1,198,000 266,000 932,000 266,000 2,662,000
35 10 45 10 35 10 100
Note: Brazil figures show mestizos and Indians combined. Panama and Venezuela figures in italics indicate author’s estimate.
Empty cells represent “no data.”
Sources: See note 12.
are currently lobbying for their addition to censuses in Colombia and Panama.
Their efforts have been supported by the United Nations and by the Inter-Amer-
ican Development Bank, which in 2000 convened an international conference of
scholars and policymakers to discuss the need for racial data in Latin American
censuses.13 Here’s hoping that those discussions yield fruit, and that future schol-
ars, citizens, activists, and policymakers will be able to draw on better informa-
tion than we currently have available.
❂
GLOSSARY
Abakuá (Sp. Am.) Cuban religion based on the Leopard cult of the Calabar
coast
agregado/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Free laborer attached to a plantation or hacienda by ties
of patronage and dependence
angelito (Sp. Am.; anjinho, Lit. “little angel”; deceased infant or child
Braz.)
boga (Sp. Am.) Oarsman
cabecita negra (Sp. Am.) In Argentina, dark-skinned rural migrant to Buenos
Aires and other cities
cabildos afrocubanos (Sp. Am.) In Cuba, mutual aid societies based on members’
African ethnic identity
candombe (Sp. Am.) African-based music and dance created in Argentina
and Uruguay
Candomblé (Braz.) Brazilian religion combining elements of Yoruba
religion and Catholicism
canto (Braz.) Gang of porters who carried loads or passengers
capoeira (Braz.) Afro-Brazilian martial art
Carnaval (Sp. Am., Braz.) Annual “feast of the flesh” preceding Lent
caudillo (Sp. Am.) Military strongman, leader
cimarrón (Sp. Am.) Runaway slave
cobrero (Sp. Am.) Copper miner; inhabitant of Cuban town of Santiago
del Prado
cofradía (Sp. Am., Braz.) Catholic lay religious brotherhood
colono/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Lit. “colonist”; in Cuba, a smallholder or medium-
holder sugar farmer; in Brazil, a plantation contract
laborer
comparsa (Sp. Am.) Group that parades and puts on shows during Carnaval
conuco (Sp. Am.) Small farm
conventillo (Sp. Am.) Tenement building
corregidor (Sp. Am.) Local-level Spanish official
210 GLOSSARY
cortiço (Braz.) Tenement building

cuadrilla (Sp. Am.) Work gang
cumbe (Sp. Am.) Settlement or encampment of runaway slaves
descamisado/a (Sp. Am.) Lit. “shirtless one”; a working-class person
escola de samba (Braz.) Lit. “samba school”; group that parades and puts on
shows during Carnaval
favela (Braz.) Urban squatter settlement
favelado/a (Braz.) Resident of a favela
fazenda (Braz.) Large agricultural estate
feiticeiro (Braz.) Sorcerer, witchdoctor
hacendado (Sp. Am.) Owner of a hacienda
hacienda (Sp. Am.) Large agricultural estate
liberto/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Person freed from slavery
llanos (Sp. Am.) Plains in southern Venezuela and southeastern
Colombia
malta (Braz.) Capoeira gang
mambo (Sp. Am.) Music and dance created in Cuba
merengue (Sp. Am.) Music and dance created in Dominican Republic
mestizo/a (Sp. Am.; Person of mixed race
mestiço/a, Braz.)
milonga (Sp. Am.) Music and dance created in Argentina and Uruguay
mineiro/a (Braz.) Native of Minas Gerais
mocambo (Braz.) Settlement or encampment of runaway slaves
montonero/a (Sp. Am.) Mounted guerrilla, or band of mounted guerrillas
mulato/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Person of mixed African and European ancestry
ñáñigo (Sp. Am.) Member of an Abakuá lodge
negro/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Black person, person of African ancestry
nganga (Braz.) Sorcerer, witch doctor
nordestino/a (Braz.) Native of northeastern Brazil
orisha (Sp. Am.; orixá, Braz.) In Yoruba religion, a divine embodiment of natural
forces, worshipped in Candomblé and Santería
palenque (Sp. Am.) Settlement or encampment of runaway slaves
Palo Monte (Sp. Am.) Cuban religion based on Congo religious practices
pardo/a (Sp. Am., Braz.) Person of mixed race
periferia (Braz.) Working-class suburbs
potencia (Sp. Am.) Abakuá lodge or congregation
preto/a (Braz.) Black person, person of African ancestry
quilombo (Braz.) Settlement or encampment of runaway slaves
rancheador (Sp. Am.) Hunter of runaway slaves
régimen de castas (Sp. Am.) Body of law and social practice that sought to structure
colonial society into a hierarchy of racial groups, or
castes
rumba (Sp. Am.) African-based music and dance created in Cuba
salsa (Sp. Am.) Music and dance based on Cuban son
samba (Braz.) African-based music and dance created in Brazil
GLOSSARY 211
Santería (Sp. Am.) Cuban religion combining elements of Yoruba religion

and Catholicism
solar (Sp. Am.) Mansion or large building divided into working-class
apartments
son (Sp. Am.) African-based music and dance created in Cuba
tango (Sp. Am.) Music and dance created in Argentina and Uruguay
terreiro (Braz.) Candomblé worship site or temple
terreno comunero (Sp. Am.) Land owned in common
tierras baldías (Sp. Am.) State-owned lands
trabalhismo (Braz.) Lit. “laborism”; labor-based populist movement
tronco (Sp. Am.) Extended family
Umbanda (Braz.) Brazilian religion combining elements of Candomblé
and spiritism
velorio (Sp. Am.) Religious service, act of worship
zambo/a (Sp. Am.) Person of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry
❂
NOTES
Abbreviations
IBGE Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística
INE Instituto Nacional de Estadística
PNAD Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios
Introduction
1. “New Census Shows Hispanics Now Even with Blacks in U.S.,” New York Times
(8 March 2001).
2. Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 210–11; and in this book, table 5.2 and appendix.
3. For example, Harding, There Is a River; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom;
Kelley and Lewis, To Make Our World Anew; Trotter, African American Experience;
Berlin, Generations of Captivity.
4. Dzidzienyo, “Activity and Inactivity”; Fontaine, “Political Economy.”
5. See, for example, Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana; Estudos afro-brasileiros; Freyre et al.,
Novos estudos afro-brasileiros; Bastide, Poesia afro-brasileira; Sojo, Temas y apuntes
afro-venezolanos; Rama, Afro-uruguayos.
6. For more recent usage, see Pérez Sarduy and Stubbs, Afrocuba; García, Afro-
venezuela.
7. Fontaine, “Political Economy,” 133.
8. On the persistence of black populations in those countries and others, see Minority
Rights Group, No Longer Invisible. For Argentina, which is not included in that vol-
ume, see Picotti, Negro en la Argentina; Frigerio, Cultura negra; Otero Correa,
“Afroargentinos y caboverdeanos.”
9. Spickard, Mixed Blood; Davis, Who Is Black?. On similar complexities in Brazil, see
Harris, Patterns of Race, 54–64; Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 249–58; Wood, “Catego-
rias censitárias”; Harris et al., “Who Are the Whites?”; Telles, “Racial Ambiguity.” On
Colombia, see Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture.
10. On these and other racial and color terms, see Stephens, Dictionary.
11. See chapter 5.
214 NOTES TO PAGES 6–16
12. Adamo, “Broken Promise”; Andrews, “Racial Inequality”; Lovell and Wood, “Skin
Color.”
13. Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth and Concept of Race; Banton, Idea of Race and
Racial Theories; Hannaford, Race. See also the comments of one of the scientific
teams that mapped the human genetic code. The team used “the genomes of three
females and two males who have identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Cau-
casian, or African American. . . . In the five . . . genomes there is no way to tell one eth-
nicity from another.” “Remarks by the President . . .” (Washington, 26 June 2000);
“Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show,” New York Times (22 Aug. 2000).
14. See especially Rout, African Experience, but also Harris, Patterns of Race; Mörner,
Race Mixture; Degler, Neither Black nor White; Hoetink, Slavery and Race; Mellafe,
Esclavitud; Knight, African Dimension. For an introduction to that literature, and the
history of scholarship on race in Latin America more generally, see Wade, Race and
Ethnicity.
15. For bibliographies of this literature, see Barcelos et al., Escravidão; Esquivel Triana,
Costa Pacífica; Fernández Robaina, Cultura afrocubana; Ramos Guedez, Cien títulos;
Gallardo, Bibliografía afroargentina; Scott et al., Societies Alter Slavery.
16. See chapter 1.
Chapter 1
1. This and subsequent quotations from Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 216–20.
2. On the arrival of African slavery in Spanish America, see Deive, Esclavitud del negro;
Aguirre Beltrán, Población negra; Palmer, Slaves of the White God; Bowser, African
Slave; Acosta Saignes, Vida de los esclavos.
3. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 3–72; Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 95–125,
166–77.
4. Cook, Born to Die, 148–54; Hemming, Red Gold, 139–46, 174, 215–16, 243, 245, and
passim.
5. Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 210–11. On the slave trade to Brazil, see Klein, Middle Pas-
sage, 23–94; Conrad, World of Sorrow; Miller, Way of Death; Alencastro, Trato dos
viventes.
6. Russell-Wood, “Gold Cycle”; Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” 290.
7. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier.
8. On slave transport workers, see Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 121–26; Karasch, Slave
Life, 188–94; Peñas Galindo, Bogas de Mompox.
9. On slaves in the urban economy, see Algranti, Feitor ausente, 65–95; Andrade, Mão de
obra escrava; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 29–41; Bowser, African Slave , 100–8, 125–46;
Duharte Jiménez, Negro en la sociedad colonial, 11–30; Hünefeldt, Paying the Price,
97–128; Karasch, Slave Life, 185–213; Reis, Slave Rebellion, 160–74; Silva, Negro na rua.
10. On slave domestic servants, in addition to sources in previous note, see Lauderdale
Graham, House and Street.
11. On slaves in non-plantation agriculture, see Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 37–52; Mar-
tins Filho and Martins, “Slavery in a Nonexport Economy”; Maestri Filho, Escravo
no Rio Grande do Sul; Deive, Esclavitud del negro, 341–50.
NOTES TO PAGES 16–21 215
12. Mellafe, Esclavitud negra; Sater, “Black Experience in Chile”; Lovell and Lutz, De-
mography and Empire, 12–17; Bulgarelli and Alfaro, Esclavitud negra; Pla, Hermano
negro.
13. Pérez, Cuba, 60; Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 35, 46.
14. Palmer, Slaves of the White God, 26–28; Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 27.
15. On slavery in these areas, see Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 23–58; Carroll, Blacks in
Colonial Veracruz; Romero, “Papel de los descendientes”; Tardieu, Negro en Cusco;
Crespo, Esclavos negros; Isola, Esclavitud en el Uruguay; Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos,
5–87; Colmenares, Popayán.
16. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 100; Klein, African Slavery, 160; Kiple, “Nutritional
Link.”
17. Klein, African Slavery, 147; Eltis, Economic Growth, 255–59. Of 180,000 Africans arriv-
ing in Havana between 1790 and 1820, some 130,000 were male. Klein, Middle Pas-
sage, 223. Of 3,270 Africans captured from slave ships during the 1830s and brought
to Rio de Janeiro, 2,384 were male. And of 52,000 foreign-born slaves living in the
city in 1849, more than 34,000 were male. Karasch, Slave Life, 34, 66.
18. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 50; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, 69; Schwartz, Sugar
Plantations, 346–49; Karasch, Slave Life, 65–66.
19. Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 166–68.
20. See, for example, the case of Minas Gerais, where the ending of the gold rush in the
late 1700s, and the simultaneous recovery of sugar cultivation along the coast, greatly
reduced the importation of African slaves. By 1800 Minas’s slave population was ma-
jority Creole (American-born) and was growing by natural increase. Bergad, Slav-
ery, 123–44.
21. Cotton production declined from over 3,000 tons in 1791 to less than 200 in 1818; cof-
fee production declined from 34,000 tons in 1791 to 10,000 in 1818. Leyburn, Haitian
People, 320.
22. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 422–23; Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” 312–14; Pérez,
Cuba, 78–79; Moreno Fraginals, Ingenio, vol. 1, 39–102.
23. Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 211.
24. Pérez, Cuba, 60; Eltis, Economic Growth, 247; Klein, Middle Passage, 209–27.
25. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 27–28, 33–34; Studer, Trata de negros, table 15.
26. Viáfara was a common surname among slaves in Colombia’s Cauca Valley at the
time of abolition (1852) and is still found today among the region’s black peasants.
Mina, Esclavitud y libertad, 52–54; Friedemann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 221.
27. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 220–30; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 60–86;
Miller, Way of Death, 140–53, 207–44; Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 208–9.
28. Karasch, Slave Life, 13–15; Reis, Slave Rebellion, 148.
29. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 27. The 1812–13 census of Montevideo, by contrast,
recorded twice as many Congo/Angolans as West Africans. Montaño, Umkhonto,
61–64.
30. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 247; see also Bergad et al., Cuban Slave Market, 72–75.
31. Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade, 162, 163; Manning, Slavery and African Life, 86–109; Eltis,
Economic Growth, 73–77, 164–84.
32. Eltis, Rise of African Slavery, 150, 224–26.
33. Moura, Rebeliões de senzala, 17. Seventeenth-century Peruvian Viceroy Montesclaros

followed a similar policy, granting permission for slave dances under two condi-
tions: that they be held under official supervision in public places, and that “the sep-
aration of the nations be maintained.” Lazo García and Tord Nicolini, Del negro
señorial, 43.
34. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 147, and 139–59. See also the case of the (unsuccessful) 1795
slave rebellion in Coro, Venezuela, which originated among the city’s Loango
(Congo) blacks. Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 225–30; Veracoechea,
Documentos, 312.
35. Franco, Minas de Santiago; Díaz, Virgin, King, Royal Slaves.
36. Díaz, Virgin, King, Royal Slaves, 339.
37. On the industrial organization of sugar production, see Schwartz, Sugar Planta-
tions, 98–159; Moreno Fraginals, Ingenio, vol. 1, 167–255; Blackburn, Making of
New World Slavery, 332–44. Statistics from Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 449–50;
Klein, African Slavery, 117; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, 43; García Rodríguez, Es-
clavitud desde la esclavitud, 21; Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 41–44. Klein mentions
30 slaves per plantation in cacao-growing areas of Venezuela. Klein, African Slav-
ery, 86.
38. Quotations from Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 364; Conrad, Children of God’s Fire,
56, 61, 62; see also 53–100 passim. On brutal conditions in the Cuban sugar industry,
see Moreno Fraginals, Ingenio, vol. 2, 5–90; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, 228–39;
Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 130–50.
39. Russell-Wood, “Gold Cycle,” 224; Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 132–36. Pre-
sent-day descendants of the slaves in the Chocó region are “continuously beset by
debilitating deadly forces which cause oozing sores, infected sputum, vile colored
stools, and pain. A restricted life cycle, and late maturity are an expected part of the
human condition.” Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 28.
40. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 122, 174–77; Zuluaga Ramírez, “Cuadrillas
mineras,” 61–64.
41. Russell-Wood, Black Man, 104–27. On the industrial use of slave labor in British-
owned mines in nineteenth-century Minas Gerais, see Libby, Trabalho escravo.
42. Romero, “Papel de los descendientes,” 69; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 37–38.
43. Karasch, Slave Life, 189–90; Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 122; Reis, Slave Rebellion,
164–65. Reverend Walsh, cited at the beginning of this chapter, noted evidence of this
gang system in Rio de Janeiro but did not understand its significance. The street
porters “followed each other in ranks, with heavy weights on their heads, chattering
the most inarticulate and dismal cadence as they moved along.” Conrad, Children of
God’s Fire, 237.
44. See for example Turner, From Chattel Slaves; Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito,
esp. 7–21; Díaz, Virgin, King, Royal Slaves, 15–16, 228.
45. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 152–59. See also Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 167–79;
Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas, 358–70.
46. Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 29; Reis, “Revolution of the Ganhadores”; Lucena
Salmoral, Sangre sobre piel, 76.
47. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 60–61; Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 187–89. For other
such cases, see Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 183–87; Andrade González, “Aprecio
económico,” 214–16; García Rodríguez, Esclavitud desde la esclavitud, 125–30; Díaz,

Virgin, King, Royal Slaves, 285–313, 317; Helg, “Fragmented Majority,” 169.
48. Schwartz, “Resistance and Accommodation”; Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa, 22.
49. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 78; Reis, “Escravos e coiteiros,” 364; see also Gomes,
Histórias de quilombolas, 382.
50. On provision grounds, see Cardoso, Escravo ou camponês?; Barickman, “Bit of
Land”; Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 45–55; Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa,
40–47.
51. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 137; Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 92–93.
52. Manzano, Autobiography, 59, 61, 101.
53. Picó, Al filo del poder, 25; see also 99, 100.
54. Gutiérrez Azopardo, Historia del negro, 32–34, 48; Zuluaga Ramírez, Guerrilla y so-
ciedad, 35–36, 41–42; Reis, “Quilombos e revoltas,” 19; Veracoechea, Documentos, 80;
Metcalf, “Millenarian Slaves?” 1547.
55. Thornton, Africa and Africans, 235–71.
56. Bastide, African Religions, 240–84. On the Yoruba orishas, see Thompson, Flash of
the Spirit, 1–97; Siqueira, Orixás.
57. Spirit possession “is a relationship of exchange, of mutuality, of shared responsibil-
ity, and above all, of accompaniment . . . Possession is particularly significant be-
cause the occupation of black bodies by divine being is a stunning contestation of
subalternity.” Harding, Refuge in Thunder, 154, 156.
58. Harding, Refuge in Thunder, 132–35, 53.
59. Quotations from Pereda Valdés, Negro en el Uruguay, 98; Karasch, Slave Life, 242; An-
drews, Afro-Argentines, 158. On slave efforts to hold public dances, see also Nistal-
Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 15, 35; Montaño, Umkhonto, 211–24.
60. Harding, Refuge in Thunder, 132–35; Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, xiii; Rose, Black
Noise, 64–80.
61. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 41.
62. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 162.
63. Some 42 percent of rural slaves were married, as compared to 21 percent of urban
slaves, 42 percent of rural free blacks and mulattoes, and 46 percent of rural whites.
Lombardi, People and Places, 135–37.
64. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 45–46.
65. Costa et al.,“Familia escrava,” 254; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 396; Castro, Das cores
do silêncio, 75. See also other articles in Estudos Econômicos 17, 2 (1987); Slenes, Na
senzala; Graham, “Slave Families”; Florentino and Góes, Paz das senzalas; Laud-
erdale Graham, Caetana Says No.
66. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 124–25; Zuluaga, “Cuadrillas mineras,” 67–80.
67. Quoted in Manzano, Autobiography, 5–6.
68. Manzano, Autobiography, 69–71, 79.
69. For a series of Cuban court cases in which slaves followed this strategy, see García
Rodríguez, Esclavitud desde la esclavitud, 107–24.
70. Manzano, Autobiography, 93, 115–21.
71. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 180; Karasch, Slave Life, 289.
72. See, for example, Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 45–46; Hünefeldt, Paying the
Price, 167–79.
73. Malagón Barceló, Código negro carolino; Lucena Salmoral, Sangre sobre piel, 23–47.
74. For a representative sample of planter opinion, in the form of a petition to the king
from Cuban sugar growers, see García Rodríguez, Esclavitud desde la esclavitud,
69–89.
75. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 305. Hall finds that the Spanish judicial system,
which operated in Louisiana from 1766 to 1803,“was, in many ways, superior to what
came before [French courts] and after [U.S. courts]. There was a significant exten-
sion of rights to slaves, except in the vital area of protection for the slave family,”
where French law was superior (p. 304). On slave suits in Spanish Florida, see Lan-
ders, Black Society, 138–44.
76. Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 22–23. For detailed examples of such complaints, see
Chaves, María Chiquinquirá Díaz; Demasi, “Familia y esclavitud.”
77. On such suits, see Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 167–79; Lanuza, Morenada, 75–81, 105;
Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 46.
78. See, for example, a 1798 case in Barbacoas (Colombia), in which a group of slave
miners alleging mistreatment by their owner approached the lieutenant governor,
because “you have responded to other complaints brought by slaves.” Andrade
González, “Aprecio económico,” 216.
79. See, for example, the 1807 declaration by a Defensor de Esclavos in Colombia that
slavery was “against the law of nature . . . a violent and odious condition that, instead
of being favored and extended, should be restricted and harassed.” Lucena Salmoral,
Sangre sobre piel, 77. See also Meiklejohn, “Implementation of Slave Legislation”;
Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos, 35; Rama, Afro-uruguayos, 47–48; Lavallé, “‘Aquella igno-
miniosa herida.”
80. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 65.
81. Lucena Salmoral, Sangre sobre piel, 84–85.
82. Díaz, Virgin, King, Royal Slaves, 317–19; Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 74–75, 201–3.
See also Juan Francisco Manzano’s reference to “the natural right that every slave has
to his ransom”—that is, to buy his freedom—in Manzano, Autobiography, 20. For an
extended discussion of slave rights under Spanish law, see Petit Muñoz et al., Condi-
ción jurídica, 181–269.
83. Rodrigues, “Liberdade, humanidade e propriedade,” 160.
84. Algranti, Feitor ausente, 112; Reis, “Quilombos e revoltas,” 35.
85. Of 380 slave petitions discovered by Keila Grinberg in the Brazilian national
archives, almost all date from the period after 1831, and the great majority are from
the second half of the century. Grinberg, Liberata, 22, 109. Also on slave petitions, see
Grinberg, “Freedom Suits”; Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No; Chalhoub, Visões
da liberdade.
86. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 272, 281.
87. Guillot, Negros rebeldes; Rout, African Experience, 104–22.
88. Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 209–15; Veracoechea, Documentos, 352–53;
see also Kapsoli, Sublevaciones de esclavos.
89. Franco, Conspiración de Aponte, 11–12; Arcaya U., Insurrección de los negros; Vera-
coechea, Documentos, 305–18, 323–28; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 343–74;
Geggus, “Slave Resistance.”
90. On runaway communities, see Price, Maroon Societies; Gomes, Histórias de quilom-
bolas; Reis and Gomes, Liberdade por um fio; Acosta Saignes, Vida de los esclavos,
178–210; Lazo García and Tord Nicolini, Del negro señorial; Friedemann, Ma ngombe;
Borrego Plá, Palenques de negros; La Rosa Corzo, Cimarrones de Cuba and Palenques
del oriente.
91. Guillot, Negros rebeldes; Rout, African Experience, 104–17; Zuluaga Ramírez, Guer-
rilla y sociedad; Rueda Novoa, Zambaje y autonomía; Carroll, “Mandinga.” See also
the case of Curiepe, a settlement of free blacks in the Tuy Valley of Venezuela that
over the course of the 1700s became a center of cimarrón activity. Ferry, Colonial
Elite, 108–20.
92. Quotation from Bastide, African Religions, 90. On Palmares, see Carneiro, Quilombo
de Palmares; Freitas, Palmares; Reis and Gomes, Liberdade por um fio, 26–109; Ander-
son, “Quilombo of Palmares.”
93. Guimarães, Uma negação da ordem; Reis and Gomes, Liberdade por um fio, 139–92.
94. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels, 112–18; Lazo García and Tord Nicolini, Del
negro señorial, 23–24.
95. Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas, 43. On the image of the Hydra, see Linebaugh and
Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra.
96. Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos, 64–70; for a dissenting view, see McFarlane, “Cimarrones
and Palenques.”
97. Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 215–19, 238–42; Acosta Saignes, Vida de los
esclavos, 190–95; Blanco Sojo, Miguel Guacamaya, 36–42; Guerra, Esclavos negros.
98. Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 200–11.
99. Reis, “Escravos e coiteiros,” 333.
100. In the United States in 1800, free blacks and mulattoes constituted only 2 percent of
the national population and 11 percent of the black population; in Saint Domingue
(in 1789, immediately prior to the revolution), 5 percent of the total population, 6
percent of the black population; in Jamaica (1800) 3 percent of both the total and the
black population. Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 47, 398; Cohen and Greene, Neither
Slave nor Free, 188, 194.
101. Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” 290–91.
102. Johnson, “Manumission”; Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 211; Schwartz, Sugar Planta-
tions, 332.
103. On manumission, see Bowser, African Slave in Colonial Peru, 272–301; Hanger,
Bounded Lives, 17–51; Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 167–79; Johnson, “Manumission”;
Karasch, Slave Life, 335–69; Bergad et al., Cuban Slave Market, 122–42; Kiernan,
“Manumission of Slaves”; Mattoso, Ser escravo, 176–98; Schwartz, “Manumission of
Slaves”; Nishida, “Manumission and Ethnicity”; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,”
145–74.
104. Aguirre, Agentes, 191; Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa, 22; Veracoechea, Documentos,
276–77, 314–16.
105. Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos, 201–03.
106. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 130.
107. “Sexual relations with white men was a major road out of slavery for slave women
and their children. . . . It was a strategy that often worked.” Hall, Africans in Colonial
Louisiana, 274; see also Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 152–54; Grinberg, Liberata,
15–28.
108. See, for example, Hanger, Bounded Lives, 35–38; Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos, 50–53; Hall,
Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 274; Higgins, “Licentious Liberty,” 159–62.
109. On the Caste Regime, see Rout, African Experience, 126–61; Russell-Wood, Black
Man, 50–82; Jaramillo Uribe, Ensayos, 163–233; Petit Muñoz et al., Condición jurídica,
334–64.
110. Kinsbruner, Not of Pure Blood, 19; Mota, Nordeste 1817, 105. For similarly negative
characterizations of racially mixed pardos, see Pellicer, Vivencia del honor, 40–48.
111. Quotation from Bowser,“Colonial Spanish America,” 52. On black and mulatto arti-
sans, see Bowser, African Slave, 125–46; Deschamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía;
Hanger, Bounded Lives, 55–87; Harth-Terré and Márquez Abanto, “Artesano negro”;
Kinsbruner, Not of Pure Blood, 70–78, 131–36; Rosal, “Artesanos de color.”
112. On free black businesspeople, see Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 106–24; De-
schamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía; Hanger, Bounded Lives, 55–87; Bowser,
African Slave, 317–20; Russell-Wood, Black Man, 53–56; Kinsbruner, Petty Capitalism,
123.
113. Mulvey, “Black Lay Brotherhoods”; Russell-Wood, Black Man, 128–60; Scarano, De-
voção e escravidão; Kiddy, “Brotherhoods of Our Lady”; Andrews, Afro-Argentines,
138–42.
114. Voelz, Slave and Soldier, 120–21.
115. The Caracas town council opposed the creation of new free black militia units in the
1790s on the grounds that they would “increase the arrogance of the pardos, and give
them organization, chiefs, and arms to facilitate a revolution.” Some 20 years later,
this indeed turned out to be the case. Stoan, Pablo Morillo, 18. On Afro-Latin Amer-
ican militias, see Voelz, Slave and Soldier, 118–22; Deschamps Chapeaux, Batallones
de pardos; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 113–38; Kuethe, “Status of the Free Pardo”;
Hanger, Bounded Lives, 109–35; Vinson, Bearing Arms; Kraay, Race, State, and Armed
Forces.
116. On marriage strategies among upwardly mobile free blacks, see Martínez-Alier,
Marriage, Class and Colour, 91–99; Deschamps Chapeaux, Batallones de pardos,
56–59; Hanger, Bounded Lives, 89–108.
117. On these reforms and their effects, see Brading, “Bourbon Spain”; Lynch, Spanish
American Revolutions, 1–24; Andrews, “Spanish American Independence.”
118. Bowser, African Slave, 141–42; Bowser, “Colonial Spanish America,” 39; Cope, Limits
of Racial Domination, 21–22; Castillero Calvo, Régimen de castas, 26; Kinsbruner,
Petty Capitalism, 82.
119. Castillero Calvo, Régimen de castas, 27; Johnson, “Artisans of Buenos Aires,” 50–145.
On similar racial conflicts among shoemakers in Rio de Janeiro, see Algranti, Feitor
ausente, 91–92.
120. On gracias al sacar, see Rodulfo Cortés, Régimen de “las gracias al sacar”; Twinam,
Public Lives; Rout, African Experience, 156–59.
121. In addition to the instances referred to above, see the numerous cases in Rodulfo
Cortés, Regimen de “las gracias al sacar,” vol. 2, Documentos anexos; King, “José Pon-
ciano de Ayarza”; Twinam, “Pedro de Ayarza.”
122. Quotation from Chance, Race and Class, 194; see also Valdés, “Decline of the So-
ciedad de Castas”; Seed, “Social Dimensions of Race”; Anderson, “Race and Social
Stratification.”
123. Cope, Limits of Racial Domination, 51–54; Mörner, Race Mixture, 69.
124. Rosenblat, Población indígena, vol. 2, 173–78.
125. Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 71.
126. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 132–33; Johnson, “Artisans of Buenos Aires,” 121; see also
Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 74.
127. Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 18, 71; Cope, Limits of Racial Domina-
tion, 56; see also King, “Colored Castes,” 56.
128. Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 18. This quotation is from a royal official
in Cuba, date unknown.
129. Brito Figueroa, Estructura social y demográfica, 77–78.
130. Pellicer, Vivencia del honor, 60.
131. Pellicer, Vivencia del honor, 28; Rodríguez, Pardos libres, 14.
132. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 414–15.
133. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 211.
134. Russell-Wood, Black Man, 67–82; Graham, “Free African Brazilians,” 41–42.
Chapter 2
1. France’s military participation in the American Revolution left her with massive war
debts. When the monarchy proposed new taxes in 1786 to pay those debts, the Estates
General convened in protest, setting in motion the events that led to the revolution.
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, 62–67.
2. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 161–264.
3. Córdova Bello, Independencia de Haiti; Mott, “Revolução dos negros do Haiti”;
Scott, “Common Wind”; Gaspar and Geggus, Turbulent Time; Geggus, Impact of the
Haitian Revolution.
4. On the slave rising in Haiti, see James, Black Jacobins; Fick, Making of Haiti.
5. On the independence wars, see Graham, Independence in Latin America; Kinsbruner,
Independence in Spanish America; Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions; Bethell, In-
dependence of Latin America; Rodríguez O., Independence of Spanish America.
6. Quoted in Souza, Sabinada, 156.
7. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition, 11; Aguirre, Agentes, 193.
8. Costa, Brazilian Empire, 140; Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito, 92–94.
9. Costa, Brazilian Empire, 41; Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 213. See also
Uruguay’s Declaration of Independence in 1825, which noted “the monstrous incon-
sistency that would result if, among the same peoples who proclaim and defend the
rights of man, children of slaves remained in that barbarous condition.” Rama, Afro-
uruguayos, 50.
10. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz, 99–101; quotation from 100.
11. See chapter 1, 39–40.
12. Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 46; Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos,
333–35.
13. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 204. “Whatever flag these groups [of slaves]
followed, they were almost always fighting their own private war.” Brito Figueroa,
Problema tierra y esclavos, 335.
14. On the Spanish side, a bill proposing to abolish slavery was submitted to the Spanish
Cortes in 1811. It was rejected, and there was apparently no further discussion of
emancipation in Spanish official circles at that time. Franco, Conspiración de Aponte,
27–29. On the Creole side, see Bolívar’s 1816 slave conscription order, which decreed
“the absolute freedom of the slaves who for three centuries have groaned under the
Spanish yoke” but then restricted that freedom to slaves (and their families) who
joined the rebel forces. Those who failed to do so (and, again, their families) re-
mained slaves. Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 344.
15. Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 46.
16. De la Vega, Cartagena de Indias; Bell Lemus, Cartagena de Indias, 87–95.
17. Colmenares, Independencia, 56, 147.
18. The Patianos left “a bitter legacy of cruelty and vandalism that has been cited many
times by the historians of the region.” Zuluaga Ramírez, Guerrilla y sociedad, 118–19;
Colmenares, Independencia, 146.
19. Quotations from Montaño, Umkhonto, 166, 167; Frega,“Caminos de libertad,” 52. On
Afro-Uruguayan towns in Paraguay, see Montaño, Umkhonto, 201–10.
20. Aguirre, Agentes, 120–25, 245–54, 276–84; see also Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition,
95–125. Slaves also took over abandoned haciendas in Cartagena. Bell Lemus, Carta-
gena de Indias, 89.
21. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 116–17; Feliú Cruz, Abolición en Chile, 75–80; Blanchard,
Slavery and Abolition, 11.
22. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 116; Feliú Cruz, Abolición en Chile, 77–79. On slave owner
resistance to draft decrees in Uruguay, see Carvalho-Neto, Negro uruguayo, 267;
Frega, “Caminos de libertad,” 48–49.
23. Bohigas, Sobre esclavos, 93–94.
24. Colmenares, Independencia, 148–49; Castellanos, Abolición en Popayán, 29.
25. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition, 8, 13.
26. Feliú Cruz, Abolición en Chile, 65–66; Bohigas, Sobre esclavos, 80; Blanchard, Slavery
and Abolition, 11; Blanchard, “Language of Liberation.”
27. Colmenares, Independencia, 145; Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 87.
28. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 212; Colmenares, Independencia, 148.
29. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 118; Lanuza, Morenada, 83–87; Blanchard,“Miguel García.”
30. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 70, 73–74; Frega, “Caminos de libertad,” 54.
31. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 116–17; Rout, African Experience, 176; Bohigas, Sobre es-
clavos, 102.
32. Frega, “Caminos de libertad,” 46–47. Rodríguez’s legal position was weakened by the
fact that he had deserted from the army. The outcome of the case is unknown.
33. This helps explain why Mexico passed no such law. Though slaves took an active role
in the insurrection in Veracruz, in the country as a whole they were an insignificant
part of the rebel forces.
34. Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 52; Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition, 50–51; Rama,
Afro-uruguayos, 52.
35. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition, 52–57; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 56, 243.
36. Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 127.

37. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 79–85; Aguirre, Agentes, 214–33.
38. Correa González, “Integración socio-económica,” 31.
39. Lombardi, People and Places, 132; Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 35, 62; Blanchard,
Slavery and Abolition, 14; McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 34, 353; Bush-
nell, Making of Modern Colombia, 107.
40. Slavery was also abolished in Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic) in
1822 by Haitian occupation forces. This emancipation freed some 10,000 to 15,000
slaves. Deive, Esclavitud del negro, 608–9.
41. Quotation from Lombardi, Decline and Abolition, 63; on abolition see 135–42; and
Wright, Café con Leche, 31, 34–35.
42. Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition, 189–207.
43. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 96–101; Lynch, Argentine Caudillo, 53–56.
44. Pelfort, 150 años, 65–84. On black military service in the civil war, see Borucki et al.,
“Esclavitud y trabajo,” 90–112.
45. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 405; Graden, “Act ‘Even of Public Security,’” 256;
Mota, Nordeste 1817, 59, 119; Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito, 91, 94; Freyre, Man-
sions and Shanties, 370. See also Mott, “Revolução dos negros do Haiti”; Karasch,
Slave Life, 324; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 478–79.
46. Franco, Conspiración de Aponte, 12–13; Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud, 212.
47. Baralt, Esclavos rebeldes, 16–29; Franco, Conspiración de Aponte, 51 and passim. Also
on Aponte, see Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 79–144.
48. On Brazilian independence, see Bethell, “Independence of Brazil”; Russell-Wood,
From Colony to Nation.
49. Pérez, Cuba, 77; Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” 314; Eisenberg, Sugar Industry, 9;
Scarano, Sugar and Slavery, 7–8.
50. Eltis, Economic Growth, 249.
51. Ortiz, “Cabildos afrocubanos”; Deschamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía, 31–46;
Howard, Changing History. On similar organizations in other countries, see Friede-
mann, Cabildos negros; Montaño, Umkhonto, 65–88; Goldman, ¡Salve Baltasar!;
Chamosa, “To Honor the Ashes.”
52. Ortiz,“Cabildos afrocubanos,” 12–13; Deschamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía, 32.
53. On the weakening of church influence in Cuba, see Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio, vol.
1, 112–26; Knight, Slave Society, 106–13.
54. Barnet, Autobiography, 33, 35.
55. Lydia Cabrera, quoted in Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 123; see also 101–59; Castel-
lanos and Castellanos, Religiones y lenguas, 127–202; Cabrera, Regla Kimbisa and Re-
glas de Congo.
56. Barnet, Autobiography, 35.
57. On Yoruba religion and Santería, see Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 1–100; Castel-
lanos and Castellanos, Religiones y lenguas, 9–125; and Cabrera, El monte and Yemayá
y Ochún; Brandon, Santeria; Murphy, Santería.
58. Barnet, Autobiography, 35.
59. On Abakuá, see Castellanos and Castellanos, Religiones y lenguas, 203–62; Thomp-
son, Flash of the Spirit, 225–68; Cabrera, Sociedad secreta Abakuá and Anaforuana;
and Sosa, Ñáñigos and Carabalí.
60. López Valdés, “Sociedad secreta ‘Abakuá’’; on the Leopard cult’s role in regulating
debt and credit in Africa, see Lovejoy and Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship,” 347–49.
61. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 30, 83.
62. On capoeira, see Soares, Capoeira escrava and Negregada instituição; Lewis, Ring of
Liberation.
63. Lewis, Ring of Liberation, 54.
64. Holloway, “Healthy Terror,” 671; Soares, Negregada instituição, 301.
65. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 42.
66. Harding, Refuge in Thunder, 68–103; Butler, Freedoms Given, 191–99.
67. Karasch, Slave Life, 262; see 261–87. This was the case in Cuba as well, where Esteban
Montejo recalled how “people used to run away from [a Congo religious leader] be-
cause they said he was the devil himself and was allied with mayombe [witchcraft]
and death. . . . When [Congo priests] had a problem with some person, they followed
that person along any path and gathered up the dirt they walked on. They saved it
and put it in . . . a secret little corner. As the sun went down, the life of the person
would leave him. And at sunset the person was quite dead. I say this because it hap-
pens that I seen it a lot during slave times.” Barnet, Autobiography, 34. See also Brazil-
ian journalist João do Rio’s reflections, for a slightly later period, on the power of
African “witchcraft.” Do Rio, Religiões no Rio, 34–35, 34–60 passim.
68. Nistal-Moret, Esclavos prófugos.
69. Quotation from Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 206. On runaways and
palenques, see also 200–11; La Rosa Corzo, Palenques del oriente; Paquette, Sugar Is
Made, 73–74; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, 83.
70. Reis, Slave Rebellion, 41; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 479.
71. Quotations from Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas, 52; Conrad, Children of God’s
Fire, 383; see also Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro, 35; Karasch, Slave Life, 311. On the
proliferation of quilombos in Brazil during this period, see Reis and Gomes, Liber-
dade por um fio, 263–498 passim.
72. Baralt, Esclavos rebeldes, 21–67; Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud, 213–15.
73. Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 186–87.
74. The phrase is from Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 468–88.
75. Reis, Slave Rebellion.
76. Queiroz, Escravidão negro, 57–58, 162–65, 176–82, 207–32; Gomes, Histórias de
quilombolas.
77. Santos, Balaiada, 66–68.
78. Lindoso, Utopia armada, 422–26. On government campaigns against similarly long-
lived quilombos in Pará—some created during the Cabanagem rebellion of 1835–40,
others up to 30 or 40 years before that—see Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 389–91.
79. Santos, Balaiada, 90–91; Souza, Sabinada, 144; Chiavenato, Cabanagem, 123–33.
80. Kraay, “‘As Terrifying as Unexpected,’” 518; Souza, Sabinada, 146–51.
81. The law also freed all slaves aged 60 and over. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 45–83; Fer-
rer, Insurgent Cuba, 15–28.
82. Quotations from Scott, Slave Emancipation, 55 (see also 45–62); Bergad, Cuban Rural
Society, 185 (see also 183–89).
83. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 47–67; Helg, Our Rightful Share, 49–51, 78–80.
84. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 113, 115.
85. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 70–89.

86. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 111–97.
87. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 58–59; Pérez, Cuba, 124.
88. The independence war in Cuba brought slavery to an end in Puerto Rico as well.
Puerto Rico’s independence uprising in 1868, timed to coincide with Cuba’s, was im-
mediately repressed by Spanish forces. Nevertheless, the Moret Law of 1870 applied
to Puerto Rico as well. Responding to pressure from Spanish and Puerto Rican abo-
litionists, the Spanish Cortes abolished slavery in the island in 1873. Slave owners
were paid 200 pesos for each slave freed, and libertos were required to work three
more years for their former masters, until 1876. Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud,
289–348; Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 126–60.
89. The Brazilian Parliament passed this measure under strong diplomatic and military
pressure from Great Britain. See Bethell, Abolition, 327–50; Needell, “Abolition.”
90. Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 365.
91. On the inter-provincial trade, see Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 120–78,
594–686; Klein, Middle Passage, 95–120; Conrad, World of Sorrow, 171–92.
92. Queiroz, Escravidão negra, 146; Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas, 333. On increasing
slave crime during this period, see Queiroz, Escravidão negra, 144–62; Machado,
Crime e escravidão.
93. Azevedo, Onda negra, 111–25.
94. Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade, 43–79; Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 119–34.
95. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 35.
96. Queiroz, Escravidão negro, 155–56.
97. Quotations from Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 185. On slave assaults dur-
ing the 1860s and 1870s, and their appeals to police and magistrates, see Queiroz, Es-
cravidão negra, 144–62; Azevedo, Onda negra, 180–99.
98. Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 550.
99. Dean, Rio Claro, 127.
100. Graham, Patronage and Politics, 183–206.
101. Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 245–57; Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, 203–24;
Graden, “Emancipation in Brazil.”
102. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 40. Abolition was “a victory of the people and, we may
add, a victory by the free blacks and slaves.” Costa, Abolição, 94.
Chapter 3
1. Quoted in Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 275.
2. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 313–18; Vincent, “Blacks Who Freed Mexico”;
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, 48–70; Krauze, Mexico, 103–18. Morelos is often de-
scribed as a mestizo, but his parents were mulatos pardos, of mixed Indian and
African descent. Aguirre Beltrán, Población negra, 167–68, 270–71.
3. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 321; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, 74–77.
4. Quotations from Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 59. See also Carracedo, “Régimen de
castas.”
5. Helg, “Limits of Equality”; Munera, Fracaso de la nación, 173–216; Lasso, “Race and
Republicanism,” 69–118.
6. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 197; Siso, Formación del pueblo, vol. 2, 189–90,
449–50.
7. Siso, Formación del pueblo, vol. 2, 444; Stoan, Pablo Morillo, 17; Arcaya U., Cabildo de
Caracas, 111–12; Sucre Reyes, Capitanía general, 148.
8. Quotation from Stoan, Pablo Morillo, 36. On pardo opposition to the rebel republic,
see Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 325–43; Rodríguez, Pardos libres, 28–36;
Carrera Damas, Boves.
9. King, “Colored Castes.”
10. Stoan, Pablo Morillo, 68, 72.
11. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 203–04.
12. During the early 1820s, as Venezuelan units marched into Colombia and Ecuador,
the number of high-ranking black commanders in those forces severely discomfited
local elites unaccustomed to seeing black men in positions of authority. See, for ex-
ample, the case of mulatto Colonel Remigio Márquez, appointed military governor
of the Magdalena region of Colombia in 1822. Local merchants upset by his enforce-
ment of anti-contraband measures accused him of fomenting race war and de-
manded that he be removed. A subsequent trial vindicated him of all charges. Lasso,
“Race and Republicanism,” 141–50. On elite opposition to black officers in Ecuador,
see Rout, African Experience, 226.
13. Costa, Brazilian Empire, 10.
14. Burns, “Intellectuals as Agents,” 245; Costa, “Political Emancipation,” 69; Kraay, Race
State, 79–80.
15. Mota, Nordeste 1817, 85, 117, 154.
16. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 359.
17. Malheiro, Escravidão no Brasil, vol. 1, 51.
18. Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 203; Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro, 48.
19. Reis, A morte é uma festa, 53–59; Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 221.
20. Hudson, “Status of the Negro,” 235–36.
21. Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives, 77.
22. Endrek, Mestizaje en Córdoba, 67–68; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 60; Pereda Valdés,
Negro en el Uruguay, 76.
23. Rout, African Experience, 176–77.
24. Halperín-Donghi, Aftermath of Revolution, 25–29; Wright, Café con leche, 28–38. For
a graphic expression of those fears, see the classic story “El matadero” [The slaugh-
terhouse], by Argentine Esteban Echeverría (1838), an almost hallucinatory account
of blood and butchery in post-independence Buenos Aires. Central to the story are
the “innumerable Negro women who go around after offal, like vultures after car-
rion, spread over the city like so many harpies ready to devour whatever they found
eatable.” In González Echevarría, Latin American Short Stories, 59–72; quotation on
p. 61.
25. On liberalism and conservatism, see Safford, “Politics, Ideology and Society”; Costa,
Brazilian Empire, 53–77; Uribe-Uran, Honorable Lives, esp. 15–19, 146–54.
26. Helg, “Limits of Equality,” 21; Sanders, “Contentious Republicans,” 91, 92; Figueroa
Navarro, Dominio y sociedad, 98–99.
27. Graham, Patronage and Politics; Anino, Historia de las elecciones; Posada-Carbó,
Elections before Democracy.
28. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, 256, 264; Lasso, “Race and Republicanism,”
150–68; Figueroa Navarro, Dominio y sociedad, 245–46. Panama was part of Colom-
bia until 1903, when it declared independence with support from the United States.
29. Aguirre, Agentes, 289–91.
30. Quotation from Anna, Forging Mexico, 228. On the Guerrero administration, see
Sims, Expulsion of Mexico’s Spaniards, 57–122; Anna, Forging Mexico, 210–28.
31. Reis and Silva, Negociação e conflito, 85; Freyre, Mansions and Shanties, 370; Costa,
Brazilian Empire, 10; Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 206; Reis, Slave Rebellion,
23–28; Barman, Brazil, 112–20.
32. Santos, Balaiada, 50–51, 76; see also Janotti, Balaida. On the Pará revolt, see Chiave-
nato, Cabanagem; Paolo, Cabanagem. On the War of the Cabanos, see Andrade,
Guerra dos Cabanos; Freitas, Guerrilheiros do Imperador; Lindoso, Utopia armada.
33. Reis, Morte é uma festa, 44.
34. This had also been a complaint of the “mulatto press” of Rio de Janeiro during the
early 1830s. Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 208–13.
35. Quotations from Kraay,“‘As Terrifying as Unexpected,’” 516–17. See also Souza, Sabi-
nada; Holub, “Brazilian Sabinada.”
36. On Brazilian politics during this period, see Graham, Patronage and Politics; Gra-
ham, “1850–1870”; and Costa, “1870–1889.”
37. Brito Figueroa, Problema tierra y esclavos, 355–402; Brito Figueroa, Ezequiel Zamora;
Matthews, Violencia rural.
38. Wright, Café con Leche, 36–38. On the Federal War, see Banko, Luchas federalistas,
143–201.
39. Walker, “Montoneros, bandoleros”; Aguirre, “Cimarronaje, bandolerismo.”
40. Cuche, Poder blanco, 150.
41. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, esp. 137, 183.
42. Carvalho-Neto, Estudios afros, 292, 301–02; Argentina Chiriboga, “Raíces africanas,”
137; Zendrón, Cultura negra, 58–62; Castro Chiriboga, “Revolución de Concha.”
43. Quotations from Pacheco, Fiesta liberal, 131, 133; Long, “Dragon Finally Came,” 128.
44. Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 63–64.
45. Mina, Esclavitud y libertad, 62; Sanders, “Contentious Republicans,” 305–14. One
hundred years later, in the 1970s, Afro-Colombians retained vivid memories of nine-
teenth-century wars between Liberals and Conservatives. “Conservatives wished to
conserve the law of the Spanish . . . to catch the Negro slaves and make them work
night and day. . . . From that comes the word ‘Conservative.’ The Conservatives
wanted to make us into slaves again. That’s why there were so many wars. The word
‘Liberal’ is the word ‘free’ [libre]. . . . This is what is called ‘Liberal’—a world of free-
dom and thought. . . . The Negro can never be a Conservative.” Taussig, Devil and
Commodity Fetishism, 67–68.
46. Sanders, “Contentious Republicans,” 322–70.
47. Figueroa Navarro, Dominio y sociedad, 98–99, 342–44; Conniff, Black Labor, 19,
41–42. On black liberalism in midcentury (1850s) Panama, see McGuinness, “In the
Path of Empire,” 132–67 passim.
48. Gootenburg, Between Silver and Guano, 49–51; Cuche, Poder blanco, 148–49. On
Conservatives in Brazil using capoeira gangs to disrupt elections, see Soares, Negre-
gada instituição, 196–245.
49. Andrews, Afro-Argentines,180. On Rosas’s repression of the liberal opposition, see

Lynch, Argentine Caudillo, 95–119.
50. On these black presidents, see Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 82–83; Vincent, Legacy of
Vicente Guerrero; Jurado Noboa, “Presidentes del Ecuador”; Ewell, Venezuela, 21–26;
Hoetink, Dominican People, 112–38 passim. The one exception to this generalization
was conservative Buenaventura Báez, five-time president of the Dominican Repub-
lic between 1849 and 1878.
51. On the Liberals’ rise to power in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and else-
where, see Bushnell and Macaulay, Emergence of Latin America, 180–246. On “popu-
lar liberalism,” see Mallon, Peasant and Nation; Guardino, Peasants, Politics; Sanders,
“Contentious Republicans”; Thurner, Two Republics.
52. See chapter 5.
53. Cuche, Poder blanco, 43–44.
54. On May 13 celebrations, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 212–18; on present-day
memories of slavery, see Queiroz, Caipiras negros, 81; Taussig, Devil and Commodity
Fetishism, 67–68, 93; Long, “Dragon Finally Came,” 24–25; Bourgois, Ethnicity at
Work, 84; “Former Slave Havens in Brazil Gaining Rights,” New York Times (23 Jan.
2001), A1, A4. To this day, lower-class Afro-Brazilians invoke as one of their principal
values the concept that “every man should be the dono [owner, master] of his own
body.” Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 231, 231–67 passim; “On the Conga
Line, Who Cares about the Crisis?” New York Times (15 Feb. 1999).
55. This was the most important demand, we might recall, of the slaves on the Santana
plantation in 1789; see chapter 1.
56. On “plebeian culture,” see Aguirre, Agentes, 165–78.
57. Aguirre, Agentes, 318; Sanders, “Contentious Republicans,” 275; Figueroa Navarro,
Dominio y sociedad, 343; McGuiness, “In the Path of Empire,” 123, 155.
58. Gootenburg, Between Silver and Guano, 49; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 143–46.
59. On black urban employment in the post-abolition years, see Stokes, “Etnicidad y
clase social,” 197–99; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 181–86.
60. On artisan mobilization during this period, and black participation in those mobi-
lizations, see Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, 54–80; Pacheco, Fiesta lib-
eral; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, 118–27, 140–42; Gootenburg, Between Silver and
Guano, 49–51.
61. “The fundamental aspiration of the liberto was not a wage; it was land, the basis of
his economic freedom.” Correa González, “Integración socio-económica,” 211. See
also, for Brazil, Machado, Plano e pânico, 21–66.
62. Correa González, “Integración socio-económica,” 235; see also Hudson, “Status of
the Negro,” 231–32.
63. LeGrand, Frontier Expansion, 10–13.
64. Cunill Grau, Geografía del poblamiento, 1745–58.
65. Correa González,“Integración socio-económica,” 142–52. Libertos and peasants may
also have petitioned Venezuelan authorities for title to their lands, but I know of no
research on this subject.
66. Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 59.
67. Friedemann, “‘Troncos’ among Black Miners.”
68. Correa González, “Integración socio-económica,” 119, 126.
69. Friedemann and Arocha also contrasted the lower inputs of labor and capital re-
quired by Afro-Colombian agricultural techniques with the massive expenditures
on machinery, fertilizer, pesticides, and other costs required to sustain hacienda
monoculture. Friedemann and Arocha, Del sol a sol, 208–18; see also Caufield, In the
Rainforest, 125.
70. Pollak-Eltz, Negritud en Venezuela, 44–63; Chacón, Curiepe; Price, “Saints and Spir-
its”; Lundius and Lundahl, Peasants and Religion, 348–81.
71. On velorios and spirit possession, see Freidemann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 402–13;
Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 132–38; Chacón, Curiepe, 116–22; Prince, “Saints and
Spirits,” 189–203.
72. Chalá, “¿Cómo vivimos?” 158; Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 137; Speiser, Tradiciones
afro-esmeraldeñas, 39–40; Zuluaga Ramírez, Guerrilla y sociedad, 135; Carvalho-
Negro, Estudios afros, 290–91. On angelitos in other countries, see Hoetink, Domini-
can People, 194; Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 268–339.
73. On similar processes among Indians in post-independence Mexico, see Tutino, In-
surrection to Revolution, 215–41.
74. As of 1850, this included an estimated 2.0 to 2.5 million slaves in Brazil, 320,000 in
Cuba, and 50,000 in Puerto Rico. Graham, “1850–1870,” 113; Kiple, Blacks in Colonial
Cuba, 6, 79; Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 38.
75. Statistics and quotation from Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 38; Bethell and
Carvalho, “1822–1850,” 84, 86–87; Graham, “1850–1870,” 115.
76. Karasch, Slave Life, 69; Braga, Sociedade Protetora. The Sociedade is still in existence
today.
77. Deschamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía, 44. Deschamps Chapeaux describes
this class in Havana; on its counterpart in the eastern city of Santiago, see Duharte
Jiménez, Negro en la sociedad colonial, 91–115.
78. Deschamps Chapeaux, Negro en la economía, 62.
79. Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 105, 113; see also Hall, Social Control, 127–32.
80. Franco, Conspiración de Aponte; Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 139–82, 233–64.
81. Rebellions increased in number both because more Africans came into the island
during the 1830s than during any previous decade and because of news of emancipa-
tion in the British islands. See Hall, Social Control, 56; Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 71–72.
82. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 96–97; Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 120; Díaz, Virgin, King,
Royal Slaves, 262; Deschamps Chapeaux, Batallones de pardos, 83–88.
83. Quotation from Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 177; see also 177–79, 209–10. See Bergad,
Cuban Rural Society, 240–41; Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 329.
84. Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 220–29.
85. See for example Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 95.
86. Paquette, Sugar Is Made, 233–64; Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 316–34;
Hall, Social Control, 57–59.
87. Castellanos and Castellanos, Negro en Cuba, 152.
88. Quotations from Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 30–33, 39. The ambi-
tions of the black middle class were brutally satirized in Francisco Fernández’s
play Los negros catedráticos [The Black Professors]. An “enormously successful” hit
in Havana during the 1860s, the play portrayed upwardly mobile Afro-Cubans as
pretentious ignoramuses who spoke an absurdly baroque and inflated style of
Spanish, committing numerous malapropisms for comic effect. Kutzinski, Sugar’s

Secrets, 43.
89. Flory, “Race and Social Control,” 208–13; Castro, “Imprensa mulata.”
90. Freyre, Mansions and Shanties, 354–99, Romero quoted on 368; Reis, Morte é uma
festa, 40. “Free men of color advanced rapidly in the arts, letters, and liberal profes-
sions under the empire.” Klein, “Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” 328.
91. Querino, Raça africana, 161; on black authors, see Haberly, Three Sad Races; Brook-
shaw, Race and Color.
92. Degler, Neither Black nor White, 219.
93. Azevedo, Onda negra, 78. Or a U.S. diplomat reporting to the State Department in
1862: “The negro is socially the equal of the white man in Brazil and among the high-
est dignitaries of the Church, in the legislative halls, on the bench, in all of the
learned professions, and even in the Council of the Emperor, the negro occupies a
conspicuous place.” Graden, “Origins, Evolution,” 186. On one such Afro-Brazilian
politician, Antonio Rebouças, see Grinberg, Fiador dos brasileiros.
94. Costa, Brazilian Empire, 53–77; Graham, Patronage and Politics, 146–81. This “tam-
ing” of popular liberalism is illustrated by the career of Francisco de Sales Torres
Homem, the most successful Afro-Brazilian politician of the 1800s. After graduating
from medical and law school, Torres Homem began his career in the 1840s as a radi-
cal liberal but became a Conservative in the 1850s. He rose to the party’s highest lev-
els, serving as a senator, cabinet minister, and president of the Bank of Brazil; ulti-
mately he was ennobled as Viscount of Inhomerim by the emperor. Magalhaes
Junior, Tres panfletários, 3–43.
95. Freyre, Mansions and Shanties, 370.
96. Azevedo, Mulatto, 282. See also the poem “Who Am I?” by mulatto lawyer and aboli-
tionist Luis Gama. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire, 229–31.
97. “The bulk of the free blacks and mulattoes were discriminated against at every turn,
and this was even truer once slavery was finally abolished in 1888.” Graham, “Free
African Brazilians,” 47.
98. Costa, Brazilian Empire, 190; see also Graham, Patronage and Politics.
99. On the paternalist character of Brazilian electoral democracy under the Empire, see
Graham, Patronage and Politics, especially 101–45; Carvalho, Teatro de sombras,
139–70. On Machado de Assis’s analysis of patron-client relations, see Schwarz, Mas-
ter on the Periphery, 40–100; Chalhoub, “Dependents Play Chess.”
100. Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 72–80; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 124–25,
195, 208, 210, 214–15, 231–33, 238–39.
101. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 185, 278; Silva, Prince of the People, 71–74.
102. Quotations from Soares, Negregada instituição, 231, 234. On the Black Guard, see
Soares, Negregada instituição, 225–37; Trochim, “Brazilian Black Guard.”
103. Pedro II died in Paris in 1891; Rebouças died in Madeira in 1898.
104. “A festa de ontem,” Pequeno Jornal (Salvador, 14 May 1890), 1. My thanks to Dale
Graden for this citation.
105. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 15–89.
106. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 49–51, 77–80; Helg, Our Rightful Share, 49–51, 78–82.
107. On the civil rights movement and the overturning of these laws, see Helg, Our Right-
ful Share, 35–43; Havia Lanier, Directorio Central.
108. Kinsbruner, Not of Pure Blood, 35. On the continuation of race prejudice into the
twentieth century, see Matthews, “Question of Color”; González, Puerto Rico.
109. Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción, 107–10. On black service in the 1895–98
independence war, see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 55–90; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba,
141–69; Scott, “Reclaiming Gregoria’s Mule”; García Martínez, “Brigada de Cienfue-
gos”; Zeuske, “‘Los negros hicimos.’” For first-person testimonies, see Barnet, Auto-
biography, 159–200; Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia.
110. See Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith’s analogous argument that, in the United
States, “substantial progress toward greater (never yet full) racial equality has come
only when three factors have concurred. Progress has come only “(1) in the wake of a
large-scale war requiring extensive economic and military mobilization of African
Americans for success; (2) when . . . American leaders [have justified] such wars and
their attendant sacrifices by emphasizing the nation’s inclusive, egalitarian, and
democratic traditions; and (3) when the nation has possessed domestic political
protest movements willing and able to bring pressure upon national leaders to live
up to that justificatory rhetoric by instituting domestic reforms.” Klinkner and
Smith, Unsteady March, 3–4. These conditions were all present in Spanish America
during and after the independence wars and account for the progress toward racial
equality made at that time.
On the importance of war in determining nineteenth-century historical tra-
jectories in the region, see also Wasserman, Everyday Life; Centeno, Blood and
Debt.
111. Quoted (from 1882) in Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 202.
Chapter 4
1. Bulmer-Thomas, Economic History, 69, 433. On the export boom, see 45–154; Cortés-
Conde and Hunt, Latin American Economies; Topik and Wells, Second Conquest;
Cárdenas et al., Export Age.
2. Throughout the Atlantic world, “‘race’ [was] an idea which penetrated the ideology
of the period almost as deeply as ‘progress.’” Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 32. On racial
thought during this period, see Banton, Idea of Race and Racial Theories; and in
Latin America, see Graham, Idea of Race; Stepan, Hour of Eugenics; Maio and Santos,
Raça, ciência.
3. On these debates, see Skidmore, Black into White; Graham, Idea of Race; Wright, Café
con Leche; Helg, “Intelectuales.”
4. Wright, Café con Leche, 72.
5. De la Fuente, “Negros y electores,” 170; Chomsky, “‘Barbados or Canada?’” 426.
6. Quotations from Azevedo, Onda negra, 141, 144; Rodrigues, Africanos no Brasil, 4. On
Oliveira Viana, see Needell, “History, Race.”
7. On the “urban reforms” of this period, see Meade, “Civilizing” Rio; Scobie, Buenos
Aires; Pineo and Baer, Cities of Hope.
8. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 115.
9. Moura, Tia Ciata; Pino, Family and Favela. See also the classic novel of slum life in
Rio de Janeiro during this period, Azevedo, The Slum; and Chalhoub, Trabalho and
Cidade febril.
10. Quotation from Carvalho, Bestializados, 139; on the Vaccine Revolt, see 91–139;
Needell, “Revolta contra Vacina”; Meade, “Civilizing” Rio, 75–120.
11. Natale, Buenos Aires; Araníbar, Breve historia, 10–34; Rossi, Cosas de negros.
12. On rumba and son, see Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 87–113, 166–90; Daniel,
Rumba. On samba, see Moura, Tia Ciata; Vianna, Mystery of Samba; Sodré, Samba;
Guillermoprieto, Samba; Browning, Samba.
13. Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción, 43. On the cabildos, see chapter 2.
14. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 83.
15. Lewis, Ring of Liberation, 42–56; Santos, “Mixed-Race Nation,” 125.
16. Chávez Alvarez, Crimen de la niña; some of these articles are transcribed in Ortiz,
Negros brujos, 295–349. See also Bronfman, “‘En Plena Libertad.’”
17. Ortiz, Negros brujos, 285.
18. Quotation from Borges,“Recognition,” 63; see also the rest of the article, and Borges,
“‘Puffy, Ugly.”
19. Do Rio, Religiões no Rio, 34, 35.
20. Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 224.
21. Almost alone among intellectuals writing on African-based religion at that time,
Nina Rodrigues condemned police repression of Candomblé as “violent, arbitrary,
and illegal.” Despite Candomblé’s negative aspects, he regarded it as a legitimate re-
ligious expression, protected by the religious toleration clause of the 1891 constitu-
tion. Rodrigues, Africanos no Brasil, 245–52.
22. Fry et al., “Negros e brancos”; Puccia, Historia del Carnaval, 69–97; Alfaro, Carnaval
‘heroico’; Morais, História do Carnaval.
23. For a case study of this process, see Alfaro, Carnaval y modernización.
24. Fry et al.,“Negros e brancos,” 252–56; Butler, Freedoms Given, 171–85. On similar sen-
timents in Rio de Janeiro, see Needell, Tropical Belle Epoque, 49; Raphael, “Samba
and Social Control,” 71–76. On Uruguay, see Alfaro, Carnaval y modernización, 153.
25. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 253.
26. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 71–72. See similar efforts in the early 1900s by
Catholic clerics in Colombia to ban the use of the Afro-Colombian marimba, which
they saw as a Satanic instrument. Friedemann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 415–22.
27. Quoted in Helg, Our Rightful Share, 135. Significantly, the 1904 editorial from which
these quotations are taken was entitled “To Be or Not to Be”—a classic expression
both of high European culture and of the existential dilemma confronting Afro-
Cubans in a society obsessed with whiteness.
28. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 31; Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 164; Carvalho Neto, Negro
uruguayo, 316; see also Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 69.
29. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 136; Ferrara, Imprensa negra, 190; Graden, “‘So Much
Superstition.’”
30. On discrimination during this period, see Soler Cañas, “Pardos y morenos”; Helg,
Our Rightful Share, 25–26, 38–39, 42, 97, 99, 137–38, 188–89; de la Fuente, Nation for
All, chapters 3–4 passim; Stokes, “Etnicidad y clase,” 209–14; Maciel, Discriminações
raciais; Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 90–139; Adamo, “Broken Promise.”
31. Hellwig, African-American Reflections, 21–83; Hellwig, “New Frontier”; Wright, Café
con Leche, 70–71, 75.
32. On these organizations, see Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 151–54, 179–80; Andrews,

Blacks and Whites, 139–43; Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won; Ferrara, Imprensa
negra; Montejo Arrechea, Sociedades de instrucción; de la Fuente, Nation for All,
161–71; Rodríguez, Historia de los afrouruguayos.
33. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 196.
34. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 168–70.
35. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 141.
36. Quotations from Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 151. On the Frente Negra, see Fernan-
des, Integração do negro, vol. 2, 7–115; Butler, Freedoms Given, 113–28; Bacelar, “Frente
Negra”; Barbosa, Frente Negra.
37. Quotations from Merino, Negro en la sociedad, 64; Porzecanski and Santos, Historias
de vida, 54. On election results, see Gascue, “Partido Autóctono Negro,” 9–11; An-
drews, Blacks and Whites, 150; Bacelar, “Frente Negra,” 83.
38. By 1931 at least 4 percent of economically active Afro-Cubans worked as profession-
als, a more than fourfold increase over 1899. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 150. On new
middle-class organizations created during the early 1900s, 161–71.
39. Fernández Robaina, Negro en Cuba, 113, 124–33; Schwartz, “Displaced and Disap-
pointed,” 197–244 passim.
40. Gustavo Urrutia, editor of Diario de la Marina’s column “Ideales de una raza” [Ideals
of a Race], recalled how the idea for the column first came to him, in a conversation
with friends: “As always when two or three black men get together, the talk turned to
the subject of the Afro-Cuban and the failure of the doctrine of Martí. Quoted in
Schwartz, “Displaced and Disappointed,” 197.
41. Naranjo Orovio, “Trabajo libre”; de la Fuente, Nation for All, 46; Helg, Our Rightful
Share, 99–103, 142–44.
42. On the PIC, see Helg, Our Rightful Share, 141–226; Fernández Robaina, Negro en
Cuba, 46–109; Portuondo Linares, Independientes de color; Fermoselle, Política y
color; Orum, “Politics of Color,” 125–257.
44. Quotations from de la Fuente, Nation for All, 84.
45. See, for example, the cases of tobacco farmers in the Cibao region of the Dominican
Republic and of smallholder banana producers on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.
Baud, Peasants and Tobacco; San Miguel, Campesinos del Cibao; LeGrand, “Living in
Macondo.”
46. On the privatization of public lands, see Knight, Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, 78–115;
Tutino, Insurrection to Revolution, 277–325; LeGrand, Frontier Expansion, 33–61;
Yarrington, “Public Land Settlement.”
47. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 240–42; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, 285. Black tenant
farmers, who had cultivated 12 percent of the island’s arable land in 1899, farmed
only 4 percent of national farmland in 1931. During the same period the proportion
of farmland cultivated by Afro-Cubans who owned their land held steady at 4 per-
cent. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 106–07.
48. Pérez, Lords of the Mountain, 75–151.
49. These armed interventions and occupations included Cuba, 1898–1902, 1906–9, 1912,
1917–22; Panama, 1903, and occupation of Canal Zone until 2000; Nicaragua,
1912–25, 1927–33; Haiti, 1915–34; Dominican Republic, 1905, 1916–24; Mexico, 1914,
1917. For a summary of this period, see Langley, Banana Wars.
50. Pérez, Lords of the Mountain, 152–95; on the uprising of 1917, see Dumoulin, Azucar y
lucha.
51. Hoetink, Dominican People, 1–18; Moya Pons, “Land Question”; Turits, Foundations
of Despotism, 39–44, 60–67.
52. Quoted in Hoetink, Dominican People, 11–12, 30.
53. Calder, Impact of Intervention, 102–10; Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 71–79.
54. Present-day black peasants in the Cauca Valley retain bitter memories of the desalo-
jos (dispossessions) of the late 1800s, and recall that Liberal landowners took part in
this process alongside Conservatives. Recalled one informant in the 1970s, “another
[turn-of-the-century] landlord was Benjamín Mera . . . He was a black and a Liberal,
while Jaime Gómez was white and a Conservative. But it was the same thing. Lots of
Liberals did the same as the Conservatives.” Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism,
72; see also 72–77; Correa González, “Integración socio-económica,” 393–95; Friede-
mann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 198–205.
55. Zuluaga Ramírez, Guerrilla y sociedad, 141–43.
56. Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 348 and 343–50 passim; see also Rios, “‘Minha mãe.”
57. Scott, “Defining the Boundaries,” 92–93, 96–98; Scheper-Hughes, Death without
Weeping, 43–49.
58. Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 327–42; Stein, Vassouras, 271–88. Many of the workers in
Rio de Janeiro’s turn-of-the-century textile factories were migrants from the older
coffee zones of the Paraiba Valley, now seeking work in the city. Keremetsis, “Early
Industrial Worker,” 62.
59. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land; Stolcke, Coffee Planters.
60. Of 36,600 owners of agricultural enterprises in São Paulo in 1940, only 2,000 were
Afro-Brazilian. IBGE, Recenseamento 1940. São Paulo, 24. On the formation of a
rural middle class, see Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 139–66; on racial prefer-
ences in plantation employment, see Dean, Rio Claro, 152–74 passim; Beiguelman,
Formação do povo.
61. Similarly, within the United States most immigrants avoided the South, which was
both less economically developed and home to most of the nation’s black popula-
tion, against whom immigrants would have to compete for low-wage jobs. The bulk
of European immigration settled instead in the Northeast and Midwest.
62. Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians, 47–66; Sánchez-Albornoz, Population,
146–67; Nugent, Crossings, 112–35. Some 28 million Europeans arrived in the United
States during the same period.
63. Merrick and Graham, Population, 91–92.
64. Figures on Chinese and Japanese immigration from Mörner, Adventurers and Prole-
tarians, 27–28; Lamounier, “Between Slavery,” 188; Gonzales, “Resistance,” 205; Mer-
rick and Graham, Population, 91. Also, 20,000 Japanese arrived in Peru during the
early 1900s. Gonzales, “Resistance,” 201.
65. Sánchez-Albornoz, Population, 167; Wright, Café con Leche, 77; Conniff, Black Labor,
29. Because so many West Indians made multiple entries into Spanish America,
these figures overstate actual levels of immigration. In Cuba, for example, West Indi-
ans came to work on the annual sugar harvest, returned home during the “dead sea-
son,” and returned again in subsequent years. The number of West Indians living in
Cuba in 1931 was about 100,000; and in Panama at the same time, some 50,000. De la
Fuente, Nation for All, 105; Conniff, Black Labor, 81.
66. On the racial attitudes of American companies and executives at this time, see Bour-
gois, Ethnicity at Work.
67. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 101–05.
68. McCullough, Path between the Seas, 559.
69. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 44–47.
70. “¿Será ya el principio del fin?” Reportorio Americano (San José, 14 May 1923), 50–51;
“¿Cómo se quiere que sea Costa Rica: blanca o negra?” Reportorio Americano (San
José, 13 Sept. 1930), 149–50; emphasis in original.
71. Purcell, Banana Fallout, 19; Palmer, “What Happen,” 148, 247. Native-born Afro-
Costa Ricans may have suffered from the law as well. See Harpelle, “Social and Polit-
ical Integration,” 115.
72. Conniff, Black Labor, 64, 66, 84; Alfaro, Peligro antillano, 18.
73. Fiehrer, “Political Violence,” 11.
74. “El negro tras la oreja,” in Alix et al., Décimas dominicanas, 15–17.
75. Quotation from Derby, “Haitians, Magic,and Money,” 523.
76. Sagás, Race and Politics, 51, 62. On Dominican anti-Haitianism, see Sagás, Race and
Politics; Howard, Coloring the Nation; Winn, Americas, 279–94.
77. Fiehrer, “Political Violence”; Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 161–80. One is struck
by the similarities between events in the Dominican Republic and Nazi Germany at
the same time. In both countries the linking of racism and nationalism, and the
promotion of both as official state policy by an authoritarian regime seeking to
centralize power and control, proved to be a powerfully destructive combination.
Both countries invoked the need to remove corrupting, subversive racial influences
from their society; in the quotation cited above, one could substitute “Judaizing”
for “Haitianizing,” and “German” for “Dominican” and thereby produce a reason-
able facsimile of Nazi pronouncements during this period. And both regimes
sought “final solutions” to their racial “problems” through state-directed mass
killings, though on an incomparably larger scale in Germany than in the Domini-
can Republic.
In 1962, Dominican troops repeated a smaller version of the 1937 massacre, killing
several hundred members, most of them black, of a messianic religious community,
Palma Sola, near the Haitian border. On these murders, and Dominican anti-
Haitianism more generally, see Lundius and Lundahl, Peasants and Religion, 171–252,
560–600.
78. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, 180–88.
79. Fernandes, Integração do negro, vol. 1, 60–97; Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 66–71.
80. Adamo, “Broken Promise,” 50–79; Keremetsis, “Early Industrial Worker,” 62, 84, 116.
At the height of immigration, in 1920, Afro-Brazilians outnumbered immigrants in
the city, 372,000 to 239,000. Adamo, “Broken Promise,” 6, 15.
81. On the tobacco industry, see Stubbs, Tobacco, 70, 79–80; Córdova, Clase trabajadora,
69, 92; see also Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets!.
82. Quoted in de la Fuente, Nation for All, 115, and see 105–28; and Maluquer de Motes,
Nación e inmigración, 141–45.
83. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, Afro-Latin American workers retained strong memo-
ries of slavery and a powerful determination to avoid anything resembling it. Resi-
dents of a black village in São Paulo state described wage employment on nearby
plantations as “like slavery that is coming back again. You won’t believe it, but the
elders used to tell us how slavery once was obligatory. Not today. Slavery is coming
back again, but not for everyone, only for those who give themselves over to it.”
Queiroz, Caipiras negros, 81; see also Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 67–68,
93; Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 84; Long, “Dragon Finally Came,” 24–25.
84. Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians, 67–69.
85. Rock, Argentina, 175; Beretta Curi and García Etcheverry, Burgueses inmigrantes;
Dean, Industrialization, 49–66. In 1902 Cuban workers protested to Congress the
“odious privileges in hiring enjoyed by Spanish workers protected by bosses of their
same nationality.” Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 93.
86. Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 79–91; Maram, Anarquistas, imigrantes, 32; Andrews, Blacks
and Whites, 282.
87. López Valdés, “Sociedad secreta ‘Abakuá,’” 21–22.
88. Echeverri-Gent, “Forgotten Workers,” 302–03.
89. Quoted in Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 237; on the 1925 petition, see Duncan and
Powell, Teoría y práctica, 69. On family and gender among West Indians in Costa
Rica, see Putnam, The Company They Kept.
90. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 55–65; Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 147–72, 209–51.
91. Chalhoub, Trabalho, 58–88, 101–11; Keremetsis, “Early Industrial Worker,” 99–100;
Fausto, Trabalho urbano, 33–36; Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 150.
92. Quotations from Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 92; Stubbs, Tobacco, 115, emphasis in
original. On the strike of 1902, see Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 92–95; Stubbs, To-
bacco, 110–13.
93. Spalding, Organized Labor, 14–15; Godio, Historia del movimiento, vol. 1, 92–100;
Bergquist, Labor, 11.
94. See, for example, Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 60–63; Gitahy, Ventos do mar, 85; de la
Fuente,“‘With All and for All,’” 338–42; del Toro, Movimiento obrero, 118; Findlay, Im-
posing Decency, 141–44; Nehru Tennassee, Venezuela, 218–21; Bergquist, Labor, 223.
95. Quotations from Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 272, 86; on the Partido Operário, see
98–103.
96. Quotations from Morel, Revolta da Chibata, 84, 90; see also Silva, Contra a chibata.
97. Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 35–36; Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets!, 131, 195, 233.
98. Scott, “Fault Lines,” 94–103.
99. Carr,“Identity, Class”; Córdova, Clase trabajadora, 166–210 passim; de la Fuente, Na-
tion for All, 189–98.
100. The riverboat workers were the functional and in many cases the genealogical de-
scendants of the colonial-period and nineteenth-century bogas who had ferried pas-
sengers and cargos up and down the river. See chapter 1.
101. On the growth of the banana industry and the 1928 strike, see LeGrand, “Conflicto”;
Herrera Soto and Romero Castañeda, Zona bananera; Fonnegra, Bananeras;
Posada-Carbó, “Fiction as History.”
102. This scene was immortalized, in exaggerated and phantasmagorical form, in García
Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 278–90. García Márquez set the number of
dead at 3,000; for much lower assessments, see Herrera Soto and Romero Castañeda,
Zona bananera, 71–77, 79; Fonnegra, Bananeras, 183–84; LeGrand, “Conflicto,” 216.
Chapter 5
1. Topik, “Middle-Class Nationalism”; Magee, Derechas.
2. Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians, 86–91; Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 87, 291; de
la Fuente, Nation for All, 104.
3. On the demographic revolution, see Frenk et al., “Epidemiological Transition”;
Díaz-Briquets, Health Revolution.
4. Bercovich, “Considerações”; de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality,” 136–42.
5. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 146–62.
6. Data from the Cuban census of 2001 were not available in time to be included in this
book. Those data will shed additional light on Afro-Latin American population
growth during the 1990s, and on the question of how people of African ancestry
were choosing to identify themselves at century’s end.
7. Black populations at this lower range (1–2 million) probably exist in Mexico and
Peru as well. See Minority Rights Group, No Longer Invisible, xii–xiii. But lacking
firm data on this point, I did not include them in table 5.2.
8. See, for example, Carl Degler’s classic discussion of the “mulatto escape hatch,” in
Slavery and Race, 224–45.
9. Wood, “Categorias censitárias.”
10. Wood,“Categorias censitárias,” 100, 102. In both censuses individuals identified their
own race.
11. On this period in Latin American history, see Bergquist, Organized Labor; Collier
and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; Halperín-Donghi, Contemporary History,
208–91.
12. On Vargas, see Levine, Father of the Poor?
13. Farber, Revolution and Reaction, 78–108; Whitney, State and Revolution, 149–176.
14. On left Liberalism, Gaitán, and La Violencia, see Long, “Dragon Finally Came”;
Sharpless, Gaitán; Braun, Assassination of Gaitán; Bergquist et al., Violence in
Colombia.
15. Long, “Dragon Finally Came,” 229, 272.
16. Braun, Assassination of Gaitán, 82–83; Green,“‘Vibrations,” 292. On left Liberalism in
the Chocó region, which during the 1930s constituted itself as a separate party, Ac-
ción Democrática, under the black populist leader Diego Luis Córdoba, see Wade,
Blackness and Race Mixture, 116–20.
17. Page, Perón, 64–65, 136–37, 240; Nállim, “Crisis of Liberalism,” 215–17.
18. Quotations from Wright, Café con Leche, 106, 122.
19. Fernández Esquivel and Méndez Ruiz, “Negro en la historia,” 186–203.
20. The percentage of voters favoring the PTB was 70 percent among black workers, 61
percent among black middle-income voters, 55 percent among white workers, and
29 percent among white middle-income voters. Souza, “Raça e política.”
21. Levine, Father of the Poor? 119.
22. Quoted in Levine, Father of the Poor? 102–3. See also Conselho Estadual da Condição
Feminina, Mulheres operárias, 59, 70.
23. Zeitlin, Revolutionary Politics, 52, 77; Pedraza, “Cuba’s Refugees,” 274.
24. See, for example, Freyre, “Escravidão, monarquia”; Duncan and Meléndez, Negro en
Costa Rica, 136; Altez, Participación popular, 53–59.
25. Thorp, Progress, Poverty, Exclusion, 127–58; Cárdenas et al., Industrialization.
26. IBGE, Brasil: Censo demográfico [1950], 24; Fundação IBGE, Censo demográfico 1991:
Características gerais, 209–10, 215–16.
27. Pereda Valdés, Negro en el Uruguay, 190; INE, Encuesta Continua, 1–5.
29. Purcell, Banana Fallout, 96–97, 162.
30. Pollak-Eltz, “¿Hay o no hay?,” 9–10; Wright, Café con Leche, 131. Judging on the basis
of a week spent at the university in 1994, I am skeptical that the student body is ma-
jority black and mulatto, but students of color do constitute at the very least a sub-
stantial minority.
31. On the growing middle classes during this period, see Johnson, Political Change;
Jiménez, “Elision.”
32. IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 18.
34. INE, Encuesta Continua, 12; Solaún and Kronus, Discrimination without Violence,
105–06; “Negros avanzan en su incorporación al país,” La Nación (San José, 3 Sept.
1977); Purcell, Banana Fallout, 64; see also 57–58, 89. On middle-class employment
among Afro-Colombians, see Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 199–200;“Negro, ni
el Cadillac,” Cromos (Bogotá, 9 Oct. 1984), 38.
35. On Pelé, see Nascimento, My Life; Harris, Pelé. On Carolina Maria de Jesus, see her
Child of the Dark and Bitita’s Diary; Levine and Meihy, Life and Death.
36. Graham and Hollanda Filho, Migrações internas, 65–89.
37. IBGE, Brasil: Censo demográfico [1950], 30; IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 16. On black
entry into industrial employment, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 90–121; Telles,
“Industrialization.”
38. The 1950 figures are from Wood and Carvalho, Demography of Inequality, 145; the
1991 figures were generously provided by Peggy Lovell.
39. Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race; Freyre, Masters and Slaves and Mansions and Shanties;
Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Siso, Formación del pueblo. On the rise of racial-democ-
racy thought, see Graham, Idea of Race; Wright, Café con Leche, 97–124; Andrews,
“Brazilian Racial Democracy.”
40. Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race; Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 99; Freyre, Mansions and
Shanties, 431. On racial constructions of Cuban national identity, see Kutzinski,
Sugar’s Secrets.
41. On these dances, see Romero, “Papel de los descendientes,” 83–84; Cuche, Poder
blanco, 179–81; Rossi, Cosas de negros, 98–150 passim; Natale, Buenos Aires; Araníbar,
Breve historia, 10–34. Especially in the 1990s, candombe has made a comeback in
Uruguay and is now acclaimed as the country’s “only original folkloric music” and
its “universal dance.” Ferreira, Tambores del candombe; “Uruguay Is on Notice: Blacks
Ask Recognition,” New York Times (7 May 1993), A4; Montevideo, Ciudad Abierta 9
(May 1998).
42. Vianna, Mystery of Samba; Shaw, Social History; Moore, Nationalizing Blackness;
Roberts, Latin Tinge.
43. Austerlitz, Merengue, 62–77.

44. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, 80–86; Raphael, “Samba,” 89–122.
45. On this process, see Rodrigues, Samba negra; Sheriff, “Theft of Carnaval.”
46. Quotations from Lewis, Ring of Liberation, 59–60; Santos,“Mixed-Race Nation,” 126.
47. Matory, Man in the City, chapter 6.
48. Ortiz, Morte branca; Birman, Umbanda; Brown, Umbanda.
49. Pallavicinio, Umbanda; Pi Hugarte, Cultos de posesión; Segato, “Vocação de mino-
ria”; Pollak-Eltz, Umbanda.
50. Pollak-Eltz, María Lionza, 104–05.
51. Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour, 338–55.
52. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness.
53. See, for example, the case of community celebrations in Barlovento, Venezuela.
Guss, “Selling of San Juan”; García, Afroamericano soy and Afrovenezuela. Or the
resurgence of candombe in Uruguay; in addition to sources in note 42, see Andrews,
“Rhythm Nation.”
54. Risério, Carnaval Ijexá; Prandi, Candomblés de São Paulo; Rego, Capoeira angola.
55. “Central Bankers Come and Go; Radio Favela Delivers Another Brazil,” Wall Street
Journal (3 Feb. 1999), A1, A14. Antonio Carlos dos Santos, founder of the bloco afro Ilê
Aiyê, and Carlinhos Brown, a prominent Bahian bandleader, both recall having been
tremendously affected by listening to Brown in the 1970s.“Vovô, do Ilê Aiyê, é o novo
coordenador do Carnaval,” Correio da Bahia (17 May 1995); “A música franca do in-
ventivo Carlinhos Brown,” Bahia Hoje (12 May 1996), A5.
56. Vianna, Mundo funk carioca; Hanchard, Orpheus and Power, 110–19; see also the
funk- and hip-hop-oriented magazines Pode Crê (São Paulo, 1993—) and Agito Geral
(Saõ Paulo, 1995—).
57. For this important insight, see Fry, Para inglês ver, 47–53.
58. IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 16.
59. As one of the Afro-Brazilian newspapers observed in 1924, “a maid is always worse
off than a worker who works for eight hours at a set task, and can then go home.”An-
drews, Blacks and Whites, 70.
60. Oliveira and Conceição, “Domestic Workers,” 364, 367.
61. Americas Watch, “Forced Labor” and “Forced Labor Re-Visited”; Sutton, Slavery in
Brazil; “Brazilians Chained to Job, and Desperate,” New York Times (10 Aug. 1995),
A1, A6; “Brazil’s Prized Exports Rely on Slaves and Scorched Land,” New York Times
(25 March 2002), A1, A6.
62. The 1980 salary figures were provided (pers. comm.) by IBGE. See also IBGE, Censo
demográfico 1991: Mão de obra, vol. 1, 323–64.
63. Andrews, “Racial Inequality”; Silva, “Cor e pobreza.”
64. Among white workers, 17 percent earned $20 or less, and 10 percent between $20 and
$40. IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 14, 16.
65. On the favelas, see Leeds and Leeds, Sociologia do Brasil urbano; Pino, Family and
Favela.
66. Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 135. On hunger in Brazil, see Instituto de
Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, Mapa da fome.
67. Jesus, Child of the Dark, 42, 45, 50; Dimenstein, Brazil, 6. See also comments by Afro-
Brazilian anthropologist Edison Carneiro on the poverty of Candomblé worship-
pers in Salvador: “Poor! You will never understand how poor. You see how rough
their skins are, how decayed their teeth? They have not had enough to eat for
decades.” Quoted in Landes, City of Women, 40. For similar recollections by former
senator and favelada Benedita da Silva, see Benjamin and Mendonça, Benedita da
Silva, 17.
68. Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 98–99; see also Wade, Blackness and Race
Mixture, 159, 160; Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 146–50; Streicker, “Policing Bound-
aries,” 56–57; Purcell, Banana Fallout, 63–82.
69. Quotations from Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 161; Mina, Esclavitud y libertad,
163–64; see also Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 86–87, 163–66; Purcell, Banana Fallout,
63–82; Wilson, Crab Antics, 58–64.
70. Lovell, “Race, Gender”; Lovell and Wood, “Skin Color”; Lovell, “Regional Labor
Market Inequalities.”
71. IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 16; Diagnóstico socioeconómico, 31 (see also INE, Encuesta
Continua, 12); Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 187, 205.
72. Lovell, “Race, Gender,” 21; Andrews, “Racial Inequality,” 247–54. The one area of the
economy where male/female salary differentials were less than 70 percent was in
white-collar clerical work, where black males earned on average 37 percent more
than black females.
73. Benjamin and Mendonça, Benedita da Silva, 18, 72; see another favelada’s description
of her teen-age son as “her ‘arms and legs,’ . . . more important to her than the . . .
older man with whom she was then living.” Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weep-
ing, 347.
74. Benjamin and Mendonça, Benedita da Silva, 10, 18; Human Rights Watch, Final Jus-
tice, 1–12. See also Dimenstein, Brazil; Hecht, At Home in the Street, 118–48; Márquez,
Street Is My Home.
75. IBGE, Censo demográfico 1991: Caracteristicas gerais, 183–98, 215–18. The comparable
numbers for whites were 7.8 million high school graduates, 3.4 million college grad-
uates, and 7.1 million with one year of schooling or less.
76. Wright, Café con Leche, 97–98; Conniff, Black Labor, 132; Duncan and Powell, Teoría
y práctica, 75. A similar such incident in Uruguay in 1956 provoked national press
coverage and debate but no legislative action. Carvalho-Neto, Estudios afros, 208–15.
In Cuba, President Prío Socarrás issued a decree in 1951 outlawing racial discrimina-
tion in hiring. Efforts by Afro-Cuban organizations in the 1950s to pass a similar law
through Congress failed. De la Fuente, Nation for All, 238–47.
77. Ruiz, Racismo; Duharte Jiménez and Santos García, Fantasma de la esclavitud;
América Negra 15 (1998), edited by Alejandro de la Fuente, especially Hernández,
“Raza y prejuicio racial,” Alvarado Ramos, “Estereotipos y prejuicios,” and Duharte
Jiménez and Santos García, “Cuba y el fantasma”; Valcárcel C., Universitarios y pre-
juicio; Turra and Venturi, Racismo cordial; Carvalho-Neto, Estudios afros, 208–24;
Britto García, “Racismo, inmigración.”
78. In addition to sources cited in previous note, see Streicker, “Policing Boundaries”;
Almeida, “Entre nós, os pobres”; Mijares, Racismo e endoracismo; Souza, Tornar-se
negro; Twine, Racism.
79. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 90–121; Silva, Negros à luz; Hasenbalg,“Negro na indús-
tria”; Castro and Guimarães, “Racial Inequalities.”
80. Hasenbalg, “Negro na indústria,” 116.

81. Rodríguez D. and Viscuña L., “Discriminación racial,” 136–37; see also 78–91. The
racial meaning of “good appearance” is suggested by a 1991 incident in which a
Brazilian employment agency placed an ad for a shop foreman. When local black ac-
tivists protested the ad’s specification that applicants had to be white, the head of the
agency responded that “there was an error in the ad. It said that applicants had to be
white, when it should have said ‘good appearance.’” “Anúncio racista vira caso de
polícia,” Estado de São Paulo (2 April 1991).
82. See, for example, Dawkings, “Condiciones laborales”; Andrews, Blacks and Whites,
166–71; Graceras, “Informe preliminar,” 23–25; Merino, Negro en la sociedad, 60–66.
83. Alicia Behrens, “La discriminación racial en el Uruguay,” Marcha (15 June 1956), 9;
see also Alicia Behrens, “¿Cuál es la situación de los negros en el Uruguay?” Marcha
(4 May 1956), 10.
84. Silva, “Updating the Cost”; Telles, “Industrialization”; Lovell and Wood, “Skin
Color.” Data from the 1991 census indicate that, after doubling between 1960 and
1980, measures of discrimination increased further between 1980 and 1991. Lovell,
“Regional Labor Market Inequalities.”
85. Note that a core issue for all three of the black parties of the early 1900s—the Partido
Independiente de Color, the Frente Negra Brasileira, and the Partido Autóctono
Negro—was equal access for blacks to state jobs. See chapter 4.
86. Ignacio Castillo,“El umbral de color,” SIC 45, 442 (Feb. 1982), 59; Fernández Esquivel
and Méndez Ruiz, “Negro en la historia,” 239; Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture,
118–22; Graceras, “Informe preliminar,” 12, 18.
87. Costa, Fala, crioulo, 94; Carvalho-Neto, Estudios afros, 231–32.
88. Quoted in Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 169.
89. “¿Gobierno contra negros?” La República (San José, 27 June 1974).
90. This was the Grupo de Empresarios y Profesionales Afrocostarricenses, created at
the initiative of black educator Eulalia Bernard. “Los negros se organizan,” Contra-
punto (San José, Dec. 1991), 44–46.
91. Interview with Quince Duncan (Heredia, Costa Rica, 7 July 1994); Maloney,
“Movimiento negro”; Conniff, Black Labor, 165; “Los 500 años y los negros
panameños,” La Prensa (Panama, 9 Oct. 1992), 6A.
92. Wade, “Cultural Politics,” 343; Hanchard, Orpheus and Power, 88–91.
93. Damasceno et al., Catálogo de entidades; see also Lindsey, Afro-Brazilian Organiza-
tion Directory.
94. Moore, Castro, 313–16.
95. Wade, “Cultural Politics”; Arocha, “Negros y la nueva constitución.” For a listing of
almost 90 Afro-Colombian organizations, see Wade, “Lista de organizaciones.” On
racial and ethnic aspects of recent constitutional reform in Latin America, see Van
Cott, Friendly Liquidation.
96. Corinealdi, “Black Organizing”; Maloney, “Movimiento negro”; Conniff, Black
Labor, 165–69; Primer Congreso; “500 años.”
97. Luciano and Rodríguez Pastor, “Peru,” 281–82.
98. Mundo Afro, Informe, 7–9.
99. “Centros educativos darán a conocer cultura del negro,” La Nación (San José, 27 Oc-
tober 1980), 8A; “Día del negro costarricense,” La República (San José, 31 Aug. 1983);
Purcell, Banana Fallout, 162. In 2000 Panama enacted a similar Día de la Etnía Negra,
celebrated on May 31. Corinealdi, “Black Organizing,” 98–102.
100. Davis, “Postscript,” 362–69. Cross-national communication among the black organ-
izations was enormously facilitated by the advent of e-mail and the Internet in the
1990s. For an introduction to Internet resources for Afro-Latin America, see the
African Diaspora web page at the Latin American Network Information Center,
http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/region/african (20 June 2002).
101. “ONU denuncia discriminação racial no país,” Correio da Bahia (30 April 1996);
“Comité de la ONU señala omisiones del gobierno uruguayo,” Brecha (1 Oct. 1999);
Mundo Afro, Racismo, 10; http://www.mj.gov.br/sedh/Cncd/index.htm (16 Oct.
2002); Corinealdi, “Black Organizing,” 108, 112.
102. For works by Afro-Latin American activists that make this point, see Santos, O que é
o racismo; Nascimento, Genocídio do negro and Quilombismo; Moura, Negro and Di-
alética radical; Smith-Córdoba, Cultura negra; Mosquera, Comunidades negras;
Montañez, Racismo oculto; Duncan and Powell, Teoría y práctica; Moore, Castro, the
Blacks; Barrow, No me pidas; Rodríguez, Historia de los afrouruguayos; Guimarães
and Huntley, Tirando a másrara.
103. Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 218–33; Maggie, Catálogo; Contins, Visões da abolição;
Presidência da República, Programa Nacional, 29–31;“Ministério de Justiça cria cotas
para negro, mulher e deficiente,” Folha de S. Paulo (20 Dec. 2001), C6; “Garotinho
sanciona lei que reserva vagas para negros em universidades,” Folha de S. Paulo
(13 Nov. 2001), C3; and documents available at http://www.mj.gov.br/sedh/Cncd/
index.htm (16 Oct. 2002).
104. “Racismo não vê a cor da condenação,” Tribuna da Bahia (19 Oct. 1995); “‘A popu-
lação negra precisa ser indenizada,’” Tribuna da Bahia (2 Aug. 1995).
105. Telles and Bailey, “Políticas.”
106. Escobar and Pedrosa, Pacífico.
107. Carneiro, “Black Women’s Identity”; Casa Dandara, Triunfo da ideologia; Yrene
Ugueto, “La identidad cultural de la mujer afrovenezolana en la Venezuela neolib-
eral,” Encuentros 7, 17 (1993), 25–26; “En busca de identidad cultural,” Panorama In-
ternacional (Panama, 3 August 1992), 32–33; Rojas, “Mujeres en movimiento”; Diag-
nóstico socioeconómico.
108. See, for example, Silva, “Black-White Income Differentials”; Silva, “Updating the
Cost”; Andrews, “Racial Inequality”; Lovell and Wood, “Skin Color.”
109. On the importance of client-patronage relations for poor and working-class blacks,
see Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 108–27; Whitten, Black Frontiersmen,
163–66; Altez, Participación popular, 51–59.
Chapter 6
1. On the “neo-liberal revolution,” see Thorp, Progress, Poverty, Exclusion, 241–73. On
the growth produced by the reforms, see Stallings and Peres, Growth, Employment,
Equity, 72–109.
2. Quotation from Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 45; see also Pereira, End of
the Peasantry, 39–55. On the Cauca Valley, see Mina, Esclavitud y libertad, 99–154;
Friedemann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 208–28. “At least half of the children of the
cane-cutters . . . showed serious signs of malnutrition” (p. 227).
3. Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, 185–200; Escobar and Pedrosa, Pacífico; Arocha,“Inclu-
sion of Afro-Colombians.”
4. On the effects of tourism on Afro-Latin American communities, see Palmer,
“Wa’apin man,” 309–50; Gallardo,“Colonización educativa”; Wright, Café con Leche,
129; Pérez, “Llamado entre los pueblos.”
5. Whitten, Black Frontiersmen, xiii, 191.
6. Arocha, “Inclusion of Afro-Colombians,” 83–84; Carvalho, Quilombo do Rio das Rãs,
185–90; “Exploração de bauxita ameaça negro do Pará,” Jornal do Brasil (11 Aug.
1991); “Invasor ameaça antigo quilombo em Goiás,” Folha de S. Paulo (27 Aug. 1995),
17; “Former Slave Havens in Brazil Gaining Rights,” New York Times (23 Jan. 2001),
A1, A4. On 2 May 2002, in the black village of Bojayá in the Chocó, leftist guerrillas
and rightist paramilitaries perpetrated the worst-ever massacre of civilians in that
country’s almost 40-year civil war. “More than 100 Killed by FARC,” Latin American
Weekly Report (7 May 2002), 205; “Colombian War Brings Carnage to Village Altar,”
New York Times (9 May 2002), A1, A15.
7. Wolff, Top Heavy; Hacker, Money; Galbraith, Created Unequal; Phillips, Wealth and
Democracy.
8. Inter-American Development Bank, Facing up to Inequality, 11–29; Portes and Hoff-
man, “Latin American Class Structures.”
9. Duharte Jiménez and Santos García, “Cuba y el fantasma,” 211; de la Fuente and
Glasco, “Are Blacks ‘Getting out of Control’?” 62; de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,”
6–9.
10. “Violencia está preocupando os negros de SP,” Correio da Bahia (5 April 1993); Maio,
“Negros e judeus”; “Defensor del Pueblo pide vigilar a ‘banda de rapados,’” El
Tiempo (Bogotá, 25 June 1993), 5D; “Orden a cualquier costo,” Lecturas Dominicales
(Bogotá, 25 July 1993), 6–7; “Los nazis están aquí,” La República (Montevideo, 22 June
1998), 3; “La ola: Apartheid en Mercedes,” Dominical (Caracas, 15 May 1994), 6–8;
“Congreso investigará discriminación racial en locales nocturnos,” El Universal
(Caracas, 4 June 1994), 13. In São Paulo, these attacks led to the creation of a special
police station and unit dedicated to investigating racially motivated crimes. “SP já
tem delegacia contra crimes raciais,” Correio da Bahia (8 June 1993).
11. Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 92–93; Alfredo Chacón, “La Piel que nos
separa,” El Universal (Caracas, 20 Sept. 1998).
12. Pérez, “Llamado entre los pueblos”; de la Fuente, Nation for All, 332–333.
13. “Igualdade desigual,” Veja (11 May 1996); “A Racial ‘Democracy’ Begins Painful De-
bate on Affirmative Action,” Wall Street Journal (6 Aug. 1996); Marcha Zumbi.
14. Corinealdi, “Black Organizing,” 94–108. As of July 2002, the anti-discrimination law
was still awaiting President Mireya Moscoso’s signature.
15. “Visivelmente negros,” O Globo (Rio de Janeiro, 1 Feb. 1997).
16. “Negros trocam militância por nova identidade,” O Estado de S. Paulo (São Paulo, 12
Nov. 1991).
17. Quotations from “‘O negro é um consumidor voraz,’” Jornal da Tarde (São Paulo, 13
Oct. 1996). On the magazine’s impact, see Questões de Raça 7 (Jan.–Feb. 1997);
“Among Glossy Blondes, a Showcase for Brazil’s Black Faces,” New York Times (18
Oct. 1996). The figure of 10 percent of Afro-Brazilian families having household in-
comes of US$16,800 or more apparently derives from the Folha de S. Paulo’s 1995
survey of racial attitudes in Brazil. Turra and Venturi, Racismo cordial, 92. This figure
greatly overstated the level of black incomes: according to the national household
survey of 1987, only 7 percent of black and brown families earned $5,000 or more per
year. IBGE, PNAD 1987, vol. 1, 103.
18. “Negros no governo,” Veja (5 Dec. 1990), 40–41; “Histórias exemplares,” Veja (19
Oct. 1994), 40–42; Questões de Raça 8 (March–April 1997); Johnson, “Racial Repre-
sentation.”
19. Oliveira, Luta por um lugar.
20. Sagás, Race and Politics, 105–15, 138–40; Howard, Coloring the Nation, 161–67, 175–80.
Preparing to run again for the mayoralty of Santo Domingo, Peña Gómez died of
cancer in 1998. The mayoral elections were then won by Afro-Dominican singer and
politician Johnny Ventura.
21. AD leader Rómulo Betancourt, president from 1959 to 1964, was a light-skinned mu-
latto. Longtime AD stalwart Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa, also a mulatto, was denied
the presidential nomination in 1968 and resigned from the party. “AD membership
spurns ‘cogollo’ and picks ‘Black Claudio’ as candidate,” Latin American Weekly Re-
port (29 April 1993), 181.
22. Gott, In the Shadow. When business leaders tried unsuccessfully to overthrow
Chávez in an April 2002 coup, his working-class base rallied solidly behind him, ex-
posing “the deep social and racial rift in Venezuela between the upper and middle
classes, who tend to be lighter skinned, and the poor [and dark-skinned] majority.”
“Behind the Upheaval in Venezuela,” New York Times (18 April 2002), A8.
23. As counterevidence indirectly confirming this proposition, note the declining num-
ber of black officeholders in Cuba during the same period in which the proportion
of black candidates and officeholders was increasing elsewhere in the region. In 1986,
28 percent of the Communist Party’s Central Committee was black or mulatto; in
1991, 16 percent; and in 1997, 13 percent. De la Fuente, “Recreating Racism,” 10.
24. Costa, Fala, crioulo, 81.
25. Note, for example, the tentative, gingerly tone of such titles as “¿Racismo en
Venezuela?” El Nacional (Caracas, 20 Sept. 1998); “¿Hay racismo en Colombia?” El
Espectador (Bogotá, 17 Oct. 1997); “¿Racismo en Colombia?” El Espectador (Bogotá,
23 Dec. 1998); “¿Racismo por omisión?” La Nación (San José, 5 Jan. 1998). More as-
sertive in its conclusions is “Discriminación en Uruguay,” El País (Montevideo, 11
Oct. 1998).
Appendix
1. For purposes of comparability, all tables and maps use the national boundaries of
2000.
2. Sources for each country: Brazil (1810), Alden, “Late Colonial Brazil,” 290; Mexico
(1810), Aguirre Beltrán, Población negra, 233; Venezuela (1800–1810), Brito Figueroa,
Estructura social y demográfica, 57–58; see also Lombardi, People and Places, 132; Cuba
(1810), Kiple, Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 32–33; Colombia (1778–81), Tovar Pinzón et al.,
Convocatoria, 68–72; Puerto Rico (1802), Kinsbruner, Not of Pure Blood, 28; Peru
(1791), Gootenburg, “Population and Ethnicity,” 111; Argentina (1778), Comadrán
Ruiz, Evolución demográfica, 80–81; Dominican Republic (1794), Deive, Esclavitud
del negro, 608; Ecuador (1778–81), Hamerly, Historia social, 16, and Tovar Pinzón,
Convocatoria, 68–72; Panama (1778–81), Castillero Calvo, Régimen de castas, 11–14,
and Tovar Pinzón, Convocatoria, 68–72; Chile (1813), Sater, “Black Experience,” 39;
Paraguay (1782), Kegler Krug, “Población del Paraguay”; Costa Rica (1801), Putnam,
Company They Kept, 25; Uruguay (1803), Nahum, Manual de historia, 35, and
Florines et al., “Bases,” 100.
3. Hamerly, Historia social, 16; McFarlane, Colombia before Independence, 34; Lom-
bardi, People and Places, 122, 41–45; Castillero Calvo, Régimen de castas, 10–14; Jaen
Suárez, Población del Istmo, 328–39. Jaen Suárez found very few mestizos—fewer
than 2 percent—in “colored” baptismal records from Panama City (p. 445).
4. Tovar Pinzón, Convocatoria, 21–31.
5. Tovar Pinzón, Convocatoria, 158, 224, 346, 533, 554–55; Castillero Calvo, Régimen de
castas, 10.
6. Romero, “Mestizaje negroide,” 246.
7. Minority Rights Group, No Longer Invisible, xii-xiii.
8. Population estimates for 2000 taken from Britannica Book of the Year 2001 (Chicago,
2001).
9. Census figures on race from Brazil (2000) [online], available at http://www.ibge.net/
home/estatistica/populacao/censo2000/tabulacao_avancada/tabela_brasil_1_1_1.
shtm [16 June 2002]; Cuba (1981), Comité Estatal de Estadísticas, Censo de población,
11; Puerto Rico (2000), [online], available at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/
QTTable?ds_name=D&geo_id=04000US72&qr_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_DP1&
_lang=en; Uruguay (1996), INE, Encuesta Continua, 1.
10. Britannica Book of the Year 2002 (Chicago, 2002). For additional estimates, see Mi-
nority Rights Group, No Longer Invisible, xii-xiii; Collier et al., Cambridge Encyclope-
dia, 161.
11. Welch, “Evolución.”
12. Sources for table A.1 and map 2 are Brazil (1890), Directoria Geral de Estatística, Syn-
opse do recenseamento, 2–3; Cuba (1899), de la Fuente, “Race and Inequality,” 135;
Puerto Rico, (1899), Encyclopedia Britannica (London, 1910, 11th ed.), vol. 22, 125;
Panama (1911), Welch, “Evolución”; Colombia (1912), Smith, “Racial Composition,”
214–18; Venezuela (1904), Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 27, 990.
13. Cottrol, “Long Lingering Shadow,” 37–38.
❂
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❂
INDEX
Abakuá, 70, 72–73, 121, 122, 145 Alix, Juan Antonio, 141
abolition. See slavery: abolition of Alvarez, Juan, 97
abolitionists, 67, 77–78, 82, 84, 107, 112 Alves, João, 197
Acapulco, 87, 94, 97 anarchists, 146, 149
Acción Democrática, 158–60 passim, 173, 198, Andreoni, João Antônio, 24
244n21 Angola, 20, 29, 73
Action Committee of Colored Veterans, 129 Aponte, José Antonio, 68–69
affirmative action, 150, 183, 187–88, 196 Arabs, 44
Africanization, 113, 131, 137 Arboleda, Alfonso, 98
Africans. See also slaves; slave trade Arcos, Count of, 21
ethnicity among, 20–21, 70 Ardito Barletta, Nicolás, 140
in Iberia, 44 Argentina, 5, 9, 10, 15, 17, 20, 41, 46, 57–65
music and dance among, 28–31, 123–24 passim, 87, 91, 99, 117, 120, 126, 136, 144,
mutual aid societies among, 8–10 passim, 147, 153, 154, 159, 166–67, 169, 205. See
66, 69–70, 102, 121–22, 123 also Buenos Aires
negative images of, 74, 78, 82, 121, 124 Arocha, Jaime, 104
religion among, 8–10 passim, 28, 69–74 Artigas, José, 60
Afro blocs. See blocos afros artisans, 15, 44–45, 47, 90, 93, 94, 99, 102,
Afro-Brazilian Congresses, 169 106–7, 147, 149, 150
Afro-Latin America Ashanti, 21
defined, 4–7 Asociación Afro-Panameña, 185
population of, 3–4, 41, 154–57, 203–7 Asociación Cultural de la Juventud Negra,
Afro-Latin Americans. See Afro-Latin Amer- 185
ica; black middle class; free blacks; mu- Asociación Cultural y Social Uruguay, 186
lattoes; pardos; slaves; women; workers Asociación de Profesionales, Obreros y Diri-
Agrupación Palenque, 186 gentes de Ascendencia Negra, 185
Alagoas, 38, 75–76 Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos del
Alfaro, Eloy, 98 Negro, 186
Alfaro, Orlando, 140 Asociación Reivindicadora del Negro
Alianza Lima, 126 Panameño, 185
276 INDEX
Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de, 110, 111 Black Soul movement, 172
Associação Atlética São Geraldo, 126 Blanco Fombona, Rufino, 119
Asunción, 60 blocos afros, 171–72, 184, 185, 196
Axé de Opô Afonjá, 169 Bogotá, 54, 93, 159, 184
Azeredo, Albuino, 197 Bojayá, 243n6
Azevedo, Aluísio, 111 Bolívar, Simón, 56, 58, 61, 62, 89–93 passim,
170
Báez, Buenaventura, 228n50 Bolivia, 17, 20
Bahia, 15, 19, 20, 21, 24, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 55, Bonó, Pedro, 133
67–68, 74, 75–77, 82, 86, 90, 93, 95–96, Bourbon reforms, 18–19, 37, 47
120, 121, 124, 128, 170, 172, 184, 185. See Boves, José Tomás, 89
also Salvador Braithwaite, Donald, 141
Balaguer, Joaquín, 198 Brasília, 196
Balaiada, 76, 95 Brazil, 9–21 passim, 24–33 passim, 36–41 pas-
Balbina, María, 36, 43 sim, 44–46, 50–60 passim, 64, 67–69,
Baliño, Carlos, 146 73–77, 80–96 passim, 100, 101, 106,
Barbacoas, 59, 65 109–14, 117–28 passim, 134–37, 143–49
Barbados, 4, 19, 137–38 passim, 153–89 passim, 192–98 passim,
Barbosa, José de Ó, 90 205–7
Barlovento, 58, 59, 103, 164, 195 Brazilian Labor Party, 158, 160
Barranquilla, 159 Brewster, John, 141
Barreto, Afonso Henriques de Lima, 110 Britton, Garret, 182
Barreto, Paulo, 123 Brown, Carlinhos, 239n55
Barreto, Tobias, 110, 111 Brown, James, 172, 239n55
Batista, Fulgencio, 158, 161 Buenos Aires, 15, 17, 20, 25, 30, 31, 38, 41,
Battle, Jorge, 187 48–49, 54, 62, 91, 102, 121, 123, 125, 127,
Bayamo, 68 142–43, 159
Behrens, Alicia, 179–80 Buraco de Tatu, 39
Belo Horizonte, 172
Bento, Antônio, 82 Cabanagem, 75–76, 95, 224n78
Bernard, Eulalia, 241n90 Cabanos, War of the, 75–76, 95
Betancourt, Rómulo, 158, 159, 244n21 cabildos afrocubanos. See Africans: mutual
Biafra, 20, 215n26 aid societies among
Bimba, Mestre. See Machado, Manoel dos Cachoeira, 55
Reis Calabar coast, 70, 72
Black Costa Rican Day, 186, 188 Cali, 54, 62, 98, 134, 159
Black Ethnicity Day, 196, 242n99 Campinas, 75, 81
Black Guard, 112 Cándido, João, 148
black middle class candombe, 9, 121, 127, 159, 167, 238n41
in 1800s, 8, 102, 107–14 Candomblé, 9, 73–74, 121, 122, 142, 169, 170,
in 1900s, 8, 124–31, 159–64 passim, 176–83, 172, 232n21
189–90, 196–97, 200–1 Cape Verde, 13
in colonial period, 45–52 capoeira, 9, 10, 73–74, 91, 112, 122, 168–69, 172,
black newspapers, 8, 99, 125–26 198
Black Panthers, 183 Caracas, 37, 38, 49–50, 54, 58, 62, 88–89, 91,
Black Power movements, 183 164, 198
INDEX 277
Cárdenas, 72, 108 Christophe, Henri, 68, 69

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 187, 188, 196 Ciénaga, 150
Carnaval, 123–24, 125, 146, 168, 171, 172, 184, Cimarrón, 184
185, 198 citizenship, 10, 82, 84–87, 91–96 passim, 153
Carneiro, Edison, 169, 239–40n67 Ciudad Guayana, 164
Cartagena, 14, 17, 38, 54, 59, 88, 93, 123, 150, civic organizations, 8, 91, 101, 113, 123, 126–28,
164, 222n20 140, 201
Casa Dandara, 189 civil rights movements, 8, 113, 182–90,
Castaño, Francisco, 36 195–96, 200–1, 206–7
Caste Regime, 9–10, 44–52, 86–90, 94, 95, 107, Club Atenas, 126, 127
111, 113–15, 140, 149 clubs. See social clubs
Castilla, Ramón, 66, 97 cobreros. See Santiago del Prado
Castillero Calvo, Alfredo, 203–04 Código Negro, 34
Castro, Fidel, 133, 161 Cofradía de la Negritud, 195
Catholic Church, 70, 186–87, 190. See also cofradías, 9, 45–46, 70, 91, 106, 201
cofradías; religion Collares, Alceu, 197
Cauca, 37, 59, 61, 93, 98, 103, 134, 192 Colombia, 10, 13, 14, 17, 24, 37–41 passim, 46,
Causa Radical, 198 56–67 passim, 87, 88, 93, 98–105 passim,
Ceará, 82 117, 134, 136, 150–51, 156–59, 164, 172, 173,
Center for the Articulation of Marginalized 176, 181–88 passim, 192–95 passim,
Populations, 196 203–7
Central America, 14, 16, 17, 117, 140 Colón, 98, 140, 185
Central American Federation, 57, 65 Communists, 145, 149–50, 160, 184, 195,
Centro Africano, 149 244n23
Centro Cívico Palmares, 126 comparsas. See Carnaval
Centro de Cocheros, 126 Comunero rebellion, 37
Centro de Cultura e Arte Negra, 184 Conceição, Odete Maria de, 173
Centro de Estudios Afro-Panameños, 186 Congo, 20, 70–71, 74
Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Frantz Congress of Afro-Venezuelan Communities,
Fanón, 184 195
Centro para la Investigación y Desarrollo de Conservative Parties, 9, 65–67, 92, 94, 96–98,
la Cultura Negra, 184 128–30, 134, 151, 158–59, 227n45, 234n54
Centro Uruguay, 126 constitutions, 36, 66, 74, 86, 88, 89, 93, 97, 158,
Ceuta, 73 183–87 passim, 193
Chacón, Alfredo, 195 Corbin, Ethelbert, 141
Charles IV, 22–23 Córdoba, 88, 91
Chávez, Hugo, 198, 244n22 Córdoba, Diego Luis, 237n16
Chicama Valley, 66 Coro, 38
children. See families Cosme Osorio, Gregorio, 22–23
Chile, 16, 17, 20, 41, 55–65 passim, 117, 153 Costa Rica, 10, 41, 117, 137, 139, 145–46, 160–64
China, 136–37 passim, 172, 173, 178, 181–83 passim,
Chincha Valley, 97 186–89 passim, 193, 206
Chocó, 24, 32, 104, 164, 176, 181, 192–93, Couty, Louis, 110
237n16, 243n6 Crespo, Joaquín, 99
Chota Valley, 105 Criola, 189
Christian Democrats, 160, 198 Cross River, 72
278 INDEX
Cuba, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 16–20 passim, 24, 32–41 Emmanuel, Victor, 141
passim, 44–50 passim, 54–57 passim, Encuentros de la Mujer Negra, 189
67–83 passim, 106–9, 113–37 passim, Encuentro de Mujeres Negras, 189
143–50 passim, 154–58 passim, 161–71 Enriquillo, 37
passim, 184, 191, 194–95, 205–7 Escalera, La, 108
Cujila, 38 Esmeraldas, 38, 98, 105, 192–93
culture Espinar, José Domingo, 93–94
African-based (see capoeira; Carnaval; Espírito Santo, 55, 128
dance; music; religion)
plebeian, 101–2 families
Cumaná, 164 free black, 9, 46–47, 104–5
cumbes. See runaway communities poor black, 174–77
Curiepe, 58, 219n91 slave, 31–33, 34, 43
Curling, Alex, 160 favelas, 120, 174–76
Federação dos Homens de Cor, 126
dance, 9, 21, 28–31, 121–24 passim, 166–68, Federal War, 97
198 federalists, 66, 93, 94, 95
Defensores de Esclavos, 35, 218n79 Fermín, Claudio, 198
Depression. See Great Depression Fernandes, Florestan, 182
Dias, Antônio Gonçalves, 110 Fernando Po, 73
Dias, Everardo, 147 Figueres, José, 160
Díaz, Porfirio, 166 Fonseca, Luis Anselmo da, 82
Dios Algorta, Juan de, 94 Fontaine, Pierre-Michel, 3–6
Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la free blacks
Raza de Color, 113–14, 126, 128 in colonial period, 9, 40–52, 203–5
discrimination after independence, 76, 90–114, 123, 147
in 1800s, 107, 111, 114 in independence wars, 86–90, 113–14,
in 1900s, 10, 126–27, 129, 143–44, 161, 176, 128–29
178–83, 186–89 passim, 194–95, 241n81, Free Womb laws. See laws: Free Womb
241n84 Frente Negra Brasileira, 128, 200
in colonial period (see Caste Regime) Freyre, Gilberto, 111, 166, 169
Dominican Republic, 4, 9, 10, 13, 15, 41, 57, Friedemann, Nina de, 104
99, 133–34, 140–42, 156–57, 167–68, 189, Fundación Socio-Cultural Afrocostarri-
198, 205, 235n77. See also Santo cense, 189
Domingo funk music, 172
Dunbar, John, 141
Dzidzienyo, Anani, 3 Gaitán, Jorge, 158–59
Gallegos, Rómulo, 160
Echenique, José, 66, 97 Gama, Luis, 230n96
Echeverría, Esteban, 226n24 Gamarra, Agustín, 94
Ecuador, 16, 17, 25, 38, 41, 56, 57, 62, 64, 67, garden plots, 26, 103
97–98, 99, 105, 156, 186, 188, 192, 193, 195, Geledés, 189
203–5 Goiás, 14, 76
education, 91, 110, 162–63, 176, 177, 179, 181 Gómez, José Miguel, 131, 132
electoral reform (Brazil), 82, 112 Gómez, Juan Gualberto, 113
emancipation. See slavery: abolition of Gómez, Juan Vicente, 166
INDEX 279
Gómez, Máximo, 80 Instituto de Investigaciones Afro-Peruano,

gracias al sacar, 47, 49 186
Great Depression, 142, 151, 154, 158 Instituto de Pesquisa das Culturas Negras,
Gremio de Pardos, 49–50 184
Grupo de Conciência e União Negra, 184 Instructions, 34, 35, 79
Grupo de Empresarios y Profesionales Afro- Inter-American Development Bank, 186, 207
costarricenses, 241n90 International Monetary Fund, 191
Guajira, 150 Isabel, Princess, 83
Guayama, 26, 35 Istúriz, Aristóbulo, 198
Guerra Chiquita, 79
Guerrero (state), 5 Jabaquara, 82
Guerrero, Vicente, 87, 94, 97, 99 Jacobin movements, 153
Guevara, Ché, 133 Jaen Suárez, Omar, 204
Gypsies, 44 Jamaica, 4, 14, 19, 137
Japan, 137, 167
Haiti, 4, 13, 19, 74, 80, 107, 137, 140–42. See also Jaramillo Uribe, Jaime, 39
Revolution: Haitian Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 161, 164, 174–76
Haitianization, 110, 113, 131, 139, 142, 235n77 Jesus, Vera de, 175
Hamerly, Michael, 203 Jews, 44
Hausa, 21 João VI, 69
Havana, 15, 37, 68–75 passim, 78, 80, 107, 109,
119–28 passim, 132, 145, 146, 149, 195 King, Martin Luther, 183
Heureaux, Ulises, 99 Kosmos, 126, 127
Hidalgo, Miguel, 58, 87 Koster, Henry, 36, 50
hip-hop, 172
Hispaniola, 13, 14 labor movements, 9, 10, 144–51, 157–62 pas-
Holguin, 68 sim, 178, 190, 198–99
Honduras, 37, 137, 139, 145 Lacerda, Gustavo de, 147
Huachipa, 39 La Guaira, 58
Humboldt, Alexander von, 32, 50 land, 103–4, 131–35, 184–85, 188, 193, 195
hunger, 27, 174–75, 192 La Paz, 15
laws. See also constitutions
Ica, 5 anti-discrimination, 114, 178, 179, 182,
Ilê Aiyê, 171, 185, 239n55 187–88, 196, 240n76, 243n14
Ilê Iyá Nassô, 74 Free Womb, 57–58, 64, 78, 82, 112
immigrants. See immigration governing free blacks (see Caste Regime)
immigration governing slaves, 33–37, 61–62, 66, 81, 91
Asian, 136–37, 142, 234n64 labor, 149, 154, 157–61 passim
European, 10, 94, 96, 119, 121, 128, 129, League of Cuban Workers, 146
135–36, 142–49, 153–54, 234n61–62, León, Oscar de, 172
236n85 Leopard cult, 72
West Indian, 10, 137–42, 145–46, 149, 160, Levine, Robert, 161
186, 234–35n65 Liberal Parties. See liberalism
Indians, 4, 8, 14, 16–17, 37, 41, 44, 48, 54, 62, liberalism, 8, 9, 64–67, 92–100 passim, 106,
76, 87, 88, 95, 101, 131, 150, 156, 166, 203, 110–11, 114, 128–32, 134, 150–51, 158–59,
206–7 173, 198, 227n45, 230n94, 234n54, 237n16
280 INDEX
libertos, 62–64, 66, 78–79, 85–86, 89, 93, militia, 8, 9, 11, 46, 87–88, 94, 107, 108
100–6, 112, 114, 134, 135, 225n88 milonga, 9, 121, 167
libres, 203–5 Mina, Cenecio, 134
Lima, 15, 16, 17, 24, 25, 32, 41, 62, 65, 94, 97, 99, Minas Gerais, 14–16, 24–25, 39, 50, 55, 83, 106,
102, 126 128, 164, 172, 184, 215n20
Limón, 137, 139, 145, 160, 164, 181 mining, 14, 17, 22, 24–25, 32, 104, 192
Lombardi, John, 203–04 mocambos. See runaway communities
López, Alfonso, 151, 158 Mompox, 26–31
Louisiana, 34, 38, 133 Montejo, Esteban, 70–72
L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 69 Montevideo, 20, 29, 62, 63, 91, 121, 123, 125,
Lovell, Peggy, 176 128, 179–80
Lucumí. See Yoruba Moore, Robin, 171
Morelos, José María, 87, 94, 225n2
Maceió, 76 Moret Law, 78, 82, 225n88
Maceo, Antonio, 78, 80, 113 Morúa Amendment, 129
Machado, Gerardo, 124, 149, 167 Morúa Delgado, Martín, 129, 130
Machado, Manoel dos Reis, 168 Mosquera, Tomás Cipriano de, 65
Macumba, 121, 122, 169 Mother Menininha, 169
Madeira, 13 Movimento Negro Unificado, 184
Magdalena River, 15, 37, 150 Movimiento Afro-Panameño, 185
Malheiro, Agostinho Marques Perdigão, 90 Movimiento Negro Francisco Congo, 186
mambo, 167 Mozambique, 20, 29
Manizales, 159 mulattoes, 43–45, 48–51 passim, 87–99 pas-
manumission, 36–37, 65 sim, 107–114 passim, 124–26 passim,
Manzano, Juan Francisco, 27, 32–33 140, 150, 154–57, 162–63, 166, 182, 203–7.
Maracaibo, 164 See also pardos; race mixture
Maranhão, 19, 76, 95, 165 Muluala, 75
María Lionza cult, 169–70 Mundo Afro, 186
marinera, 167 Murga, Juana Mónica, 55
Márquez, Remigio, 226n12 Museo Afro-Antillano, 186
marriage. See families music, 9, 28–31, 121–24 passim, 166–68,
Martí, José, 115, 129 171–72, 199
Matanzas, 24, 72, 74, 75, 78, 108, 121, 132, 149 mutual aid societies, 8–10 passim, 66, 69–70,
Medellín, 164, 176 102, 106, 113, 121–22, 126
Melo, Roberto, 197 Muzenza, 171
Mendoza, Carlos, 99
Menéndez, Jesús, 150 Napoleão, José, 82
merengue, 9, 167–68 Nascimento, Abdias do, 197–98
mestizos, 4, 8, 17, 41, 48, 54, 101, 131, 150, 156, Nascimento, Edson Arantes do, 164
159, 166, 192, 203–7 Nascimento, Francisco do, 82
Mexico, 5, 13, 14, 17, 20, 24, 38, 41, 46, 48–50, National Congresses of Black Panamanians,
57–58, 65, 87, 94, 97, 99, 117, 131, 136, 157, 186
166 Neiva, 204
Mexico City, 37, 48, 49, 94 neoliberalism, 10, 191–97
middle class. See black middle class New Granada, 13, 203–4
INDEX 281
New Orleans, 34 Partido de Liberación Nacional, 160, 173

newspapers. See black newspapers Partido Operário, 147
Nicaragua, 156, 205 Pastorales Negros, 186–87
Niger River, 72 Patía Valley, 59, 134
Nirgua, 38 Patrocínio, José do, 82, 112
Noriega, Manuel, 186 peasants, 44, 95, 97, 102–06, 109–10, 114,
Nzinga, 189 131–34, 150, 161, 164, 184, 192–93
Pedro I, 69, 94–95
Obá II, Prince, 112 Pedro II, 82, 94, 112–13, 230n103
Oduber, Daniel, 186 Pelé. See Nascimento, Edson Arantes do
Oliveira, Anazir Maria de, 172 Peña, Lázaro, 150
Olodum, 171 Peña Gómez, José Francisco, 198, 244n20
Operation Bootstrap, 164–65 Pereira, 184
organized labor. See labor movements Perla Negra, La, 126
Oriente, 22–23, 74, 78–79, 121, 131–33, 150, 158, Pernambuco, 13, 38, 50, 68, 75–76, 90, 93, 95,
161 174
Orinoco River, 164 Perón, Evita, 159
Ortiz, Fernando, 70, 119, 122, 166 Perón, Juan, 159
Ottoni, Cristiano, 17 Peru, 5, 13, 14, 17, 24, 26, 35, 39, 41, 50, 54–57
Ouro Preto, 55 passim, 60–65 passim, 97–103 passim,
136, 166–67, 186, 188, 205. See also Lima
Padilla, José, 93 Piérola, Nicolás, 97
Páez, José Antonio, 97 Pinar del Río, 74
palenques. See runaway communities Pitta, Celso, 197
Palma Sola, 235n77 plantations, 4
Palmares, 38–39, 76, 185, 196 in 1800s, 23, 69, 101–3, 106, 131–35
Palmares Foundation, 187–88, 193 in 1900s, 131–40 passim, 145, 149, 150, 174,
Palo Monte, 70–71, 122 192
Panama, 10, 38, 41, 47, 93, 98–99, 102, 137–40, in colonial period, 13–18 passim, 24–32, 105
156–57, 162, 178, 183, 185–89 passim, 196, during independence wars, 57–60, 78–80
203–7 Pollak-Eltz, Angelina, 163
Panama Canal, 99, 134, 137–41 passim, 148, Pombaline reforms, 18–19
183, 186 Ponce, 165
Panama Canal Company. See Panama Canal Popayán, 35, 61, 204
Panama City, 140, 185, 196 population. See Afro-Latin America: popu-
Panama for Panamanians, 140 lation of
Pará, 75, 95, 165, 224n78 populism, 8, 10, 100, 157–82 passim, 197–201
Paraguay, 16, 41, 57, 60 passim
Paraíba, 39 Portugal, 4, 18–19, 45–46, 55, 69, 94
Paraná, 83 Potosí, 17
pardos, 5–6, 49–50, 88–95 passim, 115, 155–57, poverty, 4, 7, 9, 133, 174–77, 193
207. See also race mixture Prieto Figueroa, Luis Beltrán, 244n21
Partido Autóctono Negro, 128, 200 Progreso, El, 126
Partido Independiente de Color, 128–29, 158, Protectora, La, 126
200 Puerto Príncipe, 68
282 INDEX
Puerto Rico, 4, 5, 10, 14–19 passim, 26, 28, 34, Rio Grande do Sul, 128
36, 40, 41, 45, 46, 54, 55, 57, 66–69 pas- Riohacha, 204
sim, 74, 106–7, 114, 117, 133, 134, 156, Rioja, María Isabel, 43
164–65, 169, 205–7, 225n88 Riva Agüero, José de la, 61
Puerto Trujillo, 145 Rivadavia, Bernardino, 99
Roca, Blas, 150
Querino, Manuel, 147 Roca, Vicente, 99
Quilombo de Ambrósio, 39 Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina, 119, 122,
quilombos. See runaway communities 232n21
Quito, 15, 17, 98 Rodríguez, Antonio, 63–64, 222n32
Romero, Pedro, 88
Raça Brasil, 197 Romero, Sílvio, 110
race, defined, 6 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 66, 99, 159
race mixture Rugendas, Maurice, 110
in 1800s, 82, 115, 119 rumba, 9, 121, 167
in 1900s, 119, 153, 156–57, 165–67 runaway communities, 8–10 passim, 38–40,
in colonial period, 43, 47–49, 51–52 58–59, 74–76, 78, 82, 108, 132, 134, 193,
racial democracy, 10, 110–12, 165–66, 172–73, 199, 200
187, 189, 200
rancheadores, 40, 75 Sabinada, 75–77, 95–96
rap, 172 Sabino, Francisco, 95
Rebouças, André, 112, 230n103 Saint Domingue, 19, 37–38. See also Haiti;
Rebouças, Antonio, 230n93 Revolution: Haitian
Recife, 90, 94 salsa, 167, 172
reggae, 172 Salvador, 20, 33, 39, 55, 67, 74, 75, 94, 95,
Regresso, 96 106–07, 110, 122, 124, 128, 147, 165, 168–72
Reis, João, 36, 110 passim, 184, 187, 196, 198
religion, 8, 9, 27–29, 45–46, 70–74, 104–05, samba, 9, 121, 167, 172
122–23, 125, 142, 169–71, 198, 217n57, San Basilio, 38
224n67 San José, 139, 163, 164, 186
Republican Party, 112–13 San Juan, 68, 165
republicanism, 53, 68, 90, 93, 95, 110–13 San Lorenzo, 38
Revolt of the Whip, 148–49 San Martín, José de, 56, 60, 61, 62
Revolution Santa Clara, 149
of 1930, 157, 166 Santa Marta, 37
of 1933, 158, 166 Santana plantation, 26–31
American, 53, 221n1 Santería, 9, 70–72, 121, 122, 142, 169–71
Cuban, 133, 155, 161, 163–64, 169, 194 Santiago (Chile), 54, 61
French, 37–38, 53, 90, 221n1 Santiago (Cuba), 74, 126, 149
Haitian, 19, 23, 37–38, 53–55, 67–69, 79–80, Santiago del Prado, 22–23, 32, 108
83, 90, 93 Santo Domingo, 15–17 passim, 20, 37, 38, 41,
Mexican, 97, 131, 166 74, 126, 198
Rio de Janeiro, 11–12, 15, 19, 24, 28, 32, 33, 51, Santos, 82, 144
73, 75, 80–86 passim, 94, 95, 106, 112, 120, Santos, Antonio Carlos dos, 239n55
122, 123, 134, 135, 143–48 passim, 160, 164, São Francisco, 68
169, 172, 184, 187, 196, 197–98 São João do Morro, 55
INDEX 283
São Paulo, 23, 32, 75, 80–83, 106, 119, 126–28 slave trade, 3, 13–14, 18–21, 64–65, 69, 77, 99
passim, 135–37 passim, 143–48 passim, abolition of, 56–57, 80, 109, 112, 115, 136
154, 164, 165, 172, 174, 184, 187, 196, 197 within Brazil, 80–81
São Tomé, 13 Smith, T. Lynn, 206
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 174, 175, 195 Smith, Walter, 185
scientific racism, 118–26 passim, 136, 140, social clubs, 8, 91, 113, 123, 126–27, 201
143–44 Sociedad de Amigos del País, 91
Septeto Habanero, 167 Sociedade Protetora dos Desválidos, 107,
Septeto Nacional, 167 126
Serra, Rafael, 125 son, 9, 121, 167
Silva, Benedita da, 177, 197, 199 Sonora Matancera, 167
Silva, José Bonifácio Andrada e, 56 soul music, 172
Silva, Luis da França e, 147 Sousa, João da Cruz e, 110
Silva, Marina, 197 South Africa, 118, 183, 187
Siso, Carlos, 166 Souza, Bento de Paula, 119
slavery, 4, 7–10. See also slaves; slave trade Soviet Union, 194–95
abolition of, 9, 57, 58, 64–67, 74, 76–78, Spain, 4, 18–19, 45–49 passim, 54, 58–61 pas-
82–84, 94, 97, 98, 115, 225n88 sim, 68–69, 73, 77–80, 83, 87–89, 113–14,
debt, 174 122, 143
memories of, 101, 236n83 Spencer, Herbert, 119
plantation, 13–14, 23–40 passim, 80–81 Standard Oil Company, 137
urban, 11–12, 15, 17, 25, 33, 34–35, 42 strikes, 8, 22, 25–31, 144–46 passim, 149–51
slaves passim, 160
African origins of, 20–21 sugar. See plantations
bargaining by, 7–8, 12–13, 22–23, 25–37
passim, 42, 51–52, 56–58, 83 Tailors’ Revolt, 90
in civil wars, 65–67, 76, 97–99, 114 tango, 9, 121, 167
Creole, 42, 43, 77, 81–82 Tauras, 97–98
demography of, 17 Ten Years War, 77–80, 113
families among, 7–8, 31–33, 34 Torres Homem, Francisco de Sales, 110,
female, 18, 42–43 230n94
flight by, 22, 38–40, 58–60, 74–76, 78–79, Torrijos, Omar, 183, 185–86
82–83 Tovar Pinzón, Hermes, 204
in independence wars, 55–64, 77–80, Trujillo, 66
114 Trujillo, José “Petán,” 168
jobs performed by, 11–16 passim, 24–25 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas, 142, 168
lawsuits brought by, 22, 33–36, 61, 79, 81 Turrialba, 139
manumission of, 36–37, 41, 65 Tuy Valley, 37
mulatto, 43
numbers of, 41, 65, 80, 106, 229n74 Ucko, Enrique, 140
religion among, 27–28 Umbanda, 9, 169, 170
revolts by, 21, 22–23, 33, 37–38, 58–60, 66, Unión Afro-Panameña, 185
68–69, 75–77, 80, 83–84, 90, 95, 107–8 Unión de Mujeres Negras, 189
rights of, 34–37 Union of Afro-Brazilian Sects, 169
strikes by, 22, 25–31 unions. See labor movements
urban, 11–12, 15, 17, 25, 33, 34–35, 43 Unitarians, 66
284 INDEX
United Fruit Company, 137, 139, 140, 145–46, War of the Thousand Days, 134
150, 160 wars
United Nations, 187, 207 civil, 65–67, 76–77, 93–99, 102–3, 106, 114,
United States, 3, 53, 78, 82, 99, 117, 118, 126, 117, 131, 134, 166
129, 132–33, 136, 137, 139, 143, 147, 150, independence, 9–10, 55–64, 77–80, 83,
167, 168, 169, 172, 183, 187, 194, 234n61–62 86–89, 97, 102–3, 113–14, 132, 151, 166,
universities. See education 231n110
Urbina, José, 97 Welch, Winston, 206
Urrutia, Gustavo, 233n40 West Indians. See immigration: West
Uruguay, 9, 10, 15, 20, 41, 57, 59–66 passim, Indian
106, 117, 120, 126, 128, 136, 144, 147, 154, Whitten, Norman, 193
156–57, 162–64 passim, 167, 169, 176, 181, Wiener, Charles, 101
183, 186, 187, 195, 205, 206. See also Mon- Winner, Charles, 141
tevideo women. See also families
liberta, 102–5, 135
Vaccine Revolt, 120 in recent black movements, 188–89
Valencia, 88, 164 slave, 18, 42–43
Vargas, Getúlio, 157–58, 160–61, 168 as workers, 11–12, 16, 102, 176, 180
Vasconcelos, José, 166 workers, 101–2, 142–54, 160–65 passim,
Vassouras, 75 173–74, 176–82, 189–90, 194, 200
Venezuela, 13–19 passim, 32, 37–41 passim, Workers Alliance, 146
46, 56–61 passim, 64–66 passim, 87–89, World Bank, 191
97, 99, 100, 103, 117, 118, 136, 137, 156–60
passim, 163, 164, 169–73 passim, 178, 179, X, Malcolm, 183
188, 189, 193, 195, 198, 203–7. See also
Caracas Yoruba
Ventura, Johnny, 244n20 religion, 28, 70–74 passim, 169, 171
Veracruz, 5, 58, 94, 97 slaves, 21, 36
Veraguas, 204
Viana, Francisco José de Oliveira, 119 zamacueca, 167
Voudoun, 142 zambos, 48, 203–5
Zaragoza, 37
Walsh, Robert, 11–12, 216n43 Zeitlin, Maurice, 161
Wanderley, João Maurício, 110 Zumbi, 39

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Afro-Latin America,

GEORGE REID ANDREWS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book had its beginnings in my undergraduate course on Afro-Latin Amer-

Appendix: Population Counts, 1800–2000, 203

Selected Bibliography, 247

COSTA RICA VENEZUELA

COSTA RICA VENEZUELA

map 2. Afro-Latin America, 1900.

COSTA RICA VENEZUELA

map 3. Afro-Latin America, 2000.

my knowledge, however, no one before Dzidzienyo and Fontaine had thought to

Fontaine’s definition also implies movement and change in the boundaries of

The Political Economy of Slavery

creates brotherhood among the miserable?” And as misfortune created brother-

Slave Actions and Reactions

expansion, they could only be described as hellish. Underfeeding, malnutrition,

claimed deposits. Most, however, worked in groups, either in placer mines or in

Country Free Slaves Subtotal Whites Mestizos Indians Total

Brazil 587,000 718,000 1,305,000 576,000 61,000 1,942,000

individual’s racial identification in different documents were commonplace. The

“AN EXTERMINATING BOLT OF LIGHTNING”

The Wars for Freedom, 1810–1890

Beginning in 1775, a wave of revolution rolled through the Atlantic world. It

ica: a tropical plantation colony ruled by an absolutist Bourbon monarchy, based

War and Abolition

Country Slave trade Free Womb law Final abolition

Dominican Republic 1822 — 1822

risings as royalist in character. But in Venezuela as in Mexico, the slaves were

figure 2.1. Infantry sergeant, Uru-

In each of these cases—as well as in Colombia and Ecuador, both of which

Peace (and War)

independence commanders Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe grac-

settlement, Muluala. Professional slave hunters (rancheadores), many of them free

high command, headed by Dominican revolutionary Máximo Gómez and Afro-

Living under an electoral parliamentary system, Creole slaves “had absorbed

“OUR NEW CITIZENS, THE BLACKS”

The Politics of Freedom, 1810–1890

exploiting moments of political crisis and instability to win major concessions

The temporary weakness of the monarchy following Pedro’s abdication

virtually all of the garrison’s enlisted men, were Afro-Brazilian—into a full-

Citizens, Workers, Peasants

Black Middle Classes

Brazilian population to the lowest, black advancement depended on these ties,

“A TRANSFUSION OF NEW BLOOD”

monarchy and replace it with a new republican regime thoroughly dominated by

The War on Blackness

organizations were ordered to divest themselves of their African names, para-

stantly in danger of ‘turning black.’”18 Journalist Paulo Barreto reported in 1906

Black Middle Classes

with. Prominent politicians, including national presidents, cultivated relations

different in the booming coffee-growing regions of the southeast. The coffee

Workers and Unions

reflects their attempt to join forces in a single, cross-racial organization. And

have suitable headquarters. . . . . This very Brazilian [read ‘Afro-Brazilian’] work-

their situation. Company officials responded by calling in the armed forces of an

BROWNING AND BLACKENING, 1930–2000

Mulattoes Blacks Whites Other Total (in millions)

Political Browning: The Rise of Populism

cent of mulattoes worked as white-collar professionals. Even in the area of retail

Cultural Browning and Racial Democracy