Black in Latin America - Gates, Henry Louis, Jr (New York University Press, 2011)
Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-247) and index
Brazil : "May Exú give me the power of speech" -- Mexico : "The black grandma in the closet" -- Peru : the black soul of Peru -- The Dominican Republic : "Black behind the ears" -- Haiti : "From my ashes I rise; God is my cause and my sword" (motto on King Henri Christophe's Haitian flag, 1811-1820) -- Cuba : the next Cuban revolution
12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest-over ten and a half million-were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms.
So the author set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their origin acknowledge or deny their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, he unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries: Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru, through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view. In Brazil, he delves behind the facade of Carnaval to discover how this "rainbow nation" is waking up to its legacy as the world's largest slave economy.
In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro's Communist revolution in 1959. In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves' hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire became a double-edged sword. In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people, far greater than the number brought to the United States, brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru.