Eleven million Africans were forcibly sent to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries. Two out of every three came to Latin America and the Caribbean. Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard, discusses how Afro-descendent mobilization has brought change to the region in the last twenty years. De la Fuente, who is also director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard’s Hutchins Center, points to a transformative wave—particularly in Latin American constitutions—that now recognizes Afro-descendents as integral members of pluricultural nations. That recognition has led to “concrete and measurable opportunities.” But there’s still a long way to go.
June:
Alejandro de la Fuente is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard. He is also professor of African and African American studies and founding director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard Hutchins Center. In addition, he is also the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Welcome Alejandro. Thank you for finding time to be with us.
Alejandro:
It's always good to be with you, June, and the [inaudible 00:00:51] audience. You know that.
June:
You know this month is Black History Month. By the time our listeners are listening to us, it will still psychologically be Black History Month, even though it is longer officially black history months. We focused on the way that racial inequalities matter, black lives matter in the United States. Can you tell us some of the ways the racial challenges facing the US are different and similar to those in Latin America?
Alejandro:
One would have to start with the similarities actually because Black History Month was created in the US in order to call attention to the need to rethink the history of this nation from and through the experiences of Africans or people of African descent. That same need exists in Latin America. To start, if you think of the 11 million Africans who landed in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, about two thirds of them went to the former colonies of Spain and Portugal. The center of the diaspora has always been South of Rio Grande, but just as in the US there is a need in Latin America, a pressing need, to rethink the region, to rethink the region's history from and through the experiences of and the contributions of Africans their descendants. I would start by highlighting that similarity. And that's why Afro-Latin American studies has become a field of academic inquiry and research and teaching in the last 20 years or so.
Alejandro:
The other commonality that I must state at the very beginning of this conversation is that when we think about Black Lives Matter, when we think about racialized police violence, many people think this is just an American, in the US of the term, phenomenon. It is not. The country in the Americas where the largest number of people of African descent die at the hands of the police every year is not the United States. It's actually Brazil. It's in Latin America.
June:
Could you talk a little bit about more about that in general? What kind of both structural and police violence blacks encounter in Latin America?
Alejandro:
So there are forms of structural violence which are common to many countries in Latin America that basically relegate people of African descent to the bottom of the social hierarchy. In terms of report after report on the economic condition of Latin America by the World Bank, by the Inter-American Development Bank, by the Organization of American States, report after report with brutal uniformity highlight how people of African descent are behind in terms of access to education, access to housing, access to healthcare services, which of course indicates that there are structural factors, there are organizing factors in society that produce these racially-differentiated results. This happens in countries with very large populations of African descent, majority populations like Brazil. It also happens in countries with smaller populations of African descent like Ecuador or Peru. It happens in capitalist countries. It also happens in socialist, or Cuba if we can call Cuba socialist today, which I'm not sure. So this is a problem that transcends borders. It transcends political systems. It transcends demographic and regional configurations. It is a problem that can be documented, and we now have good data to document this in a variety of places across Latin America.
June:
I asked you in the beginning what are the differences, what are the similarities. What do you see as being the differences between the way black people are treated in Latin America and the history of that and that of the United States?
Alejandro:
Well, I began by emphasizing similarities because I think it's important to dispel this kind of notion of Latin American exceptionalism when it comes to race and to the idea, which is quite widespread, that Latin American countries or Latin Americans as people are not racially prejudiced, are not racist. That racism really is an American problem. That it's different. The great Brazilian sociologist, Florestan Fernandes, used to call this prejudiced against prejudice, but there is some truth to that too in the sense that people of African descent are occupying very central places in the national imaginaries, the national culture, and the national formations of many countries in Latin America. Brazil and Cuba would be at the very top of that list, but other countries, certainly Panama, Colombia, could also be included. So in that sense, that's an important difference because nobody could even imagine a place like Brazil or Cuba without people of African descent, and that does create some important openings for mobilization, for demands, for claims to citizenship and national belonging that may not exist, that in fact have not existed in the United States. So there are divergent histories of race and nation that evolve out of this foundational commonality of the slave trade and enslavement.
June:
In an op-ed that you wrote for the New York Times, you did say it is frequently overlooked that the race problems in the United States are in fact not just ours but part of a larger story of racial differentiation and discrimination in the Americas. And then you go on to talk about the difference between achieving economic justice for the black community and the perpetuation of racial differentiation and discrimination. Could you talk about that? Is that a bifurcating problem? What's going on there?
Alejandro:
So it's a very complicated question. As you know, I've done research on Cuba, on this very question in Cuba, which is an interesting case study because Cuba is a unique laboratory for social justice. Not just racial justice but social justice in the Americas for the last 50 or 60 years. And even in Cuba where measurable racial inequality declined dramatically between the 1960s and the 1980s, understandings of race, different processes of racial stratification, continued to limit and undermine the otherwise egalitarian social policies implemented by the Cuban post-revolutionary experiment, which suggests that racial stratification can operate along with and can co-exist even with metrics of equality. And if that is the case, so you can find that measurable inequality declines and yet racial discrimination, racial prejudice, and eventually racism as a structuring system of power can co-exist, if that is the case, then my goodness, what does it take? How do we get rid of this tragedy? How can we then push back against these forms of social organization that basically create groups that are then relegated to the margins of the nation and to the bottom of society?
Alejandro:
That's a question that gets me out of bed every morning. How do we do this? And I have become convinced and activists would certainly teach us this, and we learn a lot from them, that racism cannot be reduced to a question of maldistribution of resources. That's an important dimension of it, but you can deal with the maldistribution of resources and racism can still not only live along with that, survive, hibernate, hide, wait, and then reassert itself whenever resources are scarce, whenever there is a need to compete for a job, whenever there are pressures in terms of social mobility and upward mobility. So we need to look beyond metrics of equality or inequality in order to understand what's happening in our societies.
June:
So you talk about Cuba as being a laboratory. Are there any countries in Latin America which are actually becoming a laboratory either on the state level or perhaps on the community level of mitigating this type of racism?
Alejandro:
For a good couple of decades, for a solid couple of decades, I would say the most interesting experiment in the Americas, I include the US, was by far Brazil because Brazilian... And these were not... People think well, leftist governments. No, no, no, no. This began with Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the early 2000s. Brazil in 1988 passed a constitution that acknowledged the existence and condemned racism, that acknowledged the existence of Quilombo communities, communities of former runaway slaves, as people who had specific titles to land and to territories. In the 2000s and early 2010s, during several administrations, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Lula, and Dilma, the Brazilian state became increasingly committed to creating specific opportunities for people of African descent, particularly in the university system and people of humble backgrounds.
Alejandro:
They created a very Latin American approach to this, by which they combined elements of racial justice with socioeconomic disadvantage, which is so blatantly obvious and powerful in Latin America. And they transformed. I mean, we're still living. They transformed the university system, higher education, and the face of higher education in Brazil. I see this in our activities. The number of Afro-Brazilian applicants that we get these days for anything we do is an avalanche of junior brilliant Afro-Brazilian scholars, activists, who have taken advantage of these opportunities in higher education.
Alejandro:
Several years ago, you may remember President Dilma Rousseff came to visit us. And I asked her about... I said, "Well, will these programs survive a political conjuncture that obviously has not been particularly favorable to these programs and to these concerns?" And I asked the question honestly thinking that she would say no, these programs can only survive if there is... Much to my surprise, her answer was yes, Alejandro, those programs will survive because they have no acquired a level of visibility and social acceptance that cannot be easily eliminated. They can be limited. They can be reduced. You can push back. So I think Brazil has been, in the last 20 years, the most interesting place to look at in the Americas, including the US, for this.
June:
What's the situation in Brazil right now, Alejandro?
Alejandro:
I think one of the things we do at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute is to work with state agencies across Latin American that do with Afro [inaudible 00:16:01] and with issues of racial justice, equity, inclusion, so we work with [inaudible 00:16:06] with the Brazilian agency against racial discrimination. You can see that agency has lost power, visibility, resources within the federal government. There is no question about that. At the same time, the university system has continued to provide opportunities for applicants of African descent to continue coming into the university system. Other programs like Bolsa Familia have been under attack, which used to provide for support to poor families. I think it's a moment of not great optimism on that front in Brazil, like with many other things, but I hope President Rousseff was right when she said that these things would have kind of a temporal permanence that will transcend just different administrations.
June:
So what have the countries been doing successfully or unsuccessfully? Interesting experiments in dealing both economic justice and this issue of racial differentiation and discrimination?
Alejandro:
There's been a wave. I think the most interesting thing to highlight is that since the 1980s... I think the first case was Nicaragua in fact in 1987 and then Brazil 1988. Since the 1980s, there's been a transformative wave in which country after country in Latin America has acknowledged, frequently in their constitutional texts, the existence of people of African descent as members frequently of plurinational nations. So you have an idea. In the 1980s, only two countries in Latin America included people of African descent in their national censuses, Cuba and Brazil. Now, basically every country in Latin American includes or is some sort of question to capture to allow people of African descent to self-identify themselves to be allowed themselves to be counted, to be identified, which of course provides visibility, recognition. In 2018, the Mexican government approved a constitutional amendment recognizing Afro-Mexicanos as part of the plurinational nation. In 2019, Chile approved also a law acknowledging the existence of people of African descent in Chile. The Mexican census of 2020 included a question. We're still awaiting the results, but included a question about people of African descent. The Chilean government committed to including such a question in the census in the future.
Alejandro:
So if you look across the region, this has been quite a transformation in terms of acknowledging and providing visibility to population groups that for many, many decades remained basically invisible. This is a major question of justice. The World Bank, in one of its reports, highlighted this. You cannot even talk about equity or inclusion if there is an [inaudible 00:20:03] neglect, if there is structural neglect, if there is state neglect. You first need to acknowledge that these people exist and that they are part of the nation. And that's a starting point. We can then start talking about other things.
June:
So what other things are we talking about? I remember that in Colombia's constitution, which was a total remake and spent a lot of language both on indigenous people and on the multicultural nature of Colombia. What practical implications do these constitutional reforms have?
Alejandro:
Well, I think the practical implications are not just symbolic. In the case of Colombia, for instance, the acknowledgement of, the recognition of the very existence of populations of African descent led later, as you, to the [inaudible 00:21:10] which basically allowed Afro-Colombian, mostly rural, communities to make claims to their lands and to their ancestral lands. This created an opportunity for those communities to claim control over lands that were otherwise under a lot of pressure from different economics actors who wanted to access those lands and to incorporate those lands into different forms of extractive industries or exploitation or commercial agriculture. So that's not a minor thing. And these communities have been fairly successful and it's not a small number. In Brazil, the number of Quilombo communities who have registered with the federal government is also significant. I mean, when you talk to activists, of course, they're going to emphasize and rightly so half empty glass kind of view about this, and I would totally agree with that. But at the same time, these constitutional changes, these kind of new constitutional waves, has created concrete and measurable opportunities, not to mention the fact that the very acknowledgement of these populations is symbolically very important.
Alejandro:
If you are a person of African descent living in Peru, it makes a difference when you have Dia La Cultura Afroperuana. You have a day of the Afro-Peruvian culture. When there is a reference to your community and to your history and to your people in the constitutional text, these are important things. I mean, there is much to be done but Latin America has actually come a long way in the last two or three decades in large part because of Afro-Latin mobilization in the region, which has been enormously potent and powerful and has driven all these changes. These changes did not come out of any expression of white generosity or anything like that. They have been produced by the demands articulated by these movements.
June:
Before, you mentioned this myth that a lot of people have about Latin America, that it's not racist and that everybody just sort of blends in. One of the things I'm having trouble getting my head around personally, and it's kind of been aggravated by reading your book, is that you talk about how the state and society developed this concept of black. Basically, it was instrumental in taking away citizenship by lumping blacks, whether they were freed or slaved, together as just sort of this one category. But when I lived in Colombia, I had a lot of friends who were from the coast. And they were not precisely... They would certainly not at that time identify themselves as black. They were pleasantly coffee-colored. And one of them, who was an actor who had traveled to the United States a lot to perform, commented to me that in Colombia nobody saw him as black, but in the United States, he was just another... And he used the n-word. So I'm wondering, with this constitutional recognition of Afro descendant communities in places like Brazil, affirmative action in the universities, is self identification of who is black, of who is Afro descendant changing? Is it morphing?
Alejandro:
It is morphing. It is changing. And of course, that is not unrelated to public policies such as the ones you just mentioned. In fact, Afro descendant movements in countries like Brazil and Colombia, it's an excellent case, there have been campaigns by activists to invite people to embrace some sort of black identity and some sort of blackness in order to be counted, in order to be visible in different state statistics and programs. So it is changing, especially among... There is some survey research nodding to this that indicates especially among younger people there has been a significant shift towards embracing these identities and acknowledging these identities. It's a very complicated question because of course, many people in those societies say "Well, this is a gringo thing. This is something that is imported from the US. This is another US cultural imposition." Activists themselves tend to reply that their blackness is not made in the US, that they experience blackness every day in the streets of Cali and Rio de Juneiro and Buenos Aires and Montevideo and Havana. So they tend to turn that around and say wait a second, this is not just an American thing.
Alejandro:
To answer your question, yes, it is producing. It is changing actually if you look at even Brazil. Brazil never had a black majority population until the last few years, which of course it doesn't mean people of African descent are having more kids or anything like that. What it means is that people are finally, many people who would define themselves as pardos or use another, are now increasingly embracing a category of blackness, one of the different labels that are associated with blackness. The same has happened in Colombia, and I think we are going to see more of this in the future.
June:
Is that significant politically or socially?
Alejandro:
Oh, I think it's very significant because it's almost like there's a circularity to this. To the extent that people self-identify, that growing numbers of people self-identify as people of African descent, depending on the various labels that are used in various countries, their numbers grow and that puts pressure on the states that then need to respond to those numbers because these are social and political constituencies. So I think it's very significant, certainly in a place like Brazil. Think about the idea of living in a country that is majority Afro descendant. That by itself changes how you think about the country. It's a country that is not a white country anymore. It's a country that is mostly a country of... And, if you look at survey research in places like Brazil, many people who self-identify as white claim some African ancestry. They actually embrace some connection to Africa and to Africans in the past in their families, in their genealogies, in their histories.
Alejandro:
I don't mean to sound like the hopeless Latin American optimist on this front, but I do think there are opportunities there coming out of Latin America that can produce interesting social and political results in the future.
June:
You're working with a lot of the young people who maybe will be producing these political and social results in the future. And one of the things that I've really been impressed by and enjoyed is your work with the Afro-Latino American Research Institute, ALARI, and these conferences that you put together with young people who are working for their graduate degrees. Could you talk a little bit about what you've seen in these conferences and what it portends for the future of both intellectual production and social leadership in Latin America?
Alejandro:
Thanks for asking that question because I could go on on this forever. What I really love about that, June, is that I see the future. I see a future of Latin America in those activities, in those conferences, in the number of people, including very large numbers of junior scholars and activists of African descent who basically jump at every opportunity available to share their experiences, share their knowledge, share their work, their research. I'm always surprised. Whenever we create an opportunity, an opening for anything, it's an avalanche. When we created this dissertation workshop on Afro-Latin American studies, the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop on Afro-Latin American Studies, the first year, we received about... This began, the first year, was in 2016. First year, we received about 60 applications. To make the story short, in four years, we have received 893 applications. Now, these are 893 people who are writing doctoral dissertations on race and inequality in Latin America. Okay? That's an avalanche of junior people who are participating, who are constructing this field through their work. About 50 percent of the applicants are people of African descent coming from various universities, especially Brazil but also Colombia, or Afro-Colombians, Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Uruguayans, Afro-Panamians who are in universities all over the world because this is open to applicants from all over the world. They can submit an application in Spanish, in Portuguese, or in English. Basically, it's very inclusive.
Alejandro:
My favorite story about this is the case of a student who applied from a Quilombo community in Brazil, Gessiane, and she wrote a beautiful text that was published afterwards in the [inaudible 00:34:00], the famous Afro-feminist organization in Brazil, saying that when a friend told her about this opportunity, she thought, "Well, I'm a young, black, woman from a Quilombo community. There's no way on earth I'm going to go to Harvard of all places." But one of her teachers told her, "No, no, no. You've got to apply. Nothing is given to us. We have to fight for everything." And she did apply. Well, then she said, "Well, but I don't really speak English." And her mentor told her, another woman, told her "No, no, no. You can do it in Portuguese. You know. Come on. Get to it." Well, she did apply. She was selected. She came. Those are the people who are transforming this field.
Alejandro:
When we hosted the first ALARI conference on Afro-Latin American studies at Harvard in December 2018, we were expecting maybe 80 proposals, papers, panels. We received over 500 panel proposals. We're talking between 2,000 and 3,000 people who were trying to get into the program. I said we can do an Afro [inaudible 00:35:24] now. We can do something similar to [inaudible 00:35:27] just on the issues of race in Latin America. For that conference, we devoted basically all of our resources, virtually 100 percent of the resources we had, to finance the participation of junior female scholars of African descent from various countries in Latin American. I mean, that was very targeted. When I spoke to the whole group the first day, that place looked like another... I mean, it was just the face of the field in that crowd was okay, we've done something. Something is happening here.
Alejandro:
I always say that what we are doing is channeling all this energy, all this productivity, all this incredible intellectual production. It's just creating spaces where these people can come together, see each other as part of a field, as part of a conversation, and also creating a space, and to me this is absolutely fundamental, we're creating a space where a wide variety of knowledge producers come together. These are not just students and your typical faculty from different universities. There's a very large number of intellectuals who are producing knowledge from the communities, from their communities, and they're producing, they're generating interesting programs, initiatives, research agendas that we need to incorporate into our classrooms. That's, in a sense, what we are doing. But the image that always come to mind is that if we created space for anything, it's a flood.
Alejandro:
Tom [inaudible 00:37:27] and I created our organizing routine around research seminar on Afro-Latin American art, trying to constitute Afro-Latin American art as a field of study. We have courses on African American art. We have books on African American art. We have collections of African American art. We don't have courses. We don't have syllabi. We don't have books. We don't have collections of Afro-Latin American art. So we decided to do this, and we issued a call for applications for people to participate. This is a very small seminar. It would be a seminar that would travel, funded by Getty Foundation. We were thinking we would have 15 people, maybe 50 applicants, but we got over 100 applicants for something like this. My goodness, it was another headache just to select the people who would participate with us. Of course, we ended up doing what we always do, which is stretching every dollar to the breaking point to try to provide additional access to people. But I think is what's happening across Latin America with this field.
June:
That's really interesting. I can't wind up this interview without asking you about your book. I have just finished reading it, as I mentioned, and actually one of the things I found really interesting was in the introduction where your co-author describes your delight with archives because I think of you as being an art collector, a conference organizer, and not so much as being a library rat. Could you talk about that side of you and could you also talk about what were the most interesting archival findings that you found for this new book?
Alejandro:
When I was very, very young, for years I basically lived at the Cuban National Archives. I spent so much time there in the 80s that at some point, I was allowed to stay after the archives closed every day. That's how close I was to the archives. I had my own desk there. After 5:00 PM, they would close the archives. Everybody had to leave. There was only one person who was like a guard with his guard and me. I would stay there every day. So those are some of the... One tends to recall youth with some nostalgia. But beyond that, as a historian, I have always enjoyed enormously the thrill of archival research. Just when you find that one special source that nobody else has seen before and then you sometimes don't even really know what to do with it. I'll tell you one example of one source which I now use in classes. I share it with students. Which was a very rare will, testamento, right? 1604, a woman, an enslaved African woman. Her name was Ana bioho, which means that she came from the Senegal area, more or less, probably from islands in the Cape Verde region.
Alejandro:
I had never seen a will by an enslaved woman because slaves usually did not have property. And certainly whatever possessions they had, they would not include in any formalized will, which had to be done before a notary and all this. So I found that document. I really didn't know what to do with it at the time. I just knew. I just could smell that this was an important historical reference. Even though I wasn't able to reconstruct Ana bioho's life beyond what information that she provides in the will, that this must have been a remarkable woman. What that document did for me, however, and that's the beauty of archival research, was to pose questions for which I had no answers, which was how on earth an enslaved African woman could even find the resources, the networks, in order to produce this kind of written evidence and why would she do that.
Alejandro:
So that document, which is a two-page document, it sort of became an important ingredient in a larger research project about black subjectivities, black agency, the Africans' amazing abilities to navigate colonial societies and colonial legal systems and input those systems with their own visions. So you take that document and you end up writing 50 pages around it, not about it but around it, and I think the ultimate testament to the importance of that moment is that in a course that I have taught with [inaudible 00:43:34] on the construction of labels of difference in Latin America, we've used that document because it's so unusual to try to think about how these categories are constructed and how people of African descent participated actively in shaping those categories and giving other meanings and creating possibilities in colonial societies. So yeah, the part of me does love to the archive and that's something I shared with my co-author, with dear colleague Professor Ariela Gross, who is a legal historian, legal scholar from the University of Southern California. I think we probably found each other first through that love for archival sources and archival research.
June:
Your book is a wonderful read. And I just have one last question, which is what do you think that your book, which deals with the colonial period, but what sort of message of what sort of implications does it have when we're looking at blacks in Latin America today?
Alejandro:
My main concern... I think our main concern, I think I can speak for Ariela here too, was to signal something that we frequently forget, which is that blackness, as we understand it today, is something that was made by power. That blackness is a fabricated category. And that it's a fabricated category that is associated with all kinds of negative meanings, derogatory meanings, but that that's not a God-given thing. This is something that was produced by colonial societies in places as diverse as British Virginia, French Louisiana, and Spanish Cuba. Okay? That's the rationale behind the book, which is that this is... We began the conversation with similarities and differences. You want a big similarity? That's the very idea of blackness is a massive similarity. But that's not something that... That was produced. That was manufactured, even though today we don't think about the process by which this category came to exist and what it came to mean. If I had to identify one purpose behind that book, that would be the one, June.
June:
Thank you very much, Alejandro. You've been listening to Alejandro de la Fuente. He is the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard. He is also professor of African and African American Studies and director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute, ALARI, at the Hutchins Center at Harvard. He is also the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Thank you very much, Alejandro.
Alejandro:
A pleasure. Blessed.