Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America: Between Race and Culture

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10999940802347764

1548-3843

Juliet Hooker,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Abstract In recent years Afro-descendant social movements have won important collective rights from the state in many Latin American countries. In addition to certain collective rights to land and culture embedded in new multicultural citizenship regimes, in a few countries in the region Afro-descendants have also won specific anti-racial discrimination rights, such as affirmative action in education and employment. However, despite such important achievements, the basis of Afro-descendant collective rights remains a highly contested issue throughout the region. This article will explore the challenges that Afro-descendants face when trying to claim collective rights in Latin America, focusing specifically on the kinds of collective rights and modes of justification of such rights open to Afro-descendant movements in Latin America today. Keywords: BlacksethnicityLatin Americamulticulturalismracesocial movements Notes This list is a modified and expanded version of the features of Latin America's new multicultural model of constitutionalism identified by Donna Lee Van Cott. See Donna Lee Van Cott, "Latin America: Constitutional Reform and Ethnic Right," Parliamentary Affairs 53(1) (2000), 41–45. For a discussion of the reasons that to date indigenous groups have had greater success winning collective rights from the state than Afro-descendant movements see Juliet Hooker, "Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America," Journal of Latin American Studies 37(2) (2005), 14–39. The contemporary descendants of Spanish, indigenous, and African mixing processes during the colonial period; they are the majority of the country's population. Martín Hopenhayn, and Alvaro Bello, Discriminación Étnico Racial y Xenofobia En América Latina y el Caribe (Santiago, Chile: División de Desarollo Social de la Comisión Económica de las Naciones Unidas para América Latina (CEPAL/ECLAC), 2001), 5. The results of the race/ethnicity question included in Nicaragua's 2005 census have not yet been released by the National Institute of Statistics, however. See Edward E. Telles, "Race Report 2007: Incorporating Race and Ethnicity into the U.N. Millennium Development Goals" (Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue, 2007), 1. See for example the "Todos Contamos" initiative funded by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to assist Afro-descendant and indigenous activists in Latin America in getting national statistics bureaus in the region to include questions about race and ethnicity in the census. In many countries, for instance, there is only a small percentage of the Afro-descendant population that self-identifies as Black or negro. This raises the question of whether estimates should include only the former or also those who would be phenotypically identified as such, i.e. Afro-mestizos, hence the range in the estimates of the size of the Afro-descendant populations of Brazil and Panama in Table 1, for instance. "Race Report 2003: Afro-descendants in Latin America: How Many?" (Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue, 2003). Telles, "Race Report 2007," 1. Lucila Bandeira Beato, "Inequality and Human Rights of African Descendants in Brazil," Journal of Black Studies 34(6) (2004): 750. Nelson do Valle Silva, "A Research Note on the Cost of Not Being White in Brazil," Studies in Comparative International Development 35(2) (Summer 2000): 21. "Día Internacional Contra el Racismo," El Mercurio, March 21, 2005. http://www.elmercurio.com.ec/. Last accessed 8 June 2007. On the history of Afro-descendants across Latin America, see George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995). This is a descriptive statement. I am not suggesting that this is (or should be) the way these categories should be understood, nor am I suggesting that the clear-cut distinction that is often presumed to exist between the two is in fact accurate or useful. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Afro-descendant (and indigenous) politics in Latin America is the overlap between race and culture. For more on this issue, see Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997). An earlier version of this typology was first developed in Juliet Hooker and Edmund T. Gordon, "The State of Black Land Rights in Central America," Paper presented at the XXV International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Las Vegas, NV, 7–9 October, 2004. Cited in María Elena García, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education, and Multicultural Development in Peru (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 171. See Edmund T. Gordon, Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Thomas McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery," Political Theory 32(6) (2004): 753. Many Latin American countries abolished slavery when they gained independence from Spain in the 1820s (Central America, Chile, and Mexico), or shortly thereafter in the 1850s (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela). Brazil is the notable exception in this regard, not having abolished slavery until 1888. Following independence there was a general absence of legally codified racial discrimination in Latin America. The situation of West Indian immigrants to Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is thus anomalous, as the U.S. companies that imported these laborers did establish racial segregation in the economic enclave zones in which they operated in Central America. Additionally, many West Indian immigrants and their descendants were legally prohibited from gaining citizenship (with all its accompanying legal rights) for many decades after their arrival in various Central American countries. On this topic see, for instance, Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Sérgio Da Silva Martins, Carlos Alberto Medeiros, and Elisa Larkin Nascimento, "Paving Paradise: The Road from 'Racial Democracy' to Affirmative Action in Brazil," Journal of Black Studies 34(6) (2004): 803. Ibid., 811–812. See Hooker, "Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America." See Luiz Fernando do Rosário Linhares, "Kilombos of Brazil: Identity and Land Entitlement," Journal of Black Studies 34(6) (2004), 817–837. See Mark Anderson, "When Afro Becomes (Like) Indigenous: Garifuna and Afro-Indigenous Politics in Honduras," Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 12(2) (November 2007): 403. On this problem in Brazil and Honduras, respectively, see: Linhares, "Kilombos of Brazil: Identity and Land Entitlement," and Eva T. Thorne, "Land Rights and Garífuna Identity," NACLA Report on the Americas 38(2) (2004), 21–25, 37. See, for example: Michael Hanchard, Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945–1988 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Winthrop R. Wright, Café Con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990). See Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Livio Sansone, "Anti-Racism in Brazil," NACLA Report on the Americas 38(2) (September–October 2004): 30–31.