Perhaps in the same way that Latin and the Roman Catholic Church gave men and women of letters in the late Middle Ages—say, in what is now Italy or what is now Germany or France—a certain degree of common culture, even if workers or serfs in those societies did not share access to that common identity, so, too, black writers in Boston and New York, London and Paris, Jamaica and the Gold Coast throughout the eighteenth century could be aware of each other, sometimes commented on each other’s existence, read and revised or troped each other’s books, sometimes even corresponded about each other, and traveled back and forth either between Africa and Europe, America and Europe, or among Africa, Latin America, America, and Europe. I am thinking of Jacobus Capitein and Anton Wilhelm Amo from the Gold Coast, both of whom attended universities in Europe before returning to Africa; the Jamaican Francis Williams, one of the first black persons to read law at Lincoln’s Inn in London (whose writing Hume disparaged in his influential essay “Of National Characters” of 1754), and who returned to Jamaica following his studies to establish a school, just as Capitein did in the Gold Coast; the widely read and commented on poet Phillis Wheatley, the first person of African descent to publish a book of poetry in English, who sailed to London to publish her book and served as inspiration to some of the black abolitionists there; the master of the epistle, Ignatius Sancho, who corresponded with Sterne and who wrote about Wheatley’s enormous significance; and the first five authors of a new literary genre called the slave narratives, who revised what I call “the trope of the talking book” in each of their memoirs of their enslavement. One of these, the best-selling author Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), who was born in Africa, visited fourteen islands in the West Indies as a slave (including the Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts, and the Mosquite Shore) and the United States, before ultimately settling in England as a free man. Many of these people were cited by foes of slavery as prima facie evidence that the African was at least potentially the intellectual equal of Europeans and was therefore an argument for the abolition of slavery. Indeed, Grégoire dedicated his book to Amo, Sancho, Vassa, his friend Cugoano, and Wheatley, among others.
As the free African American community grew in the United States, contacts with the Caribbean and Latin America increased dramatically in the nineteenth century. The black abolitionists Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass offer two salient examples. Garnet, a militant abolitionist, the first black minister to preach to the House of Representatives and a pioneering figure in the black colonization movement, traveled to Cuba as a cabin boy before he was ten and in 1849 founded the African Civilization Society to advocate for the emigration of free black people to Mexico and the West Indies, as well as to Liberia. Garnet served as a missionary for three years in Jamaica. In 1881, he became the United States minister to Liberia, where he died two months later and where he is buried. Frederick Douglass, between January 24 and March 26, 1871, served by appointment of President Ulysses S. Grant as the assistant secretary to the commission to Santo Domingo, exploring the possibility of annexing the Dominican Republic as a state, the nation’s first black state, according to Douglass, who passionately supported this plan for this reason. Between 1889 and 1891, Douglass served as the US consul general to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to the Dominican Republic. During this period, Douglass wrote several essays and speeches about the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint Louverture and the importance of Haiti as “among the foremost civilized nations of the earth,” as a speech delivered on January 2, 1893, was entitled. Even in nineteenth-century African American literature, Cuba was a fictive presence, for example, in Martin R. Delany’s novel Blake (serialized in 1859 and in 1861–1862) and in a short story published by Thomas Detter in 1871 entitled “The Octoroon Slave of Cuba.”
In the twentieth century, as we might expect, the contacts only increased in degree and number. Booker T. Washington, as the historian Frank Andre Guridy notes, had extensive interchanges at the beginning of the century with black Cuban intellectuals such as Juan Gualberto Gómez, whose son studied at Tuskegee. His autobiography was published in Spanish in its first Cuban edition in 1903, just two years after it was published in the States. Washington developed programs that trained black Cuban students at his Tuskegee Institute in the vocations and industrial arts and trades. Washington’s educational program also influenced the thinking of the black Brazilian intellectual Manuel Querino.
Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the early decades of the twentieth century had more of a presence throughout the Caribbean and Latin America than most of us have realized, again thanks to Frank Guridy’s research. Garvey named the ships of his Black Star Line after black heroes such as Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, as we might expect, but also after Antonio Maceo, the “Bronze Titan,” one of the leading generals in the Cuban War of Independence and one of Cuba’s founding fathers. The first stop of the Frederick Douglass, in fact, on its 1919 Caribbean tour was Cuba; the Cuban branch of the UNIA was founded that year, and Garvey visited Cuba two years later in March 1921, a trip that was covered in the Heraldo de Cuba newspaper in Havana. It turns out that Cuba had more branches of the UNIA than did any country other than the United States. The UNIA operated in Cuba until 1929, when it was closed down under the Machado government, using the same law, the Morua law, that had been used to ban the all-black Independent Party of Color and the organization of political parties along racial lines in 1912.
Du Bois—himself of Haitian descent, through his father, who was born in Haiti in 1826—proudly boasted of the many Afro-Latin Americans who attended the Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the first Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. At the 1900 conference, representatives from St. Kitts, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Antigua, and Haiti attended. In the pages of the Crisis, Du Bois reported that thirteen representatives from the French West Indies attended the 1919 congress (just three less than came from the United States), seven from Haiti, two from the Spanish colonies, one from the Portuguese colonies, and one from Santo Domingo. He tells us that Tertullian Guilbaud came from Havana, “Candace” and “Boisneuf” came from Guadeloupe, “Lagrosil” from the French West Indies, and “Grossillere” from Martinique. Du Bois also tells us that Edmund Fitzgerald Fredericks, a “full-blooded Negro,” attended from British Guiana.
The historian Rebecca Scott discovered that the Cubans Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez not only visited the United States but rented a house together in New Orleans, in the Faubourg Tremé district in 1884. The pivotal role of black officers such as Maceo and black soldiers in the Cuban-Spanish-American War attracted the attention, as you might suspect, of black journalists, intellectuals, and activists throughout the United States. Du Bois, of course, regularly covered events germane to the black communities throughout the Caribbean and South America as well as Africa in the pages of the Crisis, and published Arturo Schomburg’s (himself a Puerto Rican) account of the massacre of three thousand followers of the Independent Party of Color in Cuba in 1912.
James Weldon Johnson, perhaps truly the Renaissance man of the Harlem Renaissance, had extensive contacts with Afro-Latin America. In 1906, he was made consul to Venezuela; in 1909, he transferred to Nicaragua. In 1920, the NAACP sent Johnson to investigate allegations of abuse by occupying US Marines. He blasted the imperialist intentions of the US occupation of Haiti in a three-part series published in the twenties in the Nation magazine, a series he published as the book entitled Self-Determining Haiti. In his autobiography, Along This Way, Johnson relates the curious and amusing story that, just as he and a companion traveling on a train are about to be booted from a “first-class car,” or a white car, and removed to the Jim Crow car, they talk to each other in Spanish. This is what happens when they do:
As soon as the conductor heard us speaking in a foreign language, his attitude changed; he punched our tickets and gave them back, and treated us just as he did the other passengers in the car. . . . This was
my first impact against race prejudice as a concrete fact. Fifteen years later, an incident similar to the experience with this conductor drove home to me the conclusion that in such situations any kind of a Negro will do; provided he is not one who is an American citizen.
These levels of contact not only occurred between intellectuals and writers and at the diplomatic level. Stories about black baseball players pretending to be Cuban were part of the lore of black popular culture when I was growing up; teams in the Negro Baseball Leagues played teams in Cuba and even took “Cuban” names as early as the late nineteenth century, names such as the Cuban Giants, the Cuban X-Giants, the Genuine Cuban Giants (one team was named the Columbia Giants). And several “Cuban” teams, which purportedly included white and black Cubans and some African Americans, played in the United States under these rubrics in defiance of the color line, including the All Cubans, the Cuban Stars (West), the Cuban Stars (East), and the New York Cubans. So what we might think of as “transnational black consciousness” has unfolded at many levels of culture, high and low, between African Americans and black people in the Caribbean and Latin America, as extensively in the arts and letters as in popular cultural forms such as sports.
Of course, several musical collaborations come to mind, including “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop,” recorded in 1948 as a single by Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and George Russell; and the albums Orgy in Rhythm, recorded by Art Blakey, Sabu Martinez, and Carlos “Patato” Valdes in 1957, and Uhuru Afrika, recorded by Randy Weston and Candido Camero in 1960, to list just a few early notable examples.
Intricate relations obtained among black writers and critics of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, who lived for a total equivalent of a year and a half with his father in Mexico and who translated the works of Caribbean writers, such as Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Roumain, from Spanish and French into English. Hughes and his colleagues who created the Harlem Renaissance were pivotal as role models in the birth of the Négritude movement in Paris in 1934, for its founders, Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sédar Senghor. Both movements were directly influenced by Jean Price-Mars’s pioneering scholarship of black vernacular traditions and the Vodou religion in works such as So Spoke the Uncle.
In all, it is clear that, for well over 250 years, in various degrees and at several levels, there has existed a Pan-African intellectual community keenly aware of one another, looking to one another for support and inspiration to combat anti-black racism in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, in the northern and southern hemispheres. And you might say that now it is the scholars of diaspora studies who are catching up with the creative writers, artists, activists, athletes, and intellectuals who have long seen themselves as sharing a certain special sort of transcontinental New World “black” subject position.
In spite of the unique histories of slavery and persons of African descent in each of the six countries discussed in this book, certain themes recur. In a sense, this book is a study of the growth and demise of the sugar economy in many of these countries, along with that of coffee and tobacco. In most of these societies, a great deal of miscegenation and genetic admixture occurred between masters and their slaves, very early on in the history of slavery there. Several of these countries sponsored official immigration policies of “whitening,” aiming to dilute the numbers of its citizens who were black or darker shades of brown by encouraging Europeans to migrate there.
And speaking of skin color, each of these countries had (and continues to have) many categories of color and skin tone, ranging from as few as 12 in the Dominican Republic and 16 in Mexico to 134 in Brazil, making our use of octoroon and quadroon and mulatto pale by comparison. Latin American color categories can seem to an American as if they are on steroids. I realized as I encountered people who still employ these categories in everyday discussions about race in their society that it is extremely difficult for those of us in the United States to see the use of these categories as what they are, the social deconstruction of the binary opposition between “black” and “white,” outside of the filter of the “one-drop rule,” which we Americans have inherited from racist laws designed to retain the offspring of a white man and a black female slave as property of the slave’s owner. Far too many of us as African Americans see the use of these terms as an attempt to “pass” for anything other than “black” rather than as historically and socially specific terms that people of color have invented and continue to employ to describe a complex reality larger than the terms black, white, and mulatto allow for.
After extended periods of “whitening,” many of these same societies then began periods of “browning,” as I think of them, celebrating and embracing their transcultural or multicultural roots, declaring themselves unique precisely because of the extent of racial admixture among their citizens. (The abolition of “race” as an official category in the federal censuses of some of the countries I visited has made it extremely difficult for black minorities to demand their rights, as in Mexico and Peru.) The work of Jose Vasconcelos in Mexico, Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba compose a sort of multicultural quartet, though each approached the subject from different, if related, vantage points. The theories of “browning” espoused by Vasconcelos, Freyre, and Ortiz, however, could be double-edged swords, both valorizing the black roots of their societies yet sometimes implicitly seeming to denigrate the status of black cultural artifacts and practices outside of an ideology of mestizaje, or hybridity.
What did all of these societies ultimately share in common? The unfortunate fact that persons of the seemingly “purest” or “unadulterated” African descent disproportionately occupy the very bottom of the economic scale in each of these countries. In other words, the people with the darkest skin, the kinkiest hair, and the thickest lips tend to be overrepresented among the poorest members of society. Poverty in each of these countries, in other words, all too often has been socially constructed around degrees of obvious African ancestry. Whether—or how—this economic fact is a legacy of slavery, and of long, specific histories of anti-black racism, even in societies that proudly boast themselves to be “racial democracies,” “racism free,” or “postracial,” is one of the most important themes explored in this book and cries out to be explored and acted on in the social policies of each of these six countries.
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
BRAZIL: “MAY EXÚ GIVE ME THE POWER OF SPEECH”
Black in Latin America
On the whole emancipation [in Brazil] was peaceful, and whites, Negroes, and Indians are to-day amalgamating into a new race.
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1915
In South America we have long pretended to see a possible solution in the gradual amalgamation of whites, Indians and Blacks. But this amalgamation does not envisage any decrease of power and prestige among whites as compared with Indians, Negroes, and mixed bloods; but rather an inclusion within the so called white group of a considerable infiltration of dark blood, while at the same time maintaining the social bar, economic exploitation and political disfranchisement of dark blood as such. . . . And despite facts, no Brazilian nor Venezuelan dare boast of his black fathers. Thus, racial amalgamation in Latin-America does not always or even usually carry with it social uplift and planned effort to raise the mulatto and mestizoes to freedom in a democratic polity.
—W. E. B. DU BOIS, 1942
FOR A VERY long time, whenever I heard the word race, only images of black people in the United States came to mind. As silly as it might sound now, to me, then, race was a code word for black people, and for their relations with white people in this country. I think that this is probably some sort of African American exceptionalism for people my age, people who came of age in the Civil Rights Movement of the late fifties and sixties. Even today, in our era of multiculturalism, I still find it necessary sometimes to remember that race is
not just a black thing, that race (by which most of us mean ethnicity) signifies a lot of different kinds of people, representing a full range of ethnicities, in a lot of different places, and that African Americans in this country don’t have a patent on the term or the social conditions that have resulted either from slavery or the vexed history of racial relations that followed slavery in the United States.
I should say that African Americans don’t have a patent especially on slavery, as I much later came to realize, throughout the New World. When I was growing up, I simply assumed that the slave experience in the New World was dominated by our ancestors who came to the United States between 1619 and the Civil War. And I think that many Americans still assume this. But it turns out that the slave ancestors of the African American people were only a tiny fraction—less than 5 percent—of all the Africans imported to the Western Hemisphere to serve as slaves. Over eleven million Africans survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the New World; and of these, incredibly, only about 450,000 Africans came to the United States. The “real” African American experience, based on numbers alone, then, unfolded in places south of our long southern border, south of Key West, south of Texas, south of California, in the Caribbean islands and throughout Latin America. And no place in our hemisphere received more Africans than Brazil did.
I think that probably the first time that I ever thought about race, integration, segregation, or miscegenation outside of the context of the United States, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement was the night that I saw the film Black Orpheus. I had thought about Africa quite a lot, and the black people who lived in Africa, from the time I was in the fifth grade, in 1960, the great year of African independence, the year that seventeen African nations were born. But thinking about black people and Africa is not the same as thinking about race. No, that came, for the first time, when I was a sophomore at Yale, assigned to watch Black Orpheus in the class called “From Africa to the Black Americas,” the art history class taught by the great scholar Robert Farris Thompson.
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