LYNN STEPHENDEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGYCENTER FOR LATINO/A AND LATIN

AMERICAN STUDIES

Blackness and its Re-emergence in Colombia and Ecuador:

Contemporary Afro-descendent Social Movements and Knowledge

Production

Blackness in Latin America

“The Black and White Dialogue on race and culture in the United States has consistently ignored the existence of more than 150 million people of African ancestry in the other Americas. The total absence of Afro-Latinas/os from the Caribbean Mexico, Central America and South America in the consciousness of the national discourse in the United States, including in institutions that educate and inform the civil society of the nation, contributes to the absolute disregard of the presence and realities of African Diasporic communities within the U.S. national territory and aboard. This lack of recognition and omission of the history, contributions and lives of more than 150 million people of African ancestry, many of whom reside here in the United States renders their contributions and lives irrelevant.”

–Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora, “Afro-Boricua: Nuyorican de Pura Cepa,”

“Of the estimated 11 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World from the late 1400s to the 1860s, most were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, with only some 645,000 landing in the United States. “So when you’re talking about blackness, you’re really talking about Latin America.”

–Miriam Jimenez Roma

Source: Racialicious http://www.racialicious.com/2013/02/12/call-for-submissions-y-tu-abuela-donde-esta-multi-dimensional-afro-latinao-identities-in-the-21st-century/

The Forced Diaspora of African Peoples in Latin America

Afrodescendiente Origins Many from West Africa mostly

arrived in Latin America as part of the Atlantic slave trade, as agricultural, domestic, and menial laborers and as mineworkers. They were also employed in mapping and exploration and were even involved in conquest They were mostly brought from West Africa and Central Africa in what are now the nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Angola, and Congo.

There are six major groups: the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ewe, Akan, and the Bantu (mostly Zulu). Most of the slaves were sent to Brazil, and the Caribbean, but lesser numbers went to Colombia and Venezuela. C

Adrián Sánchez Galque, Mulatos de Esmeraldas, 1599

’Palenqueras’ sell fruit and candy to cruise ship passengers who disembark in Cartagena, Colombia.

Joaquin Sarmiento/Reuters

Click icon to add pictureAnti-black racism is linked to significantly higher levels of poverty among contemporary Afro-descendent populations in Latin American than in other racial/ethnic groups. The World Bank estimates that there are between 85 to 150 million afrodescendents in Latin America. They make up about 25 percent of the total population, but 50 percent of the poor.

Historically, blackness has been masked as being a part of “mestizaje” which is often about blanqueamiento or whitening. Mestizaje is seen as leading to the eventual disappearance of black and indigenous peoples while immigration policies often encouraged light-skinned European immigrants. This was a way to “Whiten” nations. Even national census’ from the late 19th century until not very long ago dropped out categories which could be identified as Afro-descendent. In Argentina, for example, in 1810, Blacks made up 30 percent of the population. By 1887 that had plummeted to 2 percent. Until 1994, the Argentine constitution restricted immigration of people of African or Asian descent, favoring European immigrants. Argentina's 2010 Census included a question on Afro-heritage for the first time since 1887. It revealed that 0.4 percent of the population is black

The emergence of black and indigenous social movements and multicultural constitutional and legal reforms in some countries during the past 20-25 years which celebrate ethnic and racial diversity, rights, and rights to territory are parts of the context for understanding contemporary political and cultural manifestations of different forms of Afro-descendent identities and cultures in Latin America.

Afro-Ecuadorians: Origins and Reistance

Ecuador was known at the Real audience of Quito, belonging to the viceroy of Peru.

Since 1535, the presence of slaves was noted. Slaves were taken to Quito, Guayaquil or Cuencas. They came from Guinea, San Tome, the Bantu zone, and Northern Africa.

Slaves worked in gold and silver mines as well as on sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations.

Most important slave-owning regions were in Guayaquil, Quito, Esmeraldas, the Chota Valley and Loja.

Slaves engaged in distinct forms of resistance, including hidden refuges, engaging in uprising, burned plantations. They also filed many complaints in the legal system.

Abolition of Slavery began in 1821 when legislators of Great Colombia ordained partial freedom. Ecuador declared independence in 1930.Although the first constitution of Guayaquil terminated slavery in Ecuador in 1852, slaves still being granted freedom in 1870

Afro-Ecuadorian Social Movements and Communities Today

Current movement has roots in movements from 1960s on as well as being influenced by civil rights struggles in U.S. and Afro-descendent organizations in Colombia and Brazil.

In 1998, a constitutional reform declared Ecuador to be a multi-ethnic and pluricultural nation. Afro-descendent are now recognized as “people” subject to collective rights.

There are about 350 social and cultural organizations that are identified as Afro-descendent.

In the Ecuadorian Constitution approved in 2008, Afro-Ecuadorians received constitutional rights to fight discrimination, reparation and affirmative action for victims of racism, and constitutional and territorial rights.

The new constitution recognizes the descendents of Africans explicitly as Afro-Ecuadorians, not as blacks, signally a rupture with colonialism. (Source John Anton Sanchez 2009).

Mujeres de la Tercera Edad Manos Unidos en el Valle de Chota, las comunidades de Comuna Río Santiago Cayapas en Esmeraldas y el

Fondo Documental Afro-Andino de la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Women Elders with United Hands of the Valley of Chota, the communities of Comuna Río Santiago Cayapas in Esmeraldas and the Afro-Andino Documentary Fund of the Andean University

Simón Bolívar)

Birthing Knowledge First, using birth as an entryway into understanding

life, the research team focused part of their effort on documenting the art of midwifery. This form of knowledge is learned with practice from being a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, or a midwife and involves multiple techniques including massages, baths, prayers, and symbolic systems.

The midwives locate the mother, the child, and the particular circumstances of each birth into a symbolic system where they construct a diagnostic analysis. The midwife and others accompanying the birth also work to ensure that the proper conditions accompany the birth. For example, there cannot be a drinking glass turned upside down or a bucket face down, a door or a window closed as all must be open at the time of the birth.

A particularly important part of midwifery is the art of cutting and curing the umbilical chord. The umbilical chord can be cured with a variety of elements that are related to the kind of person that the baby will become. There is transference of the traits of a particular plant to the child, with particular plants instilling vigor, force, and reinforcing personality traits such as courage or timidity.

Most of these practices are deeply gendered. There are particular plants used for curing baby girls’ umbilical cords and others for boys. The substance used for girls will promote knowledge of plants and of curing, for example.

Midwife from La Chota teaching others how to read an unborn child’s health and position

Mapping Medicinal Knowledge Using the concept of social mapping, the

research team first worked with participants to draw their territories and within them to outline the different kinds of knowledge that exist, the spaces for their production, the specific material and relational elements they contain, and the persons who reproduce them.

Elders, adults, and children shared experiences and from that discussion maps were drawn. For example, maps were drawn of different kinds of medicinal plants, where they grow, their characteristics as hot and cold, and how they can be used. Medicinal recipes were also shared and remembered.

After the maps were drawn, people talked about them, and then walked together to the points on the map. In situ, in particular locations of rivers, gardens, houses, cemeteries, the maps were remembered, discussed and shared.

Community mapping of medicinal plants and ritual routes in Ecuador.

Afro-descendents in Colombia: Origins, history, movements.

By the 1520s, Africans were being imported into Colombia steadily to replace the rapidly declining native American population. Africans were forced to work in gold mines, on sugar cane plantations, cattle ranches, and large haciendas. African labor was essential in all the regions of Colombia, even until modern times. African workers pioneered the extracting of alluvial gold deposits and the growing of sugar cane in the areas that correspond to the modern day departments of Chocó, Antioquia, Cauca, Valle del Cauca, and Nariño in western Colombia.

In eastern Colombia, near the cities of Vélez, Cúcuta, Socorro, and Tunja, Africans manufactured textiles in commercial mills. Emerald mines, outside Bogotá, were wholly dependent upon African laborers. Also, other sectors of the Colombian economy like tobacco, cotton, artisanry, and domestic work would have been impossible without African labor.

Free Black African towns called palenques were found where Africans could live as cimarrones, that is, they who escaped from their oppressors

Slavery was not abolished until 1851,

El Choco In 1945 the department of El Chocó was

created; it was the first predominantly African political-administrative division. El Chocó gave African people the possibility of building an African territorial identity and some autonomous decision-making power.

In the 1970s, there was a major influx of Afro Colombians into the urban areas in search of greater economic and social opportunities for their children.

Nearly 30% of the Afro-Colombian population is based in the Chocó region, an area characterized by its mega-biodiversity, the wealth of its natural resources (lumber, gold, natural resources) and by its strategic situation (possibility of an inter-oceanic channel) in contrast to the socioeconomic and cultural conditions of its settlers and their land tenancy patterns.

The Proceso de Comunidades Negras (The Black Communities Process (PCN) of

Colombia

Expanding Afro-Colombian TerritoryThe PCN is a national Afro-Colombian political organization that includes 120 cultural groups, community councils, and urban and rural collectives who together seek to gain rights for Black communities . When their struggle began in the mid-1990s, the PCN focused much of their effort on demarcating and titling ancestral Afro-Colombian lands. This priority was in response to a change in the Colombian Constitution and the Ley 70 which granted indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant peoples the right to establish collective ownership of traditional Pacific coastal territories. As a result of intense organizing efforts, the PCN and their allies were able to title five million hectares of land as the collective territories of Black communities.

LAND GIVEN WITH LEGAL TITTLE

TO BLACK COMMUNITIES

Land with legal title in Afro-descendent communities.

Erasing Blackness in Colombia through the Census.

Click icon to add pictureThe PCN made a strategic decision to push the National Department of Statistics (DANE) in Colombia to greatly improve their system for categorizing and counting Afro-Colombians in the 2005 census.

The PCN research team found that past Colombian censuses both during the colonial and republic periods lay the foundation for the invisibility of Colombia’s Afro-descendent population. The first census of 1758 in Colombia was created to diminish ethnic specificity and to begin to promote the idea of universal subjects who later became citizens. By the time that Colombia became an independent nation in 1819, Blackness had been almost completely erased from official records.

Making Afro-Colombians Visible through Expanding Census Categories.

From 1905 to 1995, there were ten censuses conducted and only two used terms related to Blacks. This had a significant effect on how people responded to the census categories of Negro and Afrodescendiente in the 20th century and beyond.

PCN found that a wide range of self-identification terms were used by Afro-Colombians including Triune, Moreno, Malate, Zamboni, Afrocolombiano, Afrodescendiente, Raizal, Palenquero, Negro, Indígena, Gitano (Rom o Li), and Blanco. Originally the DANE excluded the category of Triune on the census form, but ultimately yielded to pressure from the PCN and others and included it in the 2005 census along with other categories.

From 1.5 % to 18 – 20 % Negro

Click icon to add pictureAfter the 2005 census was carried out, the results revealed that 10.5 percent of Colombians identified as Negro (or a related term) as opposed to the 1.5 percent count generated by the 1993 census. While the figure of 10.5 percent was higher, PCN activists felt that it still represented a very significant undercount in comparison with other statistics such as the figure of 26 percent cited in the 1998 National Plan for the Development of the Afro-Colombian Population. The PCN team then carried out their own research on who had actually been asked the ethnic self-identification question on the 2005 Census where they could self-identity as Black.

Overall they found that 42 percent of the people surveyed in these cities were not asked the ethnic-self-identification question by census takers. l. After analyzing the results of their survey of the undercount, PCN researchers estimated that about 18 to 20 percent of the national population is Afro-Colombian. This would rank Colombia as number two after Brazil as the country with the largest Afro-descendent population in Latin America.

The Afro-Colombian population has become increasingly urbanized. This process has been greatly accelerated by the war in Colombia which has as its epicenters the Pacific Coast of Colombia and Buenaventura, two of the principal locations of Afro-Colombians.

Driven out by the combined pressure of paramilitaries, FARC guerillas, drug traffickers, and the Colombian army, many formerly rural Afro-Colombian communities have become urbanized, leaving behind their territories for others who arrive to stake claims.

It is crucial for the PCN to document the increasing urban Afro-Colombian population as they fight for the rights of Afro-Colombians outside of their rural locations and raise national awareness of the poverty, hunger, and lack of social services available to Black people in Colombia’s cities.

PCN Encuentro, Colombia

Visibility Establishing presence and

visibility are basic to staking any type of claim or demanding specific rights related to land and territory occupation, legal demarcation, recognition and legitimating of language, culture, ethnicity, and other “ethnic” rights. “Being seen” or becoming “visible” was at least one of the impetuses for a majority of these projects.

Comparative Findings

Larger Questions Children in the Miskitu community of Tuara

How do we move the specifics of a wider notion of health and curing into the educational curriculum for a wide range of children?

How do we establish an integrated model of territory which includes human, plant, natural, and spiritual relations in development policy at regional, national, and international levels?

How do we take what some have called the relational ontologies of Afro-descendent and indigenous peoples such as those illustrated here which avoid the dualisms of nature/culture, individual/community, material/spiritual and have them taken seriously as part of state and transnational discussions on sustainability?

How do we broaden our cultural and political definitions of “expertise” to include knowledge producers who are credentialed by their communities and organizations and not only by universities?