1. Week 8: Slavery and Race in Latin America
Dr Camillia Cowling

2. 1940s recordings of Brazilian slave songs by Stanley Stein
In the days of slavery
I endured many an insult,
I got up early in the morning
The leather whip beat me for no reason
Now I want to see the fellow
Who can shout at me from the hilltop
‘Say ‘God bless you master’ ,’
No sir, your negro is now a free man
No tempo do cativeiro Aturava muito desaforo Levantava de manha cedo Com cara limpa levo o couro, ai Agora quero ver o cidadao Que grita no alto do morro Vai-se Cristo, seu moco Seu negro agora ta forro

3. Today’s lecture will do three things…
1: explore Latin America’s very long relationship with Africa and with slavery;
2: trace the rise of a nineteenth-century “second slavery”
3. explore Latin American experiences of race since emancipation

4. Race or “race”?
Many scholars choose to always talk about “race” with speech marks
Reflects the consensus that, biologically, “race” as we think of it doesn’t exist
But, it is very much a SOCIAL reality, with a long, complex, changing history of its own across the Americas (see David Lambert’s lecture yesterday)

5. Part 1: Africa in Latin America: a 500-year-old relationship

7. The Atlantic slave trade in numbers, 1500-1870
About 9.5 million enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas in total
Nearly 15% (1.2 million people) went to the Spanish Americas
About 42% went to Brazil alone
Less than 4% went to British North America.
The rest mainly went to the British and French Caribbean
More Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas before 1800
Free African mariners were among the first explorers that landed in the New World with the Spanish
See Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery Freedom and Abolition in Latin America; and Afro-Latin Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero- Atlantic World

8. Excavation in Dominican Republic: Columbus’s African shipmates

10. Capture and forced marches in Africa

11. El Mina, slave trading fortress on West African coast (today’s Ghana)

12. El Mina castle in Ghana today

13. Working in the sugarcane fields

14. “Sugar is made with blood”: Slavery and sugar in the New World
Responsible for about 90% of all African arrivals in the Americas before about 1800
In Latin America: coastal areas of Peru, Mexico, north of Venezuela and Colombia, and especially North-East Brazil and (in C19) Cuba.
Cutting cane in the blazing tropical sun was the hardest and most intensive work there was.
On Cuban sugar plantations in the C19, the average lifespan of a slave from arrival was about 7 years.
On the other hand, enslaved people were found all over Latin America, doing a variety of work...

15. Marc Ferrez/ Coleção Gilberto Ferrez/ Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles Partida para colheita do café | Vale do Paraíba, c. 1885
From:

16. Mining in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1888
Marc Ferrez/ Coleção Gilberto Ferrez/ Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles Primeira foto do trabalho no interior de uma mina de ouro | Minas Gerais, 1888

17. Coachman, Peru, 1780s

18. Coachman with horse and carriage, nineteenth-century Cuba

19. Marc Ferrez/ Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles Quitandeiras | Rio de Janeiro, RJ, c. 1875

20. Features of Iberian slavery in the Americas
Harsh, short lives in brutal conditions; no natural reproduction; rape and sexual exploitation
But: some access to manumission (legal freedom); large free populations of colour
Laws that allowed enslaved people minimal negotiation about their conditions: see the Alejandro de la Fuente article for the seminars.
Incorporation of enslaved into cultural and religious life; syncretic, mixed African/ Catholic religions develop

21. Baptism in a Catholic church in nineteenth-century Brazil

22. Part 2: The Nineteenth Century

23. A century of emancipation…
Haitian Revolution, : slaves and free people of colour in French colonial St Domingue overthrow slavery and colonialism, establish independent black republic
Ending of the British slave trade, 1807 (and to the US, 1808)
Slavery is abolished in the British Caribbean in 1838
Spanish American independence connected to slave emancipation, faster in Chile and Mexico, slower in e.g. Argentina, Peru, Venezuela

24. The “second slavery”
Elsewhere, slavery EXPANDS: Brazil, Cuba, United States South.
Until recently: this seen as outdated relic
Recent interpretations: Emancipation in some regions of that world deepened and intensified slavery elsewhere.
Increased TRADING connections between slave-based economies and industrialising Northern Europe & the Northern United States…
Major UPSWING of the Atlantic slave trade, to Cuba (up to late 1860s) and Brazil (to 1850).
Dale Tomich: “second slavery”

25. The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, by Esteban Montejo (1860-1965)
As told to Miguel Barnet in 1963, when Montejo was 103

26. Part 3: Race in post-emancipation Latin America

27. Comparative points about “Iberian” slavery and race
Relative ease of gaining manumission; large free populations of colour
Legal frameworks granted at least some opportunities
No legal segregation by race after slavery ended (unlike US South)
Different ways of thinking about racially-defined social difference: not binary but PLURAL (mulato, mestizo…)
Race blends with other elements to form place in social hierarchy: class, wealth, social standing
BUT this doesn’t mean that Lat Am was, or is, any less racist
Problem of denial/ invisibility makes racism harder to tackle

28. “What colour are you?” The 134 answers included… alva (pure white)
café com leite (coffee with milk)
canela (cinnamon)
queimada-de-praia (suntanned from the beach)
roxa (purplish)
trigueira (wheat-coloured)
[1976 census question]

30. Ideas about race in Latin America (1): “whitening”
Lat Am relatively slow to absorb “scientific” notions of evolutionary racial difference
BUT, these ideas are adopted wholesale from about the 1870s.
So, “scientific” racism peaks, in both Brazil and Cuba, as slavery is being abolished and immediately afterwards.
Social Darwinist ideas help to fuel a turn towards ideology of “whitening”
Rejection of African past; bans on African immigration; European migrants encouraged
Demographic “whitening” occurs across the region
See George Reid Andrews’s racial maps in Afro-Latin America Library)

31. General Antonio Maceo, hero of Cuba’s anticolonial and anti-slavery struggles

32. Examination of General Antonio Maceo’s skull for racialized characteristics, 1896-1900

33. Racial democracy: a new set of ideas about race in Latin America
An intellectual turn in the 1930s towards an appreciation of Africa’s contribution to Latin America’s unique heritage
Valorisation still mixes with folkloric, stereotyped, folkloric, unequal depictions…
Gilberto Freyre in Brazil; Fernando Ortiz in Cuba
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave & Citizen (1947)
Notion of “milder” Latin American slavery and less harsh race relations
Context is segregation in US South.

34. The impact of “racial democracy” ideas
Much more than just academic: becomes part of founding discourses of national identity
Generations of Black Movement activists in Brazil have tried to dispel the “myth” of racial democracy and focus on racism
See: Edward Telles; Florence Winddance Twine
In fact: huge social divides across Latin America; the face of poverty and exclusion is still darker skinned; almost universally, those who appear in positions of power and privilege are light-skinned.

35. Benedita da Silva: Brazil’s first black woman senator denies that “racial democracy” exists
“When I was first elected to Congress, I would get in the Congressional elevator [in the congress building in Brasília] and the guards would stop me and say, ‘Sorry, this is only for congresspeople.’ And I’d answer, ‘What a coincidence. I’m a congresswoman.’ They would get so embarrassed and apologize.”