ISSN 1517-5901 (online)
POLÍTICA & TRABALHO
Revista de Ciências Sociais, nº 59, Julho/Dezembro de 2023, p. 42-63
BEYOND “OUR AMERICA”:
Abiayala, Améfrica Ladina, and Our Afroamérica as Critical Geo-Historical
Categories
ALÉM DA “NOSSA AMÉRICA”:
Abya Yala, Améfrica Ladina e Nossa Afroamérica como categorias geo-
históricas críticas
Agustin Laó-Montes
Abstract
If Jose Marti coined the concept Our America as a key construct in the invention of Latin America as a
continent, here we are proposing two geo-historical categories with the aim of decolonizing the spatial and
temporal imaginary: Our Abiayala from Native American feel-thinking and Our Afroamerica from Afro-
descendant feel-thinking. Our Afroamerica is a translocal territory that crosses over and transcends national
borders throughout the Americas, while composing those spaces. Its historical universe and its spaces of culture
and politics mark a geography extending from South to North, sketching the length and the width of the routes of
enslavement and resistance, from Argentina to Canada, transgressing the imaginary as well as material
ramparts of the Rio Grande, that separate Our America from the Northern Colossus. On that key, Our
Afroamerica includes the Afro-Latin American histories and cultures from the Mexican North to the Patagonia,
as well as the Afro-Latinx ones that exist in the United States, thus composing (together with the Afro-North
American spaces, in themselves a montage of the cultures of Africanity) a vast and diverse historical archipelago
that we denominate Afro-American Diasporas. The main argument of the article is that Our Abiayala and Our
Afroamerica constitute critical geo-historical categories to decolonize our collective imaginaries and engender
modes of re-identification of self, history, and future horizons, which are key in the new wave of antisystemic
movements. The monograph will layout both categories but will focus in Our Afroamerica,
Keywords: Abiayala. Afroamerica. Antisystemic movements. Diaspora.
Resumo
Se JoMarti engendrou o conceito de Nossa América como ideia-chave na invenção da América Latina como
continente, propomos aqui duas categorias geo-históricas com o objetivo de descolonizar o imaginário espacial e
temporal: Nossa Abiayla, originada do sentimento reflexivo de nativos americanos, e Rossa Afroamérica,
originada do sentimento reflexivo de afrodescendentes. Nossa Afroamérica é um território translocal que
atravessa e transcende as fronteiras nacionais de todas as Américas, tornando-se parte desses espaços. O seu
universo histórico e os seus espaços de cultura e potica marcam uma geografia que se estende de Sul a Norte,
traçando o comprimento e a largura das rotas de escravização e resistência, da Argentina ao Canadá,
transgredindo as muralhas tanto imaginárias quanto materiais do Rio Grande, que separam a Nossa América
do Colosso do Norte. Nesse sentido, Nossa Afromérica inclui as histórias afrolatino-americanas e culturas do
____________
Agustin Lao-Montes is an intellectual-activist born in Puerto Rico. He has a Ph.D. in Historical Sociology, is
Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he is also Co-Director of the
Graduate Program in African Diaspora Studies, and a Researcher in the Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies. He published extensively in a variety of fields including: decolonial critique, historical
sociology, political sociology, urban studies, social movements, Africana & Caribbean studies, and puriversal
education. His last books are: "Contrapunteos Diasporicos: Cartogreafias Politicas de Nuestra Afroamerica"
(2020) and Du Bois on Latin America and the Caribbean: Trans-Amerian Pan-Africanism and Global Sociology"
(with Juliana Goes & Jorge Vasquez, forthcoming). He is a member of the coordinating committee of the
Articulacion Regional Afrodescendiente en las Americas y el Caribe and several other social movement
networks." E-mail: alaomontes@gmail.com
MONTES, A. L.
__________________
Norte mexicano à Patagônia, como também os afro-latinos que vivem nos Estados Unidos, compondo, assim,
(juntamente com os espaços afro-norte-americanos) uma montagem das culturas da africanidade, um vasto e
diverso arquipélago histórico que denominamos Diásporas Afro-Americanas. O principal argumento do artigo é
que Nossa Abiayala e Nossa Afroarica constituem categorias geo-históricas críticas para descolonizar nossos
imaginários coletivos e gerar modos de reidentificação do eu, da história e dos horizontes futuros, que são chaves
na nova onda de movimentos antissismicos. A monografia apresenta ambas as categorias, mas focará em Nossa
Afroamérica.
Palavras-Chave: Abiayala. Afroamérica. Movimentos Antissistêmicos. Diáspora.
If Jose Marti coined the concept Our Americaas a key construct in the invention of
Latin America as a continent, here I am proposing two geo-historical categories with the aim
of decolonizing the spatial and temporal imaginary: Our Abiayala from Native American feel-
thinking and Our Afroamerica from Afro-descendant feel-thinking.
1
In speaking of feel-
thinking, I am following indigenous intellectuals from various locations of Our Abiayala,
acknowledging the intertwining of affective and cognitive mediations of knowledge as well as
the interplay of the ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, and epistemic dimensions of decolonial critical
reason. Coined in the 1980s, Lelia Gonzalez‘s concept of Amefrica Ladina, encompasses both
Our Abyayala and Our Afroamerica, in so far as it reconceptualize the continent centralizing
the histories, cultures, and agency of Amerindians (originary peoples) and people of African
descent.
In this article, I will take, in broad strokes, stepts toward a genealogy of the historical
universe I call Our Afroamerica, which I see as a particular formation within Amefrica
Ladina. Pursuing Gonzalez‘s argument, I see Afroamerica as a complex and contested terrain
inscribed by a variety of power struggles and mediated by vectors of class, ethnic-racial,
gender, sexual, territorial, generational, and ideological difference.
Our Afroamerica is a translocal territory that crosses over and transcends national
borders throughout the Americas while also composing those spaces. Its historical universe
and its spaces of culture and politics mark a geography extending from South to North,
sketching the length and width of the routes of enslavement and resistance, from Argentina to
Canada, and transgressing the ramparts the imaginary as well as the material of the Rio
Grande that separate Our America from the Northern Colossus. Our Afroamerica includes the
Afro-Latin American histories and cultures from the Mexican North to the Patagonia, as well
as the Afro-Latinx ones that exist in the United States, thus composing (together with the
____________
1
Abiayala is a word from the language of the Kuna people (now living between Colombia and Panama) that
means the great land of all. Abiayala was adopted as a category to denominate that part of the world
―accidentally‖ called America in the context of the organization of networks of the indigenous movement in
1992 vis-à-vis the 500 years of the ill-called ―discovery‖ by Christopher Columbus and his naval crew.
43
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
Afro-North American spaces, in themselves a montage of the cultures of Africanity) a vast
and diverse historical archipelago that we denominate Afro-American diasporas.
I do not conceive of the African diaspora as a uniform formation but rather as a
montage of local histories interwoven by common conditions of racial, political-economic,
and cultural oppression that constitute familiar resemblances based not only on measurable
historical experiences of racial subordination but also on cultural affinities and similar
(frequently shared) repertoires of resistance, intellectual production, and political action.
Our Afroamerica is a space of identification, cultural production, and political
organization framed by world-historical processes of domination, exploitation, resistance, and
emancipation. Playing that political-epistemic drum, Coronil (1998) proposes post-
Occidentalism as a critical strategy that must elaborate geo-historical non-imperial
categoriesas exemplified by names such as Our Abiayala and Our Afroamerica. He argues
that Occidentalism, rather than simply standing in as a counterpart of Orientalism, connotes
its condition of possibility, offering this definition:
[B]y the term Occidentalism I allude to the sum of representational practices that
take part in the production of conceptions of the world, which 1. separate the
components of the world in isolated units; 2. de-link histories that relate to one
another; 3. transform difference into a hierarchy; 4. naturalize said representations,
and therefore 5. intervene, albeit inadvertently, in the reproduction of existing
asymmetric power relations.
I construct my arguments on a post-Occidentalist beat, elaborating on geo-historical
categories of a relational and procedural character that seek to reveal relations and to analyze
processes that develop, as Said (1984) puts it, between intercrossing territories and
intertwined histories. The historical world we designate as Our Afroamerica, the Afro-Latin
American or Afro-Latinx world, is made up of the most populated zones of the archipelago of
African diasporas in the Americas.
2
Employing this verbal reconfiguration we can build
decolonial genealogies and cartographies that render with a greater nuancing the plurality
of worlds composing this macro-region accidentally called America. In so doing, it
____________
2
In the present work, I shall use a variety of denominations for geo-historical and identification purposes,
including Afro-America, Afro-descendants, Afro-Latin/America, Afro-Latinx, Afro-Iberians, Afro-Hispanics,
African diaspora, Afrodiasporic, Black Atlantic, and Black North-Americas. Even though this might be
confusing, the intent is not only to advise on the plurality of names and their relatively subjective expressive
value of self-denomination of the people who constitute these categories, but also to analytically demonstrate
how they intercept and interlink in complex ways with respect to the intention of conceptualizing the African
diasporas from various angles and at different levels, given their variety in time and space.
44
MONTES, A. L.
__________________
contributes to the critical task of constructing geo-historical categories in counter-current to
the prevailing Occidentalist imperial imaginary.
The vast population that has been denominated as Afro-Latin American amounts to the
major component of the African diaspora in the Americas. Demographic estimates (excluding
the Afro-Latinx population in the United States) range from 120 to 200 million, depending on
the definition of who should be considered an Afrodescendant and who should be
counted/identified as Black. Taking into account official categories and/or self-definitions, a
considerable percentage of Afrodescendants in Latin-America identify themselves as
belonging to some category of pardo
3
or mulatto.‖ Considering the available statistical
information, in the present work I define as Afro-Latinxs the totality of peoples of a
substantial African descent in the historical region of the world denominated Latinx/America,
either by birth and/or by residence.
I often use the expression Latinx/America instead of Latin America to represent a
translocal region corresponding to a historical collective that is not circumscribed either to the
north or the south of the imperial borders of which the Rio Grande marks the division. Neither
is it an expression merely constituted by a juxtaposing of nation-states created as a result of
the collapse of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. It is rather a continental or hemispheric
definition of a world-historical region composed of a diversity of peoples who populate the
continental and insular territories colonized primarily by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires,
as well as people of Latin American descent located in what is now U.S. territory. The
definition is both open and flexible, as it overlaps with other formations such as the Greater
Caribbean (the Antilles, continental territories, and global diasporas), encompasses a diversity
of languages (European, Native American, Caribbean creoles) and is composed by a
multiplicity of diasporas (African, East Asian, Arab, South Asian).
In this key, as a part of the exercise of decolonizing geo-historical categories, I
question the very idea of Latin America an offspring of Latinidad a category that pretends to
signify a global civilizational community, invented by ideologues of the French empire such
as Ernest Renan, as a resource in the battle for world hegemony against the British Empire. It
is from this signification of being Latin‖ that the idea of Anglos versus Latinos emerged in
the 19th century an ideology that continues to underlie the racialization and ethnic
divisiveness of terms such as Latin America and Latinxs in the U.S. At the turn of the century,
____________
3
Pardo was the term used to designate a tri-racial descendant of European, Native American, and African.
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Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
in the context of the 1846-48 Mexican-American War and the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-
American-Filipino War, a distinction came to be between an Anglo-Saxon America with an
imperial will to monopolize the name ―America,‖ and the vast region south of the Rio Grande
whose creole elites eventually called Latin America, that Cuban anti-colonial champion Jose
Marti named Our America. From then on, a variety of Latinamericanist‖ discourses have
debated the region‘s identity its ethno-racial, cultural, and intellectual meanings and which
historical projects should define its horizons for the future.
4
When I speak of Afro-Latin
Americans or Afro-Latinxs, I take distance from closed, categorical or essentialist definitions,
doing it with an understanding of their partial character and their limitations while at the same
time perceiving their usefulness to denominate the subjects, peoples, and cultures of an area
of the African diaspora in this territory of the world called the Americas.
I understand Afro-Latinx/Americans as a diaspora within a larger diaspora, a product
of a global dispersion of African populations since the inception of the modern/colonial
capitalist world-system, particularly within the Atlantic system, with multiple legacies and
identifiable diversities at various levels and scales from the local-national-regional to the
hemispheric and global. This larger diaspora should be interpreted as a complex constellation
of diasporas, a set of local histories linked by their common African ancestries and their
world-historical trajectories of uprooting and banishment, of enslaving and resistance, of
racial discrimination and leading-role participation in struggles against racism, all of these
being conditions that tended towards the creation of diverse genres of cultural expression of
multiple contributions to the processes of national formation, and of a variety of transnational
projects for justice, democratization, and liberation.
Capitalist modern/colonial chattel slavery and the construction of Afroamerica
The first Africans who settled in the Americas around 1505, mostly as an enslaved
workforce, came to the island called Haiti by its inhabitants and named Hispaniola by
Europeans. Following the relatively quick decline of the Indigenous population as a
consequence of their subjection to slavery and servitude by the European crowns‘ systems of
encomiendas and repartimiento indicating both forced labor and the illicit appropriation of
land and of being exposed to and dying from new diseases, the trade of enslaved peoples
____________
4
For the invention of Latin America, see Laó-Montes (2008), Laó-Montes and Dávila (2001), Ramos (1988),
and Mignolo (2006).
46
46
MONTES, A. L.
__________________
increased, and eventually the plantations based on enslaved workforce transformed into the
first form of industrial production in the emerging capitalist world-system. Since the early
16th century to the 19th century, millions of sub-Saharan Africans were brought by force to
the Americas through the capitalist slave trade. Most of the enslaved came to the region we
know today as Latin America. Estimates of the number of Africans brought by the slave trade
fluctuate from between seven to twenty million people.
Since the abolition of slavery and particularly since the early 20th century, diverse
migrations and population flows of Afro-descendants through the Americas have also taken
place. Within Latin America and the Caribbean, Central America and the United States, Afro-
American diasporas have constantly articulated and diversified.
A study of the ethno-racial map of the Americas in the 18th century shows that Afro-
descendants (Blacks and mulattos) make up the larger part of the population.
5
In view of this,
during the first half of the 20
th
century, nation-states articulated and adopted demographic
whitening policies, considerably reducing the Black and mulatto populations, especially in the
territories occupied by Argentina, Chile, and the south of Brazil. Nevertheless, those places
and regions where the Indigenous population was relatively smaller and Black settlements
were more numerous and established continue to be key territories for Afro-Latinx diasporas
and stand out as historical bulwarks of the African diaspora in the Americas. The geography
of Afro-Latin-American diasporas has changed with time; however, places and regions in
countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela
have been important centers since the beginning of the Africanization of the Americas.
Because Haiti was, in the 18th century, the wealthiest colony supported by enslaved
labor, the Haitian Revolution constituted a development of exceptional importance for the
culture and politics of resistance, as well as for the restructuring of colonial states and racial
capitalism. The world-historical event of Black revolution in Saint Domingue should be
considered the epicenter of Afro-American history of the times.
6
A widespread fear of masters
was nurtured by the dissemination, in the whole diaspora, of a memory of revolutionary
success and the possibility of a hope of freedom in enslaved Africans‘ cultures of resistance
throughout the Americas. The Haitian Revolution (1796-1804) and its aftermath as Aime
____________
5
Some of those maps exist. For the most recent, see Andrews (2004, 2016) and the Minority Rights Group
(1997).
6
Academic literature about the Haitian Revolution is wide-ranging. Some of the best contributions are Dubois
(2005), Fischer (2004), Fick (1990), James (1938), and Trouillot (1997).
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Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
Cesaire underscored inaugurated the idea of Négritude and launched a cosmopolitan circuit
of Afro-descendant racial politics that became a keystone of the abolitionist movement that
constituted the first anti-systemic movement in the capitalist modern/colonial world-system.
7
Since the 19th century, the central geography of Afro-Latin American diasporas has
been identified mainly in relationship to three territories: Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba, sites of
the largest Afro-descendant populations. Apart from Haiti, Cuba and Brazil were, to a certain
extent, the most influential Black cultures of Latin America as a world region. Brazil and
Cuba shared the peculiarity of both having experienced an increase in the immigration of
enslaved Africans and in plantation agriculture all through the 19th century, even after the
legal abolition of the slave trade and after the industrial revolution.
8
As a result, more
Africans were destined for Brazil and Cuba, instead of being sent to other places in the
Americas or of being supplied by internal markets of enslaved individuals as in the cases of
Colombia and the U.S. The relatively large amount of Africans and their late arrival from the
African continent had major implications for the strengthening and significance of Afro-
diasporic expressive cultures (for instance, in art, music, literature, dance, and religion) and
consequently for the rise of Black public spaces and their corresponding racial politics.
From the inception of modern slavery after the long 16th century, the creation of areas
liberated from slave regimes known as cumbes, quilombos, or palenques, which were
created mainly by enslaved people who escaped from plantations was crucial to the
emergence of Afro-American identities, cultures, and politics. Those historical spaces that
certain scholars call sociedades cimarronas proliferated, constituting a threat to the stability
of slave regimes. The term sociedades cimarronas (maroon societies) is derived from the
Spanish word cimarrón, which was originally used to stigmatize those who fled from slavery.
These maroon societies or palenques became beacons of hope for achieving freedom, as well
as ideological inspirations to identify with Africanity and gritude. Their memory remains
alive, as exemplified by the present-day identification with leaders such as Benkos Bioho,
who headed maroon societies in New Granada in the 17th century, and by the current village
____________
7
For abolitionism as the first antisytemic movement see Martin (2005), Santiago-Valles (2005), Winant (2001,
2004).
8
Haiti is seldom included as a part of Latin America because the region tends to be reduced to the Spanish and
Portuguese speaking countries. Here we include it for two main reasons: firstly, because of the impact of the
Haitian revolution on the very constitution of the region, and secondly because, in the last analysis, the ―Latin‖
as a category emerges, as we have noted, from ideologists of the French empire. Concerning the increase of
slavery in Cuba and Brazil after its abolition in Haiti resulting from the Haitian revolution.
48
MONTES, A. L.
__________________
of maroon heritage on the Colombian Caribbean called San Basilio de Palenque. Benkos is
invoked as a founding figure of Afro-Colombian history. In 1988, the march to celebrate the
centennial of the abolition of slavery in Brazil was conceived to honor Zumbi, the last leader
of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a kingdom of maroons in northeastern Brazil that lasted
almost a century, from 1605 to 1694, until the Portuguese finally dismantled the settlement
but not its legacy as revealed by today´s Quilombola movement.
By the early 19th century, a growing archipelago of African diasporas can already be
identified as a historical formation within the emergence of the world-region to the south of
the Rio Grande to be named as Latin America. Afro-descendants were dispersed throughout
the entire geographic area, from Mexico to Argentina, although their central geography was
concentrated in Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and
Venezuela, as well as in (some urban, others rural) sub-regions of Central America (the
Garifunas in Honduras and Guatemala, Nicaragua‘s Atlantic coast, Puerto Limon in Costa
Rica), Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay. Indeed, the combination of everyday resistances against
slavery, rebellions of the enslaved together with free Blacks, and the abolitionist movement
were the principal reasons for the abolition of the institution of slavery and for the
emancipation processes from slave regimes in the Americas.
A peculiar modernity of the historical universe that I refer to as Afroamerica
9
and
specifically Afro-Latin-America was born within Ibero-American locations of the Black
Atlantic in the search for empowerment of the Afro-diasporic subjects who inhabited those
worlds, through their daily struggles and the practical effects of their self-affirmation of
memory, being, and culture.
The historical production of Afro-Latinx/America: From the wars for independence to
the struggles for citizenship and national equity
The continuous struggle of Afro-diasporic subjects to reclaim their humanity and to
ratify their rights to a truth of their past, to a culture, and to fair living conditions resulted in
the establishment of a subaltern space of historical agency in which the leading role would
correspond to Afro-descendants throughout the continent. The existence of a middle stratum,
____________
9
I use the term Afroamerica as it was coined as the name of a journal that circulated in Mexico in the 1940s; the
meaning behind this idea is discussed and amplified throughout the book. This terminology is intended to
provoke a complete overturn in the concept or idea of African-America and Afro-North-Americans in the sense
of the ―United States of America‖ that not only excludes Afro-Latin/Americans but also Afro-Canadians from
within their rank of meanings.
49
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
composed of mulattos and free Blacks, was equally crucial for the organization of Black
public spheres with their own publications, cultural production, teaching spaces, meeting
places, and small enterprises. These Afro‖ or ―Black‖ social spaces and political-cultural
scenarios were the historical foundation for Afro-descendants‘ participation in the wars for
independence and, consequently, in the nation-state formation processes that created Latin
America and the Caribbean as a world-region. Latin-American history must be written from
the viewpoint of African diasporas, while the history of Afroamerica could be recounted from
the perspectives of the diverse Afro-Latin-American diasporas.
For instance, the wars against the Spanish empire that achieved the independence of
the territories that were later organized as Latin American nations were seen by many Afro-
descendants as an opportunity for the abolition of slavery and for the creation of more
democratic forms of citizenship, although this was not the case of the Euro-American creole
elites who identified themselves as being of Western ancestry as superior to ―Blacks‖ and
―Indians.‖ In Afro-diasporic historic narratives, protagonists were not necessarily leaders
issued from the creole elite such as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin; they were the
masses of Indigenous individuals and Blacks, subaltern subjects who collectively composed
the independence militias who fought on different fields for a more democratic political,
economic, and cultural contract with their own leaders such as Jose Prudencio Padilla in
today‘s Colombia, and Quintin Banderas in Cuba.
From the viewpoint of Afro-descendants, the wars between Spain and creoles in the
early 19th century can be interpreted as a combat between European and Euro-American
Whites, dominant classes fighting for hegemonic power. In the course of the struggles, they
made a commitment to grant the masses certain freedoms and participation, in exchange for
political and military support; that is the reason why although many Afro-descendants
struggled within the ranks of the military forces fighting for independence, others were
recruited by imperial forces. In most cases, Blacks continued to be low-rank soldiers and did
not manage to attain the grades of high-ranking officers, nor did they become political or
intellectual leaders of the movement for independence. Cuba was a peculiar case due to the
recognized importance of several Afro-descendant generals such as Antonio Maceo, while
Colombia‘s first independence epic was led by Blacks and mulattos who counted among their
leaders Pedro Romero originally a Cuban from the Province of Matanzas.
The specificity of the Cuban situation is revealing, as the exception that confirms the
rule, of the ethnic-racial politics that configured the emerging nation-states. After the Haitian
50
MONTES, A. L.
__________________
revolution, Cuba became the wealthiest plantation colony, having as its basis the greatest
enslaved workforce. The conditions assured by formidable profits and the fear of another
insurrection of the enslaved maintained loyalty to Spanish colonial rule by the island‘s
plantocracy until the late 19th century. The Cry of Yara started the first war for independence
in 1868; free ―people of color‖ and the enslaved were sufficiently organized to play a key role
in participating and providing leadership to the nationalist movement. Cuban independence
forces had the peculiarity of being composed, in the majority, of people of color, having
Black and mulatto officers as high-ranking generals. This had a big impact on the particularly
anti-racist discourse that gained ground in 19th century Cuban nationalism, eloquently
articulated by revolutionary general and political strategist Antonio Maceo, and writer and
political leader Jose Marti. This points toward a narrative of the constitution of the Cuban
nation that is different from the official memory that highlights the figure of White plantation
owner Carlos Manuel de Cespedes as the initiator of Cuba‘s first independence war in 1868.
In counterpoint, I propose, as a previous epic, the conspiracy planned by free Black Jose
Antonio Aponte in 1812, inspired by the Haitian revolution and in concert with abolitionist
movements and Afro-diasporic movements and networks throughout the Atlantic world.
Afro-descendants played an important role in the historical movement that gained the
independence of territories that are now grouped together as Latin America. On the
battlefront, they fought as soldiers of low military rank while at the same time were
negotiating the abolition of slavery as well as their inclusion as full citizens in the emerging
states. A reduced number of Afro-Hispanics were recognized as military, political, and
intellectual leaders in several nascent countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and
Mexico. In Mexico, in the early 19th century, the rebellions led by Afro-Indigenous (or Afro-
Mestizo), leaders like Vicente Guerrero and Jose Maria Morelos demonstrated the way in
which struggles for racial and economic justice continued after independence. Yet, Guerrero‘s
and Morelos‘ Africanity was virtually erased from Mexican national memory.
After having gained independence from formal political domination by European
colonialism, the young Latin American nations remained economically subordinated to a
world-economy dominated by the British Empire. Within each nation-state in the region,
Blacks, Indians, and mulattos continued to be economically, politically, and culturally
subjugated by the White creole elite that declared itself to be the heirs of Europeans and
representatives of the West in the Americas. Independence movements prepared the ground
for a gradual process of the abolition of slavery. However, the persistent condition of ethnic-
51
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
racial subordination, cultural devaluing, and class inequality contributed to rendering Black
and Indigenous subjects as second-class citizens in the nascent Latin American nation-states.
Such conditions established a new historical, racial, and social constellation of power, a
neocolonial coloniality that framed cultural struggles and movements for social justice and
citizenship in which Afro-Latino-Americans played a key role.
The process of constructing modern nation-states and liberal politics in Latin-
American nation-states did not hold the same significance for Afro-descendants as for Whites
and racially mixed members of the creole elite. By the mid-19th century, Latin-American
politieswith the outstanding exceptions of Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, all of which
remained as colonieshad abolished slavery. Afro-descendants deployed a plurality of forms
of resistance and self-affirmation that resulted in the abolition of the legal codes of castes by
the late 19th century. In the institutional domains of 19th century formal politics, Afro-Latin-
Americans remained as clients of the liberal and conservative parties that shared alternations
in power. Afro-Latin American struggles for inclusion, recognition, resources, and citizenship
were significant forces in the historical debate for world-wide democratization. But, we still
need to re-write national and regional histories recognizing the contributions of
Afrodescendents to democracy and justice.
An important arena of struggle was staged against the devaluation of Afro-diasporic
cultural forms and religious practices through Eurocentric/Occidentalist state policies and
ecclesiastic doctrines. In Brazil and Cuba, where Afro-diasporic religions had become a basic
element for the everyday life of many Afro-descendants, particularly in the most subaltern
sectors, Afro-religious organizations such as terreiros in Brazil and cabildos in Cuba had to
struggle in order to survive the degradation to which they were subjected. Afro-Latin
Americans also developed their own public spaces for intellectual expression; the creation of
newspapers, academies, and social clubs aimed, to a great extent, at the intermediate stratum
of the mulatto society. Since the late 19th century, working-class free Blacks and mulattos
have constituted a radical intelligentsia that was responsible for the emergence of an anarchist
and communist workers‘ movement, as is most apparent in the case of Puerto Rico, which
produced a workers‘ literature and press that constituted a proletarian public sphere in which
Afro-descendants stood out.
During this same time period, Afro-Cuban social and political organizations had
achieved national coordination through the creation of the Directorio Central de la Raza de
Color (Central Directorate of the Colored Race) (Lanier, 1996). Cuba provides a clear
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example of the formation of two different albeit interconnected domains, two spheres of
Afro-Cuban life with elements of continuity to this very day, one of them led by the
Westernized middle-class acting through the formal channels of the state and civil society and
the other a subaltern counterpublic centered around working classes pushed to the margins in
neighborhood and urban tenement houses. In counterpoint, these two different but intertwined
domains the one bearing the culture of the intellectual middle-class and the other
comporting the subaltern popular culture configures in its dialectical and dialogical relations
the historical substratum of cultural productions and political cultures of Afro-descendants in
Latin-America.
Another central historical field, located in an oppositional sphere of self-assertiveness
for Afro-Latin-Americans, was the economic domain. After the abolition of slavery, most
Blacks remained on the lowest wage levels or were pushed to the social margins. The Western
world‘s booming urbanization process during the late 19th and early 20th centuries drew
people of all backgrounds from the country to the city, including a mass migration of Afro-
descendants. From this influx came the creation of an urban working class. In countries like
Cuba and Puerto Rico, where a high percentage of the working class were Afro-descendants,
these groups played a fundamental role in organizing the labor movement. This new working
class led to the creation of the working class neighborhoods which were largely composed by
Afro-descendants. While a high percentage of this urban Black population was marginalized
from formal employment and citizenship, those settlements were also significant spaces for
the production of Afro-Latin-American urban cultures that had and continue to have a
national and transnational impact. The influence of Black urban cultures was facilitated by the
growth of cultural industries since the first half of the 20th century.
The emergence of Afro-Latinx politics and the boom of Black cultural expressions
The early decades of the 20th century set the stage for the creation of the first
organizations that explicitly advocated for racial politics that tended to empower people of
color in Our Afroamerica: the Partido Independiente de Color (Independent Colored Party)
(1908) in Cuba and the Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazilian Black Front) (1931) in Brazil.
Numerous world-historical conditions came together to give birth to a qualitatively distinct
moment for Afro-descendants in Latin America. The first one was the Spanish-Cuban-
American-Filipino War-SCAFW of 1898 which marked the birth of the North-American
53
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
Empire as a world power and informed the rise of Latinamericanism as a conscious discourse
of regionality, coined by intellectuals of the Ibero-American world. The SCAFW of 1898
marked the political-economic domination of the United States in the hemisphere and the
establishment of colonial and neocolonial forms of power in the Caribbean and Central
America. Puerto Rico was annexed as a colony while Cuba remained a neo-colony. In North
American imperial discourse, Caribbean and Central America became the backyard‖ and
new categories of ethnic-racial classification were developed. The racialized civilization
cultivated the divide between ―Anglos‖ and ―Latinos turned into a central issue in the
Americas. White creole elites of the U.S. and Latin-America claimed to be heirs of the West
in the Americas. Ibero-American elites defined their identities in relation to their external
others (Europeans and North-Americans) and against their internal othernesses Blacks,
Native Americans, Asians, peasantries, homosexuals. This hemispheric division, along with
the internal differences elaborated by creole elites, generated the parameters of both the U.S.‘s
imperial discourse and the hegemonic Latinamericanism of creole elites.
The creole ruling classes and the so-called intellectuals who presided over the young
Latin American nation-states promoted policies of modernization that were built on racist
themes of the times, including the nascent ―science‖ of eugenics and social Darwinism
(Stepan, 1991). The civilizing mission that guided the racial, cultural, and economic policies
of Latin American states, which were also expressions of the global configuration of the
coloniality of power/knowledge, involved a tacit equation between modernization and
whitening. Therefore, in the early decades of the 20
th
century, Latin American governments
undertook a policy of incentives, offering good jobs and subsidies for travel to White
European immigrants, thereby attempting to change the ethnic-racial composition of the
populations. The immediate effect was a substantial decrease in the Black population and an
increase in our marginalization. In places like Uruguay, Argentina, and the south of Brazil,
such efforts were successful. Nevertheless, they did not succeed in substantially transforming
the ethnic-racial demographics in most of the region, particularly in places of Indigenous
majorities such as Bolivia and Guatemala, and where there were large Black populations, as
in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Venezuela.
The general increase of global and regional migrations in the early 20th century, a
period between two world economic crises (the 1873 crisis and the Great Depression of 1930)
and World War I, accompanied by two revolutions the Russian and Mexican revolutions,
circa 1917 also included migratory movements of the African diaspora within the Americas.
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Following this movement, the massive migrations from the Anglophone Caribbean towards
Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean (especially Cuba and Dominican
Republic) first mostly as labor force for the construction of the Panama Canal and later as
rural proletarians at the service of corporations such as the United Fruit Company
redistributed the geography of Afro-Latin American and Caribbean diasporas. Another
important element of this migratory wave were the thousands of Haitians who moved to
eastern Cuba, mainly to work in the sugarcane industry, together with laborers from the
Anglophone Caribbean. The eastern part of Cuba became an Afro-diasporic, trans-Caribbean
sub-region centered in the city of Santiago. This partly explains why the Universal Negro
Improvement Association, led by Marcus Garvey who visited Cuba twice during this period
was able to sign up some 350,000 registered members in Cuba.
Migratory patterns in other countries in this region resembled those of Eastern Cuba.
Many Black migrants arrived to Central America from the Anglophone Caribbean to supply
labor for companies such as the United Fruit Company. In Costa Rica they facilitated the
creation of what became a vibrant Black community with its own cultural production (for
instance, in literature) and evolved into a political movement centered on the coastal city of
Limon, eventually gaining influence and presence in the country, and in the African diaspora.
Similarly, Afro-descendant communities grew in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and
Panama. In Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua there is the much older story of the
Garifunas who were compulsorily settled in the region at the end of the 18th century
(circa1789) when British colonialists expelled them from the island of St. Vincent after
perceiving that these groups of Afrodiasporic maroons and Caribbean Indians were hard to
colonize. These are quintessentially diasporic peoples, for they maintain their transnational
ethnic identity as Garifunas wherever they are. Many of them live in metropolitan global
cities such a New York and Los Angeles, but maintain identifying national distinctions as
Guatemalans, Belizeans, and Hondurans as part of their Garifuna identity.
Such Afro-diasporic moves within Our Afroamerica had also bore some disastrous
results. A particularly dramatic case was the 1937 massacre of nearly 30,000 Haitians in the
Dominican Republic by order of dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who aggressively deployed
a campaign in favor of a Negrophobic definition of Dominican identity based on anti-Haitian
sentiments. Trujillo‘s dictatorship was the instrument for the development of a peculiar racist
anti-Black posture in the Dominican Republic, substantiated by moving Négritude to Haiti,
while intellectuals developed a Hispanophile discourse of Dominican nationality and an
55
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
Indigenous nomenclature in which every colored Dominican was classified as an ―Indian‖ of
a sort.
Dominican Republic also witnessed successive migration waves from the Anglophone
Caribbean, particularly in the form of labor power for the sugar industry in the region of San
Pedro de Macoris. Many of these thousands of new immigrants who would eventually be
labelled Cocolos in colloquial language joined Marcus Garvey‘s Universal Negro
Improvement Association. This particular migration wave also contributed to anti-Black fears
against immigrants in this country. As revealed by Panamanian writer Orlando Alfaro in his
1924 book entitled El Peligro Antillano en la América Central other countries were exhibiting
the same response.
Panama a country that eventually became an axis for Afro-Latinx organizations at
the national and hemispheric levels historical tension between the West Indies (Anglophone
and Francophone Antilles) and Afro-Hispanic diasporas (named ―Colonial Blacks‖) entailed
negotiations to consolidate a unified national movement of Afro-descendants. The hegemonic
nationalist discourse of the so-called colonial Afro-Panamanians represented as authentic
Panamanians, in contrast with Afro-Antilleans, rejected as foreigners provoked fissures that
have hindered the articulation of the Afro-Panamanian movement (Priestley; Barrow, 2008).
The period between the Great Depression of 1930s in the U.S. and the outbreak of
World War II, the established structures of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system
suffered severe blows, and Latin American societies were reconfigured. Changes occurred in
rural areas including an increase in the concentration of land, the large-scale loss of land for
Black farmers, and the emergence of a Black rural proletariat. These changes provoked the
already-mentioned massive migration from country to city, which created the conditions for
the organization of urban settlements that became centers of Afro-Latin-American politics and
cultures. The Afro-descendants‘ urbanization process and the growth of Black urban popular
cultures were the cornerstones of the emerging process of the Afro-Americanization of public
culture in Latin America in various local and national scenarios and throughout the whole
region.
Three crucial elements explain how Afroamerican cultural practices survived this
dramatic move from the rural peripheries to central areas. The changes that ensued are most
visible in music and dance but are also apparent in other cultural genres such as literature, the
visual arts, performance, and religion. The first element, was the struggle of Afro-descendants
for reaffirmation and defense of their cultural practices as valid expressions of national
56
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culture, against the hegemonic discourse and cultural policies that devalued them as marginal
and backward. In countries such as Brazil and Cuba, there were attempts to repress Afro-
diasporic religions until the early decades of the 20th century.
Those daily conflicts racial, social, and cultural were launched by the urban middle
classes of mulattos and Blacks but also by Afro-descendants from subaltern sectors (working
class and marginalize strata) who lived in the barrios, the nascent favelas in Rio de Janeiro, or
Havana‘s solares all terms joined together in face of poor, overcrowded neighborhoods. The
Black middle strata launched its advocacy mostly in the political realm of citizenship, while
the subaltern sectors fought more informally to keep their aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual
practices.
The second process was the emergence of cultural industries such as radio, recording
studios, entertainment, and film industry, that facilitated the dissemination of Black music and
dances in several national and transnational contexts most markedly in Brazil, Cuba, and
Puerto Rico, in relation to Black Americans and Afro-Latinx metropolitan centers,
particularly New York City. The third element was the organization of transnational networks
of Afroamerican artists, writers, academics, political organizers, and cultural agents who
cultivated translocal networks through cultural creations and political as well as epistemic
activism, constituting cultural movements and intellectual currents that articulated the African
diaspora throughout the Americas and in Europe.
The roles played by Afro-Latinxs in cosmopolitan networks of the African diaspora in
the 1930s and 1940s deserve more detailed research. A productive angle that has been studied
is the life projects and multiple links of Afro-Puerto-Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who
is widely known as the creator of the largest archive of history and culture of the global
African diaspora. The life and legacy of this Black Puerto Rican who founded what is still
today the most important world archive for Black history became a pillar of the Harlem
Renaissance and also the Chairman of the American Black Academy. His work is a rich and
fertile source for the study of the avatars and articulations of the global African diaspora and
particularly of Our Afroamerica.
This period of the 1920s and 30s produced powerful and energetic waves of Afro-
diasporic reciprocity in particular through the political-cultural movements of three
cosmopolitan networks of Black cultural creators and political activists: The Harlem
Renaissance (New York), the movement of Négritude (Paris) and Afro-Cubanism (Havana).
An important relationship in the Black diasporic cosmopolitan world was the one struck
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Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
between writers Nicolas Guillen (Cuban) and Langston Hughes (North-American), whose
friendship, intellectual exchange, mutual translations of poetry, and reciprocal introduction to
their respective national and linguistic contexts eloquently exemplified Afro-diasporic
solidarity.
This period of growth continued into the 1940s, as exemplified by the organization of
the Instituto de Estudios Afroamericanos (Institute of Afro-American Studies) and the
publication of a short-lived journal called Afroamérica in Mexico. Both the institute and the
review were launched and sponsored by a group of trans-American writers and activists of (or
supportive of) the African diaspora that included the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, Afro-Cubans
Nicolas Guillen and Romulo Lachatenere, Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, Haitian Jacques
Roumain, Mexican Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran, Martinican Aime Cesaire, Trinidadian Eric
Williams, Afro-North Americans Alain Locke and W.E.B. DuBois, and European
anthropologist Melvin Herkovits.
Reconfigurations of Afro-Latin America in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization
In the early 1980s, the crisis of the developmentalist project as a strategy to promote
the growth and the state of general welfare in the world-economy converged with the decline
of North-American hegemony in the political, economic, and cultural realms within the global
system. The establishment and dissemination of neoliberal economic policies in every corner
of the planet promoted open economies to cultivate the so-called free market, favoring
investments and trade for transnational corporations. The rise of political rationalities that
compelled cuts in state-level social expenditure, the liberation of economic regulations, and
the reduction of democracy to its procedural dimensions had devastating effects on the lives
of millions of Afro-Latin-Americans.
With the exacerbation of previously existing trends that undermined the ownership of
small- and medium-sized properties of farmers, neoliberal policies also decreed the
privatization and commercialization of vital resources such as water and forests, which had
been common property or had scarcely touched by the logic of capital. Hence, regions
inhabited by Black communities such as Colombia‘s Pacific coast, Esmeraldas in Ecuador,
and Garifuna territories in Honduras, areas that, following initial colonization, had remained
relatively abandoned, and consequently had relative independence from being recolonized by
capitalists in quest of profit, became the target of the exploitation of land, labor, and natural
resources.
58
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By the 1990s, those places witnessed the emergence of social movements voicing
demands for Afro-descendants‘ identities, history, culture, as well as for racial justice and
territorial rights. They struggle against attempts to expropriate their lands and exploit their
workforce while mobilizing for biodiversity, ecological integrity, and the right to remain in
their ancestral territories. These movements of Afro-diasporic self-affirmation are coupled
with growing worldwide ecological demands contra land appropriation and against the
expropriation of communities by transnational corporations.
The proliferation of politicized terrains of struggle that characterized new ways of
entering politics and were won by the new social movements that began a rapid growth in the
1980s opened up the political space for rising Afro-Latin-American movements. A key
juncture in the emergence and articulation of Afro-Latin-American movements was the
Continental Campaign of 500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance in 1992.
Another critical occurrence was the Third World Conference against Racism, organized 2001
by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, which facilitated the consolidation of a
regional agenda for Black movements in Latin America. Durban served as a mechanism of
articulation to build networks, achieve better coordination, more focused debates, and
improved negotiation of points involving historical projects and political agendas. All this had
the effect of gaining a clearer sense of purpose and better organizational skills to shape a
hemispheric movement of Afro-descendants in Latin-America. Delegations from states and
civil society included Afro-Latinxs from the across the Americas (including the United States)
at the Durban conference. This bestowed on this effort an Afro-diasporic trans-American
character, an articulation of Our Afroamerica. Nevertheless, the post-Durban period revealed
the limitations of organizing political agendas and historical projects in the institutional
framework that prevail in the global order, as well as the differences within the Afro-Latin-
American political field as I demonstrate in my book Contrapunteos Diasporicos.
In the present period, important gains has taken place in national scenarios, most of
which resulted from the work of Black social movements. Nicaraguans approved a
constitution in 1987 that acknowledged collective rights and ethnic-racial autonomy, to a
great extent as a result of the struggle of Afro-descendants and Native Americans living on
that country‘s Atlantic coast. In Colombia, the 1991 constitution stipulated cultural and social
rights for ethnic groups, especially for Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. A similar
development took place in Guatemala, where the 1994 constitution placed the Garifuna for
the first time on the ethnic national map, together with Indigenous communities. Something
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Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
similar happened in Ecuador, Panama, and Uruguay. In Cuba, a number of Afro-Cubans were
strategically placed in the ruling Communist Party‘s Central Committee in the early 1990s. In
Brazil, the organization of the Unified Black Movement in the 1980s was followed by the
approval of a state strategy against discrimination by the latter years of the following decade.
Since the 1990s, governments have approved national strategies against discrimination in
public positions. Efforts were also made to promote the increase of Afro-Brazilians in
universities, as well as in official posts.
All of this was endorsed by the so-called affirmative action plans that were hatched on
U.S. soil, coming from Afro-North-American (including Afro-Latinx) political moves. Those
plans inspired a public debate in Brazil around the issue of whether they would be welcomed
in the Brazilian context. Likewise, a debate took place about collective rights to land
ownership and citizenship of the Quilombolas the name given to ancestral or long-term
Afro-Brazilian communities, some of them residing in former maroon societies called
Quilombos
10
in the context of constitutional change and the celebration of the centennial of
the abolition of slavery in 1888. The debate on Quilombismo revealed an ecological trend in
the new Afro-Latin-American social movements. Political matters of great importance were
promoted around the goal of historical continuity and for claims for reparations to be
extended to the whole African diaspora in the Americas.
The growth of the Afro-Latin American middle strata its formally educated and
politicized classes has been one of the most important phenomena in the development of
social change for the African diaspora and can be attributed to a large extent to the long-term
effects of the struggles for democracy and social justice. Yet, at the same time, at this very
moment, under the aegis of neoliberal globalization, there has been a growing rise in
inequality, marginalization, and poverty as well as the appearance of a new racism aimed at
Afro-descendant subaltern sectors. A growing sentiment of fear as a component of the
prevailing ethnic-racial ―common sense‖ fuels policies of debasement and of the
criminalization of sectors that have been socially marginalized, especially in urban centers. In
countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and the United States, many of the members
of the so-called ―dangerous‖ classes are Black. In this context, an important form of self-
affirmation and self-valorization, coming from the trenches of Afro-diasporic youth, is Hip-
____________
10
In Spanish they are called palenques or cumbes. See Farfán-Santos (2016) and Wagner Berno de Almeida
(2009).
60
MONTES, A. L.
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Hop culture, originally a trans-diasporic product of Afro-descendants from subaltern urban
spaces in the U.S., but now constituting a world youth movement. In Brazil and Cuba, rappers
self-identify as part of an Afro-diasporic movement and as chroniclers of life in marginal
sectors of society.
Afro-diasporic transnational consciousness and organization also manifests itself in
sub-regional and hemispheric networks and in the groupings of Afro-Latin-American and
Caribbean women. Meetings of Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean women have grouped
grassroots organizations with women from every point of the Americas to unite in the struggle
for the specific interests and needs of Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean.
These groups are part of the Afro-diasporic movements of diverse character. An influential
current self-define as bearer of a decolonial Black feminism aligned with the larger Afro-
descendant movement while retaining their autonomy. The election of Francia Marquez as
Vice-President of Colombia with an explicitly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal‖
politics, demonstrate the tremendous significance of decolonial Black feminism as a radical
force of liberation against entangled oppressions and their corresponding entwined violences.
A global movement advocating for historical reparations because of the effects of slavery as a
crime against humanity and the ―afterlife of slavery‖ in the repertoire of interlocking
oppressions and entangled violences racial, sexual, social, geo-political, ecological
epistemic is championed by regional organizations such as CARICOM (Association of
Caribbean States), the Institute for the Black World in the United States, and the Articulacion
Regional Afrodescendiente en las Americas y el Caribe (Regional Articulation of
Afrodescendents in the Americas and the Caribbean), a regional web of social movements.
The Coalicion Negra por Direitos (Black Coalition for Rights), one of the most
comprehensive Black alliances in Brazilian history, committed to organize a national
campaign for reparative justice in their national assembly held November, 2023 in Alagoas. In
short, a radical politics of reparation implies a redistribution of power, wealth, recognition,
and representation that implies profound transformation in the world order of things. Playing
this drum, hemispheric movements for Black Lives-M4BL, which incarnate the newest
expression of Black radicalism from the hearts of Amferica Ladina/Our Afroamerica,
encompasses struggles against class, gender, sexual, racial, ecological, cultural and epistemic
injustice, bearing a radical vitalism a politics of Eros against the necropolitics of the
61
Cosmovisões e territórios:
Abya Yala como Território Epistêmico
civilizational crisis,
11
that makes Amefrica/Afroamerica into a beacon of hope and a
Northstar.
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Recebido em: 17/04/2023
Aceito em: 12/12/2023
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