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T O P I C     R E V I E W
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
"Black Grandma in the Closet"- Full Episode: Mexico & Peru: A Hidden Race
In Mexico and Peru Professor Gates explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people—the two countries together received far more slaves than did the United States —brought to these countries as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru. Watch full episode:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/video/full-episode-mexico-peru-a-hidden-race/227/

Full Episode: Brazil: A Racial Paradise?
In Brazil, Professor Gates delves behind the façade of Carnival to discover how this ‘rainbow nation’ is waking up to its legacy as the world’s largest slave economy:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/featured/black-in-latin-america-full-episode-brazil-a-racial-paradise/224/

Full Episode: Cuba: The Next Revolution
In Cuba Professor Gates finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island are inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/featured/black-in-latin-america-full-episode-cuba-the-next-revolution/219/

Full Episode: Haiti & the Dominican Republic: An Island Divided
In the Dominican Republic, Professor Gates explores how race has been socially constructed in a society whose people reflect centuries of inter-marriage, and how the country’s troubled history with Haiti informs notions about racial classification. In Haiti, Professor Gates tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves’s hard fight for liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire became a double-edged sword:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/featured/haiti-the-dominican-republic-an-island-divided-watch-full-episode/165/


If you haven't caught the above episodes, they are good viewing.

[Smile]
 
Grumman
Member # 14051
 - posted
Yes it is an interesting series. I've only seen Cuba, Mexico and Peru thus far. I've only been aware of it for a week now.
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
The African genetic component to present Mexican and Peruvian population is diluted? LOL! A crock of shyt. There is no significant genetic evidence to make such a claim yet progressives still continue to push their utopian social agenda. Tsk tsk tsk.
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
This is getting more ridiculous as I continue to watch the video. Because a Mexican is dark it means he/she has Black ancestry? OMFG! So the Native Mexicans were not dark? Is that what I am supposed to believe?
 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
^Dude, shut up already, OK, we get it.

Anyways, a lot of this was lifted from the "Wonders of the African World" series that Gates also narrated, so I guess they wanted to extend the segments about Latin America. Confirming Truth is annoying but I will agree with him in that Gates is really naive in the way he asks questions and frames things sometimes.

BTW, big ups to TruthandRights for finding and sharing this.
 
ausar
Member # 1797
 - posted
I wonder if there will ever be a documentary on being black in the Arab world. The Arab world parallels Latin America in terms of racism and assimilation. Although it would probably be harder to pinpoint an whether the African ancestry was from slavery or indigenous.
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
Pre-watching the vids...

Where is Puerto Rico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela or even Honduras?

This series from right now, doesn't even seem to scratch the surface of "Black in Latin America".

Latin America of course which is a blanket term in of itself, which needs to be done away with in general.

As it takes away from the deep ancestry of Native Americans and Africans within these countries branding them all fallaciously Latin.

Will comment after viewing.
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
Post viewing:

Definitely a good way to let the world know of the African presence in what is supposedly Latin America.

That the U.S.A. is not the only place where African descendants live and the struggle and contributions to each respective culture can be found therein....

After watching the vids, I retract my previous statement, instead Gates did scratch the surface.

But that's it, he scratched the surface.

Will he dig deeper? I hope to see more.

Also, how many African U.S. Americans see and realize this fact?

quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
Confirming Truth is annoying but I will agree with him in that Gates is really naive in the way he asks questions and frames things sometimes.

Like for example?
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcvKQ4rtKpE

Some Puerto Rican Music Salsa, Bomba Y Plena etc all African....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SugaArScoSY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J09tYXHH0uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWPJQfZrv84&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOikl-BomoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I5P3rM9PEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1sk_MC3Bmk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe8SwzwlHcE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78RyIaOAY5s&feature=fvsr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIPZ_XSmqc&feature=related
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
For a good book on earlier experiences in the U.S.A. relationship wise between Puerto Rican and African Americans read...

Down These Mean Streets

quote:
Originally posted by MindoverMatter718:
Explorations in Black and Tan
Series Continues

By Carol Amoruso, Hispanic American Village Editor

Editor's Note: We follow up our discussion of troubled black-brown relations in Los Angeles with a continental drift eastward, giving a look at New York, where, to date, there have been no significant flare-ups. We’ve borrowed our title from Duke Ellington’s suite, Fantasy in Black and Tan, reasoning thus: Latinos come in all shades from black to tan, their skin having much to do with how they relate to each other and to African Americans. In addition, Ellington and his music, jazz, were a magnet for the city’s early Latino settlers. Together they bred Latin jazz, a lasting, superlative melding of affinities.



In the days before there was such a thing as a Latino in New York, “Latinos” were Puerto Rican. There was a smattering of Cubans, some stragglers from Mexico and the Dominican Republic, but their numbers were negligible compared to the 100,000 Puerto Ricans in the City at the time of the Second World War. A mass migration began at the end of the war, and by 1960, there were a million Puerto Ricans in New York.

Blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York found and fostered commonalities early on as they celebrated their African cultural and blood ties. Often they lived side-by-side, shunted into the more run-down service-deprived neighborhoods. Most whites fled when Puerto Ricans moved in, while in the black ghettoes, there was no place for them to go should they have wanted to get away.

At first, it seemed as if the population at large didn’t quite know what to make of these incoming folks, most somewhere between black and tan. Dexter Jeffries, professor of African American and other literature and writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College, tells us that his step grandfather, a “brown Cuban,” came to New York from Havana in the 30s, immediately found work, despite the hard economic times, and felt privileged and assimilated. But just 20 years later, Piri Thomas felt “hung between two sticks,” growing up on the mean streets of East Harlem. Thomas is shamed on the street when he doesn’t own up to his blackness yet shunned by his own brothers since they could “pass.” He spends a number of drug-addled years in el Barrio and in prison trying to sort it all out:

I looked at Brew, who was as black as God is supposed to be white. “Man, Brew,” I said, “you sure an ugly spook.”

Brew smiled. “Dig this Negro calling us ’spook,’” he said.

I smiled and said, “I’m a Porty Rican.”

“Ah only sees another Negro in fron’ of me,” said Brew.*



Accounts of those days may be somewhat romanticized yet truthful in revisiting shared interests--especially music--and poverty, marginalization from the mainstream society, a nascent politicization, negritude, all insuring an early black-brown brotherhood. Says Jeffries: ” …the coalition back then, it was spiritual. It was political. It was racial.” But Rigo Andino, PhD candidate at the University of Binghamton, New York, and a Nuyorican, offers a more nuanced take. By the 60s, he says, Puerto Ricans basically had to choose between three identities -- nationalist Puerto Rican, Afro-Puerto Rican, and black:

The black Puerto Rican… has historically had relationships with the black community, sees himself as being part of the black community, but at the same time, he reifies the Puerto Rican culture: “ I’m black, but I’m Puerto Rican.” Then there’s the one who says,” We have African blood in us, but we’re different. We’re Puerto Rican,” and they’ll uphold that to death. And then there’s the one who says,” I’m not black, I’m Puerto Rican,” to a certain to degree, having more of a white identity than the other two. So, it’s in terms of the individual Puerto Rican. You even had Puerto Ricans fighting alongside blacks against other Puerto Ricans.



Pushing the issue of identity was the Young Lords Party, which took many of its cues from the revolutionary Black Panthers. Although short-lived--internecine fighting and the toll taken by police infiltration and harassment led to their early dissolution--the YLP dedicated themselves to fostering Latino pride, activism--most notably against police brutality--and community service. (One of the Lords’ greatest achievements was the take-over of Lincoln Hospital, a South Bronx hell-hole, forcing the administration to establish a drug rehabilitation center.) The Young Lords and Panthers eventually made alliances with white street revolutionaries. The oppressor now was not the honkey, but the “system”; the focus became less one of Puerto Rican negritude than of class struggle.

Today, the city is the mosaic first imaged to by its first black mayor, David Dinkins, elected with massive Latino support. There are “Hispanics” and “Latinos” now, when once there were just Puerto Ricans, making the way browns relate to blacks a much thornier issue. Having been granted a pigeon-hole, all the City’s Latinos—German Argentines, Dominicans, black Ecuadorians, Peruvian indios—would, by definition, have to have much in common with African Americans, lending currency to Professor Jeffries’ definition of race:

Race is informing the dominant culture that you’ve accepted the title they’ve made up for you. It’s either words or labels intended to make the dominant culture comfortable with who you are.


http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/Hispanic/dialogue_opinion_letters/amoruso_black-brown-ny_1105.asp [/qb]


 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
1. Mexico - mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%

2. Peru Amerindian 45%, mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 37%, white 15%, black, Japanese, Chinese, and other 3%

3. Puerto Rico white (mostly Spanish origin) 76.2%, black 6.9%, Asian 0.3%, Amerindian 0.2%, mixed 4.4%, other 12% (2007)

4. Colombia mestizo 58%, white 20%, mulatto 14%, black 4%, mixed black-Amerindian 3%, Amerindian 1%

Black population in Latin America is insignificant in number.

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html
 
Just call me Jari
Member # 14451
 - posted
When I was a cashier at my old job, this beautiful latino chic and her mom came to cash out. I could tell she had some "black" in her because both her mom and herself had Afro hair and light skin. When I asked they said they were Puerto Rican.

Another Puerto Rican when I was a lifeguard, he looked like a straight up "Black" or Dark White man. Thats best I can describe it because he looked like a white man faicial and hair wise but had dark skin, and he told me he was black and peurto Rican, but I bet he was more Spanish Puerto Rican.

Also my cousin is Half PR.

African Americans def. has some connections with other Latinos...Good stuff Mind.

quote:
Originally posted by AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcvKQ4rtKpE

Some Puerto Rican Music Salsa, Bomba Y Plena etc all African....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SugaArScoSY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J09tYXHH0uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWPJQfZrv84&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOikl-BomoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I5P3rM9PEY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1sk_MC3Bmk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe8SwzwlHcE&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78RyIaOAY5s&feature=fvsr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nIPZ_XSmqc&feature=related


 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718):
Like for example?

For one he's always trying to apply that stupid 1% rule to other countries. He applies the term Black waaay too loosely, disrespecting people's ancestry which is obviously much more complex than: "oh, he/she has some African ancestry therefore he/she's Black". He brought his American cultural baggage with him to Africa as well in the Wonders of the African World Series. It's kind of annoying for me to watch sometimes when he flies around the world imposing absolute labels on people.

quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
1. Mexico - mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%

2. Peru Amerindian 45%, mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 37%, white 15%, black, Japanese, Chinese, and other 3%

3. Puerto Rico white (mostly Spanish origin) 76.2%, black 6.9%, Asian 0.3%, Amerindian 0.2%, mixed 4.4%, other 12% (2007)

4. Colombia mestizo 58%, white 20%, mulatto 14%, black 4%, mixed black-Amerindian 3%, Amerindian 1%

Black population in Latin America is insignificant in number.

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html

Why would you leave out Brazil where over half of the people identify as Black? Or even the Dominican republic for that matter? That's just stupid. Also, the Figures from Puetro-rico are nonsense and speaks to the subjective nature of surveys. Those people are "pure" nothing, far from it (LMAO @ 76% White!). One thing that you may learn from Gates' series is that many Latin Americans have some serious issues with denial with respect to their African ancestry. Wasn't that part of the point of the series?
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
^Who is denying their African ancestry? I don't see that in Latin America (except in Dominican Republic). These people, when they look in the mirror, hardly see an African component to their pedigree. Why acknowledge ancestry that accounts for only a smidgen to their genetic makeup?
 
argyle104
Member # 14634
 - posted
This Gates fruitcake is doing nothing but pandering to:

1. white's obsession with "blacks"/Africans.

2. Their insatiable need to have some regular reference to "blacks"/Africans as slaves.

3. Their obsession with some "black"/African being mixed with some other ethnicity. Eugenics depravity.


I will bet you that the majority of the audience demographic call themselves either liberal or an independent. The above three points fits them to a 'T'.
 
argyle104
Member # 14634
 - posted
ausar:
quote:
I wonder if there will ever be a documentary on being black in the Arab world.
Don't worry there will. Gates is just like your sorry ass. He believes in racial hierarchies where "blacks"/"negroes" are at the bottom, pseudo intra-African ethnic hierarchies where the more "negro" you are the lower your rank, that "negroes" = slaves, and is obsessed with "blacks" being mixed.


The above is like a narcotic high or sexual orgasm to fruitcakes such as Gates and yourself. Therefore you can bet they already have plans for so called "blacks" in the so called "Arab world".
 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
^Who is denying their African ancestry? I don't see that in Latin America (except in Dominican Republic). These people, when they look in the mirror, hardly see an African component to their pedigree. Why acknowledge ancestry that accounts for only a smidgen to their genetic makeup?

It's political. They look in the mirror and don't see lily white blondes yet classify as White? Obviously it's political since none of this is based on anything like say, known genealogy or DNA testing.
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
1. Mexico - mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%

2. Peru Amerindian 45%, mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 37%, white 15%, black, Japanese, Chinese, and other 3%

3. Puerto Rico white (mostly Spanish origin) 76.2%, black 6.9%, Asian 0.3%, Amerindian 0.2%, mixed 4.4%, other 12% (2007)

4. Colombia mestizo 58%, white 20%, mulatto 14%, black 4%, mixed black-Amerindian 3%, Amerindian 1%

Black population in Latin America is insignificant in number.

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html

quote:
Originally posted by Knowledgeiskey718:
How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asoca/asr/2007/00000072/00000006/art00004

Abstract:
According to official census results, the Puerto Rican population became significantly whiter in the first half of the twentieth century. Social scientists have long speculated about the source of this trend, but until now, available data did not permit competing hypotheses of Puerto Rico's whitening to be evaluated empirically. This article revisits the question of how Puerto Rico whitened using newly available Public Use Micro-Samples from the 1910 and 1920 U.S. Censuses of Puerto Rico. Demographic analysis reveals that racial reclassification between censuses generated a “surplus” of nearly 100,000 whites in the 1920 enumerated population. Previous studies of intercensus change in the racial composition of populations have demonstrated that racial reclassification occurs. Going beyond previous studies, we investigate empirically the underlying social mechanisms that fueled change in categorical membership. Reclassification between censuses may reflect the movement of individuals across racial boundaries (boundary crossing), the movement of racial boundaries across individuals (boundary shifting), or both of these boundary dynamics simultaneously. Operationalization of these conceptually distinct boundary dynamics shows that Puerto Rico whitened in the second decade of the twentieth century primarily through boundary shifting—an expansion of the social definition of whiteness itself. Our analysis helps advance general sociological understanding of how symbolic boundaries change.

quote:
Originally posted by Knowledgeiskey718:
How Puerto Rico Became White:
An Analysis of Racial Statistics in the 1910 and 1920 Censuses
Mara Loveman Jeronimo Muniz
University of Wisconsin, Madison University of Wisconsin, Madison

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/demsem/loveman-muniz.pdf


Abstract
The gradual “whitening” of Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century
is often noted in scholarly, journalistic, and popular descriptions of the island’s
population. In 1899, a year after Puerto Rico came under U.S. dominion, the census
reported that 62 percent of the population was white; by the year 2000, according to
official census results, the white proportion of the Puerto Rican population reached 80
percent. Observers of Puerto Rican society have speculated about the sources of this
trend, which is typically cited as evidence of the hold of “whitening ideology” on the
island. To date, however, none of the hypothesized mechanisms of whitening have been
subjected to empirical test. Using newly available public use samples of the 1910 and
1920 censuses of Puerto Rico, this paper explores three possible explanations for the
growth in the white population according to official statistics: (1) demographic processes,
(2) institutional bias of the Census Office, and (3) socio-cultural shifts in societal
conceptions of race. We find little support for the first two hypotheses. The proportion of
whites in the Puerto Rican population in 1920 is at least ten percent higher than would be
expected due to natural rates of population growth. And it appears, somewhat
surprisingly, that any institutional bias of the Puerto Rican Census Office worked to
mitigate the magnitude of whitening in this period rather than contributing to it. We find
that the statistical whitening of Puerto Rico between 1910 and 1920 is primarily due to
changes in the social definition of whiteness. The children of interracial unions, in
particular, were much more likely to be classified as white in 1920 than in 1910.
2

Introduction
The idea that race is a social construction is by now conventional wisdom across
the social sciences, and the field of social demography is no exception. Indeed, it has
become increasingly common for social demographers who investigate racial disparities
to explicitly note, in published work, the socially constructed nature of race.1 But the
passing nods to social constructivism elide a tension between the adoption of a
constructivist stance and the use of demographic methods to explore the workings of race
in society.
This paper brings the tension between social demographic and social
constructivist approaches to the study of race to the fore -- though this was not our
original design. The tension emerged naturally, as it were, as we attempted to resolve an
empirical puzzle that happens to lie at the intersection of intellectual terrain that is
typically claimed by each tradition of research. The puzzle itself only came into bold
relief thanks to the conceptual apparatus and methodological tools of demography; the
puzzle’s pieces and their possible connections, in turn, were only made visible through a
constructivist mode of analysis. This paper thus brings social demographic and social
constructivist approaches to the study of race into a rare conversation. Without aspiring to
resolve the challenges that each perspective poses for the other, we draw on their
combined resources to specify and attempt to resolve a deceptively simple puzzle: How
did the population of Puerto Rico become white?
According to official statistics, the Puerto Rican population became significantly
whiter over the course of the twentieth century. A census taken by the U.S. Department
of War in 1899, a year after Puerto Rico came under U.S. dominion, found that 61.8
percent of the Puerto Rican population was “white.” A century later, the 2000 U.S.
census results showed that 80.5 percent of the island’s population was “white.” What
accounts for this dramatic shift in the racial composition of Puerto Rico’s population as
reported in official statistics?
For those familiar with Puerto Rican society and history, this question may seem
disingenuous. After all, ever since the island came under U.S. control Puerto Rican elites
have worked long and hard to create and maintain Puerto Rico’s image as the “white
island of the Antilles.” At the turn of the twentieth century, the effort to portray the
Puerto Rican population as white was partly a response to scientific racism. Confronted
with scientific theories that linked prospects for development to a society’s “racial stock,”
Puerto Rican elites – like their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America – sought to
position their society on the road to racial progress.2 Perhaps even more ominous than the
predictions of race science, for Puerto Rican elites, was the specter of what might become
of their society were their colonizers to see Puerto Rico as predominantly non-white. The
shadow of the Jim Crow south hung over the island of Puerto Rico in the early twentieth- century, a constant reminder of what it meant to be non-white under the rule of the
United States.
Against this historical backdrop, observers of Puerto Rican society have generally
glossed the census reports of an increasing proportion of whites in the population as yet
another indicator of Puerto Rico’s “whitening ideology.” Historians have demonstrated,
beyond any doubt, that whiteness was highly valued in Puerto Rican society in the early
twentieth-century. But it is not at all clear how, exactly, the elite project of emphasizing
the whiteness of Puerto Rican society got translated into census results showing a whiter
and whiter Puerto Rican population. Some authors have speculated about the link
between whitening ideology and whitening census results (these speculations are
discussed below), but to date, there has been no empirical treatment of this issue.
There are three principal ways that the statistical observation of a whiter Puerto
Rican population could have been generated: (1) the whitening of Puerto Rico could have
resulted from demographic processes, in which case the census results capture shifts in
the racial demography of the island’s population; (2) the whitening of Puerto Rico could
have been generated by the Census Office itself, in which case the census results reflect
either unselfconscious bias or deliberate interference (or both) on the part of Census
Office personnel, or; (3) the whitening of Puerto Rico could be due to gradual changes in
socio-cultural definitions of race, in which case the census results reflect either the
movement of individuals across racial boundaries from one census to the next or – and
this is a possibility that is rarely recognized in studies of “whitening” in Latin America --
the movement of racial boundaries across individuals from one census to the next.
This paper attempts to identify the relative contribution of demographic,
institutional, and socio-cultural sources of increase in the enumerated white population of
Puerto Rico. We focus our analysis on a single decade of whitening: 1910-1920. We
focus on this period primarily to take advantage of newly available public use samples of
the 1910 and 1920 Puerto Rican censuses. These samples make it possible to bring
empirical data to bear on the question of how, according to official statistics, Puerto Rico
became white. With these datasets, we can put prior speculations about Puerto Rico’s
whitening to empirical test, and weigh the plausibility of alternative accounts. Given our
question, the availability of datasets from 1910 and 1920 is particularly propitious; Puerto
Rico whitened more from 1910-1920 than in any other single decade of the twentieth
century. Thus, the only two census years of the early twentieth century for which public
use samples exists correspond to the most important decade for tackling the question of
how Puerto Rico became white.
The Official Picture: Racial Statistics and the Whitening of Puerto Rico, 1899-2000
The gradual whitening of the Puerto Rican population began well before the U.S.
took control of the island; a modest version of the trend appears already in the nineteenthcentury
statistics produced by the Spanish imperial government.3 The first U.S.-directed
enumeration of the island’s population, in 1899, registered a minor racial “set-back” from
the Spanish count of the population a few years before. From then on out, however,
Puerto Rico’s enumerated white population began a steady upward climb, reaching a peak, apparently, around 1950. From 1899 to 1950, the white share of the population
increased from 60 to 80 percent, remaining at about that level for the remainder of the
twentieth century. No racial data were collected in the censuses of Puerto Rico between
1960 and 1990, but the 2000 census results registered a less than 1 percent increase in the
percentage of whites in the Puerto Rican population from 1950.4


 
Mike111
Member # 9361
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
1. Mexico - mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish) 60%, Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian 30%, white 9%, other 1%

2. Peru Amerindian 45%, mestizo (mixed Amerindian and white) 37%, white 15%, black, Japanese, Chinese, and other 3%

3. Puerto Rico white (mostly Spanish origin) 76.2%, black 6.9%, Asian 0.3%, Amerindian 0.2%, mixed 4.4%, other 12% (2007)

4. Colombia mestizo 58%, white 20%, mulatto 14%, black 4%, mixed black-Amerindian 3%, Amerindian 1%

Black population in Latin America is insignificant in number.

Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html

"Every time I think I'm out...they keep pulling me back in!"

The lack of scholarship on the forum is the worst that I have ever seen. True - it could be just fatigue from the sheer volume of misinformation put out by the Albinos like Lioness, Confirming Truth, and others of that ilk.

Yes I understand that they have "Trillions" of bogus sources that they can just go to, pick out the particular lie they want to use, and just post it.

Whereas we have to do tedious and time-consuming research in order to disprove the lies of the Albinos. Yes it's not fair, but it is a penalty for being born Black in an Albino controled world. So Ya gotta take the bad with the good!

So in the case of fatigue, just a simple "Bullsh1t" exclamation would at least indicate to the ignorant, that the lying assertion of the Albinos is without merit - ya gotta say SOMETHING!

BTW - glad to see that after I started researching this, some did posts refutes.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Confirming Truth - Your statistics are taken from the CIA factbook - an arm of the White U.S. government.

And like all White institutions, it's purpose is to maintain and further, the interests of the lying White power structure. And the greatest fear of the lying White power structure, is that the once dominant Black Man will become resurgent.

Thus, central to maintaining the afore mentioned lying White power structure, is the need to maintain the ignorance of those NOT under the umbrella of the lying White power structure, and in fact, are antithetical to it - Blacks!

The seemingly preferred method of doing this, seems to be to deny them their true history, and convince them of the meagerness of their numbers.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Confirming Truth - to refute your lying Albino bullsh1t, I will use REAL numbers from the past.


The Viceroyalty of New Granada, was a Spanish colonial jurisdiction in northern South America, corresponding mainly to modern Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The territory corresponding to Panama was incorporated later in 1739. In addition to these core areas, the territory of the Viceroyalty of New Granada included Guyana, and parts of northwestern Brazil, northern Peru, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

In the Americas, the largest number of African slaves were shipped to Brazil. However, in the Spanish viceroyalty of New Granada, the free Black population in 1789 was 420,000, whereas African slaves numbered only 20,000. Free Blacks also outnumbered slaves in Brazil.

Viceroyalty of New Granada - census of 1789


Colombia,

Ecuador,

Venezuela

Panama

northwestern Brazil,

northern Peru

Costa Rica

Nicaragua.

Free Blacks = 420,000.

African slaves = 20,000.

Total = 440,000

These were the overwhelming majority of the population, as compared to Whites.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Using Colombia as example:

The capital port of Cartagena de Indias - Cartagena, Colombia

In the census of 1777 the total population of Cartagena de Indias was 13.690 inhabitants. The largest group was the "freemen of all colors", which included free blacks and mulattoes. Whites represented 31.2 % of the city's population and the black slaves, 18.9%.5

We can discount Amerindians because within 100 years after the first Spanish settlement In 1526, nearly 95 percent of all Native Americans in Colombia had died. The majority of the deaths of Native Americans were the cause of diseases such as measles and smallpox, which were spread by European settlers. Many Native Americans were also killed by armed conflicts with European settlers.

So as of 1777 in Cartagena, Colombia

Whites = 31%

Blacks and mulattoes = 69%

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To further complicate matters: it is estimated that the revolutionary war led by Simón Bolívar in the early 1800s, killed off about 1/2 of the White population.

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Yet today - According to White people - and White Wannbes - the population of Colombia is mestizo 58%, white 20%, mulatto 14%, black 4%, mixed black-Amerindian 3%, Amerindian 1%

I DON'T THINK SO!

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Puerto Rico

A census conducted by royal decree on September 30, 1858, gives the following totals of the Puerto Rican population at this time: 341,015 as Free colored; 300,430 identified as Whites; and 41,736 as Slaves.

Total = 683,181

Free colored = 49.9%

Slaves = 6.1%

Total non-White = 56%

White = 44%

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Puerto Rico - TODAY!

Between 1960 and 1990 the census questionnaire in Puerto Rico did not ask about race or color. However, the 2000 United States Census included a racial self-identification question in Puerto Rico. According to the census, most Puerto Ricans self-identified as White and few declared themselves to be Black or some other race. A recent study conducted in Puerto Rico suggests that around 52.6% of the population possess Amerindian mtDNA.

White = ~ 95%

Other = ~ 5%

I DON'T THINK SO!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CONCLUSION:

Spanish speaking non-Whites are COMPLETELY fuched up!

Note Mindless:

and I think this also explains the Schizophrenic posts of Jari.

I do believe Jari may be one of them too.

 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
Their phoenotype is similar to the European; fur hair, aquiline and pronounced facial features, etc..., not to mention, language and culture. They have way more in common with the European than African Negro.


quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
It's political. They look in the mirror and don't see lily white blondes yet classify as White? Obviously it's political since none of this is based on anything like say, known genealogy or DNA testing.


 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
Language and culture? Are you kidding me? Remind me never to respond to you again. Your logic here is abhorrent.

quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
Their phoenotype is similar to the European; fur hair, aquiline and pronounced facial features, etc..., not to mention, language and culture.


quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
It's political. They look in the mirror and don't see lily white blondes yet classify as White? Obviously it's political since none of this is based on anything like say, known genealogy or DNA testing.



 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
Listen clown, they identify with the European. They speak Spanish, have Spanish ancestry, eat Spanish food, Dance like the Spaniards, play Spanish music, now go jump off a bridge.


quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
Language and culture? Are you kidding me? Remind me never to respond to you again. Your logic here is abhorrent.

quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
Their phoenotype is similar to the European; fur hair, aquiline and pronounced facial features, etc..., not to mention, language and culture.


quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
It's political. They look in the mirror and don't see lily white blondes yet classify as White? Obviously it's political since none of this is based on anything like say, known genealogy or DNA testing.




 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
Mike, are you fvcking serious?
 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
^Crab nuts. African-Americans speak English, have English ancestry, eat English food, and play European music also.

As for your eye-ball anthropology, those features are not a monopoly of Whites, stop ignoring Native Americans and stop ignoring the clearly darker (African-derived) Puerto Ricans. It's funny because where I'm from they are called "Black Mexicans". Anyone can tell a Puerto Rican from a Mexican for example. You do not live around a lot of Puerto Ricans nor do you know how they identify in America or else where.
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
^ok Yuck-mouth, enough with the babblin and produce your evidence. I provided a legitimate source to back up what I said. Ball is in your court, Yuck-mouth, provide sources to buttress your bullshyt. PUT UP OR SHUT THE FVCK UP.
 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
Your "evidence" was just undermined by AGÜEYBANÁ so I feel no need to address it any further.
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
^So let me get this straight, you think AGUEYBANA debunked - https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html ?

Hold on one sec...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Mike111
Member # 9361
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
Mike, are you fvcking serious?

All that I have posted is freely available to all:

Simply Google using the keywords "Viceroyalty of New Granada" and other such keywords.

I will wreck your lying White world, Albino Boy.
 
Mike111
Member # 9361
 - posted
CIA factbook


Honduras

Ethnic groups:

mestizo (mixed Amerindian and European) = 90%

Amerindian = 7%,

black = 2%,

white = 1%


 -


 -


 -


 -

 -


 -


 -



 -


.

I guess it depends on what you call "Mestizo" (mixed Amerindian and European).

 
Gigantic
Member # 17311
 - posted
^You a silly negro. I can just as easily picture spam Latins with elongated features and fair skin with fine hair. Get the fvck out of here with your selective photos.
 
Mike111
Member # 9361
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Gigantic:
^You a silly negro. I can just as easily picture spam Latins with elongated features and fair skin with fine hair. Get the fvck out of here with your selective photos.

I am not saying that all Hondurans look like them.
I am making fun of the Bullsh1t of you Albino people.

Reality is a bitch for you liars, isn't it.
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by Confirming Truth:
^So let me get this straight, you think AGUEYBANA debunked - https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html ?


Yea, you dullard, did you bother to read the studies posted?
 
Confirming Truth
Member # 17678
 - posted
^So let me get this straight, your porch monkey ass thinks it debunked this site? https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html

RFLOL!!
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
Too bad the thread(s) I posted with the videos from South & Central Americas are gone, lol...lemme see if I can find them for re-posting here.... [Wink]
 
anguishofbeing
Member # 16736
 - posted
Gates is not a historian or an anthropologist.

quote:
Originally posted by Sundjata:
Language and culture? Are you kidding me? Remind me never to respond to you again. Your logic here is abhorrent.

You knew all along the guy is a fruitcake yet you still tried to reason with him. lol
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
Honduras: Garifuna of the North Coast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBb4R95EAoI

====================================

http://www.garifuna.com/

=====================================
2009

Black Caribs honor endangered culture in Guatemala

(Reuters) - Descendants of African slaves who fled to Guatemala two centuries ago honored their ancestors on Thursday in a wild celebration of a culture threatened by mass migration to the United States.

Hundreds of people from the Black Carib Garifuna culture re-enacted their forefathers' arrival in Guatemala by dugout canoe, then swayed through the streets to the sound of drum beats and the blowing of conch shells.

The Garifuna are descendants of escaped slaves who mingled with Carib Indians on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent. The British deported them to an island near Honduras from where they spread along the Central American coast, arriving in Guatemala in 1802.

Today almost half of Central America's 200,000 Garifuna live in the United States, mostly in New York City.

In the Guatemalan port of Livingston, home to more than 10,000 Garifuna in late 1970s, the population has dwindled to around 4,000.

Garifuna in Livingston say they face discrimination in Guatemala, and there are few jobs in the port town which is only reachable by sea.

"I own a boat and fishing helps me keep my head above water, but most of the businesses here are Latin-owned and they control the economy," said Polo Martinez, whose three brothers and two sisters live in the United States.

Many older Garifuna say their lifestyle of fishing and farming is being lost as so many migrate.

Garifuna National Day was created in Guatemala 13 years ago to honor the country's Black Carib population. Annual festivals in Livingston and Belize are seen as a way of connecting with their roots.

MOVING AWAY

Dressed up as their shipwrecked ancestors in torn clothing, Garifuna danced to fast drum rhythms through the streets of Livingston on Thursday.

Hundreds of people crammed into Livingston's brick Catholic church for a mass given in Spanish and the Garifuna language that blends words from West Africa with the Caribbean's Arauak, as well as French, English and Spanish.

Garifuna came to the festival from New York, Miami and Los Angeles, the major U.S. cities where many now live.

Tougher U.S. border controls over the past decade mean those who migrated illegally cannot sneak between Guatemala and the United States as they did in the past and are going north permanently.

"They've begun to respond to their problems in the last five years by moving away," said Alfonso Arrivillaga, who wrote a government report on Garifuna migration this year. "Today more than ever, their presence here is in danger."

The picture is similar throughout Central America's Caribbean coast region where the Garifuna struggle to make a living from tourism and fishing.

Tomas Nunez moved to New York 37 years ago but returns to Livingston every year. "This is my tradition, but I'm glad I left when I was little, because there's a lot of economic hardship here," he said.
 
anguishofbeing
Member # 16736
 - posted
Mike, please STFU, you are of no help to anyone.
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
Musician Preserves Fading African-Caribbean Culture

April 11, 2007 - Through his music, Andy Palacio is trying to prevent his culture's extinction.

 -


Palacio is a Garifuna from Belize. His people are the descendants of West African slaves who were shipwrecked off the Caribbean island of St. Vincent in the 1600s. They mixed with indigenous Carib Indians, and eventually were forced off the island by the British and settled along the east coast of Central America.

Today, the Garifuna people live in isolated communities in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Palacio's latest album, Watina, is an attempt to document and spread his people's unique culture.

Palacio tells Melissa Block that he realized the culture was in danger of fading away when he visited a small Nicaraguan Garifuna community in 1980 and found that no one under the age of 50 could speak the Garifuna language.

He says he hopes his efforts will not only preserve Garifuna culture, but also re-energize a generation to take pride in its traditions so "it will remain vibrant for the next hundred generations."
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
on another note,

thanks Sundjata for the big up (tho I wasn't looking it, lol)... [Smile]

[Roll Eyes] [Frown] ***sigh***

I should have known a few of the resident clowns would come in and mash up my thread....SMH [Roll Eyes]

the topic of this thread is the video series "Black in Latin America"

if you all want to debate who is mixed with what to which percentage and tenth of a degree of same, etc., why don't whomever wants to do so create a thread just for that (to go along with all the other obssessioal round and round never ending people repeating the same dam things time and again (in between trading insults) in one thread like they never tired or have no form of off-net life)...
 
Mike111
Member # 9361
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by anguishofbeing:
Mike, please STFU, you are of no help to anyone.

Little Albino Boys are not on my Help list for today - check back tomorrow.
 
argyle104
Member # 14634
 - posted
Sundjata, we all know that you are that no life clown Djehuti. Sad.
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
People of Color Who Never Felt They Were Black Racial Label Surprises Many Latino Immigrants

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A01

At her small apartment near the National Cathedral in Northwest Washington, Maria Martins quietly watched as an African American friend studied a picture of her mother. "Oh," the friend said, surprise in her voice. "Your mother is white."

She turned to Martins. "But you are black."

That came as news to Martins, a Brazilian who, for 30 years before immigrating to the United States, looked in the mirror and saw a morena -- a woman with caramel-colored skin that is nearly equated with whiteness in Brazil and some other Latin American countries. "I didn't realize I was black until I came here," she said.

That realization has come to hundreds of thousands of dark-complexioned immigrants to the United States from Brazil, Colombia, Panama and other Latin nations with sizable populations of African descent. Although most do not identify themselves as black, they are seen that way as soon as they set foot in North America.

Their reluctance to embrace this definition has left them feeling particularly isolated -- shunned by African Americans who believe they are denying their blackness; by white Americans who profile them in stores or on highways; and by lighter-skinned Latinos whose images dominate Spanish-language television all over the world, even though a majority of Latin people have some African or Indian ancestry.

The pressure to accept not only a new language and culture, but also a new racial identity, is a burden some darker-skinned Latinos say they face every day.

"It's overwhelming," said Yvette Modestin, a dark-skinned native of Panama who works as an outreach coordinator in Boston. "There's not a day that I don't have to explain myself."

E. Francisco Lopez, a Venezuelan-born attorney in Washington, said he had not heard the term "minority" before coming to America.

"I didn't know what it meant. I didn't accept it because I thought it meant 'less than,' " said Martins, whose father is black. " 'Where are you from?' they ask me. I say I'm from Brazil. They say, 'No, you are from Africa.' They make me feel like I am denying who I am."

Exactly who these immigrants are is almost impossible to divine from the 2000 Census. Latinos of African, mestizo and European descent -- or any mixture of the three -- found it hard to answer the question "What is your racial origin?"

Some of the nation's 35 million Latinos scribbled in the margins that they were Aztec or Mayan. A fraction said they were Indian. Nearly forty-eight percent described themselves as white, and only 2 percent as black. Fully 42 percent said they were "some other race."

Between Black and White Race matters in Latin America, but it matters differently.

Most South American nations barely have a black presence. In Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, there are racial tensions, but mostly between indigenous Indians and white descendants of Europeans.

The black presence is stronger along the coasts of two nations that border the Caribbean Sea, Venezuela and Colombia -- which included Panama in the 19th century -- along with Brazil, which snakes along the Atlantic coast. In many ways, those nations have more in common racially with Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic than they do with the rest of South America.

This black presence is a legacy of slavery, just as it is in the United States. But the experience of race in the United States and in these Latin countries is separated by how slaves and their descendants were treated after slavery was abolished.

In the United States, custom drew a hard line between black and white, and Jim Crow rules kept the races separate. The color line hardened to the point that it was sanctioned in 1896 by the Supreme Court in its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that Homer Plessy, a white-complexioned Louisiana shoemaker, could not ride in the white section of a train because a single ancestor of his was black.

Thus Americans with any discernible African ancestry -- whether they identified themselves as black or not -- were thrust into one category. One consequence is that dark-complexioned and light-complexioned black people combined to campaign for equal rights, leading to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

By contrast, the Latin countries with a sizable black presence had more various, and more fluid, experiences of race after slavery.

African slavery is as much a part of Brazil's history as it is of the United States's, said Sheila Walker, a visiting professor of anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta and editor of the book "African Roots/American Cultures." Citing the census in Brazil, she said that nation has more people of African descent than any other in the world besides Nigeria, Africa's most populous country.

Brazil stands out in South America for that and other reasons. Unlike most nations there, its people speak Portuguese rather than Spanish, prompting a debate over whether Brazil is part of the Latino diaspora.

Brazilian slavery ended in 1889 by decree, with no civil war and no Jim Crow -- and mixing between light- and dark-complexioned Indians, Europeans, Africans and mulattos was common and, in many areas, encouraged. Although discrimination against dark-complexioned Brazilians was clear, class played almost as important a role as race.

In Colombia, said Luis Murillo, a black politician in exile from that country, light-complexioned descendants of Spanish conquistadors and Indians created the "mestizo" race, an ideology that held that all mixed-race people were the same. But it was an illusion, Murillo said: A pecking order "where white people were considered superior and darker people were considered inferior" pervaded Colombia.

Murillo said the problem exists throughout Latin American and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries with noticeable black populations. White Latinos control the governments even in nations with dark-complexioned majorities, he said. And in nations ruled by military juntas and dictators, there are few protests, Murillo said.

In Cuba, a protest by Afro-Cubans led to the arming of the island's white citizens and, ultimately, the massacre of 3,000 to 6,000 black men, women and children in 1912, according to University of Michigan historian Frank Guridy, author of "Race and Politics in Cuba, 1933-34."

American-influenced Cuba was also home to the Ku Klux Klan Kubano and other anti-black groups before Fidel Castro's revolution. Now, Cuban racism still exists, some say, but black, mulatto and white people mix much more freely. Lopez, the Afro-Venezuelan lawyer, said, "Race doesn't affect us there the way it does here," he said. "It's more of a class thing."

Jose Neinstein, a native white Brazilian and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, boiled down to the simplest terms how his people are viewed. "In this country," he said, "if you are not quite white, then you are black." But in Brazil, he said, "If you are not quite black, then you are white."

The elite in Brazil, as in most Latin American nations, are educated and white. But many brown and black people also belong in that class. Generally, brown Brazilians, such as Martins, enjoy many privileges of the elite, but are disproportionately represented in Brazilian slums.

Someone with Sidney Poitier's deep chocolate complexion would be considered white if his hair were straight and he made a living in a profession. That might not seem so odd, Brazilians say, when you consider that the fair-complexioned actresses Rashida Jones of the television show "Boston Public" and Lena Horne are identified as black in the United States.

Neinstein remembered talking with a man of Poitier's complexion during a visit to Brazil. "We were discussing ethnicity," Neinstein said, "and I asked him, 'What do you think about this from your perspective as a black man?' He turned his head to me and said, 'I'm not black,' " Neinstein recalled. " . . . It simply paralyzed me. I couldn't ask another question."

By the same token, Neinstein said, he never perceived brown-complexioned people such as Maria Martins, who works at the cultural institute, as black. One day, when an African American custodian in his building referred to one of his brown-skinned secretaries as "the black lady," Neinstein was confused. "I never looked at that woman as black," he said. "It was quite a revelation to me."

Those perceptions come to the United States with the light- and dark-complexioned Latinos who carry them. But here, they collide with two contradictory forces: North American prejudice and African American pride.

'I've Learned to Be Proud' Vilson DaSilva, a native of Brazil, is a moreno. Like his wife, Maria Martins, he was born to a black father and a white mother. But their views on race seem to differ.

During an interview when Martins said she had no idea how they had identified themselves on the 2000 Census form, DaSilva rolled his eyes. "I said we were black," he said.

He is one of a growing number of Latin immigrants of African descent who identify themselves as Afro-Latino, along the same color spectrum as African Americans.

"I've learned to be proud of my color," he said. For that, he thanked African American friends who stand up for equal rights.

An emerging cadre of Latinos in Washington are embracing their African identities and speaking out against what they say is a white Latino establishment, in the U.S. and abroad.

Lopez, the Afro-Venezuelan lawyer, who lives in Columbia Heights, said there was prejudice even in such Hispanic civil rights organizations as the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the National Council of La Raza, where, he said, few dark-complexioned Latinos work in the offices or sit on the board. "La Raza? Represent me? Absolutely not," Lopez said.

Charles Kamasaki, an analyst for La Raza, disagreed. "I don't think you can make snap judgments like that," he said. "The way race is played out in Latino organizations is different. There are dark-complexioned people on our board, but I don't know if they identify as Afro-Latino. Our president is mestizo. I would resist the assertion that this organization is excluding anyone because of race."

Yvette Modestin, the black Panamanian who identifies as an Afro-Latina, said that although she accepts her blackness, she's also an immigrant who speaks Spanish. In other words, she's not a black American. "My brother's married to a Mexican," she said. "My brother's been called a sellout by black women while walking down the street with his wife. They are both Latino. They think he married outside his race."

DaSilva agreed that nuances separate African Americans and Afro-Latinos, but he also believes that seeing Latin America through African American eyes gave him a better perspective. Unfortunately, he said, it also made him angrier and more stressed.

When DaSilva returned to Brazil for a visit, he asked questions he had never asked, and got answers that shocked him.

His mother told him why her father didn't speak to her for 18 years: "It was because she married a black man," he said. One day, DaSilva's own father pulled him aside to provide his son some advice. " 'You can play around with whoever you want,' " DaSilva recalled his father saying, " 'but marry your own kind.' " So DaSilva married Martins, the morena of his dreams.

She is dreaming of a world with fewer racial barriers, a world she believes she left in Brazil to be with her husband in Washington.

As Martins talked about the nation's various racial blends in her living room, her 18-month-old son sat in front of the television, watching a Disney cartoon called "The Proud Family," about a merged black American and black Latino family. The characters are intelligent, whimsical, thoughtful, funny, with skin tones that range from light to dark brown.

The DaSilvas said they would never see such a show on Latin American TV.

Martins said her perspective on race was slowly conforming to the American view, but it saddened her. She doesn't understand why she can't call a pretty black girl a negrita, the way Latin Americans always say it, with affection. She doesn't understand why she has to say she's black, seeming to deny the existence of her mother.

"Sometimes I say she is black on the outside and white on the inside," DaSilva said of his wife, who threw her head back and laughed.

2002 The Washington Post Company
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN PANAMA--FROM THE CANAL TO COLON CITY

THE AFRICAN BACKGROUND

Between the Spring and Summer of 2003, I had the good fortune of visiting Central America on four occasions. During this period I went to Belize (twice), Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica (for the fifth time) and Panama. All of these countries have African communities, generally depressed and most often to be found along the Atlantic coastal periphery.

The indigenous name for Panama means `abundance of fish' and I went to this land of abundance, located at the southern end of Central America (or the northern end of South America), for the first time at the end of August 2003. The Republic of Panama was the forty-first country that I visited and I went there from Costa Rica. I had already visited Costa Rica numerous times and had made up my mind that the next time that I was invited there, that I would visit one of the neighboring countries as well--either Nicaragua or Panama. I only had a few days to spend in either place but I was determined to take advantage of the opportunity and to make the best of it.

I am not sure what my thinking was at the time, but Panama soon became the desired country of destination. In making this decision, I surely must have been influenced by the knowledge that African people have a long history in Panama--a history, by the way, that begins well before the massive enslavement and deportation of Africans to the Americas. According to Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, in his comprehensive and seminal work Early America Revisited:

"Vasco Nunez de Balboa, 25 September 1513, coming down the slopes of Quarequa, which is near Darien (now called Panama) saw two tall black men who had been captured by the native Americans." And further, that Peter Martyr, "said that Negroes had been shipwrecked in that area and had taken refuge in the mountains. Martyr refers to them as `Ethiopian pirates.'

"Lopez de Gomara also describes the blacks Europeans sighted for the first time in Panama: `These people are identical with the Negroes we have seen in Guinea.' De Bourbourg also reports that there were two peoples indigenous to Panama--the Mandinga (black skin) and the Tule (red skin)."

This knowledge was very important to me and I have long been arguing, with many others, that the history and presence of African people, even in the Western Hemisphere, should not and cannot be traced solely to enslavement and its aftermath, and that even our assessments of the enslavement period need to be revised. It should not be surprising to us that the great Joel Augustus Rogers has done an excellent job of this and provides a sense of historical continuity as well. Here, from his classic work Sex and Race, volume 2, we quote Rogers at length:

"Negroes, thirty of them, not only were with Balboa at his discovery of Panama and the Pacific Ocean in 1513, one of their number being a black nobleman, Nuflo de Olano, but there is the clearest possible evidence that they had been living in that region before Columbus, and were strong enough to make successful war on the Indians.

Later, the Spaniards brought in slaves in such great numbers, and they throve so well in the hot climate that Panama has remained chiefly a Negro country to this day, though modified somewhat by white immigration since the building of the Canal began in 1878.

Under the Spaniards, the white strain was quickly absorbed by the Negroes, who were often rebellious, and joined the pirates. There is the romantic story of King Bayano, an escaped slave, as told by Pedro de Aguado, a sixteenth century historian. Taking to the mountains with a number of other slaves, Bayano set up a kingdom of his own, from where he descended on the pack-trains of the Spaniards, capturing a great quantity of gold, silver, and precious stones. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the Spanish commander, Pedro de Orsua, succeeded in defeating him and his valiant band. Finally captured, Bayano was taken before the Spanish viceroy, who not only received him with honors for his bravery and resourcefulness but sent him a free man to Spain where he lived in luxury from the loot he had captured."

THE PANAMA CONNECTION

With this historical background, coupled with the knowledge that English is widely spoken in Panama, I more or less made up my mind that Panama was the place to go. And all of this was buttressed was by the role of my initial Panamanian contacts, which where absolutely instrumental to my success there, and they were the final piece in my decision to visit Panama.

The most important of these contacts were Sonia Ford, who facilitated my hotel arrangements and opened the first door for me in Panama, and brother Claral Richards, described as the "Nelson Mandela of Panama." Through these two Africans a whole other world of contacts opened up, most notably Ricardo Richards and Arturo Branch. Between these sisters and brothers I had a profound traveling and learning experience. I never really got lonely and I always felt connected. It makes a huge difference to your peace of mind to know that somebody or somebodies in a foreign land that you are traveling to is looking out for you.

FROM THE PANAMA CANAL TO COLON CITY AND BACK

On that first full day in Panama, brother Ricardo drove me around a great deal. Even before going to the Panama Canal, which Panamanians generally regard with great pride, we drove to the Afro-Antillean Museum, which chronicles the lives of the African builders of the Panama Canal. These were mostly Africans who came to Panama from the English speaking islands of the Caribbean early in the last century. Following the museum tour we drove across town to attend two meetings of local African activists, and then visited portions of the Pacific side of the Panama Canal.

The first real highlight of that first day in Panama was a journey to the town of Portebelo. This gave me a chance to really savor my excursion from Panama's Pacific side through rain forest and Maroon country and on to the magnificent life sized image of the Black Christ in the church in Portebelo. The Christ figure is actually deep biscuit brown in complexion with a crown of thorns and wearing a purple robe and carrying a cross. The image is in a large church regularly visited by devout pilgrims journeying from all over Panama.

Portebelo, and this was one of its attractions, is also in Maroon country--the Maroons being Africans like Bayano who refused to accept enslavement and established their own independent communities. And as if their ethnic identity needed any additional clarity let me point out that these sisters and brothers call themselves Congos!

From Portebelo we journeyed to the city of Colon, a largely African city, rather crowded with automobiles and densely populated, mostly Spanish speaking and located on Panama's Atlantic coast on the shores of the Caribbean Sea. The travel books on Panama that I read depicted Colon City in a deplorable light and essentially advised visitors to stay away from the place if at all possible. Here is what one travel guide says about it:

"Children run about in rags and the city's largely black population lives in rotten buildings. With the exception of one seaside residential neighborhood where some fine houses are tucked away behind high walls and security systems, the city is a slum. If you walk its streets, even in the middle of the day, expect to get mugged. It really is that bad. Walking in this city is very dangerous. A white tourist leaving a bank here will likely be mugged. If you have something to mail, send it from another city."

I really resented this kind of biased writing, and reading it and understanding that Colon City was a major African population center, I determined early on that it was a place that I would have to visit or my trip to Panama would not be complete. It also seemed special to me that I could begin my day on the Pacific and spend the late afternoon and early evening on the Atlantic.

I'm glad that I went to Colon City. I found it to be a vibrant and pulsing and fascinating place, full of Black people and rich in culture, and I walked its streets unafraid. It is true, however, that there is a rampant material poverty in Colon, with the most downtrodden and foreboding looking section of the city referred to locally as "the Vatican." I find words difficult to fully describe the place and I suppose that you would just have to see it for your self.

Back in Panama City, brother Ricardo and I capped off the day in an African owned restaurant feasting on some of the tastiest fish that I have ever had. That first day in the Republic of Panama is a day that I will always remember.

THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN PANAMA TODAY

Arturo Branch, at the request of Claral Richards, took time out of his busy schedule to provide me with a personalized tour of Panama City. Like Ricardo Richards the day before, brother Arturo introduced me to a great many of the local residents and social activists, including numbers of aspiring politicians and business people. I say aspiring politicians as I was told by several people that although Panama is sixty per cent African that there were no Black elected officials. I found this shocking and very hard to believe but this is what I was told. But new elections were coming up and there were two or three Africans on the ballot. The major question was whether or not the local sisters and brothers would come out and vote. No one seemed to be very confident but the potential was heavy.

With brother Arturo I also passed through several of Panama City's African neighborhoods, many of them real slum areas mired in great poverty. One area was so bad that it was referred to as the "Pig House", and I was told that many residents literally lived in dread of venturing outside their doors for fear of being the victims of violent acts. The "Pig House" was Panama City's version of the "Vatican," the impoverished African community that Ricardo Richards drove me through in Colon City. These areas were about the most depressed communities that I have seen in the Western Hemisphere and I wondered what some of the African communities of Brazil and Columbia and Haiti must be like.

The neighborhoods that brother Arturo escorted me through contained both English speaking Africans and Spanish speaking African-Panamanians, as well as African-Colombians and African-Dominicans, each group tucked away in their own semi-separate enclaves. I found the whole thing utterly fascinating and looked at the entire day as akin to an anthropological field study. I then toured the section of Panama City most devastated during the 1989 US invasion. The figures varied widely but I was told that at least two or three thousand Panamanians died during the invasion and subsequent occupation.

THANKS TO THE PANAMANIAN CONNECTION

It was through this core cadre of Africans, Sonia Ford, Claral Richards, Ricardo Richards and Arturo Branch, that I learned so much about Panama and its African undergirdings. I was assured in all of my conversations that Panama was at least sixty percent African but that only about fifteen percent of them embraced their African identity. They said that a typical brother or sister might say something like, "Well, my grandmother was Black but I am just Brown." Or that, "although my Ancestors came from Africa I am now just a Panamanian." I must say that this level of argument and denial sounded so very, very familiar to me and I thoughit to myself how deeply African people are taught to hate themselves all over the world.

I was also able to get some inkling of the division between the Spanish and English speaking Africans in Panama. Of the two communities the English speaking Africans, many of whom are the descendants of the builders of the Panama Canal, seem to have it a little easier than the Spanish speakers. It should not surprise you to know that there is a pronounced degree of friction, much of it rooted in class distinctions, between the two groups. Will we never learn?

I found that Africans were much more visible on the streets of Panama City than in Costa Rica's capital of San Jose. In San Jose you only observe a scattering of African faces but in Panama City they seemed to be the majority, and it was rather exhilarating just to see the people and especially all of the beautiful African women! At the same time, however, there seemed to be very few Africans who worked in the banks, restaurants, museums (even the African museum!), airport and office buildings.

On another level, for those of you into sports, especially American baseball, you might find it interesting that Panama has produced such greats as Rod Carew, Roberto Kelly and the current New York Yankee sensation Mariano Rivera. I was told, by the way, that Rivera does a lot for the downtrodden Panamanian community that produced him. Good for him. And there is an effort to name the national stadium after hitting great Rod Carew but it seems that he is a little too Black for the deal to be sealed. Beyond the world of sports, I was informed that the noted African scholar, Dr. Kenneth Clark, is Panamanian.

MY LAST DAY IN PANAMA

I began my last full day in Panama with a visit to the pre-Columbian museum and, just as I suspected and just as I had noticed in the national museum of Costa Rica, there was little to be found in the way of Africoid images, statues and figurines. Nevertheless, I had to go there because you never know when you will discover an African treasure trove. And I am happy to say that my tour guide in the museum was a "sister." Now whether she actually saw herself as a "sister" is a very different matter.

That last night, thanks to Ricardo and Arturo, I did a global African presence slide presentation in Panama City. Panama was country number twenty-eight that I lectured in, and although organized on very short notice, the gathering, which was held at a local school, went very well and had a broad cross section of Africans ranging from university professors to business people to Rastafarians, elders and young people. The audience seemed very impressed by the overview that I gave, and I was able to gather even more information from the attendees who took it upon themselves to fill me in more completely about African life in Panama in a wide ranging discussion that covered everything from health care to the impact of Marcus Garvey.

I enjoyed Panama. I liked the people, learned a lot, had some fun, did some educating, built some bonds and felt a bit melancholy as I left the place. My great regret was that I had only been there for such a short time, and I trust that the next visit will be of considerably longer duration. Perhaps we can go together.

--San Antonio, Texas
April 2004

http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/panama.html
 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
PERU THROUGH AFRICAN EYES--A BACKGROUND AND SUMMARY
By RUNOKO RASHIDI

DEDICATED TO THE IMMORTAL SPIRIT OF FRANCISCO CONGO


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As I am now a few days between international trips I thought that it might be a good idea to take the time to write another travel note. And since I will taking my first tour group to Peru come November 2004 this seems like the perfect opportunity for me to post a brief summary of my 2001 trip there. Believe it or not, there is an African presence in Peru. Indeed, unlike some travelers and scholars, I would contend that, with the exception of Brazil, the African presence in Latin America is not invisible, it simply has not been sufficiently explored and documented.

As a bit of background, I can tell you that I first remember becoming aware of the African presence in Peru about twenty years ago. I was watching a weight lifting competition during the Olympic Games when I noticed a Black man on the Peruvian team. My first reaction was, Wow! We really are everywhere!

But the big revelation came in July 1999 as a participant and keynote speaker at the Second International Reunion of the African Family in Latin America. This was a truly historic gathering and was held in the Maroon community of San Jose de Barlovento, Venezuela. The theme of the Reunion was "People with an Ancient Past Working in the Present for a Glorious Future." The Reunion was sponsored by Afro America XXI and lasted for a week. It was both one of the greatest events that I have ever participated in and one of my finest hours. All of the forums were wonderful and while doing the presentations I was in top form. During the height of the Conference I did keynote presentations on three consecutive nights. The first presentation was on the "African Presence in America before Columbus." The second was on "Ancient African Empires." And the third and biggest of them all was entitled, "Unexpected Faces in Unexpected Places: The Global African Presence." I will never forget how after the last presentation the various national delegations lined up to shake my hand and have take their photographs taken with me. And then the very last delegate and the oldest person in attendance, a small Black woman from Jamaica, walked up with great dignity and embraced me and told how proud "your mother is of you." We were both overcome with emotion and I confess that I cried for a long time that night.

This Reunion brought together African people from as far away as Ethiopia but the vast majority of the attendees were Africans from the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, from North America came African people from Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean. From Central America came Africans from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. And from South America itself emerged sisters and brothers from Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Guyana, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Columbia and the host nation Venezuela, and Peru.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Reunion was the revelation that many of these sisters and brothers seemed completely unaware that African people lived in the neighboring countries. And this was the first time that I met African people from Peru.

With this background in mind, for ten days in June 2001 I toured Peru and found it to be a fascinating place. I had already been to Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana but I was hungry for more and Peru was my first destination on South America's western side. To begin with, the museums were excellent and I was astounded by the Africoid features of many of the Moche portrait vases. And the churches and cathedrals weren't bad either. First of all, there were a lot of them and I was especially impressed with the Church and Monastery of Santo Domingo with its life-sized statue of the black St. Martin de Porres. And who could ever forget the sacred Urubamba Valley and the mysterious city of Machu Picchu? And equally impressive, perhaps even more so, were the ceremonial centers of Sacsayhuaman and the ancient urban complex of Ollantaytambo.

THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN ANCIENT PERU

Contrary to popular belief, the first Africans to come to Peru did not come as captives, that is enslaved people. Rather, the country that is now called Peru in all likelihood became home to many of the first waves of Blacks who crossed into the Western Hemipshere tens of thousands of years ago. We have already found the bones of these ancient Blacks in Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil. Why would Peru be an exception? And then there is the Moche civilization.

Peru is probably the most archaeologically rich country in South America and one of the most important phases of its history is the Moche period. The Moche (or Mochica), a militaristic people little known to all but a few of us, erected their empire along the Peruvian coast around 100 C.E. and were not eclipsed for seven hundred years. They built their capital in the middle of the desert around what is now the city of Trujillo. It featured the enormous pyramid temples of the Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna (The temples of the Sun and the Moon). The Temple of the Sun, one of the most impressive adobe structures ever built in the Western Hemisphere, was composed of over a hundred million mud bricks.

The Moche roads and system of way stations are thought to have been an early inspiration for the Inca network. The Moche increased the coastal population with extensive irrigation projects and skillful engineering works were carried out, such as the La Cumbre canal, still in use today, and the Ascope aqueduct, both on the Chicama River.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Moche was their art, especially their amazingly life like portrait vases. In June 2001 I managed to view a number of these Moche pieces in the Lima museums, many of them so Africoid that I thought that they could have easily been manufactured in the Congo. I am talking here about vase after vase after vase. Indeed, based on this artistic evidence alone one could say that the Moche are among ancient America's best kept secrets.

AFRICANS IN COLONIAL PERU

Although some Africans came to Peru with the Spanish invaders as soldiers and translators, beginning in the sixteenth century significant numbers of enslaved Africans were being taken to Peru. During the 1550s there were an estimated three thousand enslaved Africans in Peru, about half of them residing in Lima. And wherever there are enslaved people one can also find slave resistance. Colonial Peru is no exception here and the one name that seems to most personify that resistance is Francisco Congo. He must have been extraordinary man and I am trying diligently to find information on him.

Because of its geography and the fact that Peru was not on the direct colonial slave trade routes (mostly on the Atlantic Ocean) the majority of Africans in Peru were not brought over directly from Africa but were bought from the British, Dutch and Portuguese after they were already in the Americas. Even under the background of poverty and enslavement, however, some of these Africans achieved great distinction. One such person was Martin de Porres.

Martin de Porres, eventually to become St. Martin de Porres, was born December 9, 1579 in Lima, Peru. He was the son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed African slave mother. At age eleven, he became a servant in the Dominican priory. Promoted to almoner, he begged for more than $2,000.00 a week from the rich to support the poor and sick of Lima. Placed in charge of the Dominican's infirmary Martin became famous for his "tender care of the sick and for his spectacular cures." Because of him the Dominicans dropped the stipulation that "no black person may be received to the holy habit or profession of our order" and Martin took his vows as a Dominican brother.

For Lima's poor Martin de Porres established both an orphanage and a children's hospital. And, interestingly enough, he set up a shelter for stray dogs and cats and nursed them back to health. He lived in self-imposed austerity, never ate meat, fasted continuously, and spent much time in meditation and prayer.

In 1639 Martin de Porres died of fever. He has been venerated since the day of his death. He was beatified in 1873 and canonized on May 16, 1962. He is the first African-American saint.

AFRICANS IN PERU TODAY

Today, the African presence in Peru numbers about two million people out of a total population of about twenty-three million. During my visit, however, I saw only a handful of these sisters and brothers. I did manage, with some expenditure of effort, though, to find one African taxi driver, brother Enrique. Unfortunately, the only words of English that brother Enrique ever uttered were "Black power" but that was enough for me to hire him. I saw no Africans working in the airport, in the markets, in the museums, in the banks, in the hotels or on TV.

So, the reports of pervasive and rampant anti-African racism in Peru will not come as much of a surprise to us. What else is new? According to one account, "It is systematic and permanent. It goes from patronizing attitudes to outright discrimination: blacks are dirty, thieves, all the stereotypes." In August 1996 New York Times correspondent Calvin Sims documented some of the racial bias directed against Africans in Peru, pointing out that:

"Although nightclubs feature Afro-Peruvian musical groups and a third of Peruvian soccer players are black, the number of black professionals is estimated at fewer than 400, and there are no black executives of Peruvian companies, no blacks in the diplomatic corps, judiciary, or the high ranks of the clergy or military. The country's even smaller Japanese community has produced the current President, but no black politician has risen even as far as Congress.

While incidents of open discrimination are far less common in Peru than in the United States and Brazil, which has the largest black population in Latin America, Peruvian blacks say they encounter racism daily.

In public, they say, they are frequently called derogatory names like `son of coal' or `smokeball.' At job interviews, they say, they are often told that their experience and references are excellent but that the owners are looking to hire people with `good presence'-- a euphemism for someone who is white."

RETURN TO PERU

In spite of all that, perhaps even because of it, I tell you now that I am looking forward to returning to Peru in November 2004 and I want to take you with me. I want to see a lot more of the Moche and their marvelous portrait vases. And this time I will be visiting both the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. And I am going to enter more churches and cathedrals, where I understand that in addition to statues of Black Saints there are depictions of Black Christs as well. And this time I will be accompanied by local African activists and will visit the African community of Chincha, south of Lima. And, of course, I will be returning to Cusco and Machu Picchu high in the Andes Mountains.

So come along with me. Join me and get your education. Come along with me as we further document the global African presence and write one more chapter in the greatest story never told.

May 10, 2004

http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/peru.html
 
AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718)
Member # 15400
 - posted
I'd wish the label of "Latin America" or "Hispanic" would be done away with to describe the vast amount of people from different countries who in most cases have nothing to do with one another despite the language.

All it does it take away from acknowledging the Indigenous American and Africans roots. But it is what it is...

Anyway here's a little more from P.R.

http://seeingblack.com/2004/x021304/puertorico.shtml

http://thebuffalopuertoricanpress.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/puerto-rican-latino-contributions-to-black-history-month/


quote:

Yoruba Culture: A study of our West African Roots
by Ana Maria Maynard, Founding Director
Puerto Rican Folkloric Dance & Cultural Center

Article published on website - www.prfdance.org
April 1, 2001

Abstract
Puerto Rico has a rich culture whose origins can be traced back to native Taino Indian, Spanish and West African roots. The Yoruba comprised the majority of West African people brought to our island. This short paper provides an overview of the Yoruba during their "Pre-Contact" history. Our goal is to understand and appreciate the Yoruba people and their culture, before the time of slavery and those who came to exploit their human resources, so that we can better identify and understand the contributions made to our cultural evolution, and appreciate those influences on our culture that are still with us today.

The information presented in this short paper is based on a Ph.D. thesis by a young Yoruba man who used the vehicle of geography to define the unique culture of the Yoruba people. His complete thesis, comparing and contrasting pre-contact and modern times, offers the reader innate knowledge and insight that only a Yoruba could possess.
Yoruba Culture: Pre-Contact Life
Who were the Yoruba?

The Yoruba are a people, not a place. They are a tribe of people who lived in various sections of Nigeria, but predominately west of the Niger River. This part of West Africa, where the native culture is dominated by Yoruba traditions is called "Yorubaland." Yoruba towns traditionally sprang up, not by rivers as was common in other civilizations, but in locations surrounded by rainforest. The thick forests provided protection from tribal wars, a place of refuge.
The Economy

The rural and traditional economy of the early Yoruba people was rooted in farming, hunting, and fishing. Farming in the midst of a rainforest produced unique challenges for farmers. The difficulty of cultivating land thick with roots, the challenge of clearing trees held in place by jungle vines, the fast growing vegetation that was always ready to take back the land, the isolation of living in remote rainforest locations encouraged cooperative farming among extended family members. In those days families located their plots of farmland side by side and worked on them together.

Yoruba hunting and fishing techniques made use of natural materials found in the rainforests. Hunters were typically the area experts, intimately familiar with remote rainforest locations and experts in forest vegetation. For this reason, hunters were typically the herbalists, medicinal specialists, protectors of the village and border guards. Herbalists and medicine men had a high place in society. Their time spent in the deep forest gave them the knowledge and experience with plants and animals to make medicines.

In the pre-contact days, the traditional role of a woman was to clothe the family, as the man's role was to feed it. Assisted by their daughters, women spun raw cotton, dyed the resulting threads, and weaved them into cloth for clothing. Deviations from these traditional roles included the times of year when women helped with farming, and the specialized weaving looms that only men were known to use.
Yoruba Homes and Towns

Yoruba built their houses as groups of compartments built in the form of a rectangle, with an open courtyard at the center. Houses were constructed of mud clay walls and thatched roofs of materials that depended on what was nearby and plentiful. Compounds were built on naturally flat plots, typically built around obstacles in an effort not to alter the natural surroundings. Each compound represented a simple family with a single Head. Homes were laid out around the compound of the Chief owed allegiance to, most times a relative or extended family member. This layout defined a district or "quarter". The compound of all Chiefs faced the compound of the Oba, the highest authority.

The Oba was the arch priest of the living members of society and ensured the fertility in plants and animals and the link between the living and the dead. The Oba lived in a compound in the center of the town, unseen, unheard and untouched except when performing spiritual and political duties. The Oba's palace had two or more courtyards (one example cited was 52). One of the larger courtyards was typically used for town assemblies and the public ceremonies over which the Oba presided. The section of compound facing this courtyard house the Oba's drummers, trumpeters, servants, slaves and "strangers".

At the center of town, across from the Oba's palace was the main market. The market was held there so the Oba could watch the regular assembly of his people. It was an open air market, where trees provided shade and blocks of stones, seats. Goods for sale were displayed on the floor, in baskets or handmade trays of various materials, or in dried gourds in the shape of bowls.

Yoruba towns were surrounded by thick forests that provided protection and refuge in times of tribal wars, and a place for certain religious festivals. The towns were also surrounded by a wall that was also built for protection. Along the base of the wall was typically a ditch, which probably existed as a result of digging mud to form the wall.
Yoruba Religion and Nature

African life is thoroughly permeated by religion. It is not just a component of African culture, but a catalyst of it. The Yoruba claimed to have 401 gods (meaning "lots"). The traditions and beliefs of the early Yoruba was influenced in part by the prominent objects of nature around them. For example, highland and hill gods, such as Orosun and Olofin, were honored because of the eternal presence of the hills that outlasted generations and offered protection. River gods, such as Oshun and Oya, were feared because of their high toll on life during river crossings.

The pre-contact Yoruba believed that the dense forests housed tree spirits. Devotees of tree deities were found chiefly among drummers, wood workers and herbalists. An example was the spirit of the ayan tree who was the god of drums. Animals, plentiful in number, were also revered. Monkeys were believed to house spirits of twins who had passed on. Vultures, the reincarnation of loved ones. Pythons, snakes, crocodiles and chimpanzees were also worshipped.

The earth, giver of all things needed for human sustenance, was especially revered and given back the first share of everything. It was thought the earth also held the remains of loved ones who had passed on in its bowels, so food given back to the earth to feed them. Raw materials and the elements also had their place, including gods such as Ogun, the deity of iron and war, and Sango, the god of lighting and thunder who is still remembered today in Puerto Rico as Chango.

Olodumare was the creator of the world, the Supreme Being. In Olodumare they found the final answer to all the problems of life and of living. Esu was the power of evil who causes illness, sufferings, misfortunes, and accidents. Esu shrines we always outside of town; offerings included food made for other gods, palm oil and, way in the past, human sacrifices.
Yoruba Philosophy

Yoruba philosophy was "life affirming," concerned with life whether in rocks, soil, plants, animals or human beings. Yoruba philosophy asked questions to help him come to grips with his environment, thereby shaping his mode of thought.

The creation of the world is told in two similar legends. In the first, Olodumare (the creator) sent Oduduwa (the ancestor of the Yoruba people) and sixteen assistant chiefs down to the water-surfaced earth with a shell full of sand and a giant bird. They poured sand into the water and the bird used its claws to spread the sand and create valleys and mountains. In the second legend, Olodumare sent a chameleon down to earth, who reported back that the earth's liquid surface made it unsafe to walk. Obatala, a deity, raised a portion of the lithosphere and poured sand and metal onto the liquid surface. He then sent a fowl and pigeon to spread sand and create land surfaces. When done, Obatala came down to the center of the world (Ile-Ife) to run the earth.

Yoruba believed the earth and sky were infinitely large and equal in size. The sky, shaped concave up, and the earth, shaped concave down, met at the horizon. Only the sun, moon and stars moved in the heavens. The sun was believed bigger than the moon because of the way it appeared at sunrise and sunset. But both were believed bigger than the other stars in the heavens. The sun and moon were rivals, which is why they were separated into day and night. (Eclipses were those rare times when they would clash.) Midday and midnight were times of wonder where one could see mermaids, when spirits visited the earth, and when animals and trees were metamorphosed. Rainfall on a day of celebration was a blessing.

Yoruba believed that the day began at sunrise and kept time by the position of the sun and the use of shadows on fixed objects. On rare cloudy days, time was kept by keeping note of animal behavior. There were four days in a week, each one dedicated to four of the major deities. In general, four was a sacred Yoruba number and the standard compound unit of calculations. Most Yoruba markets still assemble in multiples of four days. A month was the interval between two consecutive new moons. A year was marked by the passing of the farm cycle, and later, the season cycle -- along with corresponding lunar cycles. The length of a year was imprecise due to the fluctuations of the seasons. Multiples of years were marked by farm plot rotation and natural events of nature (e.g. locusts, epidemics).
Yoruba Art

Yoruba art, inextricably linked with religion and philosophy, is universally recognized as one of the world's greatest heritages. Traditional art included wood carving (including mask making), leather-working, bead-embroidery, weaving and painting. In an environment where the resources for artwork was the vegetation, fires which accompanied every dry season was periodically responsible for destroying years of art in a few hours. Yoruba philosophized that beauty destroyed made room for new and better works of art.
Conclusion

Just as we have seen Yoruba culture place its mark on the evolution of Puerto Rican culture, Yoruba culture in Western Nigeria has withstood the upheavals and turmoils of internal civil wars, slave raiding, and the influences of machine-backed Western culture, not only absorbing the cultural traits, but breathing new life into them from the old traditional culture.

Reference:
Yoruba Culture, G.J. Afolabi Ojo, University of London Press LTD, Published with the University of Ife, Nigeria, 1966.


 
TruthAndRights
Member # 17346
 - posted
Slavery in Belize
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throughout the Caribbean, slavery was associated with sugar plantations. Sugar production made each island a single-crop economy, entirely dependent upon colonial trade. Large numbers of slaves worked on huge plantations and slave communities developed. As the slave population increased, large black majorities developed who were ruled by white minorities. This became the typical Caribbean society, divided by race, culture, and class.


In Belize, slaves were used for logging. Therefore, slavery and Belizean society developed differently from other parts of the Caribbean where slaves and their families worked and lived in plantations. Slaves in Belize worked in scattered gangs in the forests, separated from their families in Belize City.

But there were similarities. Belizean masters had control over the lives of their slaves, and treated them like mere property. But because of the kind of work they did slaves were able to maintain some control over their lives.

Origins
The earliest historical record of black slaves is from a Spanish missionary in 1724. He reported that they had been "introduced but a short time before from Jamaica and Bermuda".

Most of the slaves were brought to Belize in the late 18th century from the West Indies. Often they came through markets in Jamaica but some were brought directly from Africa, or from the United States. At that time most of the slaves bought by the British were taken from the Niger and Cross Delta regions in the Bight of Benin (present-day Nigeria) in West Africa, and from further south in the Congo and Angola.

In 1850, African slaves in Belize still identified themselves according to the tribes they came from in Africa. It was stated that there were in Belize "Congoes, Nangoes, Mongolas, Ashantees, Eboes, and other African tribes". One section of Belize Town was known throughout the first half of the 19th century as Eboe Town. In 1850 it was said to consist of "numerous yards, flanked with long rows of what are called negro houses, being simply separate rooms under one roof, which used to be appropriated to slaves, and now accommodate the poorer labourers".

Population
African slaves were the majority of the population before the middle of the 18th century. An early census in 1790 showed that three quarters of the population were slaves, a tenth white, and the rest were free blacks and people of mixed races. Hundreds more slaves were brought to Belize before the slave trade was ended in 1807. But in the next 25 years the number of slaves declined from about 3,000 to 2,000, or from about three quarters to less than half of the population. This was because the free black and coloured population increased to almost half. The white population stayed at about one tenth of the total.

As long as slaves were imported into Belize their number increased. But after the abolition of the slave trade the numbers declined, in part because of the high death rates and low birth rates. The slaves died from disease, malnutrition, ill- treatment, over-work and accidents; sometimes they killed themselves. The birth rates were low because there were generally two or three men to every woman. Abortion was probably common because slave women did not wish to have their children born slaves. In addition, there were large numbers of slaves who escaped from the settlement. Between 1807 and 1834 approximately 200 slaves escaped. About 600 slaves gained their freedom in that period.

But, as in other parts of the Caribbean, slaves died mainly because of the horrible living conditions under slavery. Their populations were maintained only by the slave trade.

Woodcutting
Slaves in Belize were initially used to cut logwood. Because of the way logwood was cut, a large number of small timber works developed along rivers, creeks, and lagoons in unsettled areas. The white settlers, with only one or two slaves, cut the logwood themselves.

When the settlers began to cut mahogany instead of logwood they needed more money, land, and workers. Mahogany trees were larger and grew farther inland and farther from each other than logwood. After 1770, 80 per cent of all male slaves aged ten years or older logged mahogany.

Woodcutting was seasonal and required the workers to spend long periods of time isolated in camps, away from their families. The mahogany trees had to be found, cut, and trimmed. Then logs were taken through temporary paths to the nearest riverside, at a place called the "Barquadier". The logs were formed into rafts and floated down the river, usually during the rainy season. The rafts were floated to a "boom" before reaching the mouth of the river. There they were squared for shipment to England.

Several different jobs were needed in this process. The huntsman's job was to search the forest to find the mahogany trees. Because this was an important skill, the huntsman was a very valued slave.

The axemen cut down trees. This was a very dangerous and highly skilled job because the axe was heavy and sharp. The axemen had to stand on a springy platform called a "barbecue" about 12 or 15 feet high. The rest of the gang had to trim the tree after it had fallen. They also had to clear the path through which the logs were dragged.

It was the cattleman's job to take care of the cattle used to pull the huge trunks to the river. Women and children prepared the food and looked after the provisions.

It was stated in 1809 that "The gangs of negroes employed in this work consist of from ten to 50 each; few exceed the latter number. The large bodies are commonly divided into several small ones, a plan which it is supposed greatly facilitates labour". This was another major difference between the work experience of the slaves in Belize and those who worked in large gangs on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The smaller gangs reduced the need for close supervision. The foreman, whose job was chiefly to coordinate the gang's activities, had some authority. But the whip-wielding drivers of the sugar plantations were unknown in Belize.

Other Work
Apart from the jobs that were directly connected with woodcutting, slaves engaged in domestic work and some farming.

As elsewhere, the masters in Belize had slaves to clean their houses, sew, wash and iron their clothes, cook and serve food, and raise their children. Most of these domestics were women and children.

Slaves were often obligated to cultivate provisions, known as "making plantations". This allowed the master to save money by having the slaves grow their own food. Most of the slaves making plantations were women and old men. The young, strong men were used for the harder work of woodcutting. Many slaves also farmed on their own in their spare time.

There were other occupations among slaves, including sailors, blacksmiths, nurses and bakers. But most slaves had no choice and little freedom in their jobs. Young boys and girls started work waiting on their master's table, where they were taught to behave and obey their masters. Most of the young men joined the woodcutters, and the young women continued in domestic work. As they became older or sick, men were transferred to plantation work.

In Belize, a few settlers owned most of the slaves. In 1790, 20 estates owned over 100 slaves each, or more than half of the total. About a fifth of the settlers had no slaves. In the early 19th century the five largest owners owned 669 slaves, or over one quarter of the total.

Master-Slave Relations
Superintendent Arthur reported in 1820 that many settlers treated their slaves with "extreme inhumanity" and "increasing severity and cruelty". In 1824, the settlement's chaplain stated that "there are instances, many instances, of horrible barbarity practiced there". There are descriptions in the Belize Archives of horrible cruelty to slaves. In Belize, the Superintendent, the head of the colonial administration, was in charge of the management of the slave system. Even if sometimes he and the settlers disagreed, they usually agreed on how to control the slaves. He would call the British navy for support when the slaves revolted. But the slaves were also controlled socially and psychologically by practicing the principle of "divide and rule".

Divide and Rule
The Colonial administration and the British settlers succeeded in dividing slaves from each other, African-born from Creole, blacks from brown, skilled and favoured from unskilled and unfavoured, converted Christians from "heathen", and so on. They also managed to divide the slaves from the "freed blacks and coloured" by giving the freemen just enough privileges and favours to make them identify with the whites.

The "free people of colour", as they were called, had some privileges but not as many as the white settlers had. They were free, but they could not hold commissions in the military. Their economic activities were restricted. They could not become judges or even sit on a jury. They had to own more property and live in the area longer than the whites in order to vote in elections. Many of the coloured people petitioned for more privileges. They stressed their loyalty and their "whiteness", and tried to keep separate from the black African slaves. By 1832 there were about 1,800 free coloured and black people in Belize (1,000 free coloured, 800 free black). This was almost half the total population.

The freemen of Belize were among the last in the British West Indies to receive equal rights with the white settlers. The white settlers controlled the early legislative assembly called the Public Meeting. In response to petitions, they allowed only one free coloured person at a time to become a member. They did not want the free people of colour to have power, but they expected the free coloureds to take their side against the blacks.

Once the free coloured in other British colonies in the Caribbean were accepted as equals, the Colonial Office in London pressed for change in Belize. The Office threatened to dissolve the Assembly if they did not agree. As a result, on July 5, 1831 the Public Meeting of Belize granted civil rights to "coloured Subjects of Free Condition".


The colonizers also succeeded in separating all the people of African ancestry from the Maya and Garifuna peoples, and the Maya and Garifuna from each other. In 1817 the magistrates of Belize were afraid that escaped slaves would join with the Maya and overpower the British. There is no recorded evidence that this ever happened, but it is believed that some runaway slaves were assisted by the Maya in their escape.

Slave Revolts
The Slaves' own actions tell us how they viewed slavery. They took drastic and dangerous actions, such as abortion, suicide, murder, desertion, and revolt to escape from slavery.

There were four recorded revolts and many desertions of slaves in Belize. Three revolts took place during the period between 1760 and 1770. During this time the price of logwood fell. The settlers had a difficult time getting the provisions they needed to feed the slaves. Because they tried to export more logwood to make up for the lower price, the two thousand or more slaves in Belize had to work harder, but were fed less. They revolted in 1765, 1768, and 1773. The third revolt was the biggest. It began in May on the Belize River. Captain Davey arrived in St. George's Caye and reported in June:

"The Negroes before our people came up with them had taken five settlements and murdered six white men and were joined by several others the whole about fifty armed with sixteen Musquets, Cutlasses, etc. Our people attacked them on the 7th inst. but the Rebels after discharging their Pieces retired into the woods and it being late in the afternoon we could not pursue them". Unfortunately, there are no records giving the slaves' side of the story.


Fourteen rebels surrendered soon after, but Davey could not take the rest. The revolt continued through October. Davey reported that trade in the area had stopped, and that the white settlers were scared and "in a very bad situation". If they did not stop this revolt, they feared other slaves might run away or decide to revolt also.

The H.M.S. Garland was sent to Belize. Nineteen of the surviving escaped slaves were trying to reach the Spanish territories in the north. Captain Judd of the Garland sent some marines to stop them. Eleven of them, however, succeeded in reaching the Spanish port in the Rio Hondo and were not returned. These slaves had crossed about one hundred miles of bush in the five months since they began the revolt.

The last slave revolt in Belize took place in 1820 on the Belize and Sibun rivers. The Superintendent declared martial law because a "considerable number of slaves" were well armed. He sent troops up the river. He discovered that "the Negroes who had first deserted and had excited others to join them, had been treated with very unnecessary harshness by their owner, and had certainly good grounds for complaint".

About ten days after the revolt began, Superintendent Arthur offered rewards for the apprehension of two black slaves, Will and Sharper, who were supposed to be the leaders. He offered "a free pardon to any of the other runaways, who will at this time voluntarily come in and deliver themselves". This revolt lasted for about one month.

Even when there was not a revolt the white settlers were scared that one would develop, so they kept what they called dangerous slaves away from the settlement. In 1791 the settlers were said to be "panic struck" when a French ship carrying over 200 rebels from Saint Domingue (Haiti) arrived. It was decided that "they should not be permitted to land so infectious a cargo". In 1796 the Belize Magistrates prohibited the landing of five Jamaican slaves who were suspected of having been Maroons, and in 1800 a Public Meeting discussed the settlers' "apprehension of internal convulsion and the horrors of Saint Domingo" happening in Belize.

Runaways
Apart from the four recorded revolts, we know the slaves were discontented because they ran away across the borders or created their own communities in the interior of Belize. It was relatively easy for the slaves to escape because they lived in small groups scattered in isolated parts of the country, and many slaves, like huntsmen, knew the bush well. In the 18th century, many slaves escaped north into Yucatan where the Spanish offered them freedom. Some of these former slaves even helped the Spaniards attack the British settlers in 1779. When the Belize settlement expanded to the west and south early in the 19th century, the runaways went through the bush to the Peten in Guatemala, and by boat down the coast to Omoa and Trujillo in Honduras. In 1823, for example, masters complained that in a little over two months, 39 slaves had escaped to the Peten where there was a community of blacks who had left Belize. This happened over and over again.

Some of the runaways began independent communities within the Belize area. In 1816, such a community was reported "near Sibun River, very difficult to discover and guarded by poisonous snakes". The following year, Superintendent Arthur reported that "a considerable body of runaway slaves are formed in the interior." In 1820, he mentioned "two slave towns, which it appears have long been formed into the Blue Mountains to the Northward of Sibun." We cannot find the exact site of those towns now, but there is a tributary of the Sibun River called Runaway Creek. These communities provided a place to which other slaves could run.

This shows that slaves in Belize, like those elsewhere, rejected the system of slavery whenever they had the chance. They revolted, fought against their masters, ran away, and even killed themselves. But the slaves in Belize did not succeed in freeing themselves.

Indeed, the only known case in human history of a successful slave revolt is the one which began in Saint Domingue in 1791, and ended with the Declaration of Independence of the new nation of Haiti in 1804.

End of Slavery
Belize, like other British colonies, lasted as a slave society until 1838, when slaves were emancipated throughout the British empire.

With the growth of industrialization in Great Britain came the need for a free market economy, where labourers were paid wages. By paying wages capitalists could make more profit by selling products to workers who now had their own money to spend. The slave system did not provide this.

Religious people and humanitarians had campaigned for the abolition of slavery since the 18th century. By 1831, increased humanitarian concern, the new economic interests in Britain, and slave revolts in the Caribbean combined to bring about the Act for the Abolition of Slavery. This was passed in Britain in June 1833.

The Abolition Act, however, did not produce drastic changes. Slavery was abolished, but land and labour were still controlled by Europeans. The Act included the introduction of the "apprenticeship" system, which was used to keep control over the workers and condition them to accept this control. Under this system, all slaves over the age of six years became "apprenticed labourers," and were forced to continue to work for their ex-masters without pay. This system lasted from 1834-1838 when it was abolished. The Abolition Act was generous and sympathetic to the slave owners but not to the slaves. The slave owners were even paid compensation by the British government for the loss of their slaves, but the slaves, even when they were legally free, still had to depend on their former owners for jobs, and were unable to own any land.

Until 1858 free land grants were given by the Superintendent but after 1858 the Colonial Secretary in Britain made it clear that Crown land would no longer be granted. He said that allowing the ex-slaves to obtain land might "discourage labour for wages."

The former masters in Belize controlled their ex-slaves by denying them land and by developing a system of labour laws, as we will see in Chapter 9. By these methods, the people of Belize, whether African, Maya or Garifuna, remained in a dependent situation, dominated by the British colonialists.

http://www.belizenet.com/history/chap5.html
 
Sundjata
Member # 13096
 - posted
quote:
Originally posted by AGÜEYBANÁ(Mind718):
I'd wish the label of "Latin America" or "Hispanic" would be done away with to describe the vast amount of people from different countries who in most cases have nothing to do with one another despite the language.

All it does it take away from acknowledging the Indigenous American and Africans roots. But it is what it is...


Agreed. Don't want to generalize, because I indeed need to brush up a little on the recent histories of South and Central America but it seems to me the further one goes into the interior and outskirts of said urban centers (in most of the countries) one would expect to find people with much lower proportions of European ancestry due mainly to the cultural and physical isolation of some of the Afro and native/Afro-native descendants. The information in this thread as well as the videos are making that apparent (this without even mentioning the obvious issues of identity).
 



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