yo soy negro: blackness in peru
DESCRIPTION
Presentation on book - Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru - delivered at DePaul University: October 19, 2011 -2: 30 to 5:30 pmLocation: DePaul University - Richardson Library Rosati Room 300TRANSCRIPT
Yo Soy Negro: Defining
Blackness in Peru
Tanya Golash-BozaUniversity of
Kansas
Many people in Ingenio insisted to me that
blackness is no
more than a skin color, with no cultural or historical connotations.
“Yo Soy Negro”: I am black
Ingenio, Peru• Small town in northern
Peru.• Rice production for
national market.• 85% African-descended
Methodology
116 interviews– 50 semi-structured interviews in Ingenio– 8 follow-up collaborative interviews– 30 semi-structured interviews in Lima
Ethnographic fieldwork from 2002 to 2007 9 months in Ingenio and 9 months in Lima
Cultural texts, historical documents, oral histories, newspapers, and the Internet
Latin American Studies and African Diaspora Studies
My argument that the discourse of blackness in
Ingenio is primarily a discourse of color constitutes a challenge to scholarship on the black
diaspora that points to the centrality of slavery for defining blackness in the diaspora and to scholarship on race in Latin America that places
cultural and class differences at the core of racial discourses.
When asked how Africans got to Peru, only 12 of the 51 interviewees knew that Africans had been brought as slaves.
Paul Gilroy (1993: 39): Diasporic blacks share a “memory of slavery, actively preserved as an intellectual resource in their expressive political culture.”
Slavery in Piura was not prevalent• About 100,000 Africans
were brought to Peru as slaves, mostly to the South.
• Largest hacienda in Piura had 60 slaves in 1790, at its height.
• Hacienda Morropon, where Ingenio is, had
30 slaves at its peak.
When slavery ended in 1854, there were no more than 600 slaves in all of Piura.
Pre- and post-abolition, most Afro-Peruvians in Piura worked
as tenant farmers.
The way people in Ingenio remember slavery reveals the
importance of local understandings of race, exploitation, ancestry and history for the creation of
collective memory.
they also say that there was slavery before. … They made them work for free. …
Rosa
[the stockade] was a piece of wood, … with holes. They made some holes here where your arms fit; it had another hole here where your legs fit, and you would put your leg in. … They were there as prisoners. - Rosa
Africa is not part of collective memory
• 49 African-descended interviewees– 24: no African ancestry– 13: I don’t know– 12: African ancestry
130 African-descended survey respondents
Do you have African ancestry?22 responded “yes”
• Do you have black or African ancestry?
• Diana: “Blacks, yes, but that they had been of African ancestry, I don’t know.”
• Liliana: “My father was very dark-skinned, quite black, but he never told us that we were Africans.”
In Ingenio,
Africa and the
slave trade do not figure into many people’s conceptions of their
ancestry and of the history of the town.
What does it mean to be black in Ingenio?
Scholars of the
African Diaspora argue there is a
common experience among descendants of
African slaves in the Americas, and relate that shared experience
to blackness
The local discourse on blackness
Negro es una color, nada másBlack is a color, nothing more.
Doña Perla, Ingenio, Peru
Nosotros somos negrosWe are blacks.
Soy orgulloso de ser negroI am proud to be black.
Don Fabio, Ingenio, Peru
• Local Blackness– Skin Color
• Diasporic Blackness– Skin Color – Africa– Slavery– Racism– Cultural Production
Diaspora is both a process and a condition. As a process it is constantly being remade through movement, migration, and travel, as well as imagined through thought, cultural production, and political struggle. Yet, as a condition, it is directly tied to the process by which it is being made and remade. (Patterson and Kelley 2000)
Diaspora is not simply the “logical manifestation of dispersion”
Thinking of the diaspora
as both a process and a condition helps us to understand better the
multiplicity of black identities that exist and the
extent to which global and local discourses interact to produce new conditions and processes.
Latin American Studies
- Possibilities for blackness
- Commonalities of blacks across the diaspora
• Possibilities for whiteness
• Particularity of Latin America
African Diaspora Studies