“The Other African Americans” by Miriam Jiménez Román
Introduction by Guesnerth Josué Perea
As we celebrate Miriam Jiménez Román at this year’s Cumbre Afro, we wanted to highlight a lesser-known piece of her ouvre, shared today on the eve of her honoring at the University of Puerto Rico.
In 2011, shortly after the release of Miriam’s germinal work, The Afro-Latin@ Reader, the scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (colloquially known as "Skip" Gates) released the documentary series Black in Latin America. While the series served as a primary introduction to the topic for many, those of us within the AfroLatin@ community, and those dedicated to disseminating its history, found the documentary somewhat reductive and, in parts, problematic. While many chose to voice their critiques privately given Gates’ standing as a premier scholar of the African Diaspora, Miriam chose to engage the work directly. She drafted an extensive review intended for a blog post in 2011 as one of the pieces that would “kick-start” the blog on the forum’s, then, nascent website; but amidst the rush of our first transnational conference and various organizational commitments, the piece remained unpublished.
Today, fifteen years after Miriam first entrusted me with this task, her review finally sees the light of day. I think that Miriam considered this a "working" piece, good enough for a blog, but perhaps not yet at the level of her most formal academic writing. Included in her original files were comments from viewers of the film which Miriam had meticulously saved. While we have decided not to publish these external comments, believing she intended them as personal reference points rather than part of the public text, they clearly affirmed her critique; not that she needed any affirmation.
Miriam’s original document noted in a few places that she felt her conclusion was not strong enough (she wrote in one note regarding the conclusion: “Is that enough? Sounds weak as an ending…”). Apropos that, I have constructed a concluding paragraph using her final set of notes in the text, a list of "pros and cons" written in full sentences that simply lacked connective transitions. Because she placed the list of “pros and cons” immediately following her draft, I have worked under the assumption that she intended to integrate these points into a more robust conclusion. We feel strongly that this synthesis captures her ultimate stance which was a balance of rigorous critique and necessary appreciation. To maintain transparency, we have bracketed this final section to differentiate it from her original unaltered text.
The text presented below is essentially a mostly "proofread" edition rather than a fully copy-edited edition. I have corrected basic spelling, grammar, and italicization to ensure clarity while leaving her original voice and vocabulary untouched.
Miriam’s critique is a masterclass in scholarly nuance. Even as she remains critical of the documentary’s methodology, she never loses sight of its importance. She understood that documenting Blackness in Latin America is an essential act, even when the execution is flawed. It is this balance of critical rigor and communal love that remains the key to her work.
Please read below Miriam Jiménez Román’s review of Black in Latin America.
The Other African Americans: A Review of Black in Latin America
by Miriam Jiménez Román
Viewers of public television received a rare treat this past April and May when, over the course of four weeks, they were offered a guided introduction to the population of African descent in six Latin American and Caribbean countries by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. For many, if not most, of the intended audience, accustomed to thinking of Latin Americans as simply a Spanish and Indian mix, Black in Latin America is nothing short of a revelation, the very title presenting us with two concepts not usually linked together. The series challenges this long-standing perceptual disconnect between blackness and Latinidad with facts and figures that firmly locate Africans and their descendants as pivotal actors in the history and culture of Latin America.
At the same time, the documentary is plagued by an apparent ambivalence as to just how “Black” Latin Americans and Caribbeans can really be. This interplay/volleying between affirmation and interrogation of blackness in Latin America is a running/ever-present/constant subtext that suggests the complexities of racial formations forged in different contexts but ultimately relies on unenlightening sound bites and tired clichés.
The facts and figures are in themselves impressive, as Gates points out in the promotional trailer for the series. Between 1502 and 1866, more than 11.2 million captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and were dropped off at ports along this hemisphere’s Atlantic seaboard. The overwhelming majority of those Africans, over 95 percent, were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, the descendants of those Africans are estimated at 150 million people, approximately one third of the region’s total population. This is, of course, a conservative number that includes only those of discernible African ancestry—a point that takes on particular significance in the context of ideologies that emphasize hybridity as the hallmark of national belonging.
These stunning numbers serve as the rationale for a crucially important but selective exploration of “the other African Americans” in this latest installment of a trilogy that began in 1999 with Wonders of the African World, and was followed five years later with America Behind the Color Line. With a total run time of under four hours, the documentary is divided into four parts: Haiti & Dominican Republic: An Island Divided; Cuba: The Next Revolution; Brazil: A Racial Paradise; and Mexico and Peru: The Black Grandma in the Closet.
That Gates faced a daunting task navigating those historical and cultural complexities and contradictions beyond our borders is apparent throughout the four-part series and may be the reason he so frequently assumes an “oh, wow!” posture, punctuated by a self-deprecating chuckle, in the face of some dubious statements made by his informants. Or maybe he really was baffled, unable to keep up with his interpreters (Gates does not speak Spanish, Kreole, or Portuguese) or the accented English of those who spoke to him directly?
In any event, the film is presented as an expedition into uncharted territory, made by a sympathetic outsider struggling to understand his hosts. And, amiable guest that he is, Gates does not probe deeper and only rarely challenges his informants directly; instead, he offers editorial asides, often phrased as questions, with an occasional declarative statement all the more powerful because of their rarity. For the most part, we are left to our own devices as we listen to a cacophony of voices and look for clues in the many faces and surroundings that might give us more substantive answers to the overarching questions: When it comes to race, how and why is Latin America different from the United States? For Gates, Afro-Latinos are “the Other African Americans” and the US is “America.”
And there are indeed many voices: scholars, cultural workers, artists, activists, religious leaders and, very occasionally, your wo/man in the street speak to us of the documented past and the contemporary reality. Despite the varying titles and stated focus, in each country (with the notable exception of Haiti) we follow Gates as he covers similar themes: European colonialism and the slave experience; the economic, political and cultural contributions of Africans and their descendants to the construction (literally and figuratively) of the six nations; the negative depictions of blackness; the marginalization and discrimination faced by those deemed too dark to be part of the nation; and the growing international Black consciousness movement as expressed in popular culture, most clearly in hip hop music.
As informative as the scholars and archivists are, it is the very presence of Black voices that is most riveting. A gentleman named Juan laments the denial of Blackness among his fellow Dominicans and describes his own process of re-discovery while living in New York City. In Cuba, an emotional Chailloux remembers the satisfaction of volunteering in the nation’s massive literacy campaign; Drekes somewhat matter-of-factly recounts the injuries sustained during his engagements in multiple battles. A critical stance is taken by Roberto Zurbano who concisely explains that despite the official pronouncements, racism continues “under the table” and a rapper sings about the complicity of Black Cubans. In Peru, the recently appointed Minister of Culture, Susana Baca, tells of her first realization of racism as a teenager and members of the Balumbrocio family show how they have maintained the Afro-Peruvian musical tradition across generations. Activist Monica Carillo briefly describes the campaign to remove a blackface comedian from television, and the hostile reaction from her fellow Peruvians.
Hybridity—the biological and racial mixing of African, Indigenous and European peoples—plays a prominent role throughout this sojourn. The series begins with Gates contrasting the pride in blackness exhibited by Haitians to the celebration by Dominicans of their multiethnic mixture—which nonetheless privileges Spanish and Indigenous roots. This same acknowledgement of African ancestry and concurrent rejection of Black identity is a recurring theme as we follow Gates on his sojourn of discovery. One may be “Black behind the ears” in the Dominican Republic, or have “a Black grandmother in the closet” in Mexico, but the connection to Africa is invariably relegated to a distant past; it is a stance that both accounts for the African contributions that permeate almost every aspect of our national cultures while simultaneously absolving us, individually and collectively, from any accusations of racism. After all, how can non-white people, or nations that boast a rainbow of colors, be racist?
From the evidence presented, the pot of gold sits firmly on one side of the rainbow, with Blacks virtually absent from any of the citadels of power and prestige. Everywhere in the Americas, the correlation between color and socioeconomic status is abundantly apparent, even when the statistical documentation is lacking. Indeed, since the late 1980s, a primary goal of Black-advocacy organizations has been the inclusion of racial categories in the national censuses, a necessary first step in demonstrating social inequality and even more basically, as one of Gates’ Afro-Mexican informants tells us, “that we exist.” We can see this in the very faces of the film’s informants: scholars and professionals are much more likely to be lighter in color than musicians. This is as true in Haiti (voudou high priest Ati Max Gesner Beauvoir, professor Rachel Beauvoir, and architect Patrick Delatour could all easily qualify as “indios” in the Dominican Republic) as it is in Brazil (Blacks earn 35 percent less than their White counterparts).
But the emphasis on racial mixing as an exclusive feature of Latin Americans and Caribbeans is especially puzzling coming from Gates, who has publicly acknowledged his own mixed racial ancestry (50 percent European, 50 percent African) and periodically hosts television programs centered on DNA testing to show that we are all “hybrids” and race is a social construction and not biological. Yet everywhere he goes, Gates seems fascinated by the multiple terms people use when describing their color. From Santo Domingo, where the preferred term is “indio,” to Mexico City where caste paintings depict “16 shades of blackness,” to Río de Janeiro where “more than 100 categories” are used, Gates marvels at the “multitude of colors” and the resulting proliferation of terminology. In one of many memorable scenes he approaches a group of Brazilians and asks, “What color are you?” When the four men each respond “Negro,” Gates insists that they cannot all be “Negro” since they have different skin tones. The men explain, “We’re all Black, but different colors” and obligingly proffer up the color terms he has been seeking. Gates concludes: “In America, race is defined in a dramatically different way.”
And yet he surely must know that a similar scene among a group of African Americans would likely produce a comparable range of hues and descriptive terms, including mahogany, charcoal, caramel, chocolate, redbone, yellow, high yellow, high brown, low brown, and light bright. These intra-group distinctions are basically statements of the obvious, problematic only because of the values associated with those physical features. For the past two decades we have heard dire predictions about the changing face of the United States, one in which “non-Hispanic Whites” will be the minority population. At the same time we have witnessed both the proliferation of new racial terms (the 2010 census accommodated approximately 60 ethno-racial permutations) and demands that racial terms be eliminated all together, ostensibly in the interest of racial harmony.
Learning about the disastrous experience of “the other African Americans” should provoke a greater appreciation of the dangers of a color-blind approach to race. It should prod us into more meaningful conversations about how race continues to affect our lives at the institutional and personal levels. Not surprisingly, Gates’ strongest statement during his travels addressed the reluctance of Whites to acknowledge their privileged position and the need to institutionalize affirmative action in the interest of true racial democracy.
The journey begins in the Caribbean, and appropriately enough in Hispaniola, site of Spain’s first American settlement and, for over a hundred years, of Saint-Domingue, France’s “jewel of the Antilles.” In “Haiti and the Dominican Republic: An Island Divided,” we are introduced to the divergent consequences of that colonial history: while Haitian national identity is based on resistance to enslavement and their successful revolt against the French, Dominicans accentuate their ties to Spain and the island’s indigenous peoples and perceive Haiti as a potential threat to their national security. Historian Francisco Moya Pons attributes the marked divergence in perspective to the nature of slavery in the Dominican Republic, one in which distinctions between master and slave were insignificant and where the scarcity of Europeans provided non-whites opportunities for upward mobility. The Haitian Revolution depended on bringing together dozens of African ethnic groups as one people and pride in that achievement has continued to sustain and nurture them through subsequent political, economic and natural upheavals.
Scholar Silvio Torres-Saillant takes us to one of the country’s national monuments where Dominican heroes have been divested of their blackness, and explains the evolution of Dominican identity as developing in opposition to their neighbors, the “homogeneously dark” Haitians. Of course, this observation is belied within minutes when Gates goes to Haiti and we meet voudou high priest Ati Max Gesner Beauvoir, professor Rachel Beauvoir, and architect Patrick Delatour—all of whom would easily qualify as “indios” in the Dominican Republic. Here is a missed opportunity to discuss the correlation between class and color that operates in both Haiti and Dominican Republic. Indeed this commonality is overshadowed by the segment’s opening scene in which Gates stands by the Massacre River (officially Río Artibonito), where in 1937 as many as 20,000 Haitians were slaughtered by the dictator Rafael Trujillo’s soldiers, and contrasts “the clear differences” between the “two sides.” The contrast is belied by subsequent footage which shows that both countries are officially Roman Catholic, both practice African-based religions and other cultural forms. And in the course of the segment we begin to suspect that the similarities between the two countries are in fact greater than their differences, which rest more on interpretation than real conditions.
Of course, what problematizes these intra-group color distinctions are the values associated with those physical characteristics. This has resulted in the false idea that different Latin American race talk is from that found in the United States. In fact the difference is not that great. Not surprisingly, the authoritative voice is invariably coming from the mouths of the lighter skinned. Unspoken but obvious, here we are confronted with visual evidence in what too often appear as little more than sound bites. There is a sense that a tight shooting schedule required quick pre-arranged interviews; this was not a leisurely tour.
But more than benefiting from the exposure to a barrage of historical facts and statistical figures already familiar to a select group of academics and activists, Gates’ examination of the history and culture of six Caribbean and Latin American countries also affords us the opportunity to reconsider our own long-held ideas about the changing place/role/uses and abuses of race in the United States—and throughout the Americas. The documentary could not have come at a better time and not simply because 2011 was declared the International Year of Afro-Descendants by the United Nations. Sociologists Eduardo Bonilla-Silva—these post-racial arguments bear striking similarities to America—more like Latin. Rather than limit ourselves to commemorations that last a month or even a year we need to continue the conversations that such events inspire.
This was very much a layperson’s exploration into the nature of racial dynamics beyond the United States for while Professor Gates is undeniably well grounded in African-American history and culture, the series clearly reveals his neophyte status regarding Latin America. There are, of course, errors. The most egregious appeared in the first minutes. Membership/legitimacy begins to explain why Gates’ search for blackness in Latin America is not as straightforward as the title might suggest. If there is no acknowledgement of racialized bodies, then where is the blackness Gates is seeking? And if he finds it/them, is it simply a matter of the imperial eye imposing alien values on peoples perfectly at ease with their own (presumably superior) construction of social relations? And how does one explain 500 years of racial thinking and the experience of African-descendants in six countries—Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Peru and Mexico—in less than four hours?
The series wrestles with the overarching question: How and why is Latin America different? This reflects both Gates’ African-American/particular sensibilities/perspective and the very character/nature of racial formation/ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, Gates does not prove up to the task of navigating these complex waters, only rarely going beyond unenlightening sound bites and tired clichés.
[While the series is punctuated by repeated references to Dominican scholars who explain the evolution of Dominican identity as developing in opposition to their neighbors, the “homogeneously dark” Haitians, this observation is belied within minutes when one meets voudou high priest Ati Max Gesner Beauvoir, professor Rachel Beauvoir, and architect Patrick Delatour—all of whom would easily qualify as “indios” in the Dominican Republic. This represents a missed opportunity to discuss the correlation between class and color which operates in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, highlighting errors that expose the superficial nature of the research. Furthermore, Gates emphasizes racial mixture and by extension the distinctiveness of Latin Blacks from other “real Blacks,” characterizing Haitians and Dominicans as “different.” These errors expose the superficial nature of the research.
Despite these limitations, the documentary provides a vital exposure to Latin America’s racial and ethnic diversity—serving as an antidote to the commonly held view of “latinos” as one type, i.e. "BROWN." This diversity is evident depending on the region, from being “Indian-looking" in the SW & Calif to “Spanish-speaking Negroes" in the NE.
Ultimately, its greatest contribution is the visual documentation of black presence and some of their criticism of the larger society/ideology; this visual documentation is important because it allows us to make ourselves known, as Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks “Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known.”]
