Race in Latin America.

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Race in Latin America. by Mind Map: Race in Latin America.

1. Blacks in Mexico: A Forgotten Minority

1.1. -Yanga, on Mexico's Gulf Coast, is a sleepy pueblito founded by its namesake, Gaspar Yanga, an African slave who led a rebellion against his Spanish colonial masters in the late 16th century and fought off attempts to retake the settlement. -Mirroring Mexico's history itself, most of Yanga's Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants.

1.2. - Mirroring Mexico's history itself, most of Yanga's Afro-Mexican population has been pushed to neighboring rural villages that are notable primarily for their deep poverty and the strikingly dark skin of their inhabitants.

1.3. - Many of the country's mexicanos negros (black Mexicans), as they are called, know that their ancestors arrived in chains on boats that docked at ports in the sultry, steamy state of Veracruz. But they don't know much else. Indeed, Afro-Mexicans say that much of the history of los mexicanos Negros is untaught or ignored by the rest of the country.

2. Latin America in Asia- Pacific Perspective

2.1. Asian Labor in Latin America: After Mexico and Peru's independence from SPain in early nineteenth

2.2. Chinese coolie labor in Cuba and Peru: Peru which had become independent of Spain, and Cuba, which remained a Spanish colony in the Caribbean, both actively promoted the importation of Chinese coolies or contract laborers to work on sugar plantations.

2.3. Between 1839 and 1851, the Peruvian government paid 450,000 pesos in premiums to encourage importation of foreign labor to replace slaves.

2.4. After the coolie trade, some Chinese continued to go to Peru and Cuba, now as free immigrants, but a much larger number voluntarily migrated to Mexico, particularly to the northern frontier zone bordering the US.

2.5. Although the coolie labor of the nineteenth century must be distinguished from slavery, it is quite clear that Chinese laborers were imported to Cuba and Peru to substitute for African labor that was lost with the abolition of slavery.

3. Rethinking race in Brazil

3.1. 13 May 1988 was 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

3.2. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenario, organized by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organizations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President Jose Sarney.

3.3. Racial revisionism was full of insights into Brazilian racial dynamics, but it also had significant limitations. chief among these was a tendency to reduce race to class, depriving racial dynamics of their own autonomous significance.

3.4. In Florestan Fernandes' view, Brazil's 'racial dilemma' is a result of survivals from the days of slavery, which came into conflict with capitalist development and would be liquidated by a transition to modernity.

3.5. Racial formation theory seems particularly well suited to deal with the complexities of Brazilian racial dynamics. Developed as a response to reductionism, this this perspective understands race as a phenomenon whose meaning is contested throughout social life.

4. The Cultural Politics of Blackness in Colombia

4.1. "The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation"- Benedict Anderson

4.2. In the 1970s and with the emergence of organizations that alluded more assertively to blackness, some people began to use the term negro in a rather different way. A number of small and often transient movements appeared during the seventies, but two organizations still exist and are quite representative of the scene: the Center for the Investigation and Development of Black Culture, and Cimarron ( the National Movement for the Human Rights of Black Communities in Colombia.)

4.3. The problem was that such a construction of blackness resonated poorly with the Colombian situation, even among many people who identified as blacks.

4.4. This alliance between blacks and indigenous people has been tenuous but significant. "Indians" have a rather different place than do blacks in the social order of Colombia.