Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia.

The numbers tell the story: the heart of the New World African diaspora lies, not north of the border, but south. During the period of slavery, ten times as many Africans came to Spanish and Portuguese America as to the United States.(1) People of African ancestry found considerably more favorable conditions in North America for their survival and increase than they did in Latin America; nevertheless, by 1990 the estimated 100 million Afro-Latin Americans still outnumbered Afro-North Americans by a factor of more than three to one and accounted for almost twice as large a proportion of their respective national populations.(2)

Though the historiography on Afro-Latin America has expanded greatly during the last twenty years, it continues to differ in at least one important respect from comparable work on the United States: it focuses almost entirely on slavery, and essentially comes to an end at the moment of abolition.(3) While historians in the United States have devoted extensive attention to the post-emancipation period in this country and to the subsequent evolution of race relations during the twentieth century, Magnus Morner's evaluation, written a quarter of a century ago, still holds true today: historians of Latin America "seem to lose all interest in the Negro as soon as abolition is accomplished. In any case, he disappears almost completely from historical literature."(4)

In the absence of historical research, our understanding of twentieth-century patterns of race in the region has been shaped by anthropologists and sociologists: Thales de Azevedo, Roger Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Gilberto Freyre, Marvin Harris, Carlos Hasenbalg, Octavio Ianni, Clovis Moura, Joao Baptista Borges Pereira, and Charles Wagley in Brazil; Angelina Pollak-Eltz in Venezuela; Jaime Arocha and Nina de Freidemann in Colombia; Norman Whitten in Ecuador, to name just a few. Even this literature is not abundant; and, significantly, much of it has been produced by scholars who are not native to the countries they study. Latin American sociologists have proven reluctant to contest their societies' self-image as "racial democracies"; and as Peter Wade suggests for the case of Colombia, the belief that people of African ancestry have been satisfactorily integrated into their national societies has tended to remove them as objects of study for local anthropologists, who focus instead on the less assimilated, more "primitive" Amerindian populations.(5)

So when three major new works on Afro-Latin America (written, in keeping with the pattern just noted, by foreign anthropologists) appear in a relatively short space of time, it is an event worthy of notice. Only one of those works, Peter Wade's Blackness and Race Mixture, focuses specifically on questions of race. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's Death Without Weeping is concerned with "slow starvation ... as a primary motivating force in social life" and "the effects of chronic hunger, sickness, death, and loss on the ability to love, trust, have faith and keep it." (Scheper-Hughes: 15) And John Burdick's Looking for God in Brazil seeks to explain why Catholic liberation theology and "base communities," hailed during the 1970s and 80s as engines of progressive political change, are now being displaced among poor and working-class Brazilians by evangelical Protestantism and Afro-Brazilian umbanda. But in order to answer these questions, Scheper-Hughes and Burdick both carried out field research in communities which are majority Afro-Latin American. And since all three authors were able to talk directly to the subjects of their research, they portray those communities with a depth and richness of detail that historians forced to work with sketchy and fragmentary documentary evidence can only rarely achieve.(6)

Paralleling (and in part inspired by) recent scholarship on Brazil, Peter Wade begins by questioning Colombia's semi-official image of itself as a racial democracy, a mestizo society created by a centuries-long process of race mixture among Europeans, Indians, and Africans.(7) He has little trouble demonstrating that, like other Latin American societies, Colombia is in fact a racial hierarchy in which whiteness is highly valued over blackness and Indianness. Whites are correspondingly over-represented in the upper and middle classes, and nonwhites are over-represented in the working class and among the poor.

Thus far this is familiar ground. Wade pushes on beyond the existing literature, however, by noting that racial groups are unequally distributed not just in Colombia's class structure; they are unequally distributed across the country's regions as well. This leads him to ask how the ideology and practice of racial hierarchy vary between areas which are predominantly black and those which are predominantly white. The book thus becomes a comparative study within Colombia, focusing on the Choco, a lowland tropical rain forest bordering Panama, and the highland region of Antioquia.

The two locales differ in almost every way possible: ecologically, racially, economically. While the Choco is one of the poorest areas in Colombia, Antioquia is the most prosperous, with highly productive agriculture, industry, and commerce (including, most recently, in cocaine). The Choco is 80 to 90 percent black and mulatto; Antioquia is majority white. The Choco is thus associated in the Colombian mind with rural poverty, backwardness, and blackness, while Antioquia is the essence of a "whitened" society: economically dynamic, urban, and "civilized" (at least until the outbreak of the drug wars of the 1980s). But despite (or more likely, because of) these differences, the two regions have been closely linked over the course of the 1900s. Antioqueno migrants have been moving into the Choco since the 1940s and have essentially taken over the region's commerce and most of the cattle-raising on the rain-forest frontier. Meanwhile, a reverse movement of black Chocoanos has headed to Medellin, the capital of Antioquia, in pursuit of the opportunities offered by a large and dynamic urban economy.

Patterns of race relations have developed quite differently in the two regions. In the Choco, where Antioquenos and other whites form a small minority, they tend to maintain themselves as a relatively closed racial group. This is a function both of their desire to monopolize economic opportunities, and of their image of themselves as gente progresista--shrewd, energetic, forward-looking businesspeople--which is at direct variance with national stereotypes of blacks as lazy, backward, irresponsible, and lacking in ambition. Unwilling to risk the loss in status and self-image which would follow from close association with blacks, as well as possible loss of control over the region's economy, the Antioquenos stick to themselves and practice visible racial exclusion.

In Medellin, by contrast, blacks form a tiny minority (Chocoanos represent less than one percent of the city's population). Since they present no immediate danger of "contaminating" Medellin's whiteness, the city has proven relatively open to the black migrants, who occupy a position in the local labor market, and in residence patterns, essentially similar to those of Antioqueno ruralites who have moved to the capital. (Wade: 201, 214) Discrimination does exist, argues Wade, but at much lower levels than in the Choco, with the result that blacks in Medellin have the real possibility of cutting some or all of their ties to the black community and integrating into the larger society. While some Chocoano migrants continue to live in black enclaves and to identify with black culture, most disperse into the larger society, and this tendency is even more pronounced among the migrants' children. (Wade: 302-13)

So is Colombia in fact a racial democracy? By no means, concludes Wade. First, there is the case of the Choco. Second, in those instances in which integration does take place, it is dependent on Afro-Colombians' abandoning black culture and conforming to white social and cultural norms hardly a practice conducive to racial equality. Third, the acceptance of blacks into white society is always "conditional," and can be revoked at any time. Finally, what makes integration possible in places like Medellin is the relatively small number of black competitors for upward mobility. "[I]f the Chocoanos migrated in greater numbers, and especially if they tried to be socially mobile and claim higher status on a larger scale, there would be greater ethnic and racial antagonism directed at them from both working-class and bourgeois Antioquenos.... For the moment ... this has not come to pass in Medellin, although the incidents of racial antagonism which have appeared are indicative warnings." (Wade: 347)

These conclusions contrast sharply with conventional wisdom on regional aspects of race in Brazil, where the relationship between the Choco and Antioquia finds a parallel in the longstanding flow of migration between the chronically depressed, heavily black Northeast and the industrialized South and Southeast. In Colombia, Wade finds that racial antagonism is less pronounced, and opportunities for black integration greater, in the most economically dynamic part of the country. But in Brazil, Sao Paulo and the southern states are considered to be the country's most racially tense and excluding (for blacks) region. And Wade finds the highest racial barriers to Afro-Colombian advancement and upward mobility in Colombia's blackest and least developed region--again, the apparent reverse of the Brazilian situation, where the lack of economic opportunities in the Northeast is believed to have removed the basis for racial competition, thus producing relatively relaxed patterns of racial interaction.(8)

I have often wondered about this regional contrast in the Brazilian literature. One can easily see why economic expansion would produce more opportunities for economic competition, and thus tenser racial interaction. This would be especially true in areas like Sao Paulo, where the black and mulatto population is much larger than in Medellin.(9) But why shouldn't lack of opportunities produce equally intense racial competition? When people have less to struggle over, as in the Colombian Choco or the Brazilian Northeast, why shouldn't they fight even harder to get their share of the little that is available? And in fact, recent writing on the Northeast presents clear parallels with Wade's Choco, noting high levels of informal segregation in the region and intensifying racial tensions between a minority white population clinging desperately to its privileged position in the face of rising black anger and resentment.(10)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes reports similar findings. As the Brazilian economy stagnated during the prolonged economic crisis of the 1980s, racial and social tensions worsened visibly in the Northeast, acquiring "a wholly different, more desperate quality that must give one pause. Accompanying the positive spirit of the abertura [the return to civilian democracy in 1985] is an unchecked license to express ... racist sentiments that were previously disallowed, at least publicly. Savage racist jokes abound, and caricatures of one's 'ugly' black maid or washerwoman are 'playfully' engaged in by both children and adults ..." (Scheper-Hughes: 92-93)

Scheper-Hughes's book, Death Without Weeping, is not without its irritating aspects. Displaying the self-consciousness and self-regard characteristic of the post-modern social sciences, the author is ubiquitous in the text, and not all readers will find her a congenial companion. She assumes an attitude of moral superiority to many of the people she is writing about, and lapses at times into full-blown self-righteousness.(11) Readers conversant in Portuguese will also be dismayed by the book's numerous errors in that language.(12) This is seemingly a minor matter; but what would we think of a Brazilian author who wrote a book on life in the United States in which she talked, for example, about how "bleck" and "whit" people interact, or, on a more prosaic level, how she took a "bos" downtown? When observers of foreign cultures can't even get the simple things right, why should we trust them on more complicated and subtle matters?

Yet there is no doubt in my mind that Scheper-Hughes has in fact gotten her story right. Her portrait of modern Brazilian society, at both the macro- and micro-levels, rings consistently true. Death Without Weeping falls into a category that I think of as "twenty-year books": monuments to scholarship which are the product of a lifetime, or some large portion of a lifetime, of research, experience, and reflection. Her extended relationship, going back to 1965, with the (pseudonymous) northeastern Brazilian city of Bom Jesus da Mata, and its poverty-stricken neighborhood of the Alto do Cruzeiro, has enabled her to write a book which is more than a magnificent piece of scholarly research. Given the subjects with which it deals, the awful clarity of its vision, and the horrific truths which it presents, there are points at which this book takes on a truly prophetic force and intensity.

Scheper-Hughes suggests that the central theme of the book is "mother love," and how that love is affected by conditions of dire poverty and want. Certainly the Alto do Cruzeiro provides those conditions. Its residents, who were already bitterly poor in the 1960s, when she first arrived in the neighborhood, became even poorer during the 1970s and 80s, as the expansion of sugarcane cultivation swallowed up subsistence agriculture and as the decline of local industry threw more and more men and women out of work.(13) For most residents of the Alto, employment options are now limited to domestic service, "cut sugarcane, or die." (Scheper-Hughes: 75)

Or alternatively, cut sugarcane and die. Brazilian researchers estimate that average daily caloric intake for Northeastern canecutters was 1,500 calories in the early 1980s, down from 1,700 thirty years before; and chronic malnutrition, and even starvation, are endemic.(14) Such conditions strike particularly hard at young children, with the result that, for the mothers of the Alto, "infants, like husbands and boyfriends, are best thought of as temporary attachments. Both tend to disappoint women," the latter by leaving them, the former by dying, usually of diarrhea, other infectious diseases, and/or hunger.(15) In emotional self defense, mothers respond to this situation by refraining from establishing ties of affection with their children until the latter have weathered the critical first year of life and have displayed the vontade or forca (will, strength) required to survive in such a hostile environment. And just as mothers, and the rest of the family, watch for signs of the child's commitment to life, so too do they watch for the signs of the crianca condenada--the child who lacks the necessary strength or will to live. Once a child is so marked, Scheper-Hughes argues, the family will quietly adopt an attitude of "mortal neglect," allowing the infant to die even though its symptoms may be traceable to problems susceptible to remedy, such as dehydration.

Thus while mothers in reasonably healthy environments emotionally "hold on" to their children, those in the Alto learn to "let go." Scheper-Hughes buttresses her case by citing the research of Philippe Aries, Edward Shorter, and other historians who have argued that "mother love" is a relatively recent "cultural construction" associated with high levels of economic development. Parents in early modern Europe, where infant mortality rates were comparable to those of the modern Third World, allegedly resembled the mothers of the Alto in withholding affection until their infants had survived the first year of life. She is apparently unaware that this work has come under fire in recent years, and that there is now considerable evidence that European parents of several centuries ago loved their infants in much the same way that "modern" parents do.(16) Nevertheless, debate continues on this point; and no historian has ever talked to parents of the 1500s and 1600s, while Nancy Scheper-Hughes has spent years living and working with the mothers of the Alto, and watching them care for and bury their children.

What also makes her story ultimately convincing, at least for this reader, is the clarity and accuracy of her reading of other aspects of Brazilian social relations with which I am more directly familiar. Yes, the book is about "mother love"; but it is also about the impacts of poverty and hunger on a wide variety of social institutions in Brazilian life: domestic service, patron-client relations, conceptions of the body, illness and disease (especially the Brazilian syndrome of nervos, or "nerves"), Carnaval, politics. On every one of these points I found myself nodding in recognition and agreement as she dissected the social and symbolic structures of modern Brazil. Consider, for example, her brief summation of the bitter mutual dependencies of domestic service, so often presented as a "family" relationship between worker and employee.

The wages delivered to the worker may be a pittance, but the patrao's obligations do not end there. If the client is reduced, by the terms of her labor, to an unremitting vulnerability and to a clutching dependency upon her patroa, the boss, on her part, is morally bound to rescue her client from starvation, sickness, prison, and other chronic troubles associated with destitution. This is a vicious cycle and a relationship in which both parties can feel themselves ill-served and exploited, for what is being hidden in this 'bad faith' economy is the true nature of the relations governing the transactions, where desperation can be called loyalty and exploitation can masquerade as care and nurturance. (Scheper-Hughes: 111-12)

Or see her analysis of Carnaval, not as the festive inversion celebrated by her colleagues Victor Turner and Roberto da Matta, but as "a highly segregated and segmented [event] where rich and poor, white and black, male and female, adult and child, loose 'street' children and pampered 'house' children, knew their 'proper' places and kept to them." And can anyone who has taken part in Carnaval disagree with her characterization of it as an event created first and foremost to express male sexual fantasies, "a carnaval for men and boys"? (Scheper-Hughes: 484, 486)

I will reserve for later Scheper-Hughes's views on politics and political mobilization, a central concern of John Burdick's Looking for God in Brazil. Burdick carried out his research in Sao Jorge, a neighborhood in the working-class Rio de Janeiro bedroom community of Duque de Caxias. Sao Jorge has some surface resemblances to the Alto: local industry is in decline; sewage pipes feed directly into the street, and from there into the fetid river in which residents wash laundry and catch fish; and one of Burdick's informants was "often unsure about how he was going to get his next meal." (Burdick: 23) But that last comment is the book's only reference to hunger. We are now out of the Northeast and in the urbanized, industrialized Southeast. Most of the residents of Sao Jorge are poor, or working-class, or both. But most have electricity, many have television sets, and even women of modest means can realistically aspire to owning "an item with considerable emotional charge" in the community: a refrigerator in which to keep their food. (Burdick: 91)

Burdick's argument is compact and presented with admirable efficiency. After the initial wave of excitement which accompanied their creation in the 1960s and 70s, "Christian base communities" (CEB's) sponsored by the left wing of the Catholic Church are now in clear decline in Brazil, as in most of Latin America, while the competing alternatives of Pentecostalism and Afro-Brazilian spiritism are expanding dramatically. Figures from Brazil indicate that membership in evangelical Protestant churches is two to three times greater than in the CEB's; the number of people who take part in umbanda rituals is three to four times greater. This raises the obvious question: "What do pentecostalism and umbanda signify and offer to Brazil's masses that the People's Church does not?"(17) (Burdick: 5)

Burdick responds by examining the interaction of each religion with members of different class, gender, age, and racial groups. And he argues, for the most part convincingly, that the characteristics of the CEB movement have unwittingly alienated most of Brazil's population. Its emphasis on literacy, and on small group meetings in members' homes, shames poor people; its insistence on regular, active participation places intolerable pressures on people working multiple jobs and/or taking care of small children; its focus on macro-level social injustice and inequality, and its reluctance to discuss immediate personal and domestic problems, offer nothing to women facing abusive, alcoholic husbands; and its continuing institutional racism contrasts painfully with the racial egalitarianism of Pentecostalism and the overtly Afro-Brazilian character of umbanda, both of which as a result have proven far more appealing to black people. Burdick is less convincing in his assertions of Pentecostalism's success with young people, since his own data show that over 90 percent of teenagers and young adults in Sao Jorge do not participate actively in religion of any kind. (Burdick: 118) Even here, however the makes clear how Pentecostalism can appeal to young people seeking an escape from the intense competitive pressures of consumer-oriented materialism and sexuality.

Given the CEB's' explicitly political orientation, their displacement by equally explicitly apolitical religions has obvious implications for the future of democratization in the region. But here too Burdick is a contrarian. The CEB's have been greatly over-rated as a motor of progressive change in Latin America, he suggests, and Pentecostalism has been under-rated. (He does not address the political content of umbanda.) Participants in the CEB's do not in fact have a strong tendency to get involved in other, more secular movements; and when they do, they find the rough, confrontational character of competitive politics incompatible with Christian concepts of brotherhood and conciliation. Pentecostals also have problems participating in the rough-and-tumble of secular politics. But Burdick cites several instances of their successful involvement in neighborhood associations, the Workers' Party, and the labor movement, and suggests that their black-and-white, good-vs.-evil view of the world can actually form the basis of a far more radical and uncompromising socialist agenda than Catholic liberation theology.

Each of these books has important things to tell us about the social and symbolic orders of present-day Latin America. What do they also tell us about the place of Afro-Latin Americans in those orders? Obviously it is impossible to consider here everything they have to say; but I would like to note some convergence in their arguments concerning three themes: black family structure; the "cultural construction" of racial categories, images, and identities; and political mobilization and action.

Families. Wade and Scheper-Hughes both examine some of the "specific features [of family structure], often associated with other black areas of the New World, such as polygyny, series of overlapping unions, frequent common-law unions, and matrifocal households," which they found in the communities they studied. (Wade: 91) As Wade goes on to say, "the real causes of these traits are far from clear." During the 1930s and 40s Melville Herskovits and his followers tried to trace those causes back to Africa; some of his critics, most notably E. Franklin Frazier, responded that black family structure assumed the forms that it did, not because of African antecedents, but rather because that African heritage had been obliterated by the experience of slavery. Then in the 1970s and 80s a third wave of scholarship sought to explain black family structure as the product neither of preservation or destruction of African traditions but rather of a new "black" culture which Africans and Afro-Americans created in this hemisphere in response to the conditions which they faced during slavery and after.(18)

The people testifying in these books do not know or follow those theoretical debates, and thus have their own explanations. Interestingly, our authors only report views expressed by women. Do men have nothing to say on this subject, or did the authors not bother to ask them? In any case, the women paint a somber picture of family life.

Subjection to unreliable and abusive men is one of the chief afflictions facing adult women in Sao Jorge, as it is throughout much of urban Latin America.... [Domestic] fights tended to center on the conflict between the male prestige sphere and alcoholism on the one hand, and women's desire for respect, decent treatment, a stable household, and their children's education, on the other. (Burdick: 88-89)

Alcohol is a recurring motif in all three books, with white rum (aguardiente in Colombia, cachaca in Brazil) the drink of choice. Among Afro-Colombians, "for a proper parranda [party], one needed plenty of aguardiente, a group of good paisanos ... and women to dance with--although actually female companions were not considered indispensable by some: they could get in the way of serious drinking." (Wade: 294) For the women of the Alto, being a cachaceiro (rum drinker) is one of the worst deficiencies husbands can have, and a major part of what makes life, in the words of one informant, "terrible without them, but even worse with them." (Scheper-Hughes: 305)

At the same time that the women castigate their men's behavior, they readily acknowledge its economic roots. Chronic unemployment, or employment at wages insufficient to sustain a family, consistently emerges as the greatest threat to family stability. In her interviews with women on the Alto, Scheper-Hughes found that "her husband or current companion was often described as 'good' but meio-fraco, weak-poor, unskilled, unemployed ..." (Scheper-Hughes: 305) Ivanda, a Sao Jorge housewife, does not explicitly identify regular employment as the basis of family life, but her story of her marital difficulties leaves little doubt on this point. The early years of her marriage, when her husband Aldyr held an assembly-line job at the National Motor Factory, were happy ones.

It was the factory layoffs of the late 1970s that changed her family's fortunes. Aldyr turned to low-paying, unpredictable biscate [informal, short-term jobs] in neighboring towns, and Ivanda was obliged to make beds at a cheap motel on the highway. 'Aldyr didn't like that at all,' she recalled. 'He said I should stay home. That really bothered him.' He started to drink and stay away from home for extended periods. (Burdick: 91)

Struggling to save her marriage, Ivanda consulted first an umbanda medium, who told her that Aldyr had fallen victim to the "evil eye," and then a Pentecostal healer, for whom it was clear that Aldyr had succumbed to the Devil. "In the end, God, working in His usual fashion, finally allowed the line between miracle and the natural course of events to blur. Aldyr eventually found a job at a decent wage, and Ivanda withdrew from wage labor. Although they never returned to their former contentedness, their domestic lives began to improve once more." (Burdick: 102)

Both on the Alto and in Sao Jorge, monogamy is "the idealized norm," but one that can only be realized on the basis of stable, adequately paid employment. Such work is not easy to find, and those who obtain it stand out in the community as occupying a "respectable" or "reasonable" position, as opposed to the "truly poor" or, worse yet, the "wretched" and "miserable." (Scheper-Hughes: 84-86; Burdick: 23-26) Jobs are scarce in the Choco as well, which forces men and women to travel around the country in search of them. Chocoanos engage in seasonal migration within the region itself, moving up and down the rivers to pan gold and harvest forest products, and longer-term migration either to the rain-forest frontiers or to Colombia's major cities. This mobility tends to promote both "serial polygyny" and the formation of extended kin networks for support and assistance. (Wade: 159-61)

These extended kin networks are a frequently commented feature of Afro-American family structure throughout the hemisphere. Inspired by the work of Carol Stack, and on the basis of her own years of research on the Alto, Scheper-Hughes sees them as highly functional, and indeed as essential in enabling people to survive in an environment of chronic scarcity. There are hints in her account, however, of a phenomenon explicitly noted by Wade: the brake which such networks place on black economic advancement by draining family resources from more prosperous parts of the network to poorer members. This "helps the subsistence of the many but can pose problems for the upward mobility of a few." (Wade: 162)

Wade juxtaposes this "centripetal" diffusion of resources in black kinship networks to the behavior of white Antioquenio families, in which "unproductive extra members are borne less willingly. As one well-off Antioquenio said of the needy relative: 'We'll give him a helping hand, but we won't carry him.'" (Wade: 162) Again, such family practices must be placed within the context of their respective political economies: given the disparity in the two regions' level of development, poor members of Antioquenio families are more likely to be able to support themselves at a minimal level than are poor members of Chocoano families. Ensuring the survival of family members is thus not the pressing issue in Antioquia that it is in the Choco, and to an even greater degree in the Brazilian Northeast.

Looser, less "nuclear" family structures provide both men and women with opportunities for multiple sexual partners within a structure of "informal" or "serial" polygyny. It is unclear whether these partners are more or less numerous than those experienced by white people, and particularly by white middle- and upper-class men, many of whom engage in sequential liaisons outside marriage.(19) But the image of black men and women as "hotter" and more sexually "hungry" and powerful than whites persists, for reasons elucidated by Wade in his discussion of how racial identities and images are socially "constructed."

The Social Construction of Race. It is a commonplace of the post-modern social sciences that all human cognition and experience are culturally and socially "constructed." And Scheper-Hughes speaks for all three authors when she calls on scholars to deconstruct all such inventions, "stripping away the surface forms of reality to expose concealed and buried truths." (Scheper-Hughes: 171) She pays little attention, however, to one of the most salient and durable of those constructions, that of race--in large part, it seems, because her informants claim not to do so either. Despite their being "descendants of a slave and runaway slave-Indian (caboclo) population," the people of the Alto

do not think to link their current difficulties to a history of slavery and race exploitation. Racism is a disallowed and submerged discourse in Northeast Brazil, so that every bit as much as [anthropologist Eric] Wolf's European peasants, these are a people 'without a history.' They call themselves simply os pobres, and they describe themselves as moreno (brown), almost never as preto or negro (black). (Scheper-Hughes: 90)

Scheper-Hughes rarely refers to her informants' racial identity; only from her photographs, and her passing observation that "one can see both the Amerindian and the African in their eyes, cheekbones, hair, and skin, although it is the African that predominates" (Scheper-Hughes: 90), does the reader know that she is talking about people of African ancestry. A datum revealed as part of her analysis of "mother love," however, suggests that race is in fact one of the most basic determinants of social identity on the Alto. One of the indicators of Alto mothers' hesitation to form emotional ties with their newborns is their reluctance to "anthropomorphize" or "humanize" their babies. "The women of the Alto are slow to 'personalize' infants by attributing specific meanings to their whimpers, cries, facial expressions ... Alto women do not scan the infant's face to note resemblances to other family. At most what is commented on is whether the infant is light or dark skinned ..." (413; emphasis added)

Unlike Scheper-Hughes, Burdick makes race a central element in his analysis (see chapter 6, "Slaves and Wanderers: Negros in the Religious Arena") and consistently specifies the racial identities of his informants. He takes pains, however, to avoid the US-style racial labels of "black" and "white," instead using either Brazilian terminology or a color continuum running from "light-skinned" to "dark-skinned," with "lighter-" and "darker-skinned" in between.

Despite their explicitly deconstructionist approaches, both Scheper-Hughes and Burdick in effect accept Brazilian racial categories as givens. Each rejects the tired myth of "racial democracy"; but neither pays much attention to how the ideology and practice of the color continuum form one of the bulwarks of that myth.(20) Wade is more skeptical and spends considerable time taking apart and examining "the constructedness of race" in Colombia and, by extension, in Latin America more generally. How have societies in the region "constructed" racial identities? Through an extended, complicated historical process which has two related components. First, certain physical characteristics or "signifiers"--skin color, hair, lips, nose--and not others height, weight, ears, hands, feet--were flagged as identifiers of racial groups. Second, racial identities were invested with content and meaning: whiteness became associated with higher intelligence, cleanliness, ambition, progress, morality--in short, with civilization--while blackness was represented as the primitive "other," characterized by lower intelligence, laziness, criminality, sexual promiscuity.

Images of blackness are not unrelievedly negative. "White culture," Wade argues, "secretly fears its alienation from what it defines as baser, cruder aspects of life, even while it trumpets its achievements in more refined and 'cultured' realms. There begins to grow in white society an ambivalent relationship to blacks in which they are seen as politically and morally inferior but at the same possessed of special powers" revolving around music, dance, sex, and spirituality. (Wade: 248-49) These "powers" can occasionally be used by blacks to their advantage, as Burdick argues has happened in Pentecostalism and umbanda, both of which concede "the spiritual specialness" of black worshippers and, unlike Catholicism, have admitted them to formal and informal positions of power and authority. But the very exercise of these "special powers" tends to strengthen and confirm the opposition between primitive, irrational "blackness," on the one hand, and civilized, modern, rational "whiteness," on the other.

Does any of this sound familiar? Or rather, does any of it not sound familiar? These books provide clear evidence that Latin American racial constructions are strikingly similar to their North American counterparts, at least in terms of the images surrounding blackness and whiteness, and the content and meaning of race. Supposedly the markers of race are different: while all New World societies have engaged in thoroughgoing race mixture, Latin American and Caribbean societies have permitted the creation of intermediate racial identities between black and white, while the United States has not. But here too the conventional wisdom is open to question. Paralleling the disinclination of Latin American countries to gather racial data in their national censuses, since 1920 the United States has declined to gather census data on the mulatto racial group in this country. This has made scholarly research on North American mulattoes as difficult, and as scant, as research on Afro-Latin Americans--but it has not caused either group to disappear. And such work as has been done shows mulattoes in the United States occupying a pivotal, intermediate position between the black and white racial groups which is comparable in many respects to that described for racially mixed people in Latin America.(21) Meanwhile, the restoration of racial data to the Brazilian censuses of 1980 and 1991 and to the government's national household surveys has stimulated a wave of research which has led scholars to revise traditional portrayals of the "intermediate" status of mulattoes in that country. At least in statistical terms, Brazilian "browns" strongly resemble Brazilian "blacks," while both groups are clearly differentiated from whites and "yellows" (people of Asian ancestry).(22)

In short, patterns of race in the United States may in fact be more "Latin American" than previously acknowledged, and Latin American patterns may be more "North American."(23) Wade is inclined to agree: "there is no radical division [in patterns of race relations] between the United States and Latin America"; "opposing the two in a polar fashion [can] obscure their common basis." (338) This is not to say, however, that there are no differences between the two regions. The fact that mulattoes in the United States remain within the "black" racial group, while in Latin America they are treated as a separate category and are even on occasion granted white racial status, has had major implications for the individual life chances of the blacks, browns, and whites who live in these racial hierarchies, for the evolution of racial inequality in the two regions, and, not least, for the possibilities of a mass-based politics based on racial identity.

Politics. The authors differ markedly in their assessment of the prospects for successful mass-based political action in Latin America, whether organized on the basis of race, class, or both. Wade describes the electoral triumphs of black populist movements in the Choco, which seized political power from white elites in the 1930s and 40s and continue to hold it to the present. He also makes clear, however, the limitations of those victories: members of the black middle class have benefitted from expanded access to education and bureaucratic employment, but control of the regional economy remains firmly in the hands of the Antioqueno elite, and the economy itself remains poor and underdeveloped, based on the export of primary tropical commodities.

And while black politicians have prospered in the Choco, racial mobilization at the national level has not advanced much beyond a small fringe of middle-class black intellectuals. The obstacles confronting Afro-Colombian mobilization are much the same as those in Brazil. Networks of patronage and clientelism tie Afro-Colombians to existing white-dominated political factions while intensifying conflict and division among competing clienteles within the black community. The ability of upwardly mobile Afro-Colombians, and particularly mulattoes, to integrate into the larger society deprives black movements of potential members and leaders. And Afro-Colombians have proven reluctant to associate with a movement which requires them to embrace a stigmatized racial identity and which, when it is not being dismissed by Colombian media and opinion-makers, is attacked for its "reverse racism"--a major offense in a would-be "racial democracy."

Given these obstacles, the last fifteen years have seen a process of racial mobilization in Colombia similar to, if lesser in degree than, its Brazilian counterpart. Inspired by the international examples of the US civil rights and African liberation movements, small groups of Afro-Colombian intellectuals began to organize during the 1970s and 80s. The drafting of the Colombian Constitution of 1991 provided the opportunity for those groups to initiate an unprecedented national debate on racial inequality in Colombia (like the debates surrounding the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 and the centennial of Brazilian emancipation celebrated that year) and to build alliances with the larger and more active Indian movement. "The results achieved so far," concludes Wade, "although modest, are encouraging." (357)

Because of the Alto people's apparent indifference to questions of race, Scheper-Hughes does not even consider the possibility of a racially defined politics in Brazil. And her discussion of the obstacles confronting political mobilization of any kind among the Brazilian poor holds out little hope. The people of the Alto have learned at painful cost over the years that, in confrontations with authority, they will always lose. Their approach to the conservative elites who rule the country and the region is therefore to seek those elites' protection and assistance by forging ties of patronage and clientelism with them. The poor vote for the "candidates who are most likely to win, and they will avoid association with likely losers, even if the 'weaker' candidate has expressed solidarity with their class. As [one informant] qualified her support of local political leaders, 'If you're going up, I'll tag along with you. If you're going down, adeus, you can go without me.'" (Scheper-Hughes: 473) As in Colombia, pervasive networks of patronage and clientelism, while a necessary survival tactic for the poor, reduce the possibility of collective action by breaking communities down into "individually negotiated relations of dependency on myriad personal and political bosses." As a result, "direct, overt, and collective instances of redress and resistance are rare "(Scheper-Hughes: 472,509)

If Scheper-Hughes sees any hope at all for political action among the poor, it lies in the "transgressive rituals" of the Catholic Church's liberation theology. Even here, however, she notes the Church's traditional "hostility toward female sexuality and reproduction" and its failure to confront the realities of "gender oppression and ... the useless suffering of mothers and infants." (Scheper-Hughes: 529) This tends to confirm Burdick's indictment of the progressive Church's failure to serve adequately its poor, female, and black constituents. Burdick believes that the CEB's could be reformed and re-oriented in such a way as to make them a more effective activist organization; but given both his portrayal of the communities' power structure, and the current conservative hegemony in both the world and Brazilian Churches, I am doubtful. Rather, one is inclined to place more hope in the other organizations which he briefly profiles: the neighborhood associations, the Workers' Party, and the labor movement.(24)

None of the authors raises the question of the degree to which these leftist, class-based movements tend to be racially egalitarian; and I am not familiar with any other research on this point. Let me close, therefore, with a hypothesis for further investigation: working-class movements in poor, multi-racial societies like Brazil or Colombia tend to be racially inegalitarian both in their leadership and in their policy impacts, but inegalitarian in opposite directions. I suspect that the leadership of the leftist parties, the labor movement, and the neighborhood associations does not accurately reflect the racial composition either of those organizations' memberships or of the social groups which they represent; rather, it is weighted toward the white end of the spectrum, probably heavily so. But the social and economic agendas of these movements, if enacted, would disproportionately benefit black people, for the simple reason that Afro-Latin Americans are disproportionately represented among the region's poor. And those movements, by virtue of their greater weight both in politics and in civil society, are far more likely to achieve some part of their goals than are weak and marginal movements based on race.(25)

This leaves one group very much out in the cold: those middle-class Afro-Latin Americans who are either unwilling or unable to abandon their black identities and the struggle against racism and discrimination. These are the individuals who led the black movements of the 1980s in Brazil, Colombia, and elsewhere.(26) They did so in part because of their exclusion from mainstream political institutions, and in part because, within the Afro-Latin American population, it is they who most directly experience prejudice and discrimination as they compete for advancement in a white-dominated world. Poor and working-class Afro-Latin Americans do not confront these obstacles in such an obvious and visible way. However, I would argue that they experience the indirect impacts of racism far more powerfully, in terms both of the number of individuals affected and of the form which those impacts assume: the grinding poverty portrayed so effectively by Scheper-Hughes. The Afro-Latin American movements of the 1980s were an important--indeed, an essential--chapter in the centuries-long struggle against racial inequality in the region; but I predict that future chapters of that struggle will be waged more effectively by class-based multi-racial mobilization than by movements based on racial identities. Whether middle-class blacks will be able to find a place for themselves in those mobilizations will be but one of the many challenges facing that embattled social group in the 1990s and beyond.

Department of History Pittsburgh, PA 15260

ENDNOTES

1. Philip Curtin provided the original empirically based estimates of the numbers of Africans who came to the New World. Subsequent revisions of his figures by other scholars suggest a total number of 520-570,000 Africans brought to the United States, versus 5.4-5.6 million brought to Spanish America and Brazil. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 268; James Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York, 1981), p. 428; Paul Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis," Journal of African History 23, 4 (1982), pp. 473-501. Lovejoy makes use of nineteenth-century data presented in detail in David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987).

2. Few Latin American countries gather racial data as part of their national censuses, and those that do (e.g., Brazil, Cuba) are believed to undercount their nonwhite populations. I have therefore relied on estimates and projections for 1990 presented in Simon Collier et al., eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean (Cambridge and New York, 1985), pp. 152, 157. For the Spanish Caribbean (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico), for which Collier does not provide data, I have used the 1991 Britannica Book of the Year (Chicago, 1991). In 1990 blacks and mulattoes accounted for 12.1 percent of the population of the United States (30 million out of a total population of 249 million; Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1992 [Washington, DC, 1992], table 16, p. 17) and 22.6 percent of the combined population of all of Latin America (100 million out of 442 million). Three-quarters of Afro-Latin Americans (77 million) live in Brazil; 11 million in the Spanish Caribbean; 9 million in Colombia; 2 million in Venezuela; 800,000 in Central America; and 600,000 in Ecuador.

3. For useful syntheses of the literature on slavery in the region, see Herbert Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York, 1986), and Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana, 1992).

4. Magnus Morner, "Historical Research on Race Relations in Latin America during the National Period," in Magnus Morner, ed., Race and Class in Latin America (New York, 1970), pp. 214-215. Recent historical work on twentieth-century race relations in the region can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. See for example Michael Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981 (Pittsburgh, 1985); Cleber da Silva Maciel, Discriminacoes raciais: Negros em Campinas (1888-1921) (Campinas, 1987); Tomas Fernandez Robaina, El negro en Cuba, 1902-1958: Apuntes para la historia de la lucha contra la discriminacion racial (Havana, 1990); Winthrop R. Wright, Card con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin, 1991); George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (Madison, 1991); Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995). For a useful survey of earlier literature, which emphasizes its sparseness, see Leslie Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge and New York, 1976), pp. 185-322.

5. In addition to Wade (29-37), see Joao Baptista Borges Pereira, "Estudos antopologicos e sociologicos sobre o negro no Brasil," Colecao Museu Paulista, Serie Ensaios 4 (1981), pp. 193-206.

6. Anthropologists do pay a price for their access to informants. Peter Wade came down with typhoid after taking part in an exuberant community festival. Nancy Scheper-Hughes's daughter Sarah "suffered a profound form of culture shock and then fell so gravely ill that we all feared briefly for her life." (537-38) John Burdick seems to have escaped physical mishap but reveals that the experience of field research placed his marriage under such stress that he turned to umbanda mediums for help in warding off the "bad spirits" which had come between him and his wife. (31, 55)

7. Colombian censuses include no racial data; estimates of the proportion of the national population which is black or mulatto range from 10 to 30 percent. Jaime Arocha Rodriguez, "Afro-Colombia Denied," Report on the Americas 25, 4 (1992), pp. 28-31. Wade, p. ix, favors the lower figure; Collier, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America, p. 157, favors the higher.

8. See for example Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971), pp. 98-103.

9. As of 1987 blacks and mulattoes accounted for 30.0 percent of the population of Sao Paulo state, and 16.7 percent of the population of the southern states. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios--1987. Cor da populacao (Rio de Janeiro, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 158-59; vol. 5, pp. 122-23.

10. Edward Telles, "Residential Segregation by Skin Color in Brazil, "American Sociological Review 57, 3 (1992), pp. 186-97; Edward Telles, "Racial Distance and Region in Brazil: Intermarriage in Brazilian Urban Areas," Latin American Research Review 28, 2 (1993), pp. 141-62; Luiza Bairros, "Pecados no 'paraiso racial': O negro na forca de trabalho da Bahia, 1950-1980," in Joao Jose Reis, ed., Escravidao e invencao da liberdade: Estudos sobre o negro no Brasil (Sao Paulo, 1988), pp. 289-323; "A Republica Negra da Bahia," Afinal (9 Feb. 1988), pp. 53-61; "Discriminacao tambem atinge branco na BA," Folha de Sao Paulo (13 May 1991); "So If It's 'Black' Brazil, Why Is Elite So White?", New York Ties (24 Sept. 1991), p. A4.

11. See for example her characterization of the Northeast's Portuguese colonizers as "an indolent and syphilitic lot with an aversion to manual labor." (37) Ironically, the poverty-stricken Northeasterners whom she treats so sympathetically in her book have often been described in very similar terms. In either case, such a dismissive generalization contributes little to an understanding of the behavior of the individuals in question or the causes of that behavior. Or see her exhortation to Brazilian physicians to reform themselves and their profession by "putting their resources and loyalties squarely on the side of suffering humanity ... and letting the political chips and consequences fall where they may." (172) This is easy talk for someone who does not herself live in the country or work in that profession, and who therefore would not suffer those consequences nearly so directly.

12. See for example: incorrect use of accents on 27 (antropologa) and 93 (dao); incorrect plurals on 74 (coronels), 473 (eleitors), 482 (carnavals; and quintals someplace else); wrong words on 90 (da nada for danado,) 163 (tenha for tem), 176 (e for e), 252 (a for o), 357 (Sao for Santo), 387 (quise for quiser), 530 (penanda for penada); misspellings on 370 (mourrer for morrer), 547 n6 (sesta basica); and so on. Almost every time I open the book, I notice another mistake. When I turned to the bibliography, the first entry I looked for--Roberto Schwarz, Ao vencedor as batatas--gives the author's first name as Tomas and misspells both his last name and vencedor.

13. In keeping with its goal of linking the story of the Alto to the larger context of Brazil's political economy, the book should probably have mentioned the government-subsidized "gasohol" program which was the major force behind the growth of the sugar industry during those years. See Michael Barzelay, The Politicized Market Economy: Alcohol in Brazil's Energy Strategy (Berkeley, 1986).

14. In addition to Scheper-Hughes's data (128-66), see the government report by the Instituto de Pesquisa Economica Aplicada, O mapa da fome: Subsidos a formulacao de uma politica de seguranca alimentar (Rio de Janeiro, 1993).

15. Scheper-Hughes's reproductive histories of 72 Alto women show a death rate during their children's first year of life of 35.9 percent (208 deaths out of 579 live births). (307)

16. See for example Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge and New York, 1983); Steve Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 166-70; Janelie Greenberg, "'The World We Have Lost': Western Historiography and Attitudes toward Death and Bereavement among Peoples of Pre-Industrial Europe," PSR Quarterly 1, 4 (1991), pp. 185-200.

17. For other recent responses to this question, see David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (Berkeley, 1990); Rowan Ireland, Kingdoms Come: Religion and Politics in Brazil (Pittsburgh, 1992); Virginia Garrard-Burnett and David Stoll, eds., Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Philadelphia, 1993).

18. Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941), and The New World Negro (Bloomington, 1966); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1939); Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, 1974); Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976).

19. On male sexual behavior in the upper class, see Scheper-Hughes, pp. 81-82. See also her accounts of the proliferation of cosmetic surgery among middle- and upper-class women seeking to hold their husbands' sexual interest, including a new "vagina-tightening" operation. "'No man likes a flabby old woman,' I was told more than once with a wink." (78, 246, 337-38)

20. Scheper-Hughes addresses this point briefly in an endnote (543 n3); Burdick does not consider it at all. On the relationship between the color continuum and the ideology of racial democracy, see Carlos Hasenbalg, Discriminacao e desigualdades raciais (Rio de Janeiro, 1979), pp. 237-45.

21. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980); E James Davis, Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition (University Park, PA, 1991); Verna Keith and Cedric Herring, "Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community," American Journal of Sociology 97, 3 (1991), pp. 760-78; Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Roland Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York, 1992).

22. For a summary of this research, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, pp. 249-58; George Reid Andrews, "Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison," Journal of Social History 26, 2 (1992), pp. 229-63.

23. Thomas E. Skidmore, "Bi-racial USA vs. Multi-racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?", Journal of Latin American Studies, 25, 2 (1993), pp. 373-86.

24. On these organizations, see Alfred Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation (New York, 1989); Margaret E. Keck, The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven, 1992).

25. Evidence for this proposition can be found in the case of the Cuban Revolution, which has been led primarily by members of the pre-revolutionary white middle class. However, its policies, aimed at improving the position of workers, peasants, and the poor, have had particularly positive impacts for Cuba's black and mulatto population. Se Alejandro de la Fuente, "Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899-1981," Journal of Contemporary History 30, 1 (1995).

26. On the activities of these movements, see Conexoes (1989-), the semi-annual publication of Michigan State University's African Diaspora Research Project.