Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

224 Pages·2010·2.436 MB·English

by  Peter Wade

Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
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Anthropology, Culture and Society
Series Editors:
Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University
and
Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex
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RAcE And Ethnicity
in LAtin AmERicA
Second edition
Peter Wade
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First published 1997
this edition published 2010 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London n6 5AA and
175 Fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10010
www.plutobooks.com
distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave macmillan, a division of St. martin’s Press LLc,
175 Fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10010
copyright © Peter Wade 1997, 2010
the right of Peter Wade to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
iSBn 978 0 7453 2948 2 hardback
iSBn 978 0 7453 2947 5 Paperback
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this book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed
and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are
expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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typeset from disk by Stanford dtP Services, northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
cPi Antony Rowe, chippenham and Eastbourne
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contents
Series Preface vi
Preface to the Second Edition vii
Introduction 1
1. The Meaning of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’ 4
2. Blacks and Indigenous People in Latin America 24
3. Early Approaches to Blacks and Indigenous People,
1920s to 1960s 41
4. Inequality and Situational Identity: The 1970s 61
5. Blacks and Indigenous People in the Postmodern and
Postcolonial Nation – and Beyond 85
6. Black and Indigenous Social Movements 112
7. Studying Race and Ethnicity in a Postcolonial and
Reflexive World 151
Notes 163
References 167
Index 196
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Series Preface
Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic
works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of
particular, local conditions – to paraphrase an important volume
from the series: large issues explored in small places. The series has a
particular mission: to publish work that moves away from old-style
descriptive ethnography – that is strongly area-studies oriented – and
offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much
wider readership but which are nevertheless located and grounded
in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a
place in the contemporary intellectual world then it must surely be
through such research.
We start from the question: ‘What can this ethnographic material
tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social
sciences?’; rather than ‘What can these theoretical ideas tell us about
the ethnographic context?’ Put this way round, such work becomes
about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than
detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford
Geertz once said: ‘anthropologists don’t study villages; they study
in villages’.
By place we mean not only geographical locale, but also other
types of ‘place’ – within political, economic, religious or other social
systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within
political and religious movements, occupational or class groups,
youth, development agencies, nationalists; but also work that is
more thematically based – on kinship, landscape, the state, violence,
corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume –
ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections;
and shorter, polemic essays.
We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and
all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with
empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position
in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world.
Professor Vered Amit
Dr Jon P. Mitchell
vi
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Preface to the Second Edition
A lot has happened in the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America
since the first edition of this book appeared in 1997. There has been
great increase in the amount of literature produced, especially in
relation to indigenous social movements and also in relation to
black people, or Afro-Latins or Afro-descendants as the current
terminology often has it. A great deal of literature has come out of
Latin American academies – most of it in Spanish and Portuguese,
of course – as well as North American and European ones. There
are new journals, such as Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic
Studies, and new associations, such as the section for Ethnicity,
Race and Indigenous Peoples, which is part of the Latin American
Studies Association. There have been new theoretical focuses or
more emphasis on ones that were already around – on sex and
gender, on neoliberalism, on citizenship, on transnationalism and
diaspora, on political ecology and biodiversity, on materiality and
embodiment.
There have also been new overviews of the contemporary scene,
including ones that deal mostly with Afro-descendants – for
example, Whitten and Torres (1998), Andrews (2004), Dzidzienyo
and Oboler (2005), Davis (2007) – and ones that deal mostly with
indigenous people, and usually with indigenous movements, such
as Sieder (2002), Langer (2003), Warren and Jackson (2003),
Postero and Zamosc (2004) and Yashar (2005). The split between
indigenous and black people in studies of Latin America, which
is a recurrent theme of this book, while it has been overcome in
some new scholarship (see Chapters 2 and 6), seems still to retain
a good deal of force. Overviews that bridge the divide are fewer
– see, for example, Leiker et al. (2007), Branche (2008) and the
more synthetic overview of Latin Americanist anthropology in Poole
(2008) – and seem to be popular among historians (see Chapter 2).
There has been an increasing geographical spread, especially in
relation to what is sometimes called Afro-America. Although there is
still a relative paucity of anthropological, ethnographic monographs
– in English – on Afro-descendants in Latin America and although
many of those that exist are on Brazil, overall there is now much
vii
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viii RAcE And Ethnicity in LAtin AmERicA
more material on other parts of the region and I refer to some of
this in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
In preparing this second edition, I have remained true to the
underlying idea of the first edition. The book is not intended to
be an overview of black and indigenous people in Latin America,
nor of the scholarly literature that describes and analyses them.
Instead, my intention was, and still is, to give an outline of the
changing perspectives that have guided scholars interested in race
and ethnicity in Latin America and to illustrate, with concrete
examples, how these perspectives have guided their research. This
is easiest to achieve for the earlier periods, up until about the 1970s.
Thereafter it gets a little more difficult, as the field expands and
diversifies, and it becomes more tempting to produce an overview
of current scholarship in all its themes and focuses. Still, I have
tried to pull out the broad shape of the guiding perspectives, even
if these are not as easy to see for the 2000s – not having the benefit
of hindsight – as they are for previous periods.
I have revised all the chapters, adding new material that reflects
recent work and directing the reader to a wider bibliography.
Predictably, the chapters that have grown most are Chapters 5
and 6, which deal with recent approaches and themes. Chapter 6,
for example, has more than doubled in size. The bibliography has
also doubled in length. I have purposely biased the bibliography
towards material available in English, despite the fact that there is a
vast amount of material being produced in Spanish and Portuguese
(not to mention French). The audience for this book is mainly in
English-speaking countries (although a Spanish translation of the
first edition was published by Abya-Yala in Ecuador) and it is
with this in mind that I have made choices about what to include
in the bibliography. I am very aware, however, that such choices
are an integral part of the whole problematic of postcolonial and
decolonial relations that structure the production of knowledge – a
problematic that I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7.
I would like to thank the series editors, the editors and the
production team at Pluto for their interest in publishing a second
edition of this book and for working with me in their usual efficient
and friendly way.
Peter Wade
December 2009
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Introduction
All over Latin America, and indeed the world, racial and ethnic
identities are becoming increasingly significant for minorities and
majorities, governments and non-governmental organisations
(NGOs). Once widely predicted to be on the decline, destined to be
dissolved by political and economic modernisation, issues connected
with race and ethnicity are taking on greater dimensions. Indigenous
peoples and the descendants of African slaves – who are the focus of
this book – have formed organisations and social movements that
call for a variety of reforms to land rights, political rights, cultural
autonomy and, in some cases, simply the right to life itself. In some
cases, governments have adopted political measures, including consti-
tutional reforms, that recognise the multi-ethnic composition of their
nations and accord certain groups special rights, thus moving away
from the classic republican nationalism of homogeneous citizenship
in which everyone was equal before the state. Such rights, whether
given or claimed, are generally in recognition of the historical legacy
that these groups are held to have: as original owners of the land, as
subjects of enslavement, as the victims of racisms.
In this book, I examine the different ways these issues have
been understood over the years. Rather than simply describing the
current situation in its many different facets, my aim is to give a
critical overview of the debates about the significance of racial and
ethnic identities and how to analyse them. To do this, I have taken a
historical approach to theoretical perspectives on race and ethnicity in
Latin America. On a practical level, I think that current perspectives
are much easier to grasp when you know where they are coming
from and what they are supposed to supersede. More theoretically, I
strongly believe that knowledge is a process that has its own past – an
archaeology or genealogy – which it is necessary to know in order to
understand its current dynamic. As the metaphor of archaeology or
genealogy suggests, present approaches build on, or are generated by,
past approaches. It is wrong to simply debunk these as old hat, for
three distinct reasons. First, while the earlier work done on race and
ethnicity sometimes took a line that must be discarded, there were also
valuable elements: we cannot now condone the frankly racist view of
blacks and native Americans held by some early twentieth-century
1
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