Race and Ethnicity in Latin America : Scholarly Debates from the 1950s to the 1990s

384 Pages·1994·36.276 MB·English

by  Jorge I. Dominguez (ed.)

ESSAYS ON
MEXICO, CENTRAL
AND SOUTH AMERICA
Scholarly Debates from
the 1950s to the 1990s
Series Editor
JORGE I. DOMINGUEZ
Harvard University
229x152 HB
SERIES CoNTENTS
1. ECONOMIC STRATEGIES
AND POLICIES IN LATIN AMERICA
2. AUTHORITARIAN AND DEMOCRATIC
REGIMES IN LATIN AMERICA
3. THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
IN LATIN AMERICA
4. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN LATIN AMERICA
The Experience of Peasants, Workers, Women,
the Urban Poor, and the Middle Sectors
5. PARTIES, ELECTIONS, AND POLITICAL
PARTICIPATION IN LATIN AMERICA
6. LATIN AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
AND THEIR DOMESTIC CONSEQUENCES
War and Peace, Dependency and Autonomy,
Integration and Disintegration
7. RACE AND ETHNICITY IN LATIN AMERICA
VOLUME
7
RACE AND
ETHNICITY IN
LATIN AMERICA
Edited with an introduction by
JORGE I. DOMINGUEZ
New York London
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CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Race and Class in Mexico
Woodrow Borah 1
On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas.
Charles Wagley 13
Colour Prejudice in Brazil
Fernando Henrique Cardoso 28
Mass Immigration and Modernization in Argentina
Gino Germani 37
Race, Color, and Class in Central America and the Andes
Julian Pitt-Rivers 56
Beyond Poverty: The Negro and the Mulatto in Brazil
Florestan Fernandes 75
The Present Status of Mro-American Research
in Latin America
Roger Bastide 93
Mrican Culture in Brazilian Art
Abdias Do Nascimento 107
A Comparative Study of the Assimilation of the Chinese
in New York City and Lima, Peru
Bernard Wong 141
Ethnicity, Secret Societies, and Associations:
The Japanese in Brazil
Takashi Maeyama 165
Research in the Political Economy of Mro-Latin America
Pierre-Michel Fontaine 187
Minority Oppression: Toward Analyses that Clarify
and Strategies that Liberate
William Bollinger and Daniel Manny Lund 218
Brazilian Racial Democracy: Reality or Myth?
Carlos Hasenbalg and Suellen Huntington 245
vi Contents
Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives
Thomas E. Skidmore 260
Peasant Politics and the Mexican State: Indigenous
Compliance in Highland Chiapas
George A. Collier 275
Black Political Protest in Sao Paulo, 1888-1988
George Reid Andrews 303
Challenging the Nation-State in Latin America
Rodolfo Stavenhagen 329
Rethinking Race in Brazil
Howard Winant 349
Acknowledgments 369
INTRODUCTION
In nearly all racially and ethnically heterogeneous societies,
there is overt national conflict among parties and social move-
ments organized on the basis of race and ethnicity. Such conflict
has been much less evident in Latin America. Scholars have
pondered the nature of race and ethnicity with regard to both Afro-
American and Indo-American societies, though research on Brazil
has been particularly prominent. Special attention has been given
to the relationship between social class and race and ethnicity.
Charles Wagley sought to understand the diverging criteria
for racial classification-physical features, ancestry, or socio-
cultural traits. He noted that the United States relied nearly
exclusively on ancestry. In Indo-American societies, socio-cultural
criteria (including language use) predominated; in them, Wagley
thought that "it is only a question of time until such populations
may be entirely classed as mestizo by social race and social
differentiation will be entirely in terms of socio-economic classes."
In Afro-Latinamerican societies, he argued, there were few within-
country cultural variations and limited attention to ancestry; thus
physical traits shaped racial classification, as is evident in the
vocabulary employed to describe shades of color along a con-
tinuum. Nowhere did the categories have genetic validity, but
varying racial criteria were employed everywhere to sort out the
place of individuals in society.
For Woodrow Borah, the central question was: "What is an
Indian?" He reviewed various attempts to answer it-physical
traits, linguistic preferences, cultural patterns, loyalty to an In-
dian community, political choice. He noted that some intellectuals,
bureaucrats, and political activists had a stake in the search "to
find Indians." Borah's conclusion was that Indians had disap-
peared in Mexico as separate ethnic groups, that the search for
Indians thus responded to other psychological or political needs,
and that the term "Indian" had come to mean poverty-stricken
rural dwellers. "Our thinking on Mexico would be much clearer if
we abandoned the word 'Indian' ... in favor of the more accurate
term 'peasant."'
vii
vzzz Introduction
Julian Pitt-Rivers criticized acculturation theorists for ne-
glecting to study the society within which acculturation was
alleged to take place, and Marxists (and also Borah and, for Indo-
america, Wagley) for reducing the study of race relations to a
special instance of class relations. Instead, he argued, race rela-
tions could only be studied at the local level, where ancestry plays
little role and physical traits are bases for classification mediated
through social relations. Pitt-Rivers had little difficulty finding
locales where "ethnic consciousness" had emerged. He further
argued that in the long term indigenous peoples tended "con-
stantly [to] abandon their Indian identity and becom[e] integrated
into the nation;" such integration led "persons of mainly Indian
physique into the proletariat."
In the studies of the 1950s and 1960s, the focus was on the
society. By tlte 1980s, the scholarship had shifted to focus on state
policies toward indigenous peoples.
William Bollinger and Daniel Manny Lund sought to under-
stand the relationship between social class and race and ethnicity,
urging Marxist scholars to recognize that factors other than just
social class had to be taken into account to analyze the conditions
of Indo-American and Afro-American peoples in Latin America.
From a Marxist perspective, they focused on the state as an agent
of control over subordinate peoples defined in part by their race
and ethnicity.
"Indians" could be created by the state to serve political ends,
argued George Collier. State indianist policies segmented agrar-
ian workers by indigenous communities, and the latter among
themselves, to blunt their consciousness for concerted working
class political action and also to prevent alliances among indig-
enous peoples. State policies also concentrated power in the hands
of local-level peasant leaders beholden to the state through clientel-
istic patronage relations. Indigenous local-level leadership re-
mained "factional and impermanent." State-sponsored indianism
sought to secure "political compliance."
By the early 1990s, some indigenous peoples had begun to
develop an ethnic consciousness and to act politically in ways
unexpected from the earlier scholarship. Rodolfo Stavenhagen
focused on the relationship between the "unitary state" and the
"ethnic and cultural diversity of the societies of Latin America." He
noted that political movements of indigenous peoples gathered
force beginning in the 1970s. Intellectuals, church personnel, and
political activists acted to create an ethnic consciousness as a basis
for movement and party formation and for social and political
action. Such action often focused on cultural, legal, and linguistic
Introduction
concerns as well as on regional autonomy from the state. The new
groups forged international alliances to obtain political support
and financial resources.
Race and ethnicity are not the exclusive concern ofindigenous
peoples or of the descendants of African slaves. Gino Germani was
one of the premier students of the large and diverse mass Euro-
pean (mainly Spanish and Italian) immigration into Argentina. In
1914, the foreign-born constituted nearly half of Argentina's labor
force. The "Argentinization of Argentina," to use Germani's term,
was unusually complex and belated by Latin American standards.
A large number of Chinese were brought to Latin America,
mainly as indentured servants. Bernard Wong discovered that the
Kwantung province-origin Chinese in Lima, Peru, were much
more likely than Chinese in New York City were with regard to
U.S. culture and institutions to adopt Peruvian speech behavior
and to learn the Peruvian way of social interaction; to enter the
cliques, clubs, and institutions of Peruvian society; to eschew the
formation of a residential "Chinatown" and to intermarry. Wong
argues that state policies and social institutions in Peru were
much more welcoming to the Chinese than in the United States.
The experience of the Chinese in Lima, Wong notes, demonstrates
that the Chinese can be assimilated, and that the deterrent to
assimilation is found in the host, not in the sending, state and
culture.
Takashi Maeyama made a somewhat different point with
regard to Japanese immigrants, most of whom first came to Brazil
as contract labor. These Japanese immigrants are "an associa-
tional people in an unorganizational society." Repressed (though
not interned) during World War II, they responded to longer-term
challenges by forming a myriad of voluntary associations for
sports, religious, recreational, and business purposes. Such asso-
ciations served to "enforce their identification with an original
ethnicity" but also facilitated active participation in Brazilian
national life.
There is, finally, considerable research on race relations in
Brazil (less so on other Afro-Latinamerican countries), much of it
conducted by Brazilian scholars. Florestan Fernandes pioneered
much of this research, seeking to understand why Brazilians
tended to deny that there might be a racial problem in their
country even though race was, indeed, one factor in social stratifi-
cation. He demonstrated that wealth, prestige, and power were
racially concentrated and that such concentration had changed
little since the abolition of slavery. Economic growth had rein-
forced the previous racial distribution of access to goods and