Introduction

Abstract

This volume explores the current situations of Afrodescendants’ political activism in a number of national contexts in Latin America (see figure I.1.). It is premised on the assertion that at the regional level there have been in the past two decades (at least) quite notable transformations of the political landscapes within which black Latin American social movements have been operating. As shown in this book’s chapters, these transformations have unfolded distinctly in different national contexts. Their major characteristic, however, has been the passage from ideological monocultural mestizaje and “invisibility” to multiculturalism and state corporatism/co-optation. The former refers to ideologies in which the prototypical national identity has been imagined as a mestizo identity (mixed race, usually involving Spaniards and Native Americans) to which would correspond a single national culture, itself the product of a particular history of cultural hybridity between, mostly, Spain and Native America, commonly at the exclusion of African contributions. Afrodescendants have not been “an ingredient” in what I like to call “the ideological biologies of national identity.” Multiculturalism, on the other hand, evokes recent changes that have been crystallized in new Constitutions and special laws, which now recognize the cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity of national populations, making visible Afrodescendant populations.