THEMATIC CLUSTER: AFRICAN-LATIN AMERICAN SOCIAL STUDIES OF THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE South Atlantic science and technology studies: histories and practices

The history of the peoples of African origin in (so-called) Latin America and the Caribbean is largely unknown in the United States. This is unfortunate. Africans or people of African descent today represent 33% of the population in the region. 1 What accounts for this invisibility?

here by the Portuguese as a pretext for the conversion and the salvation of the souls of the "barbarians" (Africans), who were deemed to be less than human. Baptism or conversion did not of course render enslaved people free; instead, it was used as a shield to prevent them from "falling back to paganism" or natural freedom (De Alencastro 2013, 48). Moreover, according to Jesuit pro-slave theory, slaves were not only private property, they were the proper currency of the colony (De Alencastro 2013, 55).
However, the more favorable environment of the slave trade within the Portuguese Empire explains only in part the high concentration of Africans in Brazil. In contrast to the Spanish Empire, the Brazilian colonial economy was founded on the sugar plantation, which absorbed large contingents of enslaved labor. The indigenous population was sparse. But gold was also abundant in Brazil. Gold mines in the seventeenth century would occupy an enslaved labor force of about half a million human beings who had been trafficked by the Portuguese from Africa. By contrast, in 1770, Spanish America was home to only 12.5% of the enslaved population, most of it concentrated in the Caribbean (Delgado Ribas 2013, 30). As mentioned above, this started changing dramatically at the end of the eighteenth century when Spain turned to the slave trade to preserve its last colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other places such as Venezuela and Colombia. This occurred precisely when the second abolitionist movement had taken force in Britain. The upsurge in the slave trade at this time was of such huge proportions that some scholars refer to this period as the "second slavery." A spectacular import of enslaved labor was also recorded in Brazil and the Southern United States (Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara 2013, 7).
The history of Africans in the Americas was marked also by persistent resistance. The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was a pivotal moment. Haiti was the first modern nation in world history founded by the uprising of enslaved people. Haiti became a revolutionary center for the independence wars of the rest of Spanish America, helping Simón Bolivar launch his liberation campaign with ammunition and soldiers. But revolts against enslavement happened from the very beginning of the Middle Passage from West Africa. This occurred first in the ships that transported men and women, and later in the plantations and mines. The constant revolts of enslaved Africans would soon lead to the palenques, or free towns, founded by escaped enslaved people. Examples are the Palenque San Basilio in Colombia and the quilombosthe communities of fugitive slavesin Brazil. Moreover, the legendary Garifuna of Central America originated partially as a shipwrecked population on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. Thus they never experienced slavery.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. Today Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 200 million people of African descent. As we write these pages, Colombia has elected its first Black woman as vice-president, Francia Marquez, an environmental activist who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018. Yet the legacies of slavery are still present in the region. Police brutality against Black men and women in Brazil is a scourge, just as it is in the United States. The killing of Marielle Franco, a feminist and LGBTQ+ socialist and human rights activist, in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 by hired hitmen is still ingrained in our memories. People with African roots are consistently among the poorest in the region. Many have migrated to the United States searching for better lives, adding another layer to African American identity in the United States. Yet at the same time, they gain a new type of invisibility that follows the patterns of other peoples arriving from south of the border. This is the first of two clusters of Tapuya that are focused on African Latin Americans. These authors aim to provide English-speaking readers with knowledge about contemporary issues and social movements focused on knowledge production that have been led by people of African descent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
(1) Andrea Medrado and Isabella Rega explore how media and art activists have developed tools to build global social movements that can challenge the colonial legacies of social inequality and state repression. Based on workshops held in Kenya and Bahia, Salvador, they provide resources to overcome the colonial legacy of fragmented relationships between Global South peoples. They argue that such "artivism" can transform artists into cultural resistors to build repertoires of communication and to raise critical consciousness. Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America. Wade has been a student of race in Latin America for several decades now. In this book, he looks at the genetic research undertaken in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil in the second decade of the 21st century. An interest in genomics seems to have developed parallel and in response to multicultural state policies in the region. According to Wade, Latin American genomics research serves to reinstatiate the myths of mestizaje by counter positioning mestizaje against a presupposed relative racial purity of indigenous and Afrodescendent peoples. Thus, the new genomic research instead of doing away with racist categories of race, recycles them by de-racializing mestizaje and racializing Afro-descendent and indigenous peoples. In this manner, racial hierarchies are rebuilt. The overall importance of Wade's contribution is dispelling the notion that racial mixtures lead to racial democracies, a notion that has long pervaded in Latin American mythologies of race.