For the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, “no race comes back; each and every one poses its mission, it accomplishes it and goes away”.

This seems to be the most direct way to approach the current Latin American issue about the race. Yes, “the race”. The multiracial ethnicity that nowadays spreads across the length and breadth of the United States of America, with more than 50 million people.

We’ve forged our image through similarities and reflections in front of many others that approached us even when we weren’t looking for them.

Currently, there are black Latinos; white Latinos, mixed Latinos; sun-browned or with Arab, Greek or even Asian features. 

We’ve been the Mecca of multiculturality and there’s no way you can categorize us homogeneously, since our roots have mutated and they’re not only anchored in a pre-Columbian past or in a domination-product culturization.

We’re actually a vast tapestry of colors, features and identities.

Is it so implausible to believe in the possibility of a man with African American features that expresses himself perfectly in both Spanish and English? Or a brown woman with wide hips, that works as a lawyer in an English-speaking country but whose children answer to the most colloquial Latin American Spanish?

This is one of the multiple realities that Latinos live around the world, but especially inside the American territory. Not only have we established a place of our own inside the compendium of underrated minorities, but also we had to fight side-by-side in a labyrinth of mirrors to make our fellow citizens understand that we are far more than a stereotype.

In the month when Martin Luther King dreamed an egalitarian country, we came to join the cause, answering a question that only a few have dared to say out loud:

Is there an African American Latino?

The myth of the Latin American négritude

What separates America and Africa is way more than an ocean, more than a palpable and quantified distance. Is a path, a passage and a space for demographic mobilizations, a route plagued with footprints, stories, memories, fears and abandonments. 

America and Africa soon became circumstantial sisters that, for 350 years, adopted and lost children, to then complement the landscape we enjoy of today. 

Mestizos, castizos, españoles, mulatos, moriscos, chinos, salto-atrás, lobo, jíbaros, albarazado, cambujo, sambiaga, calpamulato, tente-en-el-aire, no-te-entiendo and torna-atrás, were the first denominations for the product of what we commonly know as mixture.

“White, black and indigenous”, this is the trinity that evocates the term “mixture”, and any amateur genetics connoisseur knows that the product of this intermeshing is infinitely wide, even though there may be features that are more dominant than others.

But as years went by, the Latin American phenotype has homogenized in popular culture, referring to us as “Mexicans” and “Spanish”, making a clean sweep of the multiplicity of descriptions that characterize us; the variety of ethnicities and cultural groups that comprise us, and that remain in the margins of cultural knowledge, for reasons we won’t discuss here.

It’s no surprise that in the streets of Barcelona (Spain) charro hats are sold while in some souvenir shops in Latin America we can find castanets and dresses with white dots hanging in a corner. We’ve passed the filter of globalization and ended up compacted in three or four symbols that underestimate our vast identity.

Therefore, it is very often that a man with black skin and African features wont qualify as Latin American in the eyes of, let’s say, a north American or an eastern European, since black is African and Latino is Mexican, quoting the cruelest of reductionisms. 

Let’s then seize the eve of the African American month to make some historical remarks, in a naïve impetus to return the Latin American négritude to the place it deserves in our context.

The History of the Origin

We were slaves; it’s true. There’s no historical compendium that dares to obviate, deny or conceal such a fact. We weren’t only African slaves, chained and transported in heavy ships across the Atlantic, but we were indigenous slaves as well, and so were our descendants.

But it’s important to stop and remember that the indigenous slavery was less aggressive in the Spanish colonies due to disagreements that Isabel de Castile and King Charles V had with the encomienda system. They finally allowed any “free man” to come to the peninsula, under the mandate to never be enslaved. 

Even though the royal rulings where very strict in paper, in real life there were always twists and turns that allowed the mistreatment and the abuse of the indigenous humanity.

The African slavery, for its part, began with the Portuguese’s Route in 1445, from the Mauritanian Island of Arguin, where Joao Fernández exchanged tissues and grain for man and gold and the planting of sugar cane with slaves workforce was already happening in 1425 in the Madeira Island, where Henry “the Navigator” introduced the labor from Sicily.

It was thanks to the King Ndongo of Africa that the Portuguese could get hold of so many men. Not only did the King allowed the white man to come and take away his man, but he also allowed his daughter to get baptized and transformed into doña Ana de Sousa, although later on she would rebel and would fight in Angola against the foreigner invasion.

Among disputes for maritime territory, assaults and treaties, the autonomy of the Atlantic zone with regard to slave traffic, was always a currency exchange between Portuguese and Spanish. In 1480, Huelva was already a slave trade center and, after the Spanish Succession War and the Treaty of Alcáçovas, Portugal would become the biggest slave trafficker in Europe in the end of the 15^th Century.

But after the discovery of America, the Spaniards had to get more involved in the slavery business, this time through the license (or permit) of possession. The benefit of the African slave wasn’t only his physical strength but his immunity in several epidemics that scourged the indigenous in America. In fact, it was the Franciscan friars and the Royal Audiencia of Santo Domingo, who asked for a slave envoy for the first time, to work in their plantations in Mexico, Peru and Río de la Plata, during the first 30 years of the 16^th Century.

After the success of the slave workforce in the hands of the friars and, later on, the union of Spain and Portugal under the same crown, Felipe II of Spain would accomplish a new method to profit from the importation of slaves into the New World. It was about the “Asientos” system or permits given to moral and independent persons to import slaves to the Americas, paying a fee to the Crown.

After two periods of “Asientos” – one Portuguese and one Dutch – the traffic of slaves to America grew and therefore its costs, due to the difficulty of the incursions into the continent. Therefore, as expected, the vicious contraband of man arose, thanks to the looting and the pirate gangs in the ocean.

It is estimated that during the 17^th century 268 204 slaves arrived to America, from which 70 000 entered through Veracruz, 135 000 through Cartagena de Indias, 44 000 through Buenos Aires and the rest through the Caribbean and other zones. What happened once they got to mainland has been a terrifying memory that hasn’t been forgotten thanks to the oral tradition and the literature that has done its best to immortalize it.

In general, the Portuguese nurtured the stream of black men towards the Americas, introducing men from Sacramento to Río de la Plata; the Dutch exchanged indigenous for blacks from Curacao to Veracruz, Antilles and Cartagena de Indias. The Compañía de Vizcaya provided Cuba; the Compañía Guipuzcoana carried them to Venezuela, and the Compañía de Barcelona introduced them in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico and the Margarita Island.

From 1765, the Asiento de la Compañía Gaditana de Negros supplied Cartagena, Portobello, Santo Domingo, La Habana, Santa Marta, Cumaná, Orinoco, Trinidad, Veracruz, Honduras and Campeche for 10 years with slaves that came from Senegal, Cabo Verde and Gorea, relocating them to Puerto Rico for distribution, and later on in 1773, to La Habana.

A Cry for Freedom

But the black man wasn’t always so submissive. More than one rebellion took place in the Caribbean Islands, especially in Haiti, where a third of the Island was dominated by an uprising that forced the French to reconsider their position. Many plantations were burned to the ground and many cries and chants were listened in the middle of the night, asking for freedom.

Many escaped and tried to organize as far away as possible from the cities, in semi-walled villages, known as palenques, cumbés or quilombos. Precisely to avoid this kind of organizations, the white master always tried to mix his slaves among ethnicities and different original societies, to keep off the social harmony and the come-back to ritualism.

It wasn’t until 1805 that the abolitionism boomed, only as a way for England to boycott the Spanish sugar commerce. The moral boost from the Napoleonic Wars allowed a new breath to the negotiations between Spain and England, to the point where the Spanish Criminal Code was modified, incorporating a slavery prohibition. It was then in 1864 when the Abolitionist Spanish Society was created by a free Puerto Rican and began to fight for freedom and equality. The Cuban insurrection, which decanted in a 10-year war in 1868, would mark the beginning of the end in the American slavery.

A great encouragement for the abolition of slavery was the libertarian strategy of men like Simón Bolívar and Miguel Hidalgo, who used the flag of freedom to add men to their revolutions. One way or another, 350 years had gone and the Latin American man was emerging in the gradual cross-linking between the indigenous, the white man and the slaves that came to replace the almost extinct pre-Columbine man. 

Diversity as a product

It isn’t hard to calculate the product of such mixture. If 14 million African slaves are estimated to have arrived in America, and if they were “placed” barbarously in distribution centers in Puerto Rico and Cuba, that allows us to take a fresh look to the beauty in the color of the skin of the Caribbean Latino, without blaming it to the sun.

Wide backs, big smiles and unforgettable rhythms, they have all been part of the heritage of so many years of suffering. Nowadays, our Latin American societies possess a great variety of features. From the white, the sun-browned, mulatto and mestizo, to the surviving ethnicities from the colonialist catastrophe, like the patagones in Argentina, aimaras in Bolivia, tapirapes in Brazil, mapuches in Chile, yukpas in Colombia, guaimíes in Costa Rica, quechuas in Ecuador, cacaoperas in El Salvador, quiches in Guatemala, peches in Honduras, chichimecas in Mexico, chorotegas in Nicaragua, brisbris in Panamá, chamacocos in Paraguay, tiahuanacos in Peru, bohanes in Uruguay and the yanomamo in Venezuela.

But the damage was done.

For 350 years the indigenous and the black – namely anyone who wasn’t white European – had relied upon their conqueror to subsist. Once the freedom was assimilated, not everybody had a fair north. More than one man, slaved for years and generations, didn’t know what to do his freedom.

Years of chain-forced delay, of little labor development that may help in the free world, and inside a society where having a colored skin was an unyielding stigma, didn’t only isolate him but also made unreachable a place in its own right.

Today looks more like yesterday

The adaptation process was so hard – renewing himself and finding an original identity that got lost somewhere in the Atlantic – that the new American man completely forgot that his brothers were still slaves in Africa. We have to remember Aimé Césaire and his 1935 terminology of Négritude that tried to vindicate the black man.

The class division inherited from the mantuanos was kept for a long time; it even survives today in the most concealed corners of the globalization. The direct relationship between the color of the skin and its marginality in the social schema has been a pitfall hard to overcome, even when intellectuals, public figures, artists and even presidents have proven the contrary.

This has been a simultaneous reality. You just need to read Isabel Allende or Toni Morrison to understand that the language isn’t precisely what divides us. From the Mississippi blues to the son cubano; form the Dominican merengue to the tambores in Aragua, Venezuela; from the Guyanese calypso to the Brazilian Samba, there isn’t a single space in our continent where the African blood doesn’t boil. 

So, is there a Latin American négritude? Needless to say, proudly, yes.

560 years have gone by since the beginning of slavery and the acculturation of man forced to work an ocean away from their homes. And yet, 350 years of vilification seem outweigh, since the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Mapuche Indigenous Resistance in the South of Chile are only the extremes of a long compendium of Revolutions that today are more valid than ever before.

African American events 

African American heritage has been fundamental in the structure of Philadelphia as a city.

To celebrate the African History Month, several events have been organized across the city:

In February:

Constitution National Center

Presents the history of African American leaders in the Emancipation Proclamation

Philadelphia Free Library

(From Jan. 21 to Feb. 28)

From traditional African food workshops to exhibition and performances

African American Museum

It’s one of the largest collections of art, photography, costumes and more. During the African History the museum will open two photograph exhibitions: Shawn Theodore Church of Broken Pieces and Dawoud Bey: Harlem, USA.

Kimmel Center

Will celebrate during the month the fusion of traditional African Dances and modern techniques. Special dates are 3, 4 and 8 of February.

Independence National Historical Park

During the month several historical accounts of free black men in Philadelphia like Octavious V. Catto and more.

Penn Museum

Will celebrate the African Culture Day on February 25^th. A Workshop of Nigerian masks on the 12^th and will open its doors to a large collection of African art, one of the largest in the country.

The Annenberg Center

With the American Voices, the University’s City Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will host several live shows like the African roots American Voices, with projections, live music and more.

The African-American children’s Book Fair

It will be hosted on February 4^th and it’s known to be one of the few events that celebrate the African American children’s literature.

Other area institutions:

The African American Museum, The Johnson House and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church