Report

DESPITE PERVASIVE LITANIES ABOUT Latin America's colorblind "racial democracy," blatant discrimination continues to plague descendants of the ten million African slaves who were brought to toil on the plantations and mines of the New World. Such dis- crimination is compounded by a nearly universal denial of black heritage and identity, even in countries with large black populations, that has effectively rendered blacks invisible.

Article

Norman E. Whitten, Jr. & Arlene Torres
THE AFRICANDIASPORA DID NOT, AS SO MANY suppose, originate in the New World; it began in North Africa, the Creum-Mediterranean, Europe and Asia. We do 1250 and as early as 1258 Moorish traders appeared at fairs at Guimaraes (Northern Portugal) offering sub-Saharan Aft Tricans for sale.
Jaime Arocha Rodríguez
A HUNDRED BLACK LEADERS AND PEASANTS from Colombia's Pacific Coast and northern Cauca Valley gathered in the southwestern city of Cali on May 26 of last year to discuss how the country's new constitu- tion would affect them. The founder of the National Maroon Movement, Juan de Dios Mosquera, told them that, like the previous 1886 constitution, the new charter would fail to protect the rights of the descendants of slaves brought from Africa between the sixteenth and the mid- nineteenth centuries.
Roberto Márquez
DOMINICAN PRESIDENT JOA- quin Balaguer has, surely, never been in any serious danger of being mistaken for a man of even moderately liberal ideology or opinions. The octo- genarian dean of the most pusillani- mously colonial and racially preten- tious wing of the Dominican Right, Balaguer has devoted more than half a century to the rationalization and de- fense of its most jejune orthodoxies and cliches.
Rodolfo Monge Oviedo
STATISTICS ON THE BLACK POPULATION IN MOST countries of the America are by no mean based on uniform criteria. The undifferentiated ii e of terms like Black.
Norman E. Whitten, Jr. & Arlene Torres
WHETHER OR NOT BLACK AFRICANS OR black Iberians reached the New World with Co- lumbus in either of his first two voyages is not clear.' Nor is it clear whether Africans reached the New World prior to Columbus.
John Burdick
ON MAY 11, 1988, TWO DAYS BEFORE THE hundredth anniversary of the abolition of Brazilian slavery, 5,000 people marched under a punishing sun through downtown Rio de Janeiro. At the head of the march, Frei Davi, the fiery leader of Rio de Janeiro's Commission of Black Religious, Seminarians, and Priests, bellowed through a megaphone: "They say the good white masters gave us our freedom! Nonsense!" The true importance of the anniversary, he thundered, was that it reminded Brazilian blacks that they had yet to be liber- ated.
Rachel Schurman & Beth Sheehan
Like anyone who makes a living from the sea, Arnoldo Raimilla is no stranger to outside forces. On Chilod island in southern Chile, some 700 miles from Santiago, strong winds and storms often blow over the horizon without warning.
Readers are invited to address letters to The Editors, Report on the Americas, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 454, New York, NY 10115. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
Cafe Con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela by Winthrop R. Wright, University of Texas Press, 1990, 167 pp.
Mavis C. Campbell
RESISTANCE WAS AN INTEGRAL PART OF Caribbean slave society. Slaves resisted in myriad ways-from the subtle and passive, acted out on a routin- ized daily basis, to the violent, whether singly or collec- tively, planned or spontaneous.
Bill Hinchberger
Supporters hail the Southern Cone Common Market as a major step to- ward the fulfillment of the age-old dream of Latin American unity. Critics counter that Mercosur, as it is known, is a meager, hastily drawn reproduction of the European Community that is bound to fail.
Judith Laikin Elkin
Six thousand meters up Mt. Acon- cagua in southern Argentina a graffito proclaims: "losjuden son cerdos" (yids are pigs).
John Burdick
BETWEEN 1518 AND 1873, IN THE LARGEST CO- erced migration in history, the international trade in human beings carried nearly ten million Africans to the Americas. Some historians estimate that at least ten million more died along the way, in slave raids or wars in the African interior, on the long march to the Atlantic coast, or during the infamous transoceanic voyage euphemistically known as the Middle Passage.
John Burdick
THERE'S NO RACISM IN BRAZIL!" MANUEL "declared with a dismissive wave of his glass. "Here we're all equal! How could there be racism when people of all colors intermarry and have children?" We were leaning against the counter in a small bar in a working-class town on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.