Racial Politics Racial Identities: Race and Racism in the Americas, Part III

“Racial Politics, Racial Identities," the third report of our "Race and Racism in the Americas" series, explores the ways oppressed and excluded groups of the Americas, principally Afro-Latinos and indigenous peoples, have responded to oppression and exclusion with political mobilization and self-affirming forms of expression. There is a broad range of politics on these pages: the "rising up" of indigenous peoples, painstaking transnational Afro-Latino coalition building and lobbying, the struggles of indigenous women both within and on behalf of their communities, and the sometimes-surprising turns of U.S. ethnic politics.

May/June
2002
Volume: 
35
Number: 
6

Taking Note

Fred Rosen
“We have been concerned with some of the actions of Venezuelan President Chávez and his understanding of what a democratic system is all about,” said Secretary of State Powell to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this past February 5. “And we have not been happy with some of the comments he has made with respect to the campaign against terrorism. He hasn’t been as supportive as he might have been.

Intro

NACLA
“Racial Politics, Racial Identities,” the third report of our “Race and Racism in the Americas” series, explores the ways oppressed and excluded groups of the Americas, principally Afro-Latinos and indigenous peoples, have responded to oppression and exclusion with political mobilization and self-affirming forms of expression.

Open Forum

Carlos Marichal
The heartiest dishes at the UN Conference on Financing for Development, the high-level get-together held in Monterrey, Mexico this past March, were those served at the many lunches and dinners for the 50 or so heads of state—including George W. Bush, Vicente Fox and, for a while, Fidel Castro—and the thousands of officials in attendance. The menu of financial achievements, by contrast, was worthy of an austerity diet.

Updates

Steve Ellner & Fred Rosen
On Monday, April 15, the day after his dramatic return to power, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called for a “national dialogue.” He acknowledged the “large number of Venezuelans who were in disagreement with the government, and who would continue to demonstrate peacefully,” and he called for a lowering of the levels of confrontation in Venezuela [See “Coup and Countercoup: An Eyewitness Account,” this issue].
Winifred Tate
In the countdown to the May 26 presidential elections, Colombians are bracing for increasing violence while support grows for independent hard-line candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez. Frustration with guerrilla violence and growing war-mongering by Colombian officials and the media have contributed to a dramatic swing to the right, while the rising right-wing paramilitary violence remains largely ignored.

Report

Sheila S. Walker
Most of what the world knows as Brazilian culture, and what Brazil projects in international performance, is of African origin. When one thinks of the music and dance of the country, the image that usually comes to mind is the compelling rhythms and intricate footwork and hip movements of samba, and the excitement of carnival.
Lourdes Giordani and María Eugenia Villalón
When Hugo Chávez campaigned for the Venezuelan presidency in 1998, he not only expressed solidarity but claimed kinship with the country’s small indigenous population. One of his grandmothers, he told a Venezuelan public accustomed to seeing non-Indian “criollos” in high public office, was a member of the Pumé ethnic group of the Venezuelan llanos.
Peter Wade
During my fieldwork in Colombia, I found that music and dance were important to understanding patterns of racism and racial identity formation. In the early 1980s, when working in the village of Unguía, near the Panamanian frontier, it was evident that racial and ethnic identities were linked to musical preferences.[1]
Juan Flores
Back in 1999, New York magazine was renamed Nueva York, at least for the week of September 6. The Spanish word on the issue was an eye-catcher for readers of the popular weekly, and attested to the currency of things, and words, “Latin” among the contemporary public in the United States.
Margot Olavarria
Half an hour’s drive east of Havana is the suburb of Alamar, home to 300,000 Cubans. Built in the early 1970s, it is one of the largest housing projects in the world, made up of massive, Soviet-designed, walk-up buildings spread across 16 zones divided by stretches of tropical vegetation.
Guillermo Delgado-P.
“Allpamanda! Kawsaymanda! Jatarisun!” (“For our land and our life, we shall arise!”) These Quichua words echoed in the streets as a multitude seized the church of Santo Domingo in Quito on May 28, 1990, turning it into a national arena of political dispute.
J. Michael Turner
Afro-Latino activists and development workers had long harbored high hopes that the UN World Conference on Racism, held late last summer in Durban, South Africa, would prove to be a watershed in the struggle for racial justice in the Americas.
R. Aída Hernández Castillo
One thing I am clear about is that since I realized, at the age of 13 or 14, that something is not quite right with being a woman, I had a change of conscience. That was when I discovered that there were injustices done towards women.

Reviews

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
“Why are you importing a U.S. problem into our society? We are not black, or white, or Indian. We are all Latin Americans.” This discourse of silencing race is upheld by people from all segments of the political spectrum in Latin America.

In Brief

Notisur
MONTEVIDEO—More than 20 years of tireless effort finally paid off for Uruguayan Sara Méndez on March 19 when she was reunited with her son, Simón Riquelo.

Article

Garry M. Leech
In the wake of the suspension of peace talks between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country's civil conflict has dramatically esca- lated. The Colombian military initi- ated a massive bombing campaign against the FARC-governed zone (zona de despeje) before sending in thousands of ground troops to retake the zone's principal towns.