Report
At the very moment when Haitians should have been celebrating the bicentennial of their revolutionary overthrow of the most powerful slave regime in the world, they instead found their country thrown into political instability and internecine violence with rival political groupings openly assassinating opponents.
During the 1990s, Argentina’s government and national media repeatedly called attention to a wave of migration that was supposedly flooding the country with new immigrants, a wave comparable in scale to the influx of Europeans at the turn of the previous century.
Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo entered office in July 2001 raising ethnic banners to mobilize the masses against the corrupt and authoritarian regime of his predecessor, Alberto Fujimori. Labeled as a modern-day Pachacútec—the Incan emperor widely credited with expanding and renovating the ancient empire—and waving the rainbow-colored flag of the Inca, Toledo configured his place within a centuries-old mythology still lodged in the popular Peruvian consciousness: the return of the Inca.
When the Brazilian government began considering affirmative action policies based on race, critics claimed they would be impossible to implement because of the ambiguity of the country’s racial categories. Given extensive mixing and fluid identities, how can the state determine just who is black? Yet supporters of affirmative action say the question of “who is black?” is disingenuous.