Status Updates From Black in Latin America

“By the middle of the eighteenth century, Haiti was producing nearly half the world’s sugar. And it accounted for two-fifths of France’s overseas trade.”

“To this day the annual procession for El Señor de Los Milagros is one of the largest religious processions in all of Latin America, and I was deeply moved to learn that all of this had been set in motion by the vision of an Angolan slave.”

One of Peru’s most famous saints is a black man, St. Martin de Porres, born in Lima 1579.

This page has a print of a painting of Vicente Guerrero, second president of the Mexican Republic. He was partially of African descent.

“The Afro-Mexicans of today have paid a very high price for these experiments in race and what we might think of as “categorical racelessness” the living social death resulting from the invisibility of their black cultural and genetic heritage. If your ethnic group can’t be counted then your social presence and your rights as a citizen…don’t count either.”

“It struck me that, in a sense, Mexico is a victim of its own pioneering successes in race relations. It was quite a noble act to abolish slavery in 1829, five years before Britain…thirty six years before the United States. But despite these noble beginnings, over time race relations fell prey to a romantic idea- that by getting rid of racial categories officially, this could eradicate racism throughout society