Kristen’s Reviews > Black in Latin America > Status Update

“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.

“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

“The fight [for Mexican independence from Spain] was taken up by two generals: Jose María Morelos y Pavón and Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña. They were great heroes in the war, she told me, and they were both descended from Africans.”

“Because the church allowed the marriages and because Spanish people have a heritage of being more open to mixture due to the Arabic presence in Spain.”

“In the earliest years of the slave trade— up until about 1600– the [Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database] indicates that Mexico would have had the largest slave population in the New World.”

“By 1600, Brazil produced half the world’s sugar, and that sugar was produced through the labor of African slaves.”

Brazil “was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888, just after Cuba abolished slavery in 1886.”