Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books
for Public and Secondary School Libraries The history of how six
Latin American countries acknowledge—or deny—their African past
12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the
Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous
journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States.
The rest—over ten and a half million—were taken to the
Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our
entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere,
and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans
created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling
syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and
Spanish influences. Despite their great numbers, the cultural and
social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most
Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin
Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries
acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race
and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural
worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave
experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history
of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil,
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through
art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the
very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes
sought to keep the black cultural presence from view. In Brazil, he
delves behind the façade of Carnaval to discover how this
‘rainbow nation’ is waking up to its legacy as the world’s
largest slave economy. In Cuba, he finds out how the culture,
religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked
to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its
enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and
racism have fared since Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in
1959. In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever
black republic, and finds out how the slaves’s hard fought
liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire became a
double-edged sword. In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost
unknown history of the significant numbers of black people—far
greater than the number brought to the United States—brought to
these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have
created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region
on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru. Professor Gates’
journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices
of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He
shows both the similarities and distinctions between these
cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but
distinct from, their African antecedents. “Black in Latin
America” is the third instalment of Gates’s documentary trilogy
on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin
America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined
the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In
Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys
to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest
full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined
to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy
of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly
moving and irresistibly compelling.
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