Yo Soy Negro: Defining

Blackness in Peru

Tanya Golash-BozaUniversity of

Kansas

Many people in Ingenio insisted to me that

blackness is no

more than a skin color, with no cultural or historical connotations.

“Yo Soy Negro”: I am black

Ingenio, Peru• Small town in northern

Peru.• Rice production for

national market.• 85% African-descended

Methodology

116 interviews– 50 semi-structured interviews in Ingenio– 8 follow-up collaborative interviews– 30 semi-structured interviews in Lima

Ethnographic fieldwork from 2002 to 2007 9 months in Ingenio and 9 months in Lima

Cultural texts, historical documents, oral histories, newspapers, and the Internet

Latin American Studies and African Diaspora Studies

My argument that the discourse of blackness in

Ingenio is primarily a discourse of color constitutes a challenge to scholarship on the black

diaspora that points to the centrality of slavery for defining blackness in the diaspora and to scholarship on race in Latin America that places

cultural and class differences at the core of racial discourses.

When asked how Africans got to Peru, only 12 of the 51 interviewees knew that Africans had been brought as slaves.

Paul Gilroy (1993: 39): Diasporic blacks share a “memory of slavery, actively preserved as an intellectual resource in their expressive political culture.”

Slavery in Piura was not prevalent• About 100,000 Africans

were brought to Peru as slaves, mostly to the South.

• Largest hacienda in Piura had 60 slaves in 1790, at its height.

• Hacienda Morropon, where Ingenio is, had

30 slaves at its peak.

When slavery ended in 1854, there were no more than 600 slaves in all of Piura.

Pre- and post-abolition, most Afro-Peruvians in Piura worked

as tenant farmers.

The way people in Ingenio remember slavery reveals the

importance of local understandings of race, exploitation, ancestry and history for the creation of

collective memory.

they also say that there was slavery before. … They made them work for free. …

Rosa

[the stockade] was a piece of wood, … with holes. They made some holes here where your arms fit; it had another hole here where your legs fit, and you would put your leg in. … They were there as prisoners. - Rosa

Africa is not part of collective memory

• 49 African-descended interviewees– 24: no African ancestry– 13: I don’t know– 12: African ancestry

130 African-descended survey respondents

Do you have African ancestry?22 responded “yes”

• Do you have black or African ancestry?

• Diana: “Blacks, yes, but that they had been of African ancestry, I don’t know.”

• Liliana: “My father was very dark-skinned, quite black, but he never told us that we were Africans.”

In Ingenio,

Africa and the

slave trade do not figure into many people’s conceptions of their

ancestry and of the history of the town.

What does it mean to be black in Ingenio?

Scholars of the

African Diaspora argue there is a

common experience among descendants of

African slaves in the Americas, and relate that shared experience

to blackness

The local discourse on blackness

Negro es una color, nada másBlack is a color, nothing more.

Doña Perla, Ingenio, Peru

Nosotros somos negrosWe are blacks.

Soy orgulloso de ser negroI am proud to be black.

Don Fabio, Ingenio, Peru

• Local Blackness– Skin Color

• Diasporic Blackness– Skin Color – Africa– Slavery– Racism– Cultural Production

Diaspora is both a process and a condition. As a process it is constantly being remade through movement, migration, and travel, as well as imagined through thought, cultural production, and political struggle. Yet, as a condition, it is directly tied to the process by which it is being made and remade. (Patterson and Kelley 2000)

Diaspora is not simply the “logical manifestation of dispersion”

Thinking of the diaspora

as both a process and a condition helps us to understand better the

multiplicity of black identities that exist and the

extent to which global and local discourses interact to produce new conditions and processes.

Latin American Studies

- Possibilities for blackness

- Commonalities of blacks across the diaspora

• Possibilities for whiteness

• Particularity of Latin America

African Diaspora Studies