U.S. Afro-Latinos Push Rights Movement in Both Regions

By Bruno Gaston

International Editor

ATLANTA, July 15, 2007, 12:20 p.m. - Afro-Latino communities in the United States may be just as invisible to the average American as they are hidden in their many countries of origin. Now, more than ever, their voices are grabbing the attention of the American government and challenging the concept of race and identity in Latin America.

Robert Asprilla, executive director of the Afro-Latino Development Alliance in Washington D.C., spoke to Redding News Review about the historical advances made by Afro-Colombians at home through the efforts of the Diaspora in America.

“White Colombians have traditionally migrated to Miami and Queens," Asprilla said. "Afro-Colombians went to Houston and Chicago.”

War on Drugs vs. Civil Rights

In Colombia, millions of dollars in American aid for development and fighting the war on drugs were not reaching the country’s Afro-Descendant population until efforts from the Afro-Latino Development Alliance and members of Congress gave way to historical changes in Colombia policies toward its black citizens, said Asprilla. Black and indigenous communities have been displaced by guerilla and paramilitary groups fighting over control of the drug trade and government.
 

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“Two million people are internally displaced within Colombia," he said. "A third of them are Afro-Descendants from the Chocó region and are homeless in the urban shantytowns like Bogotá, Medellin and Cali.”

Chocó is located between Panama and the southern Valle del Cauca province. More than 80 percent of the population is Afro-Colombian and the area remains one of the most underdeveloped, according to the World Bank. Chocó’s coca leaf producing land and geographic proximity to Central America made this an attractive area for both factions and blacks found themselves caught in the middle.

“When the paramilitaries, guerillas and narco-traffickers needed access to the ports and coastal regions to ship illegal drugs to the U.S. and Europe and receive arms from Panama, Afro-Colombians were standing the way because they own the land around the Pacific Coast," he continued.

“They were between a rock and a hard place and the area is very underdeveloped," he said. "In the pacific coast there is no infrastructure and no jobs. So the youth is either recruited into theses factions or killed. It's a precarious situation."

In 2000, former Chocó governor, Luis Murillo, was granted political asylum in America after fleeing political unrest and co-founded the organization with Asprilla. In a teary response, he told Redding News Review that their first voice in Congress in raising awareness about Afro-Colombian issues was former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who organized a panel hearing for Africans in the Americas. The hearing prompted several Congressional Black Caucus members and others in Congress to urge President Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to include Afro-Colombians in humanitarian aid benefits.

In 2005, Rep. Gregory Meeks led a delegation to Colombia in towns never visited before by members of Congress such as Tumaco, Quibdo and Buena Ventura - a major port in Colombia, which is majority Afro-Colombian - to ensure that USAID was assisting blacks in the region.

Then, Meeks went to the capital, Bogotá, with a number of recommendations for President Uribe, including a cabinet level position for Afro-Colombians and a civil rights commission modeled after the Commission on Civil Rights recommended to Congress by former President Harry Truman in 1948.

Conscious Mestizo!

Dr. Marco Polo Hernandez Cuevas, is an associate professor of Spanish at North Carolina Central University and author of the book, "African Mexicans and the Discourse on Modern Nation." He launched the Instituto Mexicano de la Africanía Americana (Mexican Institute of Africana Studies or IMAA) to be the Mexican counterpart of the NAACP in a 2005 summer trip to Mexico, with the support of the Rev. Glyn Jemmott, a Roman Catholic priest from Trinidad and leader for the advocacy group, Mexico Negro. (Black Mexico) Jemmott has served Afro-Mexican towns on Mexico’s Pacific Costa Chica region since 1984. In spring of 2006, the professor worked with the 10th annual meeting of Afro-Descendants from Oaxaca and Guerrero that took place at El Ciruelo, Oaxaca to declare March as Mexico's black history month.

“My focus of research is the African presence and persistence in Mexico," Cuevas said. "I believe that Africa did not wash away in Mexico or Latin America, as assured by mestizaje (racial miscegenation) discourse. It is my standing instead that it propagated and created a new dimension of African-ness, which vibrates in most popular ethnic texts in Mexico and Latin America.”

Teaching at a historically black college, Cuevas tries to challenge both blacks and Latinos on the concept of identity. “Many African Americans look Latino or I even go as far as saying sort of Mexican and this is accepted. So I turn around and say, 'Why is it so difficult to accept that a great part of Latinos look like African Americans?'” he asked.

Most people remember the controversy that started after the Mexican government printed commemorative stamps of the country’s famed comic book character, Memin Pinguin. The stamps drew condemnation from blacks and civil rights groups including The National Council of La Raza. The White House also condemned the character as racist.

The Mexican government eventually discontinued the stamps after increased public pressure, but the reaction in Mexico was generally one of confusion over the controversy. Luis Ernesto Derbez, Mexico’s foreign minister, said that it comes from an American misunderstanding of Mexican culture.

In Cuevas’s latest Spanish language book - "África late en la mexicanidad" - he used a painting showing a blonde haired, blue-eyed Memin Pinguin, by Prof. Alfred J. Quiroz of University of Arizona in Tucson, on the front cover to subvert the image from the popular Mexican comic book.

“The transnational reach of this debate is reaching places like Mexico that have always claimed they were racial paradises.” he said, “This was a display of centuries-old worldviews...The only way we are going to undo a bit of the damage that was done is through education.”

Next year, he plans to speak about the damage cartoons have had on African based identities and worldviews at the Congress of the American Historical Association/Latin American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. He plans to speak of three Mexican comics Memin, Hermelinda and Aniceto.

He said he is working on children’s books as well. The Libraries Consortium of Duke and UNC Chapell Hill granted him a fellowship in support of the project on a fourth-grade reader in Spanish (College Intermediate for Spanish as a second language learners) entitled ¡Atrévete! (Dare!). “This is Father Glyn's challenge to people who are 'passing' and refuse to embrace - or want to but are afraid - their Africaness with pride. He proposed I should work on ¡Atrévete! in Summer 2006. The book will tell the history of the presence of African and Afro-Descendants in New Spain, Mexico and Southern US through stories of Africans and Afro-Descendants in the region,” he said.

Finally, Cuevas also plans to take his work to Africa at the first International Conference on Afro-Hispanic Studies Across the Disciplines conference, which is scheduled for August at the University of Ghana in Accra.

Afro-Latino Consciousness in the U.S.

The Miami Herald published a five part series covering the black communities in several Latin American countries with a multimedia web version showing images, almost never seen before by American readers, of Afro-Descendants proudly embracing their African heritage. The series drew both praise and criticism from readers for its reports on racism in the region and even started controversy over perceived negative comments reported by Professor Ramona Hernández, director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York, about black women in their second installment titled, “Black Denial”, on the Dominican Republic. The Miami Herald reported: The director, Ramona Hernández, later said the "portrayal'' of the comments attributed to her were "utterly false and absolutely opposed'' to what she believed. Readers wrote to the school questioning her suitability for the job. She remains in her position. Hernandez, however, has agreed to speak with Redding News Review upon her return from the Dominican Republic.
 
This awareness also comes as more historically black colleges have been stepping up efforts to recruit more Latino students. Morehouse College is pushing for at least 5 percent of its student body to be made up of Hispanics within five years. The number of Hispanic students attending historically black colleges increased more than 60 percent from 1994 to 2004, while the number of black students grew by 35 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
 
Dr. Luis Miletti, a professor at Morehouse College's Modern Foreign Languages Department and creator of the Afro-Latin journal, Negritud, said: “In the last seven years, you can see an increased demand of Caribbeanist professors in American academia. It's kind of a trendy thing these days for universities to have a Latin American studies program and of course, one of the things they study is Afro-Latin American history, culture or literature.”

Puerto Rican Reggaeton artist Tego Calderon, who is black, wrote in a commentary for the New York Post newspaper:
 
"Young black Latinos have to learn their story. We also need to start our own media, and forums and universities. We are treated like second class citizens. They tell blacks in Latin America that we are better off than U.S. blacks or Africans and that we have it better here, but it's a false sense of being. Because here, it's worse."
 
Miletti, a dark skinned mestizo and also Puerto Rican, agrees with Calderon: "It is interesting when Latin Americans discriminate against blacks or whites but do not want to look at themselves or their history," he told Redding News Review.

Asked whether or not racism is worse in the United States, he said: "Not even close. My mother is black, my father is white and they went through hell. People are ashamed of what they are. There are people that marry lighter to advance the race and you can clearly tell have African or Indian roots." 

Some of what Tego Calderon said is beginning to take root. In Brazil, the first TV channel TV da Gente, (Our Channel) targeting its Afro-Descendants has prompted some changes in other media outlets in the region.

"Since TV da Gente was launched we can notice there are more black people on channels, especially on journalism. I'm sure TV da Gente is influencing this change," said José Paula de Neto, who launched the network using his own funds from a successful career as a singer and TV personality with the support of Angolan investors.
 
"We hope that the history of the TV inspires other ethnic groups, not just the black community," he said. "Even though the history of the Brazilian black community is different of the other Latin countries. Here, 48 percent of the population is black, while in many countries of Latin America most of the population is indigenous. It's very important for any country to have at least a TV channel that reflects its people, with no kind of prejudice."

Historically Black Colleges in Latin America?

Redding News Review has learned of at least one Afro-Centered University in Colombia and Brazil. The Universidade da Ciudadania, Zumbi dos Palmares in São Paulo and The Technological University of Chocó.

“The Technological University of Chocó was founded by former Afro-Colombian congressman Diego Luis Cordoba who thought the only way out of poverty was through education,” said Asprilla, of the Afro-Latino Development Alliance. “It actually focused strongly on putting out good teachers which ended up making them nationally respected. Nearly every educated Colombian was educated by an Afro-Colombian.”

The university also has an alliance with Howard University, and Asprilla said it is planning to create a research library modeled after Howard’s world renowned Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

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