Categories: Descriptors

To most U.S. inhabitants, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is most famous for his arrest not so long ago in Cambridge, MA, when he was allegedly arrested in his own home for breaking in and entering. It quickly morphed into a black-white race war, since Skip, as he’s most commonly known, identifies as Black and the officer, as White.

To be fair, Gates is an alumnus of universities some students desire to study in: Yale University (Bachelors of Arts in History) and Cambridge (PhD in English Literature). He has served as faculty in, not surprisingly, Yale, Cornell, Duke and lastly, Harvard, where he now holds position of Professor of English – among other curricular positions.

However for those U.S. inhabitants with time and energy to watch television, Gates has resurfaced in 2011 and not for being handcuffed; he’s hosting a PBS-funded series on Black in Latin America. The series will features black identity in Mexico & Peru, Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic & Haiti.

REVIEW

Latin America, a cultural rather than political space, broadly encompasses all countries and regions in the Americas whose speech derives from Latin or a Latin-based language. Of course these Latin Americans have much more than language in common; there’s the legal code, religions, cuisine, music, dance, folklore, mannerisms, and overall mindset. In short, Francophones in Canada, Creolophones in Louisiana, Papiamento-speaking Arubans, Mexicans, Brazilians are cultural and often recent ancestral relatives. In theory, a Brazilian from Governador Valadares should feel at home in Lafayette, Louisiana, and a Haitian should feel at home in Venezuela.

ANTHROPOLOGICALLY, Black in Latin America has some issues. I will touch on a few.

Firstly, Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, Brazilians and Peruvians identify with their national identity. In the episode on Cuba, the interviewees continuously referred to themselves as Cubanos, and being proud of being Cubans. Meanwhile, Gates continued to ask them about blackness, and to refer to them as black, even though they referred to themselves as Cubans, and one gentleman, as a moreno. Gates did remark that Cubans identified first as Cubans.

Secondly, Gates, as well as many speakers of English in the U.S. are appalled by usage of physical descriptors in Latin America, which these same individuals erroneously equate with racializers/races/subraces and insist on those terms being offensive, regressive and racist.

Speakers of all Latin-based languages in Latin America use physical descriptors, which are literal expressions related to physical features. They do not imply hypodescent or “admixture,” as the individual is only taken into consideration; parents and forefathers play no functional role in the identification of these descriptors. Curiously, these descriptors aren’t foreign to speakers of English, either, most of which are used cross-“racially” in English.

The column above for Creole is Louisiana Creole, unless marked with an asterisk*, in which case to indicate Antillean Creole, Haitian Creole or French Guyanese Creole.

The term morani, I’ve only ever heard in South Louisiana, but it may be a derivative of “moreno.” Moranis have relatively fair-skin, often light yellowish, with tightly woven or dry hair, which is often brown, light brown or blond.

Gates conflates these descriptors as racializers, because color in U.S. English, especially for his age group, is synonymous to race.

Thirdly, Gates and many other U.S. citizens are mapping onto Latin Americans a black-white paradigm with which they are often unfamiliar. In the case of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and other regions, measures of hypodescent, aka One-Dropping (determining a person’s “race/ethnicity” based on the one drop of dark/black/indian/etc “blood”), are marginally familiar, as these regions have long intermingled; the U.S. government occupied the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, and would have done the same in Mexico and Nicaragua. The racialist impulses and impositions of the occupancy government representing the U.S. in Latin America were covered by Gates in the episode on Cuba. Most Latin Americans resent racializers and ethnicizers.

Google “Blacks in Latin America” and you will see the deluge of posts on the topic. Some agree, some do not. Those that agree usually are speakers of English, and/or live or have lived in the U.S., or wish to emulate the U.S. racial system. As my grandmother used to often say “that grass seems greener on the other side of the fence.”

HISTORICALLY, the series was shaky, so much so that I was on the edge of my chair as I watched it. For sure, Gates is not an historian. The objective of the series seemed to be clear: tell the story of Blacks in Latin America. Let’s see if he held up to that objective.

In the clip above, the young man touched on some of the historical parallels and setbacks in the series.

For instance, on the Mexico segment, Gates was floored learning that a mulato was a General in the Mexican War for Independence, and that he was not alone. Skip referred to him as the “George Washington of Mexico,” and asserted that these kinds of military positions were not held in the United States. I kept thinking that Hispano-French Louisiana doubled the landmass of the United States in 1803; before and after that year, men of color held high ranking military positions, and their own militias even, in battles such as the U.S. War for Independence, the Battles of Natchez, New Orleans, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. As a matter of fact, an entire corps was established for Louisiana’s soldiers “of color” in the Civil War, initially called the Corps d’Afrique, an entertaining name given that none of the soldiers were born or raised in Africa. Later it was renamed the Louisiana Native Guards. My ancestors fought in all of these wars and battles, plus more. They did not identify as Americans, but they were born on American soil, held American passports, and were eager to fight in the name of republican principles. I guess they are not American enough for Gates.

On the Mexican, Brazilian and Dominican segments, Gates marveled over the “race-mixing” that produced “astonishing” results in the people. He implied that this did not exist in the United States. Meanwhile, I was naming ALL lands along and west of the Mississippi River that were fully Latin colonies, many still are culturally today, where “race-mixing” was ubiquitous and racialization more of a curiosity. What’s more is that this occurred in the Anglophone regions of the country as well, especially in places like Charleston, South Carolina, Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York City, Boston and so on.

Also, I get the impression that Gates went to regions where he knew folks identified with the Anglophone construct of blackness (e.g. Bahia, Rio de Janeiro & São Paulo, Brazil). These 3 states in Brazil attempted Ação afirmativa, largely mocking the U.S. institution established after desegregation. The hope (wa)(i)s to achieve similar social and economic mobility for negros in Brazil, as in the United States. And yes, in those 3 states, many Brazilians do now identify as negro but they continue to identify firstly as Brasileir(o)(a)(s), then as negro. Likewise in Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico and many other central and south American countries, there is a similar trend. In Brazil, virtually everyone (from blonds to blue black), save the folks from the South and also Vitória state, will not bat an eye to tell you that they’ve a grandparent or great-grandparent(s) who was/were muito preto (very dark). The logistical challenge for Affirmative Action would be “measuring” blackness in efforts to enfranchise the systemically underprivileged. If everyone has a black grandparent, then the entire damned country is black!

It is dangerous to copy-and-paste social, political and economic projects from one country to another. It is even more alarming to attempt to do so between countries with entirely different political, economic and social systems and histories. US-based folks admire Brazilians for their “mixture,” and all of the “treats” that admixing endowed Brazilians with,  but those same US inhabitants denounce these exact same features in the U.S., which exist in abundance.

Overall, I found the series essentialist, imposing and superficial. The broad strokes and essentialization may be tied to funding limitations. I was told that the project had to be aborted midway due to lost funding. But this series is not Latin Americans telling their history; it is Skip Gates telling his story through Latinos that is then divulged to large numbers of US inhabitants. To date, neither of the series air(ed) on public access TV in the countries in which they were produced to my knowledge.

I do think that there is a yearning for the uniting of oppressed “black” people in the Americas on behalf of U.S. Anglophone inhabitants. What then would be the goal? To create a Black United States of America? Slaughter all the white folks?

We cannot change the past, we can only document it, but that documentation should serve as a tool for what we should not re-encounter. All humans struggle and have struggle, are marginalized and have been marginalized, are enslaved and have been enslaved. Struggle, oppression and hope are the three elements in the human psyche that we all share, the world over.

At some point, it will click. Or, maybe not?