Blacks in Latin America, a brief history (344 hits)
May 5 On this date of Cinco de Mayo, we look briefly at the history of Africans in Latin (Central and South) America and the Caribbean. In world history these two western regions were the first areas of the Americas to be populated by African immigrants. Yet wherever possible, they prepared and accepted reality with t African immigration to the Americas may have begun before European exploration of the area. African slave trading began before Columbus 1492, and the earliest Spanish and Portuguese explorers were likewise accompanied by Black Africans who had been born and reared in Iberia. In the following four centuries millions of immigrants from Africa were brought to the New World in servitude.
Today, their descendants form significant ethnic minorities in several Latin American countries, and they are the dominant element in many of the Caribbean nations. Over the centuries, Black people have added their original contributions to the cultural mix of their respective societies and thus exerted a deep influence on all facets of life in Latin America. A strong African influence saturates music, dance, the arts, literature, speech forms, and religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean. Africans, whether as slaves or free immigrants, brought a variety of African cultural influences to the New World. They came from so many places in Africa and were too scattered throughout the Americas to reestablish all the conditions of their homelands.
Like all other immigrant groups, they discarded some aspects of their culture, modified others, and created new forms. This African adaptation to local American conditions is called creolization. The percentage of Africans in local society and the time they spent in any one place played in the development of an African (central or south) American culture in Latin America. In countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, African immigrants were the minority. They had to deal with a significant and dynamic form of European society and culture. The African communities survived, and in some instances grew against the stiff and relentless competition of the majority, or "high," culture. Pieces of the African ethnic subculture were eventually adopted by the mainstream. Nonetheless, the African character of the African American culture is less pronounced than in societies where Blacks were the majority of the people.
In the plantation societies of the Caribbean islands, people of African ancestry held substantial control over their daily lives, despite the efforts of the politically dominant minority group to restrain and oppress them... In some cases, however, the transition from low to high culture buried the African origin and influence... As is expected, spirituality and religious practices were distinct factors in the cultural adjustment for Blacks in Central and Latin America, and the Caribbean. Regarding religion, African immigrants to Latin America and the Caribbean not only retained some of their original beliefs but also borrowed and modified religious rituals from the various European Christian churches they encountered there. Religious affiliation, however, is no longer restricted by race or color... http://www.aaregistry.com/detail.php?id=24...
Reference: Africana The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience Editors: Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Copyright 1999 ISBN 0-465-0071-1
