3.5
Black in Latin America
ByPublisher Description
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.
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3.5
Elizabeth Parret
Created about 1 year agoShare
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Vanessalee
Created about 2 years agoShare
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Madeleine Mechura
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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mars2624
Created over 4 years agoShare
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“Originally started reading this book as it came up in my research during lesson planning for my AP Spanish class. While I was only planning on using the PBS series, I think my students need to read more and this book uses pretty common vocabulary that would not intimidate students during their reading.
I appreciated the level of research and the number of people referenced in this book. The author uses their numerous interactions with people from the different Latin American countries that identify themselves as Black. Coming from a Mexican background, I understand the dynamics of colorism from a young age though I did not realize the level of complexity of Black identity in other Latin American countries.
In including non-Spanish colonies, Haiti and Brazil, we also get to see how other colonizers addressed racism. It is very interesting that this book is from 2011 because it makes me curious to see how Black identity has developed and strengthened in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder.”
natalie 🐝
Created over 6 years agoShare
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About Henry Louis Gates Jr.
is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including several award-winning works of literary criticism as well as the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and Tradition and the Black Atlantic. Gates has hosted ten PBS television specials, including Looking for Lincoln and the two part series, African American Lives, upon which his book
was based. He is winner of the 2009 Ralph Lowell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Television and the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Non-Fiction.
Other books by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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