A very glossy presentation from the Miami Hearld on African Latin Americans
The descendants of Africans living in Central and South America have for the most part lived the past 400 years as invisible people as this video shows. A couple of years ago I wrote about a meeting I attended of mainly African Latino women in Washington DC and was shocked to listen to their experiences of racism in their respective countries:
“Brazil, Panama, Columbia and Belize and a smaller community in Costa Rica. I did not realise that there were also considerable numbers of descendants of Africans in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela and Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Uruguay. In fact 45% of Latin Americans are Black.”.Now it seems that there may be just the beginnings of a “flicker” of change as this report shows. There is of an awareness of both the existence of Black people throughout the continent but more importantly in some countries, the people themselves are asserting their presence, their cultures and their aspirations to be included as enfranchised members of their communities. Nonetheless racism is still very much part of people’s lives and still internalised by some though it differs from country to country