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NYU Press
August 2011
On Sale: July 27, 2011
270 pages
ISBN: 0814732984
EAN: 9780814732984
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
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 of their 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. In Brazil, he delves behind the façade of Carnaval to
discover how this ‘rainbow nation’ is waking up to its
legacy as the world's largest slave economy. In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics
and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge
amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously
profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and
racism have fared since Fidel Castro's Communist revolution
in 1959. In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever
black republic, and finds out how the slaves's hard fought
liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte's French Empire became a
double-edged sword. In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history
of the significant numbers of black people—far greater than
the number brought to the United States—brought to these
countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants
have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa
Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru. Professor Gates' journey becomes ours as we are introduced
to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans
who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and
distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World
manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their
African antecedents. “Black in Latin America” is the third
instalment of Gates's documentary trilogy on the Black
Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin
America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates
examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day
America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a
series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture.
Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to
discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the
vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of
thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are
astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.
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