Way Before Columbus, African Presence In The Americas

Until the last two decades, the African diaspora to Spanish America received scant attention compared to the US, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean

This was due in part to a scholarly reading of slavery through labor, the plantation complex, and an emphasis on numbers. These approaches caused previous scholars to underestimate the socio-political impact of slavery and Black life throughout much of Latin America.

To some degree and for some time now, scholars colluded in this elision, privileging studies of slavery as an institution, or race mixture and social climbing. Consequently, the writing of Spanish America’s Black history was fraught, episodic, and belated relative to the flourishing studies on Indigenous populations and women since the advent of social history in the 1970s and 80s. Finally, a US-centric approach to African American history and the prominence of the Atlantic basin in diaspora studies contributed to these omissions

A focus on the Afro-Andes suggests that we reconsider what we know about colonial history in the region and the importance and presence of Africans and their descendants. In my book, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage:

Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito, I insist that actually Quito was quite emblematic of slavery across mainland Spanish America, where enslaved Africans and their descendants were interstitial aspects of colonial life and society

It suggests the need to study Black life outside of both major urban centers like Lima or Mexico City, beyond large-scale slave-holding to see how the enslaved and slavery still proved ubiquitous, productive of standing and honor, and elemental to all economies due to its malleability

But this is not merely the story of Quito. Rather, it is the story of slavery as a corollary to conquest and a governing practice that helped to build the scaffolding and architecture of colonial bureaucracies, even when there were few slaves present in a given society. Ultimately, Afro-Quito invites us into life along another passage within the African Diaspora, reminding us of the importance of time, place, and scale in our methods and theorizations.

https://www.aaihs.org/afro-latin-america-and-the-black-pacific-an-interview-with-sherwin-k-bryant/

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