Details

Subject(s)

• Mestizos—Peru—History [Browse]
• Mestizos—Race identity—Peru [Browse]
• Racism against Black people—Peru [Browse]
• Intellectuals—Political activity—Peru [Browse]
• Peru—Race relations—History [Browse]
• Indigenous Studies [Browse]

Summary note

"As Latin American countries sought to modernize in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and build national identities, elites promoting racist ideologies sought to marginalize and erase Afro-descendant populations. In this much-needed monograph, Afro-Peruvian Mestizos: The Invisibility of Blackness in Post-Abolition Peru, Daniel S. Cozart focuses on Afro-Peruvians and their enmeshment in the dominant ideology of mestizaje (racial mixing). He uses diverse sources and perspectives to analyze the narrative of Afro-Peruvian invisibility after the abolition of slavery in 1855. Between the abolition and the national census of 1940, Afro-Peruvians as a category of analysis disappeared from civil, criminal, notarial, and census records. During this period, a complex body of literature associated blackness with an immoral past and posited that Afro-Peruvians would disappear through the process of mestizaje. Cozart's close readings of archival records, popular literature, and local accounts highlight the paradoxical and complex construction of Afro-Peruvian identities within this ideology. Cozart uses anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot's four "crucial moments of historical production" that silenced Afro-Peruvian history: the making of sources, archives, narratives, and history. In this framework, Cozart follows the contradictions of Liberalism that became the contradictions of Positivism. Cozart shows how these laid the foundations for mestizaje as central to indigenismo in the 1920s and 1930s. The conclusion reflects on the significance of erasure for Afro-Peruvians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as they now demand to be seen"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

• Historic invisibility and contemporary Afro-Peruvian activism
• Afro-Peruvian invisibility and mestizaje as national identity
• La patria peruana: race, honor, and citizenship in post-abolition discourse and law
• Callejones of Lima: race, class, and gender in post-abolition Peru
• Afro-Peruvian invisibility in the historical record: twentieth-century censuses, mestizaje, and demographic decline
• Peruanidad and Blackness in national and local perspectives: popular literature and racial science
• Afro-Peruvian invisibility in narratives of mestizaje: Locating African descendants in national dualism and indigenismo
• Afro-Peruvian invisibility in retrospective significance.

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ISBN

0-8173-9576-8

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