IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 59

this trio has had the most problems with
visibility, due to discrimination and racism. Similarly, Afro-descendant populations are the ones with the worst socioeconomic indicator levels today. For
example, according to CEPAL, 76% of
the Afro-Colombian population was living in poverty in around 2004; in 2006,
44.8% of Brazilian blacks were too, as
were 58.5% of black Ecuadoreans. The
most complex situation was in Nicaragua, in around 2001, with 87.6% of its
Afro-descendants living in poverty.
When the colonial period ended, Afrodescendant populations were marginalized and made invisible for so long a
time due to the stigma of slavery. Even
if abolition came gradually, with the
passage of time, in some cases, as in the
Colombian one, the measure was superfluous: by the time legal abolition was
declared (1851), there were few slaves.
Abolition was delayed in other cases:
Paraguay (1869), Puerto Rico (1873),
Cuba (1886), and Brazil, the latest
(1888). Yet, in every single case, formal
abolition did not imply the stigma would
disappear along with slavery. The elites
constructed nation-States during the second half of the nineteenth century, and
took as their reference the European
model. They imposed a seal of whiteness
to the extreme, particularly in places like
Argentina and Uruguay. These nations
took on indisputably white profiles. In
Argentina, there was talk of the disappearance of Afro-Argentines; Uruguay
declared itself the Switzerland of South
America, in a successful concretion of a
European-style nation.

The Afro-Uruguayan population was
silenced and marginalized, despite its
presence having been quite notable during the colonial era. In conclusion, the
elites either discriminated its black
populations or, in the most extreme of
cases, silenced them and denied the use
of the most blatant and shameful form of
racism, as happened in Argentina, Chile,
Paraguay, Mexico, and Costa Rica.
Organizational dynamics
The first systematic attempts to reclaim
Afro-ness and the creation of the first
local organizations took place in the
1980s. Yet, it was not till the following
decade that regionally important movements dealing with an attempt to Afrodescendant populations visible, the
struggle against racism, and the search
for improvements within the divergently
different country configurations, took
place. These noble intentions were encouraged by the creation of the first,
Latin American, Afro-descendant, transnational networks, among them, for example, the Afro-Latin-American Women’s Network, which started in 1992 in
the Dominican Republic, and the Continental Afro Organizations, created in
Uruguay in 1994. Three factors explain
the paradigm changes that began in the
early 1990s. Conditions around the
world changed considerably after the
end of the Cold War; new social movements became popular and Chiapas’s
Zapatista Movement flourished once
again at the hands Sub-Comandante
Marcos, in around 1994.

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