Neither Enemies nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos

Abstract

"While the stigma of blackness is similar throughout the hemisphere, the experience of blackness is heterogeneous depending on historical and cultural characteristics as well as the demographic of each country" (16). The essays included in Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler's Neither Enemies nor Friends explore the idea that "blackness" means different things to different populations. By exploring these distinctions within Latin America and the United States, the essays deepen the discourse on racial dynamics abroad and describe the implications for African American-Latino relations at home. A powerful read, the book is a sharp addition to the understanding of African American-Latino relations. Not only does it discuss the challenges facing collaboration, but it questions how they came to be. The contradictory frameworks underlying race relations in Latin America and the United States are systematically questioned and deemed problematic. Each dynamic is exposed for being responsible for many dilemmas facing African American-Latino cooperation today. Wide in its scope and successful in its argument, the collection's only limitation is not addressing the process by which a Latin American immigrant transitions from his native understanding of racial identity to that which confronts him in the United States. Divided into three main sections, each piece of the book approaches this topic from a different angle. While the first section contains the editors' analysis of the dialogue that is about to appear, the second section explores the politics and process by which race is constructed across Latin America, and the third delves into political and economic coalition building between African Americans and Latinos in the United States. The essays of the second section begin with the unquestioned premise among Latin Americans that, unlike their northern counterparts, they are free of racist prejudices. Proud that they have never had race-based discrimination embedded in the rule of law, Latin Americans emphasize national unity. The overarching assumption is that, in stark contrast to the race obsession in the United States, Latin Americans are color blind, and class and gender are the main social organizing principles on the continent. Yet these essays flip this widely held belief on its head. Systematically, they show that it is the lack of race-based societal discourse that allows color-coded hierarchies to perpetuate. As editors Suzanne Oboler and Anani Dzidzienyo argue in their opening essay, the value placed on the idealized conception of mestizaje, or that the populations are of mixed race, "has led to the neglect of racial difference as a significant aspect of social experience" (8). When Afro-Latinos seek to illuminate these patterns of discrimination, they are met with accusations of trying to subvert national interest. In his essay, "Afro-Ecuadorian Responses to Racism: Between Citizenship and Corporatism," Carlos de la Torre observes that Afro-Ecuadorian responses to racism and efforts to overcome inequality are often based on paternalism and individual relationships. The results are "individual accommodation over the collective struggle for citizenship" (62), with minimal reduction of structural inequalities. He notes, though, that the Ecuadorian government has recognized the need to create a unitary Black movement. In contrast, in "The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Peru's Limenos in the 1990s," Suzanne Oboler remarks that tying a Black movement to the political power dynamic in Peru has been difficult. When they are generated, suggestions to improve the status of Blacks in society are suggested in individual terms, not structural ones. One of the highlights of this section is Mark Anderson's "Bad Boys and Peaceful Garifuna: Transnational Encounters Between Racial Stereotypes of Honduras and the United States." This essay is an exploration of the Garifuna of Honduras, which, like Ecuador and Peru, lacks overtly constructed identities based on race. …