The Red and the Black in Latin America: Sandalio Junco and the “Negro Question” from an Afro-Latin American Perspective

During two historically unprecedented events in May–June 1929, communist and trade union organizers and intellectuals from across Latin America came together and discussed how to combat the exploitation of black and indigenous labor in the region. The speeches and debates on the so-called Negro and Indigenous Questions at the founding conference of the Confederation of Latin American Labor Unions in Montevideo and at the First Latin American Communist Conference in Buenos Aires initiated a debate on the complexities of the intersections of race and class in Latin America that continues to resonate today. Although understudied, related scholarship tends to recognize these two conferences for their contributions to an examination of indigenous labor through the interventions of Peruvian philosopher Jos e Carlos Mari ategui. However, it was in this same context where Afro-Cuban union organizer Sandalio Junco, whose work I consider in this essay, presented a little known yet foundational text of black internationalism that provided an analysis of the conditions faced by black workers in the Americas. In this speech, “The Problem of the Negro and the Proletarian Movement,” and his subsequent comments, Sandalio Junco disagreed with Mari ategui’s strict differentiation between black and indigenous experiences and rejected some of the conference participants’ dismissal of the presence of anti-black racism both among the Latin American working classes and in Latin American societies more broadly. In contrast to these positions, Junco drew comparisons between black Latin Americans’ experiences of racialization and those of other racialized populations throughout the hemisphere, such as indigenous peoples, U.S. African Americans, and West Indian migrant workers. Through these comparisons, he significantly theorized the overlap between anti-