By Shane Greene

A couple of months ago I was sitting in yet another needlessly bureaucratic meeting at Indiana University. Taking advantage of a lull in the administration speak, a senior colleague turned to me and asked, “So, what are you working on now?”

“I’ve just started a relatively recent project on Afro-Peruvian politics and state multicultural reforms,” I said. Looking perplexed, she responded, “You mean there are black people in Peru?”

Getting such bewildered responses – even from folks with the cosmopolitan credentials of a PhD — are familiar to the small group of social scientists interested in Afro-Peruvian issues. One is immediately struck with the impression that a similar response would be most unlikely were the national context Brazil or Colombia. In those countries contemporary descendants of the transatlantic slave trade are indeed more numerous. For example, current estimates of the black population in Peru range from 5-10% of the national population while in Brazil estimates range from 44-70%. More importantly, the very existence of Afro-Latinos, the larger regional ethnic group to which Afro-Peruvians belong, is simply more well known in other Latin American contexts.

Leading Afro-Peruvian lawmaker talks on culture and identity
by peruviantimes

 

But this response also implicitly reveals something about the unique experience of historical invisibility that black Peruvians face. And from a contemporary perspective it reveals something about the importance of contemporary Afro-Peruvian activism over the last decade or more that seeks to challenge black invisibility by demanding a presence in the Peruvian state’s recent turn towards multiculturalism. In Peru the invisibility that black activists seek to overcome is in part due to the long-standing fascination Peru’s national elite has with its indigenous Andean past, which is to say its Inca past.

Let me be clear.

This does not mean that contemporary Andean peoples receive the royal treatment in Peru. It’s really the imagined glory of an ancient Inca empire that Peruvian elites tend to revere: not the actually existing indigenous descendants found living in highland villages or selling contraband on Lima’s streets to survive. Much like black Peruvians, contemporary indigenous peoples suffer from the same kinds of everyday racism and cultural prejudice that continue to plague Peruvian society.

Yet, from the contemporary Afro-Peruvian perspective pressing the state and the broader multicultural world community to recognize their existence involves not only contesting the doctrine of white supremacy that legitimizes social exclusion in the first place. It also involves challenging Peru’s deeply national desire to constantly celebrate its connection to the prestigious Inca patrimony.

The kinds of social exclusion this situation gives rise to can be appreciated from the briefest of encounters with Peruvian high schoolers, particularly if you catch them just after they emerge from a history exam. Ask any one of them to tell you something about Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion against the Spanish in the Cuzco region during the early 1780s, still the largest indigenous rebellion in the history of the Americas.

They’ll launch into a story about Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui (the most memorable of Peru’s Andean rebels, as he was known by his Christian name) as the last of the Inca’s royal lineage that the Spanish struggled to destroy. They would never think to tell you, for example, that Tupac Amaru II promised freedom to the small number of African slaves living in Cuzco at the time if they assisted in the anti-colonial effort. Or that the Spanish mobilized a free black militia to help in squashing the revolt.

They wouldn’t tell you because these are things you never learn about in the Peruvian school system. Aside from an occasional reference to Ramon Castilla and the abolition of slavery in the 1850s – or a reference to Susana Baca as Peru’s most visible Afro-Peruvian music artist – one is hard pressed to find any references to African descendants in the popular imagination.In the shadow of both Peru’s Spanish and Inca legacies, it is this peculiar pattern of exclusion from history and contemporary society that Afro-Peruvians are now eagerly struggling to emerge. Contemporary black activism has roots that stretch back at least to the 1950s.

The life of folklorist Nicomedes Santa Cruz, which revolved around documenting the music, oral, and dance traditions of Peru’s black populations on the coast, is the most visible symbol of efforts to raise consciousness about Afro-Peruvian contributions to the national society. Indeed, in 2006 the Congress passed a law that now recognizes June 4, the birthday of Santa Cruz, as “Afro-Peruvian Culture Day.”

Such efforts are largely symbolic. But they point to an attempt by the government to respond to black activists who have pushed for such official recognition for years and have now found a political spokesperson in Congresswoman Martha Moyano. Martha Moyano has complex party ties to supporters of the ousted and now recently imprisoned ex-president, Alberto Fujimori. But she is also sister to the legendary shantytown activist, Maria Elena Moyano, who was brutally killed by Shining Path loyalists in 1992. Self-identified as a black Peruvian, Congresswoman Moyano has taken up the cause of communicating the interests of the Afro-Peruvian activist community to the Congress.

As for the activist groups involved in contemporary Afro-Peruvian issues, they represent a diverse array of civil society actors. One of the oldest and still most important to emerge is the “Francisco Congo National Afro-Peruvian Movement.”

First founded in the mid 1980s by a group of black intellectuals in Lima, the movement’s name reveals much about its politics. Congo is the name of an escaped slave and leader of a marroon community near Huachipa outside of Lima in the early 17th century. In appropriating his namesake, Peru’s contemporary black movement also appropriates Congo as a symbol of their connection to a longer history of active resistance by peoples of African descent to various forms of domination.

The movement’s current name also replaces an older one in which the term “negro” (“black”) originally stood in for “Afro-Peruvian.” Much like African-American in the US context, the term Afro-Peruvian is used as a more politically correct and — ideally — less racially pejorative term. However, many ethnic activists that identify as Afro-Peruvian continue to think and speak in terms of being negro but with the obvious caveat that they do so to redefine it positively and resist its historically negative associations with colonial racial categories.

The Congo movement’s rhetorical substitution of Afro-Peruvian for black also occurred at a time in the early 1990s when a number of grassroots non-governmental organizations emerged to voice the needs, demands, and express the aesthetics of Peru’s contemporary black population. These include the more well known such as the Centro de Desarrollo Etnico (CEDET) and the Asociación Negra de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (ASONEDH). In the last few years multiple other organizational actors have emerged including the Organización de Desarrollo de los Afro-Chalacos (ODACH) which focuses on intercultural education projects in Callao and LUNDU, an organization dedicated primarily to promoting Afro-Peruvian creativity through the performing arts. One of the most useful sources of information about contemporary Afro-Peruvian politics, culture, and history continues to be the online Foro Afroperuano, maintained by the organization Cimarrones (see http://www.concytec.gob.pe/foroafroperuano/).

The international development community is considerably more aware of the existence of Afro-Peruvians than it was just ten years ago when arguably it wasn’t aware of them at all. As part of a larger policy trend targeting both indigenous and Afro-Latino communities in the region, the World Bank granted the Fujimori government a five million dollar loan in 1999 intended to be used in part for social and economic development of Peru’s predominantly black communities on certain areas of the coast. Engaged in a reelection campaign that eventually ended in exile in Japan and the rise of ex-president Alejandro Toledo, Fujimori never implemented the development loan.

However, upon taking office in 2001 Toledo placed the First Lady, Elaine Karp, in charge of a commission to reform Peruvian policy as regards its ethnic minorities and make it officially into a multicultural nation. Unlike the precedents from other officially multicultural countries in Latin America, like Colombia which Karp was fond of referencing, this did not result in a process of constitutional reform in Peru. Instead, after a long and controversial battle, the result of which was many unsatisfied indigenous and Afro-Peruvian representatives, it resulted in a new state institution.

The new institute is called INDEPA, the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian, and Afro-Peruvian Peoples and was founded on the principle of including ethnic representatives from the minority groups the institution seeks to represent. One of the first actions this state institution took – well before it was Congressionally ratified and while it was still known as a commission – was to gain access to the World Bank development fund for indigenous and Afro- Peruvians the Fujimori government had left untouched. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first things many indigenous and Afro-Peruvian activists remember about Karp’s role in creating INDEPA was the alleged misuse of precisely this fund.

Here too the name of an organization reveals something important about the complex political reality contemporary Afro-Peruvians face. In this instance what the name reveals is the fact that Karp’s original commission – which initially named only indigenous Andeans and Amazoneans - did not even contemplate Afro-Peruvians as part of an emerging multicultural Peru.

And it did so despite claiming administrative responsibility for a World Bank development loan that specifically mentioned them. In early 2002 in response to hearing the news about the state’s multicultural commission and its intentions to access the World Bank fund, a delegation of Afro-Peruvian activists sought a meeting with a Karp representative and demanded inclusion in the multicultural reform process.

Clearly, not everything is rosy in the struggle for greater visibility for black Peruvians. Frequently forced to demand inclusion from the state, the forms of inclusion the state now offers also bring with them new challenges and exacerbate existing antagonisms within the diverse array of civil society groups seeking to speak for Afro-Peruvians.

The state’s eventual decision to include Afro-Peruvian representation in INDEPA, which necessitated electing two black representatives to accompany the seven indigenous representatives now working there, is a case in point. As if defining the procedures for election wasn’t hard enough, the immediate result was considerable in-fighting among those jockeying for position by a few black leaders, allegations of corruptions within the black movement by others, and a decision to bow out entirely of cooperating with the multicultural state altogether by others.

As has often been the case when state governments offer new programs intended to include the excluded, the price of greater inclusion often comes with the risk of cooptation – both real and perceived – by existing political interests within the state that would reproduce the status quo even while engaged in symbolically “reforming” it.

But such is the current state of affairs in Peru’s newly Afro-Peruvian times.

— L. Shane Greene is Assistant Professor of Anthropology Faculty Associate, Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT) at Indiana University