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its Portuguese-speaking geographical associate, Brazil, actively support issues of race while denying, at the same time, the existence of practices of racial victimization. Yet there are many expressions that can be extracted from the folk mythology of both areas that carry inferences of a racial dichotomy. For the most part, they demonstrate the convoluted psychology of folk maxims that carry the intention of jocular diversion along with the deleterious and misconstrued result of implying a social truth in a contextural atmosphere of “racial harmony.” For example, in Spanish-speaking areas one hears:
In Brazil, the thought is the same, although with a slight edge of volatility:
Of course, the determination of the entertaining or didactic aesthetics of such pronouncements depends on the listener's social position.
However, my main interest in the presentation of the following essays concerns the image and social effect of the aesthetics of blackness that one finds in the creative literature of Latin America. For the aphorisms presented earlier, the question of entertainment versus didacticism might have been simplistically rhetorical, but in the area of creative literature, an exposition in this sense requires more expansion. Is it also rhetorical, then, to ask if the end result of creative literature is aimed only at entertaining the reader, or is there also a didactic goal? Given that most short stories, novels, epics, poems, dramas, and memoirs are constructed as an author's reaction to an analysis of experiences, concepts, or an imagined world, the literary target can serve to pique an interest or present a truth as the writer perceives it. It is with this last element in mind that I have looked at the reality of the Afro Latino image in various examples of Latin American creative writing (i.e., novels, poems, short stories, and song lyrics) wherein