|
|
Prologue
“Ellos son blancos se entienden.” (Spanish)
“Eles que são brancos, se entendem.” (Portuguese)
(“They understand each other, they’re all White.”)
—An aphorism culled from the author's
personal experience with folk sayings of Latin America
An aphorism is often accepted as a concise expression of a social truth. Yet, these pithy sayings, like most units of language, have the tendency to reveal both intent and effect when reviewed with critical considerations for their surface arrangement and deeper structural levels. For example, the saying that introduces this section of my study makes it obvious that the “speaker” and the “spoken about” are actors in separate social environments who nevertheless share a context controlled by precepts of race. In questions of race, this surface level/deep structure approach to an apothegm more often than not reveals more about a society's true psychology of race than the pronouncements of “racial democracy” or “race-neutral” identification that one finds in the “politically correct” declarations of most Latin American societies. Both Spanish-speaking Latin America and