The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesi ...

some Latin environments, is the glaring entity of focus in this vignette. This child grew in his mother's womb as a curse. Why? At birth, his red hair and milky white coloring gave him away as not being the child of a co-islander. Chambacú, as Zapata Olivella tells us, was an island whose inhabitants were all black. The author uses his perception of the environment as subtitle: un corral de negros [a ghetto of black people]. The historical link that the island's inhabitants have with each other is obvious in the author's construction. Dominguito, as the child was named, was the son of Emiliano, an outsider, a white man. The child's phenotype had made his paternity suspect, and unequivocally suggested interracial breeding. That in and of itself could have been seen as a curse in this all-black society. Only his mother's ties to her black community saved Dominguito. Curiously, in other Afro Latin societies a phenotype of this nature would have been considered an advancement and hence a step away from the embrace of Africa in a history and psychology that entailed enslavement. As a matter of fact, the cultural expression used to denote generational skin color that changes from dark to light within the group, in many Latin American countries, is precisely “adelantar la raza” (to improve the race, i.e., make it lighter in complexion). For Zapata Olivella to say that red-haired, milky white Dominguito was the son of a white man was superfluous in a certain sense, but necessary artistically to intimate that the father was someone with whom the black people of Chambacú were familiar, and who was not one of them racially.

As an Afro Latin writer, Zapata Olivella intentionally exposes one of the avenues of miscegenation in the Latin American world: relationships through rape or concubinage of white men with black women, even though the race of the latter, as a whole, is despised or belittled by the socially dominant group. The Afro Latin reader will surely raise additional questions concerning the phenotype of Dominguito. By itself, “piel lechosa,” that is, milk-colored skin, does not definitively guarantee, for the Afro Latin reader, that this child's coloring is the sole result of a white ancestor in the immediate past, or that he will be accepted as white. In all Latin American cultures, there are a plethora of words to describe the individual whose skin tone might be in a range of accept