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Most of what was presented in that issue focused principally on linking the African directly to slavery within a historical, anthropological, and sociological perspective. Integration as a person into his or her respective community did not seem to merit being studied in any depth. The Afro Latino is seen mainly as an object to be clinically dissected considering only the guidelines of history, anthropology, or sociology. In “The Slave Trade and the Negro in South America,” Fernando Romero, in citing the weaknesses of previous studies, concludes that the list of countries that require investigative studies to determine the physical presence of the African person in South America should be increased to include Ecuador, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. As he declares, “Such omissions do not seem desirable to the writer [i.e., Romero], for these countries also received a large number of Africans…” (370). Later studies, with different methodologies and interests, have confirmed that there is a definite and viable African image in the aforementioned regions. The thematic path we have followed in the essays of the present work extends the African image found at the surface level to include a deep-structured total integration within a national space. For example, in the essay on “phenotypes,” it would be impossible to acknowledge the gradations in skin color that one finds in the Dominican Republic and most Latin American countries without accepting the root cause(s) that produced the distinctions. The indigenous Indian, the usual scapegoat for the basis of color variations in Latin America, is present in some countries, but not in all. To wit, the range of mulatos, pardos, morenos, trigueños, and even the prototypical Latin phenotype would have been difficult to produce without an African presence.
I consider it important to show that authors native to diverse Latin American cultures do find that their use of the Afro Latino image can provide their literary canvases with subtle symbols of nationalism and even of racism without resorting to the stridency of political populism. After all, literature is a slice of life that has been given direction and