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

able whiteness but whose total phenotypic morphology indicates a near or distant African ancestor. While color is of paramount significance, there are other physical determinants such as the shape of the nose, the fullness of one's lips, and the amount and type of curl to one's hair that also pronounce a linkage to an African ancestral base. However, the color of the Afro Latin individual can range from very black (negro retinto) to almost white (jabao, mulatto claro, pardo, etc.). Consequently, when another Colombian writer, Carlos Arturo Truque, describes a character in his short story “Vivan los compañeros” [“Long Live the Comrades”] as “el negro Ayala” [“Ayala, the black man”], there would be little to distinguish him phenotypically from other people found in the Colombian context of this story. However, in need of specifics to highlight and denigrate the racial imagery of Ayala, Truque focuses on a physical feature attributed to most blacks, but often reserved in literary descriptions as an overt pejorative: “el jetón Ayala” [“big-lipped Ayala”] (124). Even when the reader learns that Ayala, in this short story, has outstanding qualities, is quite astute, and very intelligent, his one unredeeming characteristic and major impediment is the fact that he is black. Evidently, Truque's omniscient voice intends to register or indicate a generalized disapproval and distrust of all blacks in his society, morphed into the negative characterization of Ayala, “el Negro engreído” [“the self-centered Negro”] (130):

Aesthethic blackness in the creative literature of the Latin/Hispanic reality is by no means one-dimensional. While Truque is usually listed as an Afro Latin writer, the aesthetic construction that directs his imagery of the sole character identified as black in “Vivan los compañeros” does not adhere to the ethnic schema usually employed by racially sensitive