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

When one reads that in both the sixteenth and seventeenth century, 10 percent of the registered population in Lisbon, Portugal's capital, was black (Loude 33), the statistics cited by Tinhorão appear sufficiently credible. While the transportation of black slaves to the Americas is recorded as beginning in earnest in the sixteenth century, in Europe African labor had started many years before. The first African slaves arrived in Portugal some fifty years before Columbus sighted the lands of the New World, before Vasco da Gama returned from his voyage to India, and prior to Pedro Alvares Cabral's landing on the shores of the Land of the Holy Cruz, later baptized as Brazil (33). With further reference to Lazarillo's observation regarding his biracial half-brother, interracial unions in both Spain and Portugal had already become a fait accompli, with miscegenated offspring a not unheard of result. Many Islamized Africans came with the invasion of the Arabs in the eighth century, while other Africans were recorded to have been in the area prior to the invasion of the Arabs in 711 A.D.. Meanwhile, during the same period, sexual unions between the European male and the African female were not unusual even before the African female left the Continent to be sent to her destiny in Europe or Latin America. Consequently, one speaks today of an Afro Latin/Afro Hispanic ethnicity that displays a broad gamut of skin tones. Nonetheless, prior to this contemporary reality reference can also be made to an Afro Iberian actuality as the established precedent for the present-day image of inconclusive phenotypes. An actuality is found much earlier than Lazarillo's sixteenth-century Spain:

The following lines, taken from the poem “The Raven and the Lily” by Ibn Hamdin of twelfth-century Spain, comment on the perceived image