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

between a white sociologist and a black Uruguayan university student. In answer to the question of what characterized, specifically, the Afrodescendant experience in Uruguay, the reply was:

This sense of shared needs and shared rights is perhaps one of the principal modules for determining group bonding in the construct of an Afro Latin identity. More likely than not, the realization that one is participating in or has participated in the construct of mutual affiliation will stem from an acceptance or recognition of one's historical link to an African history, a history that was transported to the Americas under the conditions of belonging to a captive group. Although it may not be overtly expressed, the psychological sentience for an ethnoracial group connection tends to remain subjacent, although not totally absent. Often it is subjectively felt. For the creative artist, more than likely his or her awareness of an ethnoracial affiliation will be couched as the subtext of the artistic expression. In this manner, the artist's sentiments will seem less oratorical, less sententious. While not overtly expressed, for the black Colombian writer Manuel Zapata Olivella, the displaced phenotype becomes pivotal to the storyline in his novel Chambacú corral de negros [Chambacu, a Ghetto of Black People]: “Dominguito le creció en el vientre como una maldición. El pelo rojo y la piel lechosa. Ajeno en la isla. ‘El hijo del blanco Emiliano’. Nació sin padre” [“Little Dominguito grew in her womb like a curse. His red hair and his milk-colored skin. So foreign on the island. ‘The son of the white man Emiliano.’ He was born fatherless”] (22). The implications are multiple, although parsimoniously indicated. Miscegenation, a reality that is often ignored in