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

of African genes attached to a European base and a latent if not a complete absence of indigenous Indian stock. Yet, Puerto Rico appears to be less African, in phenotype, than the Dominican Republic. Cuba, with its vibrant African presence and strong psychological tendency to separate the miscegenated from the European-appearing person, lies somewhere in the middle of its two sister countries. Nonetheless, all three share a genotypic and phenotypic Afro Latin reality that is inescapable. Miscegenation of the races is the process that has mestized the European genetic base (i.e., created mixed-race individuals, or “mestizos”) to produce the chromatic range in pigmentation that eludes ethnoracial typing by the unaware. As for the vast landmass of the South American continent, from Venezuela down to Chile, African genes are certain to appear in today's sophisticated DNA processing. Colombia, in this respect, has the third-highest number of African descendants after Brazil and Cuba.

Portuguese-speaking Brazil, in contrast, is not only Africanized culturally, linguistically, and phenotypically, but its spiritual karma owes as much if not more to the ancestral concept of a Supreme Being brought over on the slave ships from Africa than to practices of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Recent scientific studies by Brazilian researchers have proven that for the Brazilian populace there exists the hazard of ethnoracial misinterpretation when “equating color or race with geographical ancestry, and using interchangeably terms such as white, Caucasian, and European on the one hand, and black, Negro or African on the other” (Parra et al. 181). Brazilians, according to this study (“Color and genomic ancestry in Brazilians”), form one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. This is basically due to five centuries of interethnic mixing of peoples from Europe and Africa with the autochthonous Amerindian (179).

This does not mean, however, that there is complete acceptance or admission of an African-derived heritage as an integral element or as the basis of the ethnic composition of all peoples in the areas where Spanish and Portuguese are the linguistic means of communication. Most tend to look askance when questioned about an African element in their country's ethnicity. What pigmentation does not reveal, a psychological