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the fictive cosmos alludes to a concrete and real space. The imagery of the Afro Latino person registers, upon careful reading, as a form of noesis or perception, perhaps truth by design. In short, we are led to approach the author's organization of his or her fantasies as recognition of the Afrodescendant's symbological factor in the national societies where Spanish and Portuguese are the modes of communication in the Americas.
With the previous thought in mind, I crafted the four essays in this study to be correlated in overall theme and concept. However, they can and should each be read as separate discourses. Their organization is within the pragmatics of a common literary experience, that is to say, the integration of Afrodescendants into the literary spaces of Latino culture as symbols of national identity. The context of the first three essays is based on the creative writing of authors with a Latin American mindset, wherein we go from a specific geopolitical environment (e.g., Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, or Mexico) to promote by hypothesis that the topics discussed can also apply to the entire area termed Latin America, in part if not as a whole. Under this guise, the specific terminology—Latin America—includes all the countries in the Americas where Spanish and Portuguese are spoken. The basic tenet I am proposing is to establish, with some validity, the extent to which the national psyche has accepted or rejected (as can be shown in one specific case) the ethnic Afro Latino and Afro Latinism as icons of the national culture.
Most natives of the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking areas of the Americas are not oblivious to the fact that there are black and partially black natives in their regions. Yet the phenotypic distinctions that would affirm an infusion of African genes apparently are not so discernible to the non-native observer, or even to a sizeable group of non-native academicians. Many of the latter claim to specialize in Latino or Hispanic studies and make suppositions about the culture that distort the Afrodescendant presence. Perhaps their stance is politically motivated since the same color gradations are apparent in U.S. nationals and are cause for differential treatment toward those who are not accepted as white.
Nonetheless, Africans were introduced into the Latin American area in the early sixteenth century, long before the institution of slavery became