| Chapter I: | Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality |
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indio con facciones de negro, negro con pelo lacio, ondulado o suavemente enrizado, negro de facciones finas, moreno adelantado, pardo, fula, or the red-haired bachaco mulatto of Venezuela—is but a miniscule listing of indeterminate categories of color that are produced in the miscegenation process, and often appear as descriptors in the creative literature. One finds these skin tones and designations of racial characteristics catalogued throughout Spanish-speaking Latin America. Brazil's listing, while much more expansive, follows a similar paradigm of inconclusive ethnoracial patterning.
As indicated, the African presence in Latin America, together with acts of interracial procreation, is not a recent phenomenon for the Spanish- and Portuguese-European base, as seen in Spain's sixteenth-century Lazarillo de Tormes and in references to earlier centuries. An unknown number of black and “mulatto” servitors were in the entourage of Hispaniola's first governor, Nicolas Ovando, when he landed on the island in 1502 (Rout Jr. 24). The first slaves brought from Spain to the Americas had already begun to show signs of being the issue of biracial unions. During a recent trip to the Elmina Castle on Cape Coast, Ghana, the learned docent made it graphically clear that before African women were shipped to Europe, and subsequently to the Americas, many were forced to submit to sex acts with their Spanish and Portuguese slavers while being held captive in forts and dungeons. In their lectures, the guides emphasized that the question of biracial offspring did not appear to be a matter of much discussion or concern for the slaver/rapist. Mixed-race children were both a happenstance result and an incriminating fact of the female slave/white captor relationship.
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In Latin America, racial identity—or who is or is not black—seems to have always been and continues to be a matter of appearances. The noticeable presence or noticeable absence of African genes is considered, without a doubt, the principal factor of ethnic and racial classification. The emphasis is on “noticeable.” Both in the past and in the present, social