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genetic base: African. Until the cultural diversity of black people is accepted, some national groups will not be considered to have African-descendants in them. The uncertainty of racial parameters as they pertain to Latin Americans is not a topic of discussion for most Americans who subscribe to the rhetoric of “Hispanism,” as if the term in some measure promoted a decree of racial singularity. Nonetheless, it has to be considered that an Afro Latino, by the narrowest of definitions, refers in the main to someone with genetic ties to Africa by birth or descent, and who has also been endowed with a sociocultural heritage (current or in disuse) from the Latin culture of the Portuguese-speaking or Spanish-speaking Americas. This, I declare, is a form of “ethnogenesis.” Likewise, it has to be taken into account, as Romero confirmed over sixty years ago, that one's physical appearance (in Latin America) might determine one's racial assignation, although this is not absolute. Both racial blackness and racial whiteness, in Latin America, can become correlative at some point in the charting of skin tones and the graphing of the accompanying morphology of hair quality and facial features. Since the Latin American author lives and shares his space with conationals of diverse races—or, in a sense, ethnicities—we considered it pertinent to look at the author's aesthetic approach to race or the ethnicities of his or her country and the resultant creative literature. We observed the semiotic context, implanted in the literary space, with language as symbols that betray the rejection or acceptance of race/ethnicity by the national psyche, and especially the place that phenotype assumes as an artistic construct in the hierarchy of national symbols.
The fourth essay has been organized with the goal of diminishing the concept of Afro Latinism as mythos only, arguing that it should be viewed as a vital experience. It is here that we turn to an African space in real time as opposed to a fictive context. True, an African presence in the Latin space does validate the basic mythology that one finds in the literary concept of such Cuban films as Guantanamera and Patakin, with perspectives that may have come straight out of the African-related Kulturgeschichte of Cuba, or of Brazil with a film such as A Deusa Negra. Does Africa contain, nevertheless, a reality that can be conjoined to that