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of its Latin counterparts and serve as inspiration? It should be noted that the examples we offer in the fourth essay establish the contemporary presence of an Afro Latino link with the African continent's history and present, and with possibilities for the future, perhaps as it may pertain to the creative literature written by Latin American authors of diverse ethnic groups: black, mixed, and white. It is in this spatial reality that we confront the returnees’ psyches, their strengths and weaknesses, their sensitivities, their social status, and the vagaries of human experiences without the spatial, political, and psychological constraints of slavery that still plague the Latin kinship. The new environment does not share the Latino space's sociopsychological atmosphere of noetic perceptions of enslaved race and ethnicity. We look for roles of behavior for survival, such as the African spirituality observed in Essay I. We observe the prominence or absence of phenotype as demonstrated in Essay III, or if there will be a sense of hierarchy based on economics and a perception of royalty and class entitlement.
But is it logical, some might question, to consider the symbology of an African identity in the creative literature of Latin America, and the actual existence of descendants of returnees to Africa from Latin America under the same rubric of African Latin identity? If we find that the image of the African Latino and the Latino African carries a correlative relationship, it is not without reason to explore the possibilities that such a concept offers for establishing an identity that is germane to both African and Latin heritages. In Essay IV, as we explore the world of Latino returnees to the African continent, we hypothesize how a black Latin psychology would have evolved without the encumbrance of a slave mentality.
Our curiosity about the possibility of locating Latino returnees to Africa was piqued by references to the fact that the Brazilian poet Luiz Gama was the son of Luiza Mahin, whose origins were claimed to be in Ghana. We read that she had been a hunted revolutionary figure in the fight against the enslavement of Africans in Brazil, and subsequently learned that the poet's mother might have returned to the Continent. However, the available literature presented this more as a probability