Blackness in the White Nation

A History of Afro-Uruguay

George Reid Andrews

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899601
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Uruguay is not conventionally thought of as part of the African diaspora, yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of enslaved Africans arrived in the country. Afro-Uruguayans played important roles in Uruguay's national life, creating the second-largest black press in Latin America, a racially defined political party, and numerous social and civic organizations. Afro-Uruguayans were also central participants in the creation of Uruguayan popular culture and the country's principal musical forms, tango and candombe. Candombe, a style of African-inflected music, is one of the defining features of the nation's culture, embraced equally by white and black citizens. In Blackness in the White Nation, George Reid Andrews offers a comprehensive history of Afro-Uruguayans from the colonial period to the present. Showing how social and political mobilization is intertwined with candombe, he traces the development of Afro-Uruguayan racial discourse and argues that candombe 's evolution as a central part of the nation's culture has not fundamentally helped the cause of racial equality. Incorporating lively descriptions of his own experiences as a member of a candombe drumming and performance group, Andrews consistently connects the struggles of Afro-Uruguayans to the broader issues of race, culture, gender, and politics throughout Latin America and the African diaspora generally.

CHAPTER ONE
THIS NOBLE RACE HAS GLORIOUS ASPIRATIONS, 1830–1920

Seventy-one years later, in 1963, Toribia Petronila Pardo Larraura still remembered that night, down to the words she and a chorus of young women had sung on the stage of the Teatro San Felipe. As her interviewer pressed her for details, she broke into song:

A great, harmonious memory
Tonight we send to Columbus.
And as we raise our voices in chorus,
We express our hopes and dreams,
Remembering on such a solemn day
The most glorious deed in history,
And he who gave one world to another,
Making precious his memory.

This noble race has glorious aspirations,
And as we sing this hymn to Columbus,
We ask God to grant in his celestial mansion
A place reserved for the great discoverer.¹

It was 12 October 1892, and throughout the Western world governments, civic organizations, and social clubs were commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. Montevideo was no exception; and among the many events scheduled for that night was a velada, an evening of music, poetry, speeches, and readings, held by and for the sociedad de color. The principal organizer was Sergeant Camilo Machado, an orderly to President Julio Herrera y Obes. The evening opened with the national anthem, sung by, in the words of El Día, one of the city's principal newspapers, “a large chorus of very nice morenitas and elegant morenitos” dressed, like the audience, in tuxedos and ball gowns.² Speeches and poems followed, and musical selections performed by a quartet of piano, violin, oboe, and double bass, led by Guillermo Céspedes.

Following an intermission, the second half of the program opened with the “Hymn to Columbus,” composed by Céspedes, with lyrics by poet and journalist Marcos Padín. More poems, speeches, and music, this time performed by the piano duo of Céspedes and Carlos Pérez, “two colored men,” in the words of La Tribuna Popular, “who justify the vulgar saying that there is no such thing as a pardo who is not a musician.” The program concluded with an address by Julián Acosta, “a boy eighteen or twenty, tall, well formed, and with a nice voice that won the attention and interest of the audience as soon as he began to speak. He talked of the advances of the people of color, who began by spilling their blood on the battlefields and finished by dedicating themselves to study, in order to stop being cannon fodder and to begin to exercise their civil and political rights.”³ The audience then adjourned for refreshments and dancing that continued until 4:00 A.M.

The Montevideo press was unanimous in its praise of the event, though with an occasional note of condescension. “A large crowd attended, thinking they were going to a picnic of blacks,” reported La Semana, employing a phrase used in Uruguay to refer to something that is disorganized and poorly put together. “But they were wrong. The event was magnificent, receiving great and well-deserved applause … [and] demonstrating clearly the degree of culture and progress to which the colored class has arrived.” La Tribuna Popular agreed. “The descendents of those unhappy Africans, hunted like beasts by those who took part in the infamous slave trade, have advanced to the point of being able to present themselves as educated and free to celebrate the glorious discovery of America with beautiful speeches and inspired poetry. Last night's party redounds not just to the honor of the illustrious mariner but especially to the honor of the sociedad de color and the social culture of Montevideo.”⁴

Because it succeeded so effectively in demonstrating the “culture and progress” of the black community, the 1892 velada was remembered for years afterward as a high point in the community's history.⁵ The event was memorable as well for the way it encapsulated and illustrated some of the principal features of nineteenth-century Afro-Uruguayan history: the transition from slavery and forced labor to freedom and citizenship; the role in that transition of black military service; the rise of black social and civic organizations; and the central role of music and dance in the community's history. And hovering in the background were the progenitors of that history: “those unhappy Africans, hunted like beasts” and brought to Montevideo to work as slaves. By 1892 not many of them still lived, but their memories persisted, accompanied by the question of exactly where Africanness and blackness fit into a modern, European-style white republic. Of moderate interest to white Uruguayans, for their black compatriots the question was considerably more pressing.

Africans in Uruguay

At Montevideo two great oceans meet. One is the maritime ocean of the Atlantic, which has connected the city at different times to Europe, to Africa, to the Caribbean, and always to its neighbor and sister city across the Río de la Plata, Buenos Aires. The other is the land ocean of the pampa, the waves of grassland that roll hundreds of miles north into southern Brazil, west into Argentina, and east to the Atlantic.

The city sits on the shores of those two seas. Its original core, the Ciudad Vieja, rests on a narrow peninsula, eight to ten blocks wide, between the Río de la Plata and the large inland bay that forms the port. From its central square, the Plaza Matriz, one can see both bodies of water sparkling in the sun. Ever since the city's founding in 1724, the bay has been a perfect anchorage, easily defended by the fortress and gun emplacements on the Cerro, the hill that overlooks it from the west.

Into that bay came ships from Africa and Brazil bearing the slave laborers who built the colonial city's fortifications, houses, and commercial buildings. Slaves also worked as domestic servants, as street vendors, as porters, and as skilled artisans. In the countryside surrounding Montevideo they worked on farms and ranches, many as gaucho cowboys, and in the saladeros where beef was dried and salted for export to Brazil and the Caribbean.⁶

The census of 1805 counted ninety-four hundred people living in the city, of whom over one-third (thirty-three hundred) were African or Afro-Uruguayan.⁷ Almost all of them (86 percent) were slaves, a rate of enslavement higher than in other Latin American cities at that time.⁸This was the result both of Montevideo's relatively recent foundation (Afro-Uruguayans had had less time than in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, or other older cities to win freedom and bear subsequent generations of free children and grandchildren) and the arrival in the late 1700s of large numbers of Africans to the city.⁹ In comparison to native-born Afro-Latin Americans, Africans were much less knowledgeable of the laws and customs governing slavery, as well as of the psychology, cultural values, and even languages of their owners. As a result, Africans were greatly disadvantaged in the pursuit of freedom and won grants of manumission (freedom granted them by their owner) at rates much lower than those of American-born slaves.¹⁰ While in cities like Buenos Aires and Lima manumission rates averaged 1.2–1.3 percent per year or higher (i.e., of every one thousand slaves, on average twelve or thirteen gained freedom each year), in Montevideo manumission rates between 1790 and 1820 were 0.9 percent or less.¹¹

The recent arrival of large numbers of Africans meant the presence in the city of an institution found in other Latin American cities at this time: mutual aid societies based on African ethnic identities.¹² In Montevideo, the salas de nación (roughly translatable as “nation courts”) provided a variety of benefits to their members. To people who had been torn away from friends, family, and home, the nations provided much-needed social networks and support. These networks helped make life in the New World endurable; and if they were important during life, they were essential at the moment of death, when African souls required the prayers of compatriots to be restored to their homes and their ancestors.¹³

To people seemingly powerless at the hands of their owners, the nations provided political representation and lobbying organizations through which the African population courted colonial and then national authorities and sought to recruit them as patrons and protectors. On major religious and civil holidays—Christmas, New Year's, Epiphany, Easter—the monarchs of the nations, accompanied by their courts, would march to the presidential palace and to the homes of other politicians and officials to convey their holiday greetings and express their obedience and political fealty.¹⁴

To a people deprived of their gods and religions, the nations provided sanctuaries where those religions could be at least partially reconstructed and the gods worshipped.¹⁵ And wherever Africans worshipped, they sang, danced, and drummed at ritual events that Montevideans called tangos or candombes.¹⁶ The latter word first appeared in print in 1834, in a Montevideo newspaper, referring to the dances held by the nations on Sundays and other holidays. The following year it appeared again, in a poem commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 1825 Law of the Free Womb.¹⁷ Written in Afro-Uruguayan dialect by the white poet Francisco Acuña de Figueroa (the author of the lyrics to Uruguay's national anthem), the poem sought to convey the jubilation of the city's Africans at the edict of gradual emancipation.

Candombe brother [compañelo di candombe],
Make some noise and drink corn beer,
Now the children that we have
Will be slaves no longer here.
That's why the Cambundá,
The Kasanje, the Cabinda,
The Benguela, the Munyolo,
All are singing, all are shouting.¹⁸

The candombes held by the Cambundá, the Kasanje, the Congo, the Benguela, and other nations were immensely powerful and evocative occasions. Part of this power was provided by the rhythmic impact of the African drums, which was then reinforced by the visual (and again rhythmic) impact of the dances that the Africans performed. A French visitor described those that he witnessed in Montevideo in 1827.

On 6 January, the Day of the Kings, strange ceremonies called our attention. All the blacks born on the coasts of Africa gathered together in tribes, each one electing a king and a queen. Costumed in the most original manner, with the most brilliant outfits they could find, preceded by the subjects of their respective tribes, these monarchs for a day went first to mass and then paraded through the city; and gathered at last in a small plaza near the Market, everyone performed, each in his own way, a dance characteristic of their nation. I saw in rapid succession war dances, representations of agricultural labor, and steps of the most lascivious type. There, more than six hundred blacks appeared to have regained for a moment their nationality, in the heart of that imaginary country, whose memory alone … in the midst of that noisy saturnalia of another world, made them forget, for one single day of pleasure, the pains and sufferings of long years of slavery.¹⁹

The intensity of emotion at the dances, their alien aesthetic, the crowning of African monarchs and the re-creation of what appeared to be scenes of war, combined to provoke occasional apprehension among the city's officials. In 1807 the city council banned the dances both within and outside the city walls, then in 1816 it lifted the prohibition on dances outside the walls. A police decree of 1839 reiterated that distinction—candombes were banned inside the walls but permitted outside—and indeed, for most of the 1800s, candombes were held mainly in the Recinto area immediately outside the city walls, in what is now the Barrio Sur. Most of the nations built their headquarters in that neighborhood, partly because unoccupied land was available there, and partly, according to legend, to be close to the sea and therefore to Africa.²⁰

The candombes were less in evidence during the eight-year (1843–51) siege of the city during the Guerra Grande civil war, but they burst forth with renewed energy in the 1850s and 1860s. Following extensive black military service (on both sides, Blanco and Colorado) during the war, few questioned Africans’ right to play their music and dance their dances. Those who did were roundly reproved in 1859 by La Nación. “It is no dishonor for Montevidean society, nor any lessening of its civilization, to tolerate this kind of celebration [candombe]; to try to ban these festivities would be both. Far from diminishing our civilization, they enhance it, enhancing as well our republican customs” of freedom and toleration.²¹

By the 1850s and 1860s, Montevideans were not only willing to tolerate candombe; many actively embraced it. The African dances were the most heavily attended form of public entertainment in the capital, drawing crowds of five to six thousand in a city of some sixty thousand—10 percent of the population. “Yesterday afternoon the streets … were filled with merrymakers, an uninterrupted flood of people heading south, toward where the Congo nation and others have their thrones,” reported La Nación on 7 January 1860, the day after Epiphany (known in Latin America as the Day of the Kings, for the three magi who came to honor the baby Jesus). “Some five thousand people were there, and wherever one looked the panorama was magnificent: groups of lovely girls and young men, on foot and on horseback, all united by the harsh sound of the drums.” A report on 6 January 1862, indicated some six thousand people present. Other articles from the 1860s and into the 1870s cited no numbers but described the festivities as “extremely crowded,” drawing “large crowds,” “incalculable crowds,” and so on. “It was something to see,” recalled a memoir written later in the century. “There was not a single old shopkeeper, nor a single family head, nor matron, nor young girl, nor gentleman who did not head down to the candombe.”²²

Several contemporary accounts referred to the crowds as being on a “pilgrimage” to the candombes.²³ The word was entirely appropriate. Held on Sundays or religious holidays, the candombes were deeply rooted in African religious observances and were powerfully spiritual events. As such, they were a direct response to, and repudiation of, the sufferings of slavery. As Rachel Harding has observed with reference to Brazil, “the same body that contorted under the weight of cane-stalk bundles or barrels of rum or water or years of washing clothes by hand, the same body that worked involuntarily, unpaid, and under duress emphasized, through dance, another meaning of itself.”²⁴ As an alternative to the oppressive, painful, dehumanizing movements of coerced labor, the candombes offered the deeply pleasurable, healing movements of dance—and dance, furthermore, performed collectively, in concert, with friends and countrymen from one's homeland. Here elders and spiritual leaders, gifted musicians and dancers, all assumed the positions of authority and prestige denied them in daily life; here the nations strode onto the public stage, asserting t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• BLACKNESS IN THE WHITE NATION
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• introduction
• CHAPTER ONE THIS NOBLE RACE HAS GLORIOUS ASPIRATIONS, 1830–1920
• CHAPTER TWO REMEMBERING AFRICAComparsas and Candombe, 1870–1950
• CHAPTER THREE THE NEW NEGROS, 1920–1960
• CHAPTER FOUR TODAY EVERYONE DANCES CANDOMBE, 1950–2010
• CHAPTER FIVE DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY, 1960–2010
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX