In his introduction to a special issue of The Americas in 2006, Ben Vinson III noted how easily the history of Latin America had been dissociated from that of the African Diaspora. “When looking at the broad trajectory of historical writings on Latin America outside of the Caribbean and Brazil, it has long been possible to do Latin American history without referencing blackness or the African Diaspora.”Footnote ¹ A decade later, it is safe to say that the tables have turned. What were before scattered efforts to recognize black individuals' contributions to the history, culture, economy, and political developments of the region as a whole have evolved into a growing field meriting its own name: Afro-Latin American Studies. Born of the cross-pollination of scholarly debates that were previously disparate, the field of Afro-Latin American Studies has grown and developed in response to the rise of Black Studies and in connection to new realities in countries where Afro-descendants have pushed for social and economic equality.

The development of this field is well illustrated in the pages of The Americas. Articles published in the journal, starting from its creation in the 1940s, evoke the several threads that would be woven together to create the concept of Afro-Latin America. During the 1940s and 1950s, as part of governmental efforts to foster area studies in general, increased financial support helped consolidate the field of Latin American Studies. One of the signs of this institutionalization of the field was the appearance of dedicated journals, including this one. And while in its initial years The Americas focused primarily on missions in colonial Spanish America (see Christopher Woolley's introduction to the special issue on this topic), it also published important articles that highlighted Africans and their descendants' contributions to the development of colonial societies.Footnote ² That trend gained momentum during the 1960s and 1970s, fueled by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, as black activists claimed space in the academy with the creation of African and African Diaspora studies programs. Black leadership was at the forefront of domestic and international political debates, and also in the scholarly work published at the time. Articles featured in The Americas in the 1980s and 1990s reflected the methodological innovations then under way, such as cultural history, African Diaspora Studies, and a shift of attention to agency and black protagonism. Initially these studies tended to focus on the institution of slavery in areas considered “typical slave societies,” but during the first decade of the 2000s the gradual integration of African Diaspora Studies into the framework of colonial Latin American history expanded the geographical range to other regions of the continent and extended through a greater time period. Largely influenced by Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic—and responding to the Anglocentric focus that followed its publication—essays featured in The Americas reflected this change, foregrounding race and blackness in the South Atlantic and on mainland Spanish America.Footnote ³ Finally, it is possible to distinguish two trends that have emerged in more recent years. On one hand, historians have begun reexamining the very institution that forced Africans to the Americas, arguing for its centrality as a mode of governance since the early days of imperial expansion. On the other hand, a growing interest in subjectivity is evolving from nuances in the study of agency.

In this introduction, I draw on articles from The Americas that demonstrate these historiographical developments. As the articles compiled in this curated online edition show, the journal not only responded to these scholarly innovations, but also shaped the emerging field of Afro-Latin American history. In the United States, the establishment of Latin American Studies as an organized field dates back to the World War II period, when, as Lewis Hanke noted in a 1947 essay, government funding promoted institutes dedicated to specific area studies.Footnote ⁴ Hanke pointed to the academic exchange between Latin American and US-based scholars, the inclusion of Latin American topics in university courses, and the proliferation of specialized publications—including The Americas—as important steps in the institutionalization of the field. He also listed important journal articles and scholarly monographs that had been published up to that point, providing a road map for how to interpret the field's early years.

One of the trends Hanke identified was an emphasis on the role of blacks in Latin America, primarily in Brazil—a trend that other articles published in this journal during the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrate. Ernesto Ennes's 1948 “The Palmares ‘Republic’ of Pernambuco: Its Final Destruction, 1697,” for example, anticipated what would later become one of the central points of Afro-Latin American historiography: the prominence of Africans and Afro-descendants in the colonization process. While his focus on that essay rested on the dismantling of the famous Maroon community, Ennes noted in the opening paragraph that enslaved black labor had been essential for the Portuguese colonization of Brazil—a theme that scholars have echoed over the decades.Footnote ⁵ In 1959, J. V. D. Saunders took this idea one step further with an essay dedicated to examining Afro-Brazilians' role in shaping that nation. “An adequate comprehension of Brazilian institutions, history, economics, and other aspects of national life,” Saunders argued, “could be but with great difficulty acquired without a consideration of the role played by the Negro in the development of the Brazilian nation. His influence has been far-reaching, encompassing the major social institutions; and his impress is to be found in virtually every phase of the culture.”Footnote ⁶

While a focus on Brazil would continue to dominate, two articles that appeared in The Americas during the 1960s extended the study of black subjects to other regions of Latin America. Robert L. Brady's “The Domestic Slave Trade in Sixteenth-Century Mexico” and Peter Boyd-Bowman's “Negro Slaves in Early Colonial Mexico” reflected the changes under way in slavery studies, with the incorporation of new sources for studying the African experience on the continent.Footnote ⁷ Brady analyzed sales records to scrutinize the internal trade in slaves, while Boyd-Bowman used a range of sources that included notarial records, reports of runaway slaves, and freedom papers, among others, to offer a detailed account of slave life in Puebla. Boyd-Bowman's article further demonstrated that these records constituted a valuable source for the study of African ethnicities and naming patterns.Footnote ⁸ By focusing on a region other than the more markedly slave societies of Brazil, Cuba, and parts of Colombia, these works showed that the black presence in the continent had been more extensive than what an exclusive focus on plantation regions would suggest—a finding echoed during the following decade by important monographs such as those authored by Frederick Bowser and Colin Palmer.Footnote ⁹

This new wave of scholarship, attentive to the widespread presence of Africans and their descendants in Latin America, grew in connection to the US Civil Rights Movement.Footnote ¹⁰ Organized black activism prompted the creation of departments dedicated to African American and Diaspora studies, and the consolidation of Black Studies programs across US campuses supported new research into the state of race and racial relations during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as well as in earlier decades. As a result, historians began to challenge ideas of racial harmony and racial democracy constructed by earlier generations of academics. In 1971, The Americas published one of the first criticisms of Brazil's reputed racial democracy, Robert Levine's “Some Views on Race and Immigration during the Old Republic.” Levine's article exposed the prejudice against people of color in early twentieth-century Brazil, examining the results of a 1926 questionnaire to demonstrate that racial harmony was far from a reality, given that those results pointed to Brazilians' opposition to further black immigration to the country.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, John F. Bratzel and Daniel M. Masterson sought to undermine the fallacious idea that Brazil had been a haven of integration and harmony with their analysis of an Afro-Brazilian newspaper published in Porto Alegre in the aftermath of Abolition.Footnote ¹²

The myths of racial harmony and racial democracy derived largely from Frank Tannenbaum's 1947 Slave & Citizen, an important work that formed part of an emerging school of comparative slavery studies.Footnote ¹³ Contrasting the recognition of slaves' personhood in the Iberian empires and the existence of legislation protective of certain rights of the enslaved population in the Anglo system of chattel slavery, Tannenbaum concluded that these different legal traditions were the cause for extreme racial discrimination in the United States vis-à-vis the supposedly better integration of Afro-descendants in Latin America. And while it is well known that his vision of a “milder type of slavery” in Latin America borrowed from Gilberto Freyre's Casa Grande & Senzala, there were a number of authors working on comparative studies of legal slave codes who came to similar assumptions.Footnote ¹⁴ Some of these less known works were assessed in an article by Leslie B. Rout Jr, published in this journal in 1973. It offers a discerning (and critical) genealogy of the intellectual tradition behind the school of comparative slavery.Footnote ¹⁵

While race and race relations continued to be a principal object of historical work during the 1980s and 1990s, the cultural turn marked the way historians interrogated the past. Heavily influenced by anthropology, but also responding to the emergence of African Diaspora Studies, historians working on Latin America searched for enslaved and free blacks' contributions to colonial societies through the prism of culture. Considering the renewed interest in local sources and the weight of the Catholic Church in the Iberian empires, many of these studies tended to focus on slaves and free blacks' public life within religious organizations. Patricia Mulvey's 1982 article, for instance, examined the role of slave confraternities in colonial Brazil, showing how works of charity, religious festivals, and church building turned black brotherhoods into vehicles for social action.Footnote ¹⁶ She noted that these associations preserved African traditions while simultaneously bringing Africans and Afro-descendants into the realm of the church, thus functioning as spaces where a black form of Catholicism was created.

Responding to the scholarship that saw them mainly as promoting acculturation, Elizabeth Kiddy posited that black confraternities were also instrumental in forging racial identity.Footnote ¹⁷ Looking at rosary brotherhoods in colonial Minas Gerais, Kiddy found that while members came from different ethnic backgrounds and legal conditions, their shared devotional practices produced an idea of race that surpassed status (enslaved, freed, or free). Furthermore, she argued that the development of a racial consciousness allowed members of the brotherhood “to assert themselves in a united way in the dominant society.”

Many scholars have identified religious syncretism as a phenomenon typical of the New World. In contrast, John Thornton broke ground in 1988 with a contribution to The Americas that linked religious developments in the New World to previous conversions in Africa, particularly in the kingdom of Kongo, where Portuguese missionaries had long been present.Footnote ¹⁸ Thornton called for more attention to the African roots of American phenomena, and strengthened the dialogue with African Diaspora Studies.Footnote ¹⁹ The latter field also came to the fore in works that analyzed race relations in Latin America beyond Brazil, and those that called attention to agency.

Of the first group, this journal published two important pieces in the late 1980s, by John Hoyt Williams and Winthrop Wright. Williams stressed the need to integrate Uruguay's black community fully into the narrative of nation building, while Wright reexamined the myth of racial democracy in Venezuela.Footnote ²⁰ Of the second group, Dennis Valdés offered a counterpoint to the mainstream, top-down narratives of Mexico's abolition of slavery, demonstrating that agency was crucial in altering labor relations in urban settings. “Actions of the slaves themselves,” such as negotiating manumission with owners or resisting through escape, were instrumental in dismantling slavery in the new republic.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, in examining slave mortality and morbidity in one of Brazil's mining parishes, Donald Ramos found that enslaved mine workers also escaped often, in this instance to evade the threat to their lives imposed by particularly dangerous work conditions.Footnote ²²

Scholarly work on agency would continue to gain ground over the next two decades. Lowell Gudmundson contributed to the journal a transcribed primary source, accompanied by an introductory essay, in which enslaved men and women in Guatemala can be seen negotiating better work and life conditions with their Dominican masters. Acting in collaboration with representatives from the office of the Protector of Slaves, these individuals secured financial remuneration for their work, in addition to clothing and food.Footnote ²³ And Ruth Pike described the actions of those who escaped slavery to form palenques (Maroon communities) in early colonial Panama, conquering the vast jungle areas around the isthmus that connected the Pacific and the Atlantic and fighting Spaniards.Footnote ²⁴

Historians' focus on agency was further influenced by social and political change across Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s. After a long period of authoritarian and military governments throughout the region, the return of democracy was accompanied by organized activism by black citizens who demanded their full insertion into society through equal rights and opportunities, including (but not limited to) access to education, housing, and health services, as well as legislation to ensure the extirpation of racial discrimination. As had been the case during the Civil Rights Era in the United States, this movement placed black leadership on the forefront of contemporary political struggles, once again contributing to the growth in studies of black leadership and agency at large.

Academic work published in The Americas in the 1990s and early 2000s reflects historians' awareness of these new realities. Writing shortly after the end of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), the centennial of Brazilian abolition (1888), and the promulgation of a new Brazilian constitution (1988), Kim Butler authored a piece on Afro-Brazilian activism in early twentieth-century São Paulo that traced the origins of an important advocacy group and of a black public sphere.Footnote ²⁵ A. J. R. Russell-Wood, for his turn, took agency to his field of expertise—colonial Brazil—to reflect on Afro-Brazilians' contributions to local governance.Footnote ²⁶

While the case of Brazil might be emblematic precisely because of the convergence of such transcendent events, Latin America studies of black protagonism also gained ground elsewhere on the continent. For historians of the Spanish empire, one of the main objectives was to foreground Africans and Afro-descendants' active roles in all layers of society, whether in the conquest efforts, in the military, or in local communities. Thus, their work brought closer together the intellectual traditions of African Diaspora Studies and colonial Latin America. Indeed, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an exponential growth of scholarly production that can be categorized as Afro-Latin American history. Its distinctive features include the recognition of Africans and Afro-descendants as settlers in early modern Spanish America and their portrayal as agents of cultural, political, and economic development in colonial society; inquiries into the construction of racial identity that predates abolition; a reexamination of social integration in the post-independence period; and an effort to do all of that from the perspective of Afro-descendants’ peoples themselves, nuancing agency to make way for subjectivity.Footnote ²⁷

Two special issues of The Americas, published in 2000 and 2006, became a historiographical foundation for the field of Afro-Latin American history. The first, organized by Jane Landers and Matthew Restall, revealed the ubiquity of the African presence in Latin America and the diversity of the experiences of the people who made up that diaspora.Footnote ²⁸ Extending far beyond plantation societies, the articles featured in that volume looked at the eastern Andes, Guatemala, and rural Mexico, as well as Quito and Popayán, asserting that Africans and Afro-descendants were important actors in Spanish America as a whole. Whether it was in the conquest efforts, in settling territories, toiling in mines, or developing the agricultural hinterlands of the Spanish empire, the volume asserted, Africans and their descendants were integral to the social history of Spanish America.Footnote ²⁹ The second issue, organized by Ben Vinson, sought to further consolidate the African Diaspora as constitutive of colonial Latin America by focusing on a region in which the canon had evolved around Europeans and indigenous populations: the Andes. With essays that uncovered black-indigenous relations, identified pockets of a slave society outside of the traditional zones, and highlighted the African component of Andean culture, the issue called attention to the need to reassess the Atlantic paradigm when investigating the African Diaspora in Latin America.Footnote ³⁰ Taken jointly, these two specially edited volumes make the case for the full incorporation of Afro-Latin American history as a core topic of the history of the colonial Americas.

As a paradigm, this review of Afro-Latin American historiography invites us to move past studying the institution of slavery purely on its tangible levels—how it operated, how it affected and structured the economies, and the actors involved—to consider its relationship with governance, power, and race, expanding the study of blackness both chronologically and geographically. Going beyond the periodization of Atlantic slavery, or the typical slave societies of Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia, Afro-Latin American historiography can examine the black experience from the early moments of colonialism to present struggles over rights to ancestral lands and equality, in every corner of the continent.

In addition to raising the central questions shaping this scholarly conversation, The Americas has also answered the call through numerous articles published over the last two decades. Essays that look at militia service as a space of racial formation or demonstrate Africans and Afro-descendants’ active participation in the conquest efforts have been central to dismantling the image of armed service as a white European space.Footnote ³¹ Articles exploring Afro-descendants' role in shaping colonial societies in Brazil, Mexico, and Puerto Rico are representative of the efforts to consider blacks as actors in the process of social formation, and not merely as subjects incorporated into changes conducted by whites.Footnote ³² Similarly, studies that examine people of African descent making use of colonial institutions to pursue ecclesiastical protection, achieve social mobility and status, or attain financial benefits show how subjects of color appropriated traditional Spanish notions relating to religion and blood purity and pushed the boundaries of belonging toward a more inclusive definition.Footnote ³³ Familial practices have also been under the scope, no longer perceived as only resistance, but also as strategies of social advancement.Footnote ³⁴ Still others have expanded the examination of race and its relation to wider social and cultural phenomena into the nineteenth-century.Footnote ³⁵

In addition, a number of monographs appearing in the last decade (some of which were anticipated in article contributions to the journal), unequivocally lay down the roots of a new historiographical tradition.Footnote ³⁶ This body of scholarship has become so robust that institutional changes are under way. Not long ago, Harvard University inaugurated the first research institute dedicated to Afro-Latin America. Faculty hires in the History and African American Studies departments have increased the number of scholars working on—and mentoring graduate students in—Afro-Latin topics, and the United Nations' designation of 2015–24 as the Decade for the People of African Descent is expected to generate further scholarly development in African Diaspora studies.Footnote ³⁷

Through the publication of important essays over the years, The Americas has reflected the ways in which the symbiosis between Latin American History and the growing areas of African Diaspora Studies engendered a new field, anticipating many of its turning points. The trend now seems to rest on examining blackness in areas of Latin America traditionally conceived of as bastions of whiteness, extending national borders to study race and blackness in broader regional perspectives, be it through the reassessment of the Caribbean as an African space during the early colonial period, or the discovery of bridges between the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds.Footnote ³⁸