Cuba did not abolish slavery until 1886, the last country to do so in Spanish America. Seven years later the colonial government passed legislation granting Africans and their descendants civil rights equal to those of whites. In a tardy and unsuccessful attempt to retain control of the colony, the 1898 Constitución Autonómica granted political autonomy to the island and the franchise to all males, regardless of race, education, or income. Three years later, the first Constitutional Convention of the Cuban Republic ratified, despite the strong objections of the United States government of occupation (1898–1902), universal manhood suffrage as one of the pillars of a republic in which, according to the 1901 Constitution, all were equal before the law. Perhaps nowhere in the Americas had the transition from slave to citizen, to put it in Frank Tannenbaum's words, been accomplished so thoroughly and in so brief a period of time. At the same time that racial segregation was being legally enthroned in the US South, the Cubans were creating the political foundations of a republic that was frequently imagined to be racially inclusive, egalitarian, and harmonious.

Tannenbaum would have found this contrast compelling but somewhat unsurprising. His Slave and Citizen was built, precisely, on the notion that what he called “the two areas” of the New World were characterized by dissimilar social structures, particularly by the “divergent position of the Negro” within them. Whereas in Latin America the former slaves were easily integrated into societies that lacked rigid “horizontal stratifications” along racial lines, in the United States the distinctions between free and slave, or white and black, were absolute. The “Negro was considered a slave by nature,” a situation that emancipation did not alter. Lacking equal “moral status in the sight of the white community,” black Americans were denied equal social standing even after emancipation.Footnote ¹

Although more than sixty years have passed since its publication, Slave and Citizen continues to inform comparative studies of race and slavery in the Americas. The book is still in print, is used in seminars across the United States, and is frequently quoted by scholars of slavery and race relations.Footnote ² In a sense, the same reasons that led Tannenbaum to write this short and incisive book explain its remarkable endurance. He was interested in understanding a “great subject” that, changing social conditions notwithstanding, remains as important today as it was then: the persistence of racism and inequality in the United States. The questions that troubled Tannenbaum—in his own definition, questions of freedom, justice, liberty, law, and morality—still trouble us. We are still trying to understand “the place of man in the world and the relation of men to each other,” except that we have expanded our efforts to include women and children in our quest, and we have begun to treat “the world” as a subject with its own history.Footnote ³

The enduring interest of Slave and Citizen is surprising in at least one sense, however. This is a book that has been subject to serious, almost demolishing critiques by several generations of scholars now. In this sense its trajectory is similar to another book from the same period, Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery. Both books have been much critiqued, but that has probably contributed to reaffirming their centrality to scholarly debates. Both tried to answer big questions concerning slavery and the construction of the modern world. Both offered general causal explanations that linked a past of slavery with a present of racism and capitalism. Even historians who disputed the specifics of their findings agreed that Tannenbaum and Williams were on to something when they established the existence of a relationship between slavery and modern race relations, or between slavery and capitalism. But how to interpret those relationships has remained, in both cases, the subject of much fruitful controversy.Footnote ⁴

This article tries to summarize some of the scholarly debates sparked by Slave and Citizen's most controversial assumptions and arguments. The book was based on two interrelated assumptions that subsequent scholarship revised: first, that “Latin” and “Anglo-Saxon” America were two different entities with overlapping but clearly distinguishable histories, and second, that one of the crucial distinctions that separated these two Americas was the nature of their respective race relations. Whereas rigid forms of racial separation and segregation characterized the United States, most countries in Latin America were mestizo, racially mixed nations that did not have, or were in the process of eliminating, the color line that characterized US society. From the official “cosmic race” ideology of José Vasconcelos's Mexico, the Venezuela “café con leche” of poet and politician Andrés Eloy Blanco, the harmonious Luso-tropical civilization of Gilberto Freyre's Brazil, to the mulatto Cuba of Fernando Ortiz and Nicolás Guillén, the Latin American nations seemed to embrace mestizaje as their very essence and as their creative solution to the racial problem. In the United States, many leading scientists had talked for decades about the perils of mongrelization and miscegenation. By contrast, in Latin America, as Tannenbaum knew well, nation-makers and intellectuals extolled the virtues of mestizaje and embraced it as their path to the future.

These assumptions framed Tannenbaum's approach and research design. A sociologist by formation, he understood that if race relations had been “structured differently” in the United States and Latin America, it was because they had different histories. “This separation has a historical basis,” he asserted without a hint of doubt. The possibility that different patterns of race relations may have emerged out of a shared history of slavery and racism was not even considered. “A social atmosphere so dissimilar in two nations built in the New World … cannot be a mere accident,” he noted. Tannenbaum was not oblivious to the similarities in the colonial histories of British and Iberian America, but he clearly believed that beneath the similarities (colonialism, slavery) lay profound, systemic differences. He also believed that, as an activist social scientist concerned with the key social issues of his day, it was his duty to identify “the source” of these differences and, by implication, of America's racial troubles.Footnote ⁵

Tannenbaum found the main historical difference between Latin America and the United States in their respective “slave systems,” which had developed under what he characterized as different legal and moral settings. Slavery in the Iberian colonies was regulated by a well-established body of ancient law and by social mores that endowed slaves with a legal and moral personality. Slaves had the right to marry, to purchase their freedom, and to complain in cases of abuse. As equal members of the community of believers in the sight of God, they had the right to obtain the sacraments and were considered by the Church as “moral human beings and as brothers in Christ.” Slavery was against reason and nature; the laws and institutions were biased in favor of freedom, and manumission was frequent. In law and custom, slavery in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies became a “contractual arrangement between the master and his bondsman,” a “matter of financial competence on the part of the slave,” not a permanent status of degradation and moral or biological inferiority. By contrast, in the United States slavery developed in the absence of a previously established legal system, so the planters were free to assimilate the slave to the status of chattel. Slaves had no rights under the law, they could not testify in trials, they did not have the right to purchase their own freedom, and they could not petition judges or authorities. Their families enjoyed no legal recognition, and their marriages had no civil effects. They were denied the benefits of Christianity and did not belong to the community of believers. More to the point, whereas in Latin America freedom was favored by law and custom, the social and legal environment in British America was hostile to freedom. Numerous legal obstacles made manumission costly and difficult, and slaves could not obtain freedom without the consent of their masters. Slavery was assumed to be perpetual and “being a Negro was presumptive of a slave status.”Footnote ⁶

Although the central thesis of the book was that these “different slave systems … achieved sharply contrasting results,” most of Slave and Citizen is devoted to analyzing those differences rather than the process through which they resulted in “contrasting” patterns of race relations. The connections between “slave systems” and “results” are barely sketched out in the book. Tannenbaum explains that the permissive manumission regime in Latin America allowed for easy and frequent transits from slavery to freedom. Furthermore, freed people of color, who were numerous in all Spanish and Portuguese colonies, did not face serious obstacles in their integration to society. “In fact, in Latin America there was for legal and practical purposes no separate class of freedmen. The freedman was a free man.” Since legal and religious provisions had always recognized the moral personality of slaves, facilitating their social integration once freed, the abolition of slavery was neither traumatic nor violent.Footnote ⁷

Conversely, in the United States manumission was not only rare and difficult, but freed people of color faced significant social barriers. Manumission did not mean special rights and the social environment was “discriminatory and hostile.” Interracial marriage was prohibited and freed people of color could be enslaved when entering some of the slave states. After manumission the freedman remained “a Negro,” and the presumption was that all blacks were slaves and naturally inferior. These rigid divisions could only be changed through violence, thus the traumatic process of abolition in the United States. But even after emancipation these divisions continued to define the social structure. The Civil War gave blacks formal equality but not what slaves and their descendants had always enjoyed in Latin America: experience with freedom and “moral” equality. As Tannenbaum explained, “Herein lies the great contrast between the outcome of the two slave systems. The last eighty years in the United States may be characterized as a period within which the Negro has been struggling for moral status in the sight of the white community.”Footnote ⁸ What happened in Latin America during those years was not really explored, however.

In the following sections, I analyze how scholars criticized Tannenbaum's central premise and arguments. Almost immediately after the publication of Slave and Citizen, a significant body of scholarship began to review the assumption that race relations were in fact very different in the United States and Brazil. Working in a parallel fashion, a separate group of scholars questioned Tannenbaum's characterizations of the “slave systems” in both countries as separate and different. Scholars also questioned his analysis of the processes of abolition and the alleged relationship between “slave systems” and “outcomes” (race relations). In the process, this scholarship moved away from Manichean divisions between “Latin” and “Anglo Saxon” America and began to emphasize similarities and connections between them. That we are still writing about Tannenbaum despite these formidable challenges remains an interesting question in itself, however. A few tentative answers are suggested later in the article.

Different Outcomes: Segregation and Racial Democracy

The premise of Tannenbaum's study was common sense in the postwar environment: Race relations in the United States, what he called “the position of the Negro,” were not only different from Latin America, they were also much worse. The subordinate position of black people in the United States became painfully obvious during World War Two. As Nazi Germany's extreme forms of racism became known, and as the United States entered the war, segregation and racial discrimination at home became increasingly visible and politically problematic. Scholars and institutions turned their attention to race or, to be more precise, to the question of the social place of blacks in American society.Footnote ⁹

It was in this context that, in the late 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned a series of studies on the “Negro” in the United States. As the scholars involved in this effort searched for answers, Latin America lurked in the background. Tannenbaum was not alone in his interest in the region and was not the first scholar to place the study of American blacks in a pan-American context. Several of the studies resulting from the Carnegie Corporation's commission, which antedated Slave and Citizen by just a few years, made references to Latin America and reinforced the notion of the two Americas. Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work, An American Dilemma (1944), noted, for instance, that definitions of who was “Negro” were very different in the United States and in Latin America, and that discrimination in Brazil was “much milder” than in the United States.Footnote ¹⁰ In The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), anthropologist Melville Herskovits compared the black cultures of the United States with those of South America and the Caribbean, especially Brazil, Suriname, and Haiti. Herskovits also maintained personal and professional links with scholars of race from the region, such as Jean Price-Mars from Haiti, Fernando Ortiz from Cuba, and Arthur Ramos from Brazil.Footnote ¹¹ Several of the contributors to Otto Klineberg's Characteristics of the American Negro (1944) also made reference to Brazil and to other Latin American and Caribbean countries in their studies.Footnote ¹²

American scholarly perceptions of the Brazilian racial paradise were reinforced with the publication of Negroes in Brazil (1942) by Donald Pierson, who argued that whatever prejudices and disadvantages blacks faced in that country, they were to be explained primarily in terms of their class position. Pierson noted that blacks were largely concentrated in the lower sectors of society and that many derogatory statements and stereotypes denigrated blackness. But he also remarked that opportunities for mobility did exist and that a black person could achieve “superior status” and “overcome the handicap of color.” Furthermore, unlike the United States, in Brazil there was a long-term “tendency to absorb all diverse ethnic elements” into the dominant group through intermixture and intermarriage.Footnote ¹³ These assertions basically reproduced Gilberto Freyre's claim, in his Sobrados e mucambos (1936), that Brazil was becoming a “racial democracy.”Footnote ¹⁴

Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, were, everybody seemed to agree, regions that, building on foundations of African slavery similar to those in the United States, had managed to create racially harmonious, integrated societies. This was not just an issue for scholarly consumption. Brazil was deemed a racial paradise, or something close to it, by the majority of observers, including notably African-American intellectuals and visitors. W. E. B. DuBois was probably the most famous of those. He characterized Brazilian emancipation as “peaceful”—a characterization that Tannenbaum would echo decades later—and asserted that Brazilians were in the process of creating a “new” race into which “whites, Negroes, and Indians” were “amalgamating.”Footnote ¹⁵ African-American intellectuals and professionals were familiar also with race relations in other Latin American countries, particularly Cuba, a country that they visited frequently. As Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1933, “To American Negroes interested in the cultural development of their race, a trip to Cuba would be an inspiration and a revelation that might astound them.”Footnote ¹⁶

Yet by the time Slave and Citizen was published, this central premise of Tannenbaum's study was about to become the subject of serious scholarly inquiry and critique. Precisely because Brazil enjoyed the reputation of being a racial democracy in a world beset by racial animosities, in 1950 UNESCO commissioned several studies about race relations in that country. As Alfred Métraux, the Swiss-American anthropologist who became director of the UNESCO Division for the Study of Race Problems, explained, “The generally favorable impressions produced by Brazil's race relations has for many years been remarked on by travelers and sociologists … Brazil has, in fact, been hailed as one of the rare countries which have achieved a ‘racial democracy'.” But rare cases such as these had not been seriously investigated in the past; most scholarship had been devoted to analyzing racial discrimination and animosities in the United States and South Africa. “Yet the existence of countries in which different races live in harmony is itself an important fact capable of exercising a strong influence on racial questions in general.” In other words, it was to “draw a lesson from the case of Brazil” that a group of sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists was commissioned to investigate race relations in that country.Footnote ¹⁷

These studies challenged the image of Brazil as a racial democracy and documented the existence of pervasive, although regionally variable and informal, racial differences in that country.Footnote ¹⁸ In all of Brazil, researchers found that blacks tended to occupy the lowest social positions and faced obstacles in their aspirations to upward social mobility. In industrial São Paulo, anthropologist Roger Bastide found a “semi-voluntary segregation” that prevented blacks from accessing white-collar positions or the best industrial jobs. “There is,” Bastide noted as early as 1952, “a policy of directing colored workers into certain branches of industry, such as the building trades or hard and dirty types of work for which the whites are not anxious to compete.”Footnote ¹⁹ From Rio de Janeiro, sociologist Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto likewise reported that “the harmonious integration which is regarded as characteristic of inter-racial relations in Brazil fails to correspond to facts revealed by sociological investigations.” As in São Paulo, Costa Pinto found that upwardly mobile blacks ran “into prejudices expressed as racial stereotypes” and that these barriers inevitably produced “an awareness of race.”Footnote ²⁰ Anthropologist Charles Wagley, a colleague of Tannenbaum's at Columbia, noted a similar trend in the rural communities of northern Brazil. Racial considerations could hinder the access of black people to the upper classes, as illustrated in civic ceremonies, political appointments, and marriages. Furthermore, even in these small towns, which contrasted sharply with the competitive and modernizing environment of industrial São Paulo, “the ‘people of color’ generally do occupy positions that are socially, economically and educationally inferior.”Footnote ²¹

By the early 1950s these studies, which would later result in influential books, began to cast serious doubts about the veracity of Brazil's much-touted racial democracy. But their findings were more ambiguous than later scholars, with the benefit of hindsight, have typically realized. Although these studies noted that competition for resources, jobs, and upper-class positions heightened racial tensions and that racial stereotypes were widespread and derogatory, they offered an overall assessment of Brazilian society that was not necessarily at odds with the notion of racial democracy. Bastide, whose report was among the most critical, noted that intermarriage was common, especially among the lower classes, that a certain number of “colored people” became integrated into the white population as shown by the censuses, and that in the competitive urban environment color prejudice was evolving into class prejudice. Costa Pinto remarked that working-class Afro-Brazilians saw racial prejudice as isolated incidents and understood their status in terms of class rather than race. Wagley reported a similar situation in the rural northern communities: “the most important principle governing relations between people was membership of a social class rather than ‘race’.” And from Bahia, physician and anthropologist Thales de Azevedo offered a positive view of race relations. Although he concurred with the other authors that elites tended to be predominantly white, he referred to skin color as a “simple accident” that had limited impact on social mobility. “In few parts of the world today,” he asserted in what amounted to a restatement of the ideology of racial democracy, “is the relationship between whites and colored people (and especially the descendants of African slaves) better than in Brazil. Active racial prejudices do not really exist in Brazil, much less any organized or open struggle between whites and Negroes.” This is why, when summarizing the initial findings of the research teams, Métraux could still report that, when it came to building a racially harmonious world, Brazil remained “an exemplary nation.”Footnote ²²

The vision that class positions were fundamental to racial differences and prejudices informed some of the subsequent scholarship of race in Brazil, as exemplified by the works of anthropologist Marvin Harris and sociologist Florestan Fernandes. In his fieldwork in a town in Minas Gerais, Harris found that social status was based primarily on class indicators such as wealth and occupation. Race correlated almost perfectly with class status, however, so blackness and poverty were virtually interchangeable, while wealth was always assumed to be white.Footnote ²³

A member of the Bastide group who did research on São Paulo, Fernandes became one of the most important critics of Brazilian racial democracy, a system of beliefs that he famously characterized as a “myth” that allowed the country's elite to ignore the obvious racial injustices that characterized Brazilian society. Although he believed, as other contemporary scholars did, that racial differences would ultimately give way to class identifications under the weight of capitalist development, Fernandes documented the widespread persistence of racial inequalities in Brazil. He explained these inequalities as the long-term consequences of the slave system, which had left behind a racially stratified social order that had seriously impaired blacks' abilities to compete with whites and “change the terrible course of history.” Curiously, Fernandes echoed here an argument that Tannenbaum had applied to blacks in the United States, who were allegedly “unprepared” for freedom by the time slavery was abolished.Footnote ²⁴

Other scholars, including some of Fernandes's colleagues, began to dispute the notion that modern racial inequality could be attributed primarily to the long-term effects of the slave system or that race differentials were somehow subordinated to class positions. By the 1970s, in the context of renewed Afro-Brazilian political activism, new research began to show that race differences persisted even when controlled by income or education (i.e., by class-related indicators). In several studies, sociologist Carlos Hasenbalg demonstrated that blacks suffered from what he called cycles of “cumulative disadvantage” that hampered their aspirations for mobility. Racial discrimination went a long way in explaining these disadvantages. Not only did blacks have lesser educational opportunities than whites of the same social origin, but their educational gains translated into lower earnings as well. Sociologist Nelson do Valle Silva reached similar conclusions when studying income differentials in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. In these visions, of course, racial inequality was no longer a legacy of slavery that would disappear in due time, but a vital social process with no end in sight.Footnote ²⁵

These studies not only reaffirmed Florestan Fernandes's claim that racial democracy was a myth, but paved the way for the next scholarly phase, in which the ideology itself, its roots and modus operandi, became a subject of research. Scholars noted, for instance, that because racial democracy denied the existence of systemic racial discrimination, it offered no explanation for blacks' subordination, other than their own inability to overcome slavery's many legacies.Footnote ²⁶ From here, it was only a step to claim, as numerous scholars began to do in the 1990s, that racial democracy was in fact the problem. These nationalist myths, in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, were creations of white elites that served one main purpose: to demobilize racially subordinate groups and thus to reproduce unequal social orders. Racial democracy was characterized as a smoke screen that hinders the development of racial consciousness among Afro-Brazilians (or their social equals elsewhere), who in the process become accomplices of their subordination. In the absence of racially defined forms of mobilization, “white supremacy” remains intact.Footnote ²⁷

The critique of Brazil's racial democracy by scholars not only challenged Tannenbaum's assumption that race relations were much better in Brazil than in the United States, but also implicitly questioned the notion that their histories were in fact fundamentally different. As early as the 1950s, some of the UNESCO studies began to raise questions about these differences. As Costa Pinto put it, when placed side by side, differences between the United States and Brazil appeared to be “of degree rather than of nature.” Racial labels and classifications were constructed differently in each place, but a color line distinguishing whites from nonwhites was drawn in both countries.Footnote ²⁸ A few years later, Carl Degler noted that Brazil did not always compare favorably to the United States after desegregation and civil rights and that race relations in both countries were in fact “converging.” This claim was investigated and reinforced by at least some subsequent scholars, so by the 1990s one of Tannenbaum's most important assumptions—that race relations in Brazil and the United States were fundamentally different, much better in Brazil than in the United States—had been, to say the least, seriously called into question.Footnote ²⁹

Slavery and Abolition

Scholars have investigated not only how race relations in Brazil and the United States compare, but also whether their respective slave systems were truly different. Although some followers of Tannenbaum reinforced the notion that slavery in Latin America and the United States differed in fundamental ways, other scholars noted that, when immersed in economically comparable situations, the slaves' experiences were remarkably similar.Footnote ³⁰ Whichever differences did exist, as Carl Degler noted in 1971, they could be “quite adequately accounted for by the accidents of geography, demography and economy … rather than by differences in the laws or practices of church and state regarding slavery.”Footnote ³¹

Slave and Citizen's comparative analysis of slavery sparked significant scholarly debate. Between the 1950s and 1970s numerous scholars reviewed the book's most important arguments, frequently finding that they were misleading or empirically incorrect.Footnote ³² Some authors, for instance, questioned Tannenbaum's position concerning the existence and nature of legal precedents, claiming that they did exist in Britain or denying that slaves were endowed with a moral personality in the Roman traditions that informed the Castilian codes. Others probed the assumption that Spanish legal principles had been transferred to the colonies, as Tannenbaum implied without proper demonstration.

Another group of scholars wondered about the usefulness of legal texts for understanding the nature of slave regimes. These authors did not necessarily dispute Tannenbaum's characterizations of these regulations as relatively humane but emphasized instead that these laws were ignored in practice and that a huge gap existed between written regulations and social realities. As anthropologist Marvin Harris put it, “law and reality bore an equally small resemblance to each other,” so the Spanish Crown could “publish all the laws it wanted, but in the lowlands, sugar was king.” Or as the author of a much more recent study of slavery in Louisiana claims, “laws or religion had little or no influence on either the planter class or the condition of black slaves or free blacks.”Footnote ³³

Tannenbaum's argument concerning the peaceful abolition of slavery in Latin America, as opposed to a violent process in the United States, received much less attention from scholars. The cause for this is probably obvious. This is arguably his weakest argument, one that appears to be empirically untenable even under a cursory examination. First and foremost, despite his insistence that enslavement and freedom constituted a sort of continuum in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, Tannenbaum did not even try to explain why the last countries to abolish slavery in the hemisphere were, precisely, Spanish and Portuguese colonies such as Cuba and Brazil. Second, the notion that abolition had taken place without conflict was empirically problematic, particularly in the Cuban case, where the emancipation of slaves became inextricably linked to the wars for independence. Abolition was a contentious process also in many of the mainland Spanish colonies, even though slavery was less central to their economies than in Cuba or Brazil. To make matters worse, nowhere in Latin America, including Brazil, did the slave owners agree to emancipation without resistance. This was an area in which the stark contrasts that were at the very foundation of Tannenbaum's approach simply did not exist.Footnote ³⁴

Persistence

Why, then, do some of Tannenbaum's ideas continue to inform current scholarship, despite the fact that most historians consider his main arguments wrong? Why is it that, almost fifty years after its publication, a new edition of Slave and Citizen was issued? How come this book is still in print? A careful look at the literature on slavery, emancipation, and race relations in Latin America offers some clues about the obstinate relevance of Tannenbaum's work.

First and foremost, during the last twenty years scholars working on slavery in Latin America have produced a growing body of scholarship that vindicates one key element of Tannenbaum's approach: the centrality of the law. As mentioned above, in the 1960s and 1970s historians, particularly those studying the plantation economies in Spanish and Portuguese America, argued that legal institutions, customs, and traditions had little or no bearing on slaves' lives. Plantation slaves were conceived, as Manuel Moreno Fraginals famously argued, as industrial tools that were rationally and mercilessly exploited to extract as much additional value from them as possible.Footnote ³⁵ These “men-machineries” were dehumanized to such a degree that it bordered on the absurd to conceive the possibility that slaves would somehow be able to make legal claims or have legal recourse against mistreatment and abuse. Mistreatment and abuse, not abstract and ignored legal considerations, were the essence of slavery in Latin America, at least in the plantation zones. Slaves' lives may have been better in the cities, but this was true in the British colonies as well.

However, in the 1980s and 1990s, as historians turned their attention to the study of slaves themselves and of their strategies for survival, adaptation, resistance, and family life, they again began to encounter the laws that previous historians had dismissed. This, in turn, contributed to a gradual and, of course, only partial resurrection of Slave and Citizens for, as legal scholar Bob Cottrol has stated, Tannenbaum had presented clearly and forcefully the case for the importance of legal norms in determining the often contrasting conditions under which slaves lived. Scholars began to make the book part of the scholarly conversation again, and some studies explicitly validated some of his main arguments.Footnote ³⁶ Even those who carefully stayed away from Tannenbaum, however, advanced arguments and evidence that reinforced the centrality of legal institutions and showed how slaves had found ways to use those institutions to their advantage. Whatever one thinks of Tannenbaum and his work on slavery, it is now impossible to claim that legal institutions, mores, and initiatives are irrelevant to understanding the experiences of slaves in Latin America.

Furthermore, scholars working on related but different social issues have reinforced, frequently without reference to Slave and Citizen, Tannenbaum's notion that the colonial societies of the Iberian and British empires were different in at least some important ways. For example, in her study about race, illegitimacy, honor, and mobility in Latin America, Ann Twinam notes that whereas in English America “a person's race and birth tended to be sharply defined and permanently fixed,” in Spanish America existed “in-between categories” that allowed individuals to have more than one race or birth status, depending on the social context in which those labels were used or invoked. Likewise, in his comparative study of the British and Spanish empires, John Elliott claims that Spanish conceptions of society were “inclusive rather than exclusive” and opened some opportunities for subordinate groups, such as the indigenous population, to claim rights and affirm identities. In turn, the English colonists' approach was “exclusionary”: “When the [English] colonists followed the Iberian example and turned to imported Africans to meet their labor needs, the space accorded their slaves by law and religion was even more limited than it was in Spanish America.” This is basically a nuanced restatement of Tannenbaum's central thesis.Footnote ³⁷

Additional evidence in support of some of Tannenbaum's arguments has come from studies of slavery in the United States as well, particularly from those territories that were once controlled by Spain, such as Florida and Louisiana. This evidence has been produced at times by authors critical of Tannenbaum, even if their findings may suggest support for his theses. One illustrative example concerns manumissions in Louisiana. There is consensus that manumissions increased significantly during the decades in which the future state of the American union was under Spanish control. In those years the free population of color increased threefold, from less than four percent of the black population to about twelve percent. Scholars critical of Tannenbaum have tried to explain this process using arguments such as fluctuating market conditions or attitudinal changes among slave owners, but it is difficult to ignore the impact of the Spanish legal regime on manumissions.Footnote ³⁸ As a scholar of slavery in Spanish Louisiana explains, “many blacks quickly learned that it was infinitely easier to acquire freedom under the Spanish than it had been under the French.”Footnote ³⁹ The Americanization of Louisiana's legal system during the nineteenth century, in turn, resulted in rapidly diminishing rights for the slaves. Judith Schafer asserts that “many of the relatively benign traces of Spanish law had disappeared” just a few years after the acquisition of the territory by the union.Footnote ⁴⁰

Scholars working on postemancipation race relations have also contributed to keeping Tannenbaum's central premise of two distinct Americas alive. Despite talk on converging trends and despite mounting evidence about transnational connections among black militants and intellectuals, scholars of Latin America continue to interpret race relations in the region in an implicitly comparative framework that always takes the United States as a contrasting reference. I concur with anthropologist Livio Sansone when he asserts that the United States is “the ever-present main model for comparison of race relations systems in Latin America.” When it comes to race, Brazil (and Latin America more generally) continues to be “another” America, one that shares with the US a history of racism and discrimination, but also one in which race operates “in very different ways” from the US.Footnote ⁴¹

These differences are upheld by scholars with otherwise widely different points of view about the nature of race relations in the region. As with slavery, during the last two decades studies of race relations in Latin America have moved somewhat from the analysis of abstract structural inequalities to the study of how these inequalities are experienced, negotiated, and acted upon by blacks and other groups. This is what scholars used to refer to as “agency.” Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and political scientists have sought not only to document inequalities—although this continues to represent an important part of their agendas—but also to understand how people cope with pervasive racial discrimination within the confines of the national projects of racial democracy.

Although scholars critical of racial democracy have criticized notions of Latin American or Brazilian “exceptionalism,” therefore implying the existence of deep commonalities between the two Americas, their approaches have contributed in fact to reinforcing distinctions between the United States and Latin America. These scholars frequently frame their questions in negative terms, asking why blacks in Latin America have failed to mobilize in racially autonomous ways, that is, as in the United States. As Hanchard puts it, “Why has there been no sustained Afro-Brazilian social movement in Brazil comparable to the civil rights movement in the United States or nationalist insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the New World during the post-World War II period?” Anthropologist France Twine, who quotes Hanchard's question, asks why antiracist groups have failed to attract support among the black masses. Historian Aline Helg, in turn, wonders why race “did not become an organizational category” in early nineteenth-century Caribbean Colombia and why did the “lower classes of color not collectively challenge the small white elite” during the process of independence in the region.Footnote ⁴² These questions imply that blacks in the Americas should share a common history of mobilization against racial oppression. At the same time, however, these questions also acknowledge that the histories of black mobilization in the United States and Latin America are, in fact, fundamentally different in at least some important ways.

Distinctions between the two Americas have also been upheld by scholars who offer an alternative reading of Latin America's racial democracies. During the last decade, and largely in response to the important scholarly contributions of the critics of racial democracy, some scholars have advanced an alternative interpretation. These scholars have sought to understand the ideologies of racial democracy not as elite-generated tools that demobilize the lower classes of color, but as shared (although contentious) national projects, aspirations, and dreams that popular sectors can turn into opportunities in their struggles for equality. Unlike the critics of racial democracy, these scholars do not expect Latin American blacks to mobilize in racially autonomous ways and investigate other paths of mobilization and sociability. They do not treat racial democracy as a smoke screen, but as a set of contradictory and contested ideas and discourses that can be experienced in different ways and invoked for vastly different political purposes.Footnote ⁴³

Whatever their disagreements over these ideologies and their effects, all these scholars concur that there are important differences between Latin America and the United States. The critics of racial democracy locate those differences in the absence of black mobilization in Latin America. The critics of the critics, in turn, locate those differences in how Latin Americans of various social sectors articulate and experience ideas of race and nation and how they imagine those nations should be. But that the “two areas” of the New World, to put it in Tannenbaum's words, are different in at least some important ways is not really open to debate.

Slave and Citizen has endured decades of critique for yet another reason. Scholars continue to deal with the question of how to evaluate the impact and long-term effects of slavery on postemancipation societies in general and on race relations in particular. By the 1970s a consensus began to emerge, posing that Tannenbaum's mechanistic correlation between the two was factually wrong and glossed over complex historical processes that cannot be explained simply as the legacies of differential slave regimes. Carl Degler was among the first to raise serious questions about the connections between slavery and race relations in Neither Black nor White. After comparing the “slave systems” of Brazil and the United States, he concluded that “the differences are not fundamental to an explanation of differences in contemporary race relations.”Footnote ⁴⁴ H. Hoetink followed suit, arguing that “no causal link” could be established between a harsh or mild slavery and mild or tense postemancipation race relations.Footnote ⁴⁵ Family studies also played an important role in this regard. As early as the 1950s studies on family organization conducted in the British Caribbean indicated that family forms were rooted in prevailing socioeconomic conditions, not just on a slave past. In the 1970s, Herbert Gutman's famous study The Black Family explicitly challenged the belief, articulated by Daniel Moynihan and others, that slavery and its effects explained “the deterioration” of the African-American family, or that family life was unknown among slaves. A similar point was made, from the British Caribbean, by Barry Higman, who found that in the early nineteenth century, nuclear families were relatively common among rural slaves in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados.Footnote ⁴⁶ By the 1980s, as Emilia Viotti da Costa explains, “scholars were abandoning the assumption that different forms of racism, discrimination and segregation in modern society derived from different slave systems, or that the different contemporary patterns of race could be explained by reference to traditional differences in the perceptions of race in the Anglo-Saxon and Iberian world.”Footnote ⁴⁷

That slave regimes did not fatally condition how postemancipation societies would be structured does not mean, however, that they are unimportant. Scholars now qualify slavery's impact, claiming, as Degler did, that it did not shape the future in “fundamental” ways, or that it had “relatively little to do” with subsequent racial dynamics (John Cell), or that slave systems “cannot directly explain” the shape of later racial orders (Anthony Marx).Footnote ⁴⁸ These propositions, however, do not take us very far in understanding how slavery's legacies shaped postemancipation societies, if at all. They avoid Tannenbaum's main and most controversial argument: the existence of causal links between slavery (or “slave systems”) and postemancipation racial orders.

Any discussion of these links must be grounded in a specific case (something Tannenbaum failed to do), so let us return, to end, to the Cuban experience, briefly mentioned in the opening paragraph. Although in the Cuban case it seems possible to construct a narrative of linear progress from slavery to citizenship, as the opening paragraph does, there was in fact nothing linear about such a process. Such linearity is an illusion. In Cuba, as elsewhere in the Americas, the slaves and former slaves struggled for equal rights and political standing for decades before their rights as citizens were formally recognized or respected. Rather than peaceful, as Tannenbaum would have it, the protracted process of emancipation in Cuba was characterized by high levels of mobilization and violence.

Although by the mid-1860s slave owners had come to accept slavery's death as unavoidable, they still opposed immediate emancipation, predicting that it would ruin the production of sugar, the foundation of the colonial economy. As late as 1866 the Cuban delegates to the Junta de Información, a gathering called by the Spanish government to discuss economic and political reforms in Cuba and Puerto Rico, opposed immediate emancipation as an “inopportune” and “dangerous” attack on property rights. The most radical solution that the Cuban representatives were willing to accept was a process of “gradual” abolition that would delay actual emancipation for another fifteen years.Footnote ⁴⁹

These concerns were shared by the group of landowners and slaveholders who rose against the colonial state in eastern Cuba in 1868. Individual insurrection leaders, such as white slave owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, manumitted their slaves and even referred to them as “citizens,” but the rebels did not embrace immediate emancipation and condemned attempts to disrupt production and property relations. The first constitutional text approved by the rebel forces—Guáimaro, 1869—proclaimed that all inhabitants of the republic were “entirely free,” but a subsequent regulation placed limits on the freedmen's and freedwomen's rights to move and find employment at will.Footnote ⁵⁰

Whether these restrictions could be enforced was a different question, however. Equipped with the new rhetoric of legal equality and taking advantage of the social disruptions produced by the war, slaves and former slaves claimed rights and equal standing, giving meaning to the constitutional declaration of “entire” freedom. By December 1870 Céspedes was forced to acknowledge that the situation had changed. The leaders of the insurrection were no longer able to control the social forces they had unleashed. In a circular that eliminated all limitations on the former slaves, Céspedes proclaimed that the former slaves had “regenerated” to such a degree that they were entitled to “all the independence” and “indisputable rights” enjoyed by any other citizen of the republic. These rights were presented as concessions given to the former slaves by magnanimous white patriots, but it was the former slaves who forced this radicalization through their actions.Footnote ⁵¹

In any case, after late 1870 the intertwined principles of legal (and to some degree racial) equality and universal male suffrage became, to borrow Louis A. Pérez's expression, “key separatist ideal[s].”Footnote ⁵² These ideals, according to which males of African descent were to enjoy full political rights as citizens, were a creation of the wars for independence, particularly of the black soldiers and officers participating in them. They cannot be traced back to the Spanish “slave system,” the way Tannenbaum would have it. At the same time, however, some responses to the war, such as the Moret Law of 1870, were clearly grounded in Spanish legal traditions. Also known as the Free Wombs Law because it prescribed that all children born of slaves after September 1868 would be free, the law included protections and recourses that were very much in tune with longstanding Iberian legal traditions. Among these, for instance, were clauses dealing with the well-established doctrine of “excessive cruelty” against slaves, as well as the creation of administrative and judicial bodies to which aggrieved slaves could appeal (the “Juntas Protectoras”). Similar principles informed the later Law of Patronato of 1880, which sought to regulate the gradual emancipation of slaves on the island. The dexterity with which slaves made use of some of these new regulations strongly suggests that they had absorbed enough of the Spanish legal culture to use it to their advantage.Footnote ⁵³ In this rather narrow sense, one could perhaps argue that the Spanish “slave system” did facilitate, as Tannenbaum claimed, the transformation of slaves into citizens.

But these transformations were in any case forced on colonial authorities and their Cuban planter allies, who always resented the intromission of outside authorities in their plantations. The hacendados opposed even the mild abolitionism of the Moret Law of 1870, despite the fact that its main effect was to delay emancipation.Footnote ⁵⁴ After the Ten Years War (1868–1878) Spain moved cautiously to grant equal rights to the growing free population of color, but these concessions were also made under duress, as the colonial government attempted to capture the sympathies and support of Afro-Cubans. The very fact that Spain had to eliminate legal barriers that prevented the gente de color from equal access to several areas of social life is a good indicator that the transition from slavery to freedom and citizenship was fraught with obstacles and was anything but linear. These barriers were eliminated only gradually, as the colonial government wished to avoid alienating the support of the planter class, which would likely resist any policy that enhanced the status of their social inferiors. Still, between 1878, when a decree authorized black youths to attend secondary schools and the university, to the desegregation of municipal schools in 1893 in response to demands made by Afro-Cuban organizations and activists, the colonial state dismantled many of the regulations that limited Afro-Cubans' equal access to public spaces.Footnote ⁵⁵

By intensifying the competition for Afro-Cubans' support, the new War of Independence, launched in 1895, contributed to the creation of racially inclusive political institutions. The nationalist forces reaffirmed their commitment to racial and legal equality and to an inclusive republican order based on universal male suffrage. The Constitution of La Yaya, approved by representatives of the Liberation Army in 1897, clearly established that electoral rights were to be regulated “on the basis of universal suffrage.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Not to be outdone, Spain replied with its own constitution. It granted autonomy to the island and extended electoral rights to all males, regardless of race or income.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the time US forces landed in Cuba in 1898, the two competing political regimes that existed on the island were based on electoral regimes where black males participated as voters. One could argue, then, that the transition from slavery to citizenship, understood primarily as equal electoral rights, had been completed. But as the very forces of occupation would soon make clear, there was nothing permanent about such transition. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful, the Government of Occupation tried to limit the franchise in ways that clearly excluded most Afro-Cuban males from electoral rights.Footnote ⁵⁸

Herein lie perhaps the greatest limitations of Tannenbaum's approach. On the one hand, Tannenbaum failed to recognize that between “slavery” and “citizenship” there was a process, always contentious and frequently violent, that was inherently unpredictable. It may well be, as Rebecca Scott has argued, that it is unlikely that we will be able to create “any simple global explanation” that accounts for different outcomes in how slave societies evolved.Footnote ⁵⁹ It may well be that all we can do is to explain how conflicts over rights and resources produced different results in each case. Those conflicts did not start with emancipation, so previous economic, social, and legal practices do matter, as Tannenbaum surmised. The conflicts that created postemancipation societies were informed by expectations and by cultural and legal norms that had been formed under slavery. But this is not the same as claiming that “slave systems” constitute “the source” of modern race relations. On the other hand, citizenship was a contentious political construct subject to negotiation, not a fixed and unproblematic category of inclusion. Even after conquering the formal rights of citizens, a process that in many Latin American countries took decades, the struggles of the former slaves and their descendants were far from over. Citizenship meant little unless those rights could be claimed and exercised.