Blackness in the White Nation

George Reid Andrews’s Blackness in the White Nation is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Afro-descended peoples in Latin America. Having now published four books on Afro-Latin America, Andrews has cemented his place at the center of this growing field. In this book, Andrews approaches the related but contradictory histories of people of African descent in Uruguay and of the widespread embrace of African culture by Euro-Uruguayans. The contradiction lies in the fact that Euro-Uruguayan interest in African music and culture exploded during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the black Uruguayan population declined precipitously. Andrews explores this contradiction in a clearly written and impeccably researched monograph that offers valuable insight into race and racism in modern Uruguayan history.Uruguay may seem a strange location for studying Afro-Latin America. It is a country — like neighboring Argentina — largely defined by the overwhelming whiteness of its citizenship, the result of a huge wave of European immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Echoing Andrews’s work on the black population of Buenos Aires, this study looks to recover the history of Afro-Uruguayans in the face of official claims that this population had essentially vanished from modern Uruguay. In one example, Andrews points to a 1925 publication by the Ministry of Public Instruction celebrating Uruguay’s centennial, which claimed that “Uruguay is populated by the white race, totally of European origin” (p. 3).This nationalist narrative does not wholly overlook the role of slavery in Uruguayan history: it includes the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century more than one-third of Montevideo’s population was of African descent, 86 percent of whom were enslaved. But because Uruguay experienced the early abolition of slavery in 1842, followed by a wave of European immigrants who quickly replaced the forced labor of enslaved Africans, the narrative took hold that Euro-Uruguayans displaced the Afro-Uruguayan population and that European liberal democratic models replaced the hierarchical model of the Latin American caudillo. This demographic shift proves difficult to substantiate with quantitative evidence, as the Uruguayan state effectively stopped collecting data on race from 1852 to 1996, but by the turn of the twenty-first century Afro-Uruguayans comprised less than 10 percent of the overall population. In his first and third chapters, Andrews presents a thriving Afro-Uruguayan culture in 1830 – 1920 and 1920 – 1960, respectively. Under an allegedly nonracist liberal democracy, from 1870 to 1950 Afro-Uruguayans were per capita far more active in the publication of journals targeting their social and cultural needs than were the much larger African-descended populations of Cuba and Brazil. Andrews also focuses on the importance of Afro-Uruguayan military service during the wars for independence, which Afro-Uruguayan journalists, activists, and intellectuals regularly cited “as justification for black legal and civil equality” (p. 33). Rather than petering out in the face of demographic displacement, Afro-Uruguayan culture thrived. Andrews argues that black culture developed in response to dislocation and crisis caused first by forced slave migration in the colonial period and then by European immigrants displacing Afro-Uruguayans from their jobs.Although Andrews effectively draws on diverse sources in crafting this history of modern Uruguay, the heart of the book is his examination of the comparsas, the musical groups that paraded through Montevideo during Carnival, and candombe, the drum-driven style of music and dance for which these groups became famous. Andrews argues that drumming offered “an organizational vehicle” (p. 131) for both blacks and whites to find a cultural place in the city. His second chapter documents the changing role of these Carnival groups in 1870 – 1950, while his fourth expands on this theme for the period from 1950 to 2010. Initially comparsas consisted of Afro-Uruguayan musicians and dancers. As Carnival took on a more formal role in the late nineteenth century and the participation of upper- and middle-class Uruguayans grew, most black comparsas shifted away from African drums, embracing instead “refined” European melodies and instruments. However, there was a parallel growth in comparsas populated by white musicians, who took up African drums and lyrics focused on race, racism, and the sexuality of black women. In the early twentieth century these white groups became dominant, including women (often black) as dancers, while musicians increasingly used blackface. In the second half of the twentieth century, actual blackness, in musicians and dancers, was seen as more legitimate and as an asset to these Carnival groups.While carrying out research in Montevideo, Andrews joined a comparsa and studied the drum, which he reflects on in chapter 4. Here the methodology shifts from traditional sources to a contemporary and personal reflection on Uruguayan ideas on race. Although this offers useful insight, this section felt somewhat disjointed and may have served better as an epilogue. Additionally, this focus throughout on candombe and the comparsas as the primary means for understanding modern Uruguay may limit the work’s audience, which would be unfortunate. It is striking how seamlessly Andrews integrates diverse sources into this fascinating history. Throughout Andrews presents material in various comparative frameworks, contrasting Uruguay with other Latin American states as well as slave societies throughout the Atlantic world. This work should thus appeal to scholars beyond the fields of modern Uruguay or Latin America, as it represents an important and underrepresented aspect of the African diaspora

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