Who is Afro-Chilean? Authenticity struggles and boundary making in Chile’s northern borderland

ABSTRACT

Research on Afrodescendant ethnic renewal in Latin America has mostly focused on how identities become politicized as Afrodescendants demand legal recognition, affirmative action policies and multicultural rights. This article instead directs attention to individuals’ everyday negotiations and struggles over the definition of who is authentically black and who can legitimately claim an Afrodescendant identity. Through ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with individuals who identify as Afrodescendants in northern Chile, I look at how they construct boundaries to define membership into their community. I find that in their effort to present themselves as both Chileans and Afrodescendants, Afro-Chileans construct boundaries to distance themselves from three groups: “regular” Chileans, Aymara Indigenous people, and recently arrived black immigrants. Each boundary helps them emphasize different aspects of their local, ethnic, and national identity, promoting distinct and sometimes conflicting ways to define what it entails to be Afro-Chilean.

KEYWORDS:

• Afrodescendants
• ethnic renewal
• boundaries
• authenticity
• performativity
• Chile

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge all the Afro-Chilean individuals that I interviewed and spent time with during my time in Arica. I would also like to thank Mara Loveman, Tianna Paschel, Irene Bloemraad, Dani Carrillo, and Adriana Ramírez, as well as the members of UC Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop and of the Race/Ethnicity and Inequality Workshop, for their extensive and thoughtful comments on previous drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more information about how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians minimized the relevance of African slavery and the descendants of slaves in Chile, see Cussen (2006).

2 Chile is one of the only countries in the region that has never included a question about African ancestry in its National Population Census (and only included a question about Indigenous ancestry for the first time in 2002). Therefore, a national estimation of Afrodescendants in Chile is not possible. Nevertheless, the National Statistical Institute carried out during 2013 the First Survey of Characterization of the Afro-descendent Population in the Region of Arica and Parinacota, which reveals that 4.6 per cent of the region’s population identify as Afrodescendant, of whom 93 per cent are Chileans, almost 90 per cent live in the city of Arica, 56 per cent are women, and over half are under 30 years old (INE 2014). This population speaks Spanish and did not prominently distinguish themselves from other Chileans until recently. It is not possible to characterize their cultural practices in an unequivocal way since the boundary of what is Chilean, what is Peruvian, and what is properly Afro-Chilean is in itself a site of struggle.

3 The Chilean state officially recognized the existence of an Afro-Chilean population in April of 2019, with the enactment of Law 21.151, which grants legal recognition to the Chilean Afrodescendant tribal people.

4 Mestizaje in Latin America refers to both physical race mixture and cultural hybridity (Paschel 2011), and most commonly suggests the mixture between European and indigenous populations while in some few countries, as in Brazil, it has also included the descendant of Africans.

5 Although most Afro-Chileans in the Province of Arica and Parinacota live in the city of Arica and only 10.8 per cent live in rural areas (INE 2014), the Afro-Chilean movement adopted an “indigenous strategy” in their quest for legal recognition, following the International Labour Organization 169 Convention definition of tribal people to claim the possession of distinct social, cultural and economic conditions that differentiates them from the rest of Chilean society.

6 Race and ethnicity are concepts that have been defined in very different ways by different theoretical traditions and, in some occasions, even used as synonyms. In this project, I follow authors such as Loveman (2014) and Wade (2010) to argue that, although race has been commonly defined as associated to phenotypical variations while ethnicity to cultural differences, notions of biological and cultural difference are often interconnected. This is why instead of choosing between both terms, I use the term ethno-racial.

7 Some Spanish-origin names are very common among the Afro-Chilean community of Arica. According to my interviewees, this is so because slave owners would give their own last names to all of their slaves. A genealogical study which will reveal most typical Afrodescendant surnames and family lineages is about to be published, as a result of the joint effort of academics and the afro-Chilean community.

8 Between 2010 and 2013, the “Candela” project was carried out in Chile, which included taking blood samples of 2009 individuals to determine their DNA ancestry. Several of my respondents reported that they participated in this research, which they said provided them with proof of their African ancestry.

9 The Aymara people are located within the south of Bolivia, the southeast of Peru, and the north of Argentina and of Chile. They are the second largest of the nine Indigenous groups recognized in the Chilean Indigenous Law of 1993. They are located in the northern regions of Arica and Parinacota and of Tarapacá, which only came under Chilean control after the Pacific War (1879–84), and were subject to a process of forced “chileanization”, since they were seen as foreigners. However, they have been able to maintain their cultural unity, including their language, also called Aymara.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible with funding from the Comisión Nacional de Ciencia y Teconología de Chile (CONICYT).