Souls A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20
Black Skin, White Uniforms: Race, Clothing, and the Visual Vernacular of Luxury in the Andes Tamara J. Walker To cite this article: Tamara J. Walker (2017): Black Skin, White Uniforms: Race, Clothing, and the Visual Vernacular of Luxury in the Andes, Souls, DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1239158 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1239158
Published online: 13 Feb 2017.
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Date: 13 February 2017, At: 17:40
Souls Vol. 00, No. 00, 2017, pp. 1–17
Black Skin, White Uniforms: Race, Clothing, and the Visual Vernacular of Luxury in the Andes Tamara J. Walker
In a 2011 article in Hola! magazine, several members of a wealthy Colombian family posed on the terrace of their expansive estate overlooking the Valley of Cauca. It was a striking image, in part because it featured an all-female lineup of mothers and daughters who were all power-players in the local business community. But it was the figures in the background of the image that stood out most of all: posed in profile were two Afro-Colombian women dressed in all-white uniforms and holding serving trays. The image adhered to and called forth a visual tradition that dated back to the region’s slaveholding past, when masters and slaves appeared together in various genres of portraiture. These images persisted even as slavery gave way to freedom, with members of elite families in the Andes posing for cameramen in the company of their black domestic servants. In tracing the contextual and conceptual origins of the photograph that appeared in Hola! magazine, this article it not only signals just what central figures African-descent servants have always been to the visual culture of the Andes, but also highlights the utility of visual culture to understanding discourses of race in the region. Keywords: diaspora, gender: Latin America, photography, Race, slavery, visual culture In December 2011, Spain’s Hola! magazine published a profile of several members of a wealthy and connected Colombian family.1 The article’s lead photograph featured the multi-generational group—which included matriarch Rosa Haluf de Castro, her daughter Sonia Zarzur de Daccach, granddaughter Royi Cucalón, and greatgranddaughter Rosita Aljure, all power-players in Colombia’s fashion industry and business community—on the terrace of their expansive estate (Figure 1). Nestled in what author Nana Bottazzi referred to as the “Beverly Hills” of Santiago de Cali, the home’s clean lines, modern décor, and sweeping views of the verdant Cauca Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com.usou. ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online Copyright # 2017 University of Illinois at Chicago DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1239158
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Figure 1
Untitled. Andrea Savini, 2011. Hello Media.
Valley provided a fitting backdrop for the women, whose crisp white shirts, designer denim, sleek hairstyles, and perfectly made-up faces conveyed an air of privilege and good taste. But there was another element of the photograph that turned an otherwise standard companion to the magazine’s trademark coverage of the rich and famous into something else entirely, for standing in the background, on opposite sides of the terrace, were two Afro-Colombian maids dressed in all-white uniforms and matching white headscarves. The two women stood posed to face one other (without making eye contact with the camera), holding serving trays stacked with silver coffee sets. The photo became an immediate source of controversy in Colombia and later garnered wider attention thanks to the power of the Internet. It primarily attracted criticism for how clearly it called to mind the region’s history of African slavery, on one hand, and emblematized the vast status gulfs that continue to separate Afro-Colombians from their white and mestizo counterparts, on the other. Consequently, the image provides a compelling point of entry for a broader analysis of the relationship between race and status in the Andes— specifically Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.2 For scholars of the African Diaspora, this kind of analysis opens up the possibility for fruitful comparison among former slaveholding societies in the Americas. Indeed, despite the marginal status of the Andes within slavery studies—particularly relative to the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean—the region comprised an important center of slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The presence of Africans and their descendants in the Andes, together with that of Indians and Spaniards, shaped enduring racial hierarchies,
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dynamics, as well as ideologies. The latter all made their mark on the region’s visual culture, beginning with the various genres of colonial portraiture depicting masters and slaves. These images were intended to showcase the formers’ wealth, status, and prestige, and as such positioned slaves in myriad subordinate positions (both symbolic and physical). These types of images persisted even as slavery gave way to freedom and portraits gave way to photographs, with members of elite families in the Andes posing for cameramen in the company of their (predominantly) black domestic servants. In analyzing several such images and the historical conditions that gave rise to them, this article traces both the contextual and conceptual origins of the photograph that appeared in Hola!. In the process, it not only signals just what central figures African-descent servants have always been to the visual culture of the Andes, but also highlights the utility of visual culture to understanding discourses of race in the region. An “Indignity”: The Weight of History and the Reality of Inequality in Colombia The conversations that followed in the wake of the Hola! photograph’s publication revealed the degree to which the image called forth the past and its legacy in the modern era. For example, during an interview for a Colombian radio station, Oscar Gamboa, director of the country’s Programa Presidencial para el Desarollo de la Población Afrodescendiente (a government-backed program to promote the advancement of Colombians of African descent),3 argued that the photo “reduce[d] Afro-Colombian women to a servile status.”4 One commentator remarked that the “indignity” of the image was that it depicted the women as mere “household adornments.”5 The photograph took on additional significance thanks to the timing of its publication, which coincided with the release of a United Nations Development Programme study showing that more than 60% of Afro-Colombians were living in poverty.6 And, just days earlier, Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos signed a law that promised to penalize acts of discrimination on the basis of “race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, political or philosophical ideology, sex or sexual orientation, disability and other reasons.”7 In other words, for many critics, the photograph seemed to hold a mirror up to Colombia’s history of racial discrimination and resulting socioeconomic inequality in an uncritical, almost celebratory way. On the other side of the debate was Spanish photographer Andrea Savini, who managed to both dismiss and sidestep any responsibility for the criticism surrounding his image. “It’s not a special photograph,” he insisted in an interview with Colombia’s El Tiempo, noting that it was one of more than one hundred that were taken for the article, before going on to say that the inclusion of the maids “must have been someone on the crew’s idea—the women were coming to serve coffee and it was someone’s suggestion to put them in the photo.”8 His characterization made it seem as though the two women were mere props in this tableau of luxury, their presence somehow less meaningful than both the family at the center of the photograph and the designer goods that clothed and surrounded them.
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For her part, Rosa Haluf de Castro took a slightly different approach in her and her family’s defense, claiming in a phone interview with the hosts of W Radio that she never expected that the photo would spark so much outrage. She and her family were happy to pose alongside the maids in the photo, she said, and if there was any message behind their inclusion it was simply that “we serve the people of the city and the people of the city serve us.” She therefore framed her family’s various business interests as a kind of community service, with the people of Cauca—for whom the Afro-Colombian maids functioned as stand-ins—provided their labor in grateful return. Haluf further asserted that there was nothing shameful about depicting the maids—adult women to whom she repeatedly referred as niñas, or girls—doing their jobs. “I don’t understand,” she said, shortly before hanging up the phone and abruptly ending the interview, “is it so appalling to work? Is it so appalling to serve coffee?”9 When taken together, the debate surrounding the image can be summarized thusly: on one side were critics who saw the photograph as both a symptom and a component of the subordinated status of Afro-Colombians; while on the other side were those who saw it as an innocently flattering depiction of a family and their household servants (if they happened to notice the servants at all). But missing from the discussion was any acknowledgment of just how closely the image adhered to and called forth a visual tradition that had deep roots in Colombia as well as in other parts of the Andes. It dated back to the region’s slaveholding past, when masters and slaves appeared in various genres of portraiture that were intended to showcase the formers’ wealth, status, and prestige. These types of images persisted even as slavery gave way to freedom and portraits gave way to photographs, with members of elite families in the Andes posing for cameramen in the company of their (predominantly) black domestic servants. In analyzing several such images and the historical conditions that gave rise to them, this article traces both the contextual and conceptual origins of the photograph that appeared in Hola! magazine. In the process, it signals just what central figures African-descent servants have always been to the visual culture of the Andes. The Andes: Background and Cultural Formation During the pre-Colombian era, the Andes were home to vast and diffuse communities of Indians that, despite diverse linguistic, cultural, and religious practices, were also bound by several unifying features. These included the observance of polytheistic religious traditions, the reliance on collective labor obligations (through a concept known as the mit’a, which required a rotational supply of workers to complete construction and irrigation projects), the exchange of goods produced in ecological niches (such as lowland maize, highland llama wool, and silver and gold from mining centers throughout the region), and the development of agriculture and architecture along multi-level terraces as an adaptation to mountainous, high-altitude terrain.10 And while the arrival of the Spanish in the 16 th century did not fully obliterate these practices—thanks to a combination of indigenous resilience and Spanish pragmatism—it nonetheless fundamentally altered the region’s demographic and
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cultural landscape. The imposition of colonial rule and the introduction of Catholicism came the importation of scores of west and west central Africans, who along with Indians would provide the backbone of the region’s labor force and economy for centuries to come. Africans were dispatched to coastal cities, rural hinterlands, and highland communities throughout the Andes, where they labored in households, churches, plantations, textile factories, and mines (among other settings).12 Slaveholding held appeal across the socioeconomic spectrum, with owners of varying means acquiring as many human souls as they could purchase. For elite Spaniards, especially, slaves served a dual function as laboring bodies and as status symbols, particularly in such wealthy capitals as Lima and Quito (and, further to the north, in Mexico City as well). There, slaves joined their elegantly turned-out owners during promenades along city streets and in religious and royal celebrations, all while adorned in finery. For elite slaveholders, outfitting their human property in valuable jewels, fabric, and other luxury goods served to further underscore their own nobility as a quality that could transcend a single embodied form.13 Vicente Albán’s Señora principal con su negra esclava Several artists of the 18th and 19th centuries helped to illustrate these practices, preserve them for posterity, and make them known to peninsular audiences. One such figure was Vicente Albán, who was born in Quito in 1725 and came of age during the Enlightenment, a period when Spanish America not only played host to scientific expeditions from Spain and other parts of Europe,14 but also served as an incubator of ideas, where local adherents read, engaged, and contributed to Enlightenment discourse. Even artists joined the conversation, using visual media to detail the region’s flora, fauna, and human types. They did so for local audiences as well as those across the Atlantic. In 1783, for example, Vicente Albán produced a series of paintings that are now housed in Madrid’s Museo de America (and which were likely intended for inclusion in Spain’s Royal Cabinet of Natural History, which had been established in 1771).15 Albán’s image juxtaposed Quito’s diverse inhabitants with native and non-native fruits, plants, and trees that grew throughout the region. One of the best-known images in the series is titled Señora principal con su negra esclava, or Noblewoman with Her Black Slave, and features the titular (Spanish) woman standing at the center of the image, posed slightly in front of an enslaved woman (Figure 2). The women’s subject positioning and body language help to communicate the relationship between them: while the enslaved woman’s eyes focus intently on the noblewoman, the latter does not return her gaze but instead looks out at the viewer. In depicting the women in this way, Albán was drawing upon a representational technique that had roots across the Atlantic. Specifically, the image bears strong similarities to Cristóvâo de Morais’s 1553 painting, Joanna of Austria with a Black Page (not pictured), in which the titular page plays the role of subjugated body, as evinced by the way in which the teenaged daughter of Spain’s King Charles V and Isabella of Portugal stands with her hand
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Figure 2 Noblewoman with Her Black Slave (Señora principal con su negra esclava). Vicente Albán (Ecuador, Quito, active second half of 18th century), circa 1783. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
placed imperiously atop the head of her page, who looks at her while she looks at the viewer. Morais’s page also served as a kind of appositional figure that was common in early-modern portraiture. Of one such portrait, 16th-century historian Pierre de Bourdeille noted: Here we see an excellent painter who, having painted the portrait of a very beautiful and pleasing lady, places in apposition to her either an old woman, a black slave woman, or a very ugly male slave, so that their ugliness and blackness lend greater luster and spontaneity to her great beauty and whiteness.16
However jarring, Bourdeille’s remarks—and Morais’s painting—resonate in Albán’s 1783 painting. The enslaved woman is rendered in such opaque tones that her facial features are difficult to discern. Only the whites of her eyes and teeth stand out from the rest of her visage, while in contrast the noblewoman’s high forehead, strong brow, and pale hue capture the viewer’s attention. But the image was no mere facsimile of early-modern European templates. Rather, it was a decidedly South American portrait. The pair stands surrounded by an assortment of local flora: on their right are granadillas, naranjillas, and a loquat tree, and to their left is a spread of coconuts, Brazil nuts, and a palm tree. As part of this illustration of Quito’s natural bounties, Albán depicted both of his human subjects wearing jewelry made of gold and silver, which were extracted from highland mining centers and circulated throughout the region in addition to being shipped to Spain,
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Asia, and other markets around the world. The women’s bodies also showcased the variety of textiles produced in local obrajes, or factories as well as those goods (such as laces, silks, and brocades) procured through the luxury trade.17 By including both local and imported commodities—with the enslaved African woman alternately figuring as human being and purchased good in this context—the image functioned as a kind of taxonomy of the bounties that grew in and made their way to the region. Albán’s image produced an overall impression of an Andean world in which elite Spaniards had access to the best the world had to offer. In addition to enjoying local fruits, textiles, and jewels, they wore luxurious imported fabrics, all in the company of African slaves. The presence of the latter—who were above all else persons with a price—helped the images to speak a specific kind of language, because their presence suggested that the owners they served could afford to free themselves from manual or household labor and instead enjoy leisurely, comfortable lifestyles while exercising dominion over other human beings. It was a message in which local elites took tremendous pride, and which allowed metropolitan audiences to see both the exotic and the familiar; as such it was a message that would be repeated in various ways in other visual images produced throughout the Andes. Carmelo Fernández’s Mujeres blancas, provincia de Ocaña In 1850, government officials in Colombia commissioned an elite team of intellectuals and military men to create a chorographic map of the region’s widespread provinces. More than mere topographical depictions, the watercolors that were produced by the group—which would come to be known as the Comisión Corográfica, or Chorographic Commission—featured renderings of Colombia’s diverse topography, geography, and human population. From urban streetscapes to rural plantations, the images depicted a variety of scenes that were intended to advance the Commission’s agenda of signaling the region’s process of modernization.18 The first artist to work for the commission, from 1850–1852, was Venezuela-born artist Carmelo Fernández. During this time, Fernández produced a body of work that focused primarily on the region’s human types. At times these men and women appeared in their own social milieus, populated with people just like them; other times individuals of varying statuses appeared within the same frame. An example of the latter can be found in an image titled Mujeres blancas, provincia de Ocaña, or White Women, in which Fernández depicts a group of three women. In the foreground are the two titular white women—possibly sisters or a mother–daughter pair—and behind them stands a woman of apparent African descent (Figure 3). The woman at the center of the image wears a white dress with a fitted bodice and full skirt, her hair in a chignon decorated with colorful flowers. To her right stands another white woman, wearing a black dress and matching lace mantilla. Both women hold handkerchiefs in their hands, perhaps to wipe sweat from their brows on a hot day. The woman in black also holds a parasol, which could be used to shield her and her companion’s pale skin from the sun’s rays. Together, their outfits and accessories serve to signal the women’s good taste and comfortable lifestyles. In
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Figure 3 Mujeres blancas, provincia de OcaĂąa. Carmelo FernĂĄndez, circa 1850. National Library of Colombia, Digital Map Library; used with permission.
contrast, the African-descent woman standing behind them, posed in profile, is draped in a heavy dark cloak that covers most of her head and body. Unlike the fashionable and figure-flattering garb of the white women, her clothing is plain and androgynous. Further, her placement and positioning relative to the other women suggests a subordinated, even servile status (given that the image was produced following the abolition of slavery in Colombia in 1851, the woman in the image would have been free nonetheless). The latter possibility is bolstered by the fact that unlike the other women, she has no handkerchief; instead, she carries a heavy fringed textile in its place. The textile appears to be the kind of prayer rug that was customarily carried by servants and laid on the ground to provide a cushion for their mistresses’ knees while they worshipped. In other words, rather than carrying something that would have ensured her own comfort, the woman carries something intended for the comfort of the white women behind whom she stands.
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In depicting the black woman purely in terms of her subordinate relationship to the white women in the image, Fernández’s watercolor mirrored the rhetoric of Vicente Albán’s 18th-century painting. Both artists (along with several of their contemporaries) deployed a longstanding visual vernacular, in which black subjects cast adoring gazes in the direction of their European masters and mistresses.19 Likewise, in the case of the Fernández and Albán images, Afro-Andeans functioned only to highlight the status of the Spaniards alongside whom they appeared. Even the titles of the images—Noblewoman with Her Black Slave, and White Women—tell us just who is supposed to be at the center of our attention and imagination when gazing upon them. But even without the titles, the black women guide us towards the same conclusion: in the case of the Albán painting, by casting her own eyes upon her owner; and in the case of the Fernández, by turning her face away from the viewer. They are only subjects insofar as they facilitate our ability to better know the women they serve. The Courret Brothers’ Carmen Gallagher Canaval y ama By the latter half of the 19th century, artists were able to draw upon these old traditions using new technologies. Most notable among them were the French brothers Eugenio and Aquiles Courret, who founded the popular Fotografía Central studio in Lima, Peru, in 1863 (just a few years after the 1854 abolition of slavery in Peru), where they specialized in the production of produced albumen prints mounted on small pieces of cardboard.20 Known as cartes de visite, or visiting cards, the photographs featured men, women, and children of all colors and classes. They appeared alone, in pairs, and as part of groups while wearing work clothing, uniforms, and formal attire. For many of the limeños who sat for the Courret brothers, the photo sessions provided a chance to preserve their and their families’ likenesses, mark special occasions, and even to provide distant relatives with reminders of the loved ones from whom they were separated. One of the most popular session types featured the children of wealthy locals with their (mostly black) amas de leche, or wet nurses. By definition these women were recently post partum, so that their lactating breasts could feed their charges (a practice which often came at the expense of feeding and caring for their own children). One typical example of the genre, from 1881, featured a baby posed on a pedestal in front of her nurse (not pictured; for a similar image see Figure 4). The image was titled Carmen Gallagher Canaval y ama, so named for one of the daughters born to Scottish physician John Patrick (also known as Juan Patricio) Gallagher, who had arrived in Peru in 1840 and recruited hundreds of unskilled laborers from Scotland and Ireland to work his local estates.21 In the photograph, Carmen is swaddled from head to toe in a white, lace-trimmed fabric. Holding her from behind is the unnamed wet nurse, who wears a heavy, dark shawl that covers all but her face. Although the woman faces the camera, her facial features are mostly hidden beneath the shadows cast by her shawl. Thus, even as she meets our gaze she remains elusive, her own face cloaked in darkness as she shows off the white child.
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Figure 4 Melanie Cocle y ama. Eugenio Courret, 1884. National Library of Peru, Courret Collection; used with permission.
Andean Visual Culture in Comparison When taken together, the above-discussed images from 18th- and 19th-century Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru offer compelling insight into an enduring feature of Andean visual culture. In Vicente Albán’s oil on canvas, Carmelo Fernández’s watercolor, and the Courret brothers’ photograph, black slaves and servants function as indices of status. In so doing, they occupy a position as both instrumental and marginal figures. Their presence in the images is crucial to conveying their owners and charges’ access to labor and its attendant comforts, but at the same time, their placement and rendering—in the background, with their own dark features indistinguishable or partly obscured—ensure that they do not attract too much attention. Indeed, regardless of whether they were human types or actual living beings, the black women depicted in these images stand bereft of their own subjectivities. We
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learn nothing about them other than their subordination, a fact that poses a formidable challenge to using visual culture as a source for understanding the history of Africans and their descendants in the Andean world. Nonetheless, the images do provide evidence of the symbolic labor that black servants and slaves have long performed, not only on behalf of their owners but for the far-reaching audiences who consumed the images in which they appeared as well. Moreover, they provide a visual companion to what historian Greg Grandin has referred to as the “ideological edifice of slavery,” which not only held that “slaves were loyal and simpleminded but that they had no independent lives or thoughts or, if they did have an interior self, that it too was subject to their master’s jurisdiction, it too was property, that what you saw on the outside was what there was on the inside.”22 The images also provide the background necessary for understanding just how heavily the past weighed on the creation of the photograph that opened this article, of the Colombian family in the pages of Hola! magazine in 2011. To be sure, there were obvious conditions that preceded the creation of the photograph, and enabled the maids to fit so neatly within it. The women were already employed within the family’s home, had already been given matching outfits and headscarves to wear while they performed their duties, and had already inhabited their servile roles within the household. In other words, there was nothing staged about the maids’ presence or behavior at the estate on the day that Hola! came to visit. Yet, despite photographer Andrea Savini’s later insistence that the inclusion of the two black maids was a last-minute decision, their presence—in the background, in profile, their own faces indiscernible—was perfectly consistent with the conventions of the genre of which the resulting image forms an obvious part. Intentional or not, the photograph neatly reproduced the same notions of African-descent men and women’s servile status in the region that had been in circulation since the 18th century. Whether posed in profile or looking at their owners, these women never make eye contact with the artist, photographer, or viewer. In keeping with that tradition, nor do the maids in the 2011 photograph. Not only do they never invite us to consider their subjectivities— we never even learn their names. This fact is most visibly—and perhaps most strikingly—on display in the Hola! article. For, in a story that is filled with names—of unseen husbands and business interests, and of clothing designers, works of art, and home furnishings—nowhere was either of the maids identified by her name. Instead, their presence was meant to reflect and enhance the glory of those they served. The Wages of Andean Luxury and Nostalgia The two maids also appeared in another photograph in the 2011 Hola! article. Standing in the home’s kitchen, on opposite sides of a counter island, the women were photographed in profile as they sorted through a pile of tropical fruit stacked between them. The caption for the photograph simply read: “preparing fruit juices in the kitchen” (Preparando unos zumos de frutas en la cocina; Figure 5).23 In other words, the women’s labor is their most defining characteristic. Because of this, as well
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Figure 5 Preparing fruit juices in the kitchen (Preparando unos zumos de frutas en la cocina). Andrea Savini, 2011. Hello Media.
as the fruits they were shown preparing, the image calls to mind aspects of Vicente Alban’s 1783 painting, Noblewoman and Her Black Slave, which shows the two title subjects surrounded by local fruits and flora. At the same time, however, knowing that we are looking at a photograph makes it impossible to think of the women as generic human types who exist in a sterile vacuum where they have no socioeconomic realities of their own. Those realities, in fact, are precisely what critics of the image sought to draw attention to when it first appeared in 2011, in order to point out the conditions that were literally just outside the frame. Afro-Andean Realities The majority of Afro-Colombians live in the Pacific Littoral, a region that includes the Cauca Valley (of which the Hola! magazine photo offers a shot from the Haluf de Castro family estate). There, they constitute 90% of the region’s population, and occupy the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. One study found that in a country that is home to somewhere between 4 million to 10 million people of African descent, nearly 80% of them live below the poverty line. This figure is particularly striking
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in comparison to the region’s general population, of which 49.2% lives in poverty. Further, according to policy analyst Richard André, only one in fifty Afro-Colombians completes a university education. When coupled with what André describes as “less quantifiable barriers like racial discrimination in the hiring process and the lack of familial or community safety nets,”24 Afro-Colombians’s socioeconomic exclusion and limited access to upward mobility is obvious.25 People of African descent are largely relegated to servile positions in the valley, both in private households as well as within the labor economy more generally. For Afro-Colombian women, especially, domestic service has long been a realm in which they could find employment and meet their and their families’ material needs. A legacy of the region’s history of slavery, and the post-abolition era, the association between black women and domestic service has enduring racebased connotations.26 Seen in this light, the 2011 photograph is a fitting symbol for how much the wealthy family pictured therein relies on but also keeps their distance from the valley below. Of all the erasures black subjects suffer in Andean visual culture, one stands out as most damaging: the erasure of their status as historical actors and contemporary political subjects. This is of course a part of erasing their individual subjectivities (which has the result of severing black servants and slaves from socioeconomic and political contexts), but it also has broader resonance and implications. For example, in a 1996 New York Times article, reporter Calvin Sims described the preponderance of uniformed black men standing sentry outside of luxury hotels, upscale restaurants, exclusive nightclubs, and elite funeral homes in Lima, Peru. Outfitted in crisp tuxedoes and starched white gloves, with top hats perched upon their heads, the men lent an air of elegance to the establishments they guarded and to the proceedings contained therein. When interviewed, they also articulated a sense of pride of place. One longtime pallbearer, 73-year-old Augusto Chevez, explained that he and others like him predominated the ranks in his field “because we are so strong and so serious yet we look so elegant. Who else could do a better job?” For activists, however, the sight of these men in largely subservient roles—particularly during a time when black Peruvians generally faced limited access to education and careers in medicine, business, and politics—was a painful reminder of their country’s long history of slavery and racial discrimination. That they notoriously struggled to gain entry as patrons to businesses that would rather employ than serve them only heightened their sense of exclusion.27 Such reminders remain plentiful in contemporary Peru. One of the capital city of Lima’s most well-known and highly trafficked restaurants, Manos Morenas, brings forth a particularly notable example. The name itself (which loosely translates to mean “brown hands”) references the region’s tradition of employing African slaves, servants, and their descendants in food preparation, where they have blended African, Indian, and European techniques and ingredients to create meals that today comprise Lima’s criollo cuisine. The restaurant’s predominantly black service staff dresses in what might loosely be described as “period” costume, with long and full white skirts for the women, cropped-pants for the men, and colorful headscarves for all. The servers
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work surrounded by artifacts such as handcuffs and chains, and on behalf of a largely mestizo and white (Peruvian and tourist) clientele, giving the restaurant the quality of being fixed in time. The resulting effect is an atmosphere of imposed nostalgia for the past—alongside, even, the tangible evidence of its horrors. Together, these two vignettes paint a striking picture of not just the physical but also the aesthetic and symbolic labor black men and women perform in contemporary Peru. More than marginal or decorative figures, they are central to the experiences, perceptions, and self-regard of the men and women for whom they open doors, serve meals, and provide final passage. Moreover, how they dress, adorn, and carry their bodies is inextricably tied to the contexts in which they operate: in humble getups with deferential gestures at restaurants, or even in suits and with seriousness at funerals. Examples of the latter example are visible in the predominance of black male pallbearers at funerals for wealthy Peruvians. In one such example each of the men can be seen wearing a black tuxedo, white shirt, black bowties, and white gloves, to carry the coffin and the deceased man or woman to their final resting place. That the men are all black is no accident. In fact, in an article last year published in the Huffington Post, a reporter described how the families of well-heeled politicians, bankers, business owners, and other privileged whites and mestizos in Lima make specific requests for black pallbearers.28 They consider the men’s presence to lend an air of elegance to the proceedings, and believe it to be as crucial as saying prayers during the service and driving the coffin away in a hearse. But for critics of the practice, the use of black pallbearers reflects larger problems, most notably the fact that Afro-Peruvians are largely excluded from the professional labor force and only have access to menial jobs. Put another way, it is clear that one group’s idea of a status symbol is another group’s reminder of entrenched inequality. Indeed, one of the profound ironies facing African-descent populations in the Andes is that they are at once highly visible and widely excluded. In Ecuador, for example, African-descent men stand out on the national stage in the arena of futbol, or soccer. In fact, the national team is almost entirely black. Yet Afro-Ecuadorians have for centuries been excluded from dominant understandings of the nation.29 To some scholars, the ideology of mestizaje is to blame: The mestizaje philosophy that the “delinquent” black and Indian races can be improved by racial intermixture with white or Europoid races, has not only led to political and economic discrimination, but helped the lighter-skinned ethnic groups in power deny their country even had a black population. It was only in 2001 that the first national census included a question about ethnicity. Before that groups could only be distinguished by language. Since Afro-Ecuadorians speak Spanish, their numbers often did not appear.30
This information comes by way of an assessment organized by a U.S.-based research team, which found that, among the development projects in the region that have been funded by nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank, most are largely indigenous-focused initiatives. While Afro-Ecuadorians have certainly benefited from the indigenous rights movement’s promotion of a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational Ecuador, government development programs for
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Ecuador’s indigenous populations have simply been applied to Afro-descendants, without taking into consideration their unique situations. While new laws and departments are the first serious attempts to disaggregate the needs of Afro-Ecuadorian communities from those of the indigenous, and address the problems faced by blacks within society, significant change in Afro-communities has not happened. Nonetheless, recent constitutional and legal gains are the positive results of the Afro-Ecuadorian movement that began about 30 years ago with the formation of black empowerment organizations. The Center of Afro-Ecuadorian Studies, for example, was the first organization to rally around issues pertaining to marginalized blacks in Ecuador and remains active today. Another long-standing group is the Association of Black Ecuadorians, founded in 1988, whose aims include developing cultural pride and reversing environmental damage by logging companies and shrimp farms in the coastal region. And, in 1989, the Afro-Ecuadorian Institute was founded to revive African traditions among Ecuador’s Afro-descendants. When considering the fact that Afro-Andeans look to the past to instill a sense of pride and empowerment, a key question that emerges is whether the images that have constituted the focus of this article have anything to offer. Is there anything to claim, or reclaim, within Andean visual culture? Perhaps, at the very least, their very prevalence helps to convey a sense of endurance, for even in the face of constant attempts at erasure Afro-Andeans have always, ineluctably and undeniably, been in the picture.
Acknowledgment I thank the editorial staff of this journal, as well as the anonymous reader they selected to review this article, for providing valuable feedback as I revised for publication. I am also grateful to the following individuals for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece: Siobhan Carter-David, Tiffany Gill, Tanisha Ford, Rachel O’Toole, and Brandy Thompson.
Notes 1. Nana Bottazzi, “Las mujeres más poderosas del valle del Cauca, en Colombia, en la formidable mansión hollywoodiense de Sonia Zarzur, en el Beverly Hills de Cali,” Hola!, 7 December 2011. 2. Geographically speaking, “the Andes” encompasses the region connected by the Andean mountain range, which extends along the western portion of South America from Venezuela in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south. However, from a cultural and political perspective, “the Andes” more specifically refers to present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, all of which share a common pre-Colombian heritage, have undergone similar historical processes from the conquest through the modern era, and which constitute the current membership of the Andean Community trade bloc. For the purposes of this article, I use the second definition of the Andes. 3. For more on Gamboa’s program, see: http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/afrocolombianos/ programa/Paginas/programa.aspx (accessed October 28, 2016). 4. Radio interview, 7 December 2011. For full audio clip: http://www.caracol.com.co/noticias/ regionales/gobierno-califica-de-perversa-fotografia-con-posible-contenido-racista/20111207/ nota/1589627.aspx (accessed October 28, 2016). The original (transcribed) Spanish reads: “Lo
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5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Souls 2017 que yo critico es lo que expresa la foto, porque muestra a las mujeres afro como personas simplemente serviles.” All transcriptions and translations are mine unless otherwise noted. http://www.wradio.com.co/escucha/archivo_de_audio/rosa-haluf-de-castro-una-de-lasprotagonistas-de-la-polemica-foto-de-la-revista-hola-de-espana/20111205/oir/1588028.aspx (accessed October 28, 2016). The original (transcribed) Spanish reads: “Indignante que haya puesto las personas que trabajan como si fueran adornos de la casa.” The full study can be found at: http://www.undp.org/content/dam/colombia/docs/ODM/ undp-co-odmafrocolombianos-2012.pdf (accessed October 28, 2016). For the full text of the law, see: http://www.secretariasenado.gov.co/senado/basedoc/ ley_1482_2011.html (accessed October 28, 2016). http://thisisfusion.tumblr.com/post/13835949005/hola-magazine-colombia-maids (accessed October 28, 2016). http://www.wradio.com.co/escucha/archivo_de_audio/rosa-haluf-de-castro-una-de-lasprotagonistas-de-la-polemica-foto-de-la-revista-hola-de-espana/20111205/oir/1588028.aspx (accessed October 28, 2016). See, for example: Charles Gibson, Spain in America (New York: HarperCollins, 1966). Even the most aggressive evangelization efforts were no match for deeply held indigenous beliefs. Spaniards also understood that preserving certain indigenous practices—such as the mit’a and certain mining techniques—was crucial to the successful extraction of resources and labor. On the institution of slavery as it took shape in various parts of the Andes, see: Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1974); Rachel O’Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburg Press, 2012); and Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). See, for example, Tamara J. Walker, “‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honor, and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 30, no. 3 (September 2009): 383–402. One of the more notable expeditions began in 1735, when France dispatched another expedition to the region, led this time by mathematician Louis Godin and geographer Charles de la Condamine, who were financed by the Paris Academy of Sciences with the ostensible purpose of measuring a longitudinal degree at the Equator. Out of these voyages came several publications. Britain’s Shelvocke penned Voyage round the World by way of the Great South Sea (1726), while his marine captain William Betagh wrote A Voyage Round the World (published in 1728, his volume likely bore such a similar title to its antecedent by design as the two men had become rivals by the end of their journey). Among the French, Frézier published Relation du voyage de la mer du sud aux côtes du Chili, du Pérou, et du Brésil (1717), and Condamine wrote Journal du voyage fait par orde du roi à l’équateur (1751). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, came Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación histórica del viaje a la América meridional (1748). The genesis of the latter text owed to the Spanish Crown’s insistence upon sending two of its own scientists on Godin and Condamine’s expedition (the only one of the four that was undertaken with Spain’s explicit approval) in order to ensure that the Frenchmen would stay focused on scientific inquiry rather than acts of espionage related to mining or the military. For a rich analysis of this expedition, its context, and consequences, see Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). And for a discussion of other scientific expeditions from the era, including the Royal Botanical Expedition to Chile and Peru (1777–88) and the expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada (1783–816), see: Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 17–41. Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire, 161.
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16. Cited in Victor Stoichita, “The Image of the Black in Spanish Art: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part I: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 198. 17. For an analysis of Ecuador’s early textile industry, as well as the roles that indigenous labors played in it, see: Anne Pollard Rowe, Costume and History in Highland Ecuador. 18. See, for example: Veronica Uribe Hanabergh, “Translating Landscape: the Colombian Chorographic Commission,” Journal of Arts & Humanities 3, no. 1 (2014): 126–36. 19. Kim Hall, Things of Darkness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 242. 20. For more on the Courret brothers, their Lima studio, and their photography projects in other parts of the world, see: Keith McElroy, “Eugenio Courret and the Courret Archive in Lima, Peru,” History of Photography 24, no. 2 (2000): 121–26. 21. Information about John Patrick Gallagher can be found in: Gabriela McEvoy, “Irish Immigrants in Peru during the Nineteenth Century,” Irish Migration Studies in Latin America 7, no. 4. http://www.irlandeses.org/imsla2011_7_04_10_Gabriela_McEvoy.htm 22. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: The Untold History of a Slavery Rebellion in the Age of Liberty (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014), 8. 23. Nana Bottazzi, “Las mujeres más poderosas del valle del Cauca,” Hola!, December 7, 2011, 15. The original Spanish reads: “Preparando unos zumos de fruta en la cocina.” 24. Richard André, “The Invisible War against Afro-Colombians,” Americas Quarterly, March 16, 2011. http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/2322 (accessed October 28, 2016). 25. For a discussion of recent patterns of geographic displacement (from the Pacific Littoral to the Andean region) and other forms of marginalization since the 1990s, see: Kiran Asher, Black and Green: Afro-Colombians, Development, and Nature in the Pacific Lowlands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 26. See, for example: Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 27. Calvin Sims, “Peru’s Blacks Increasingly Discontent with Decorative Roles,” New York Times, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/17/world/for-blacks-in-peru-there-s-no-room-at-thetop.html (accessed October 28, 2016). 28. https://web.archive.org/web/20140921110836/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/19/ black-pallbearers-lima-peru_n_3623028.html (accessed October 28, 2016). 29. http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-52/rahier (accessed October 28, 2016). 30. http://www.mar.umd.edu/assessment.asp?groupId=13001 (accessed October 28, 2016). For more on the impact of the discourse of mestizaje on Afro-Latin populations, see: Juliet Hooker, “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 285–310.
About the Author Tamara J. Walker is an historian of slavery and gender whose work has appeared in such publications as Slavery & Abolition, Gender & History, and the Journal of Family History, and received support from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. Her book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in early 2017. In 2016–2017, she will be the inaugural Visiting Scholar at the Americas Center at the University of Virginia, and a fellow at the Max Planck Center for European Legal History.