Afro-Latin America: Five Questions

This article surveys recent historical and social scientific research on Afro-Latin America and poses five questions about that work. (1) What kinds of scholars study Afro-Latin America, and why do they do so? What seem to be their motives, intellectual or otherwise? (2) How can Afro-Latin American societies most effectively achieve racial equality? (3) Is Latin American racial democracy a myth, a reality, or both? (4) Are Latin American racial identities as fluid, contingent, and shifting as the scholarly literature has tended to suggest? Or might they perhaps be more fixed and stable than is traditionally thought? (5) What do we learn when we undertake comparative studies of Afro-Latin American societies? More specifically, what do we learn when we compare Afro-Latin American experiences in different parts of the region, and when we compare Afro-Latin American and indigenous experiences?