Afro-Latin American - History

History

Many people of Black African origin arrived in the Americas with the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries. Pedro Alonso Niño, traditionally considered the first of many New World explorers of Black African descent was a navigator in the 1492 Columbus expedition. Those who were directly from West Africa mostly arrived in Latin America as part of the Atlantic slave trade, as agricultural, domestic, and menial laborers and as mineworkers. They were also employed in mapping and exploration (for example, Estevanico) and were even involved in conquest (for example, Juan Valiente). They were mostly brought from West Africa and Central Africa in what are now the nations of Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Angola, and Congo, There are six major groups: the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ewe, Akan, and the Bantu (mostly Zulu). Most of the slaves were sent to Brazil, and the Caribbean, but lesser numbers went to Colombia and Venezuela. Countries with significant black, mulatto, or zambo populations today include Brazil (86 million, according to how censuses are applied nationwide, considering all the brown Brazilian population as being "Black", which must signifies of African descent and makes caboclo identity lacks of space on racial classifications there), Colombia (10 million), Haiti (8.7 million), Dominican Republic (up to 8.1 million), Cuba (up to 4 million), and Puerto Rico (20%–46%). Recent genetic research in UPR Mayaguez has brought to light that 26.4% of Puerto Ricans have Black African heritage on the X chromosome and 20% on the Y chromosome, thus between 20%–46% of the Puerto Rican population has African heritage. (For more on this see Demographics of Puerto Rico).

Traditional terms for Afro-Latin Americans with their own developed culture include Garífuna (in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize), cafuzo (in Brazil), and zambo in the Andes and Central America. Marabou is a term of Haitian origin denoting a Haitian of multiracial ethnicity. The term describes the offspring of a Black African/European or mulatto and an Amerindian, specifically the native Taíno, born in Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue). The heavy population of Africans on the island established by the French and Spanish diluted the generations of so-called "marabous" over the decades, and virtually all Haitians today of Amerindian descent are assumed to also possess Black African ancestry. Several other terms exist for the "marabou" racial mixture in other countries.

The mix of these African cultures with the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and indigenous cultures of Latin America has produced many unique forms of language (e.g., Palenquero, Garífuna and Creole), religions (e.g., Candomblé, Abakuá, Santería, Lucumi and Vodou), music (e.g., kompa, salsa, Bachata, Punta, Palo de Mayo, plena, samba, merengue, cumbia) martial arts (capoeira) and dance (rumba, merengue). Many of these cultural expressions have become pervasive in Latin America.