World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [38]
In emphasizing that poor African-blooded Brazilians can achieve upward mobility by “lightening themselves”—for example, by making a fortune (which almost never happens) or by marrying someone with lighter skin (which more often does)—Brazilians don’t seem to see the extent of racism and ethnic self-hatred that pervades Brazilian society. As Eugene Robinson eventually realized, “In Brazil, most people with some measure of African blood”—again a large majority of the country’s population—“demanded to be not thought of as black.” As a result, concludes Robinson, there was no black consciousness or indignation: “[N]obody saw these neighborhoods that were running with blood as black neighborhoods. Nobody saw that blood that was flowing as black blood.”
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Brazil, moreover, is not exceptional in this regard. Throughout Latin America, centuries of ethnic degradation and discrimination, not to mention disenfranchisement and violence, have left deep, lasting psychological scars. A dashing blond, water-skiing Bolivian recently assured me that “in my country everyone is mestizo, everyone has some Indian blood,” then later in the same conversation asserted, with equal equanimity, that “no member of the upper class would even think of marrying a Quechua.”
Treated as “subhuman,” even “bestial,” Latin America’s indigenous populations have internalized a profound and debilitating sense of inferiority. It is no wonder that throughout Latin America—right up to the cusp of the twenty-first century—ethnicity had little appeal. During most of the second half of the twentieth century, Latin America’s poor have not wanted to think of themselves as “Indian” or “indigenous.” Political, even populist movements have been organized around class, almost never ethnic, lines. And because in election after election, despite coup after coup, political and economic power always remained in the same light-skinned, “illustrious-blooded” hands, “apathy and fatalism” among the indigenous populations spread and deepened.
Globalization and the Kindling of Ethnic Resentment
All this, however, is changing. To the extent that ethnicity has been downplayed in the last several decades in Latin America, globalization, together with the demise of Marxism, is revitalizing it. Capitalism, it is often said, “transcends national boundaries,” but so too can ethnic consciousness, ethnic demagoguery, and ethnic anger—with just as much speed and even greater intensity and passion.
Along with global markets and global media, “Indian-ness” is spreading across Latin America with technologically unprecedented zeal. Particularly in those countries where Amerindians constitute a majority of the population—and even in countries like Mexico, Chile, or Venezuela, where they do not—Latin America’s poor masses are being ethnicized, increasingly through radio, television, and most recently the Web. They are being reminded—by cellphone-wielding leaders like Bolivia’s El Mallku, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, or Mexico’s Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos—that they are Aymaras, pardos, Indians, cholos, whatever identity best mobilizes great numbers of frustrated, long degraded, dark-skinned masses.
Peru’s Amerindian Alejandro Toledo, who swept to landslide victory in the 2001 presidential elections, offers the best of examples. “You’re one of us—win for us!” shouted thousands of wrinkled Amerindian women in bowler hats, weeping as Toledo campaigned through the streets in a truck emblazoned with the ancient Inca symbol of the sun. Reversing five hundred years of ethnic degradation, Toledo—who many insist resembles Pachacutic, the Incas’ greatest ruler—highlighted his indigenous origins, wearing Indian garb, calling himself el cholo, and appealing explicitly to Peru’s dark-skinned majority “who look like I do.” Indeed, reclaiming ethnic