Afro-Uruguay: A Brief History

Andrews, George Reid

In the following account University of Pittsburgh historian George Reid Andrews provides an introduction
to the history of the population of African ancestry in Uruguay.
When we think of the great nations of the African diasporaBrazil, Cuba, Haiti, the United Statesthe
South American republic of Uruguay is not one of the first names to come to mind. To the contrary: the
recipient of almost 600,000 European immigrants between 1880 and 1930, Uruguay has long presented
itself to the world as one of the two white republics of South America (its neighbor Argentina is the
other). In the national household survey of 1996, 93 percent of its citizens classified themselves as white,
a figure significantly higher than in the United States (where 75 percent of the population classified itself
as white in the 2000 census).
Yet in common with other Latin American countries, during the last 25 years Uruguay has experienced a
significant upsurge in black civic and political mobilization. Organizations such as Mundo Afro (Afro
World), the Asociacin Cultural y Social Uruguay Negro, the Centro Cultural por la Paz y la Integracin,
Africana, and others have pressed the nation to acknowledge its black past and present and to work
toward the full integration of its black and indigenous minorities into national life.
These recent organizations are the latest chapter in a long history of black mobilization that began in the
early 1800s with the salas de nacin, mutual aid societies organized on the basis of
members African origins. Uruguays capital, Montevideo, was a required port of call for slave ships
bringing Africans to the Ro de la Plata region. Most of those Africans continued on to Argentina, but
during the late 1700s and early 1800s some 20,000 disembarked in Montevideo and remained in
Uruguay. By 1800 the national population was an estimated 25 percent African and Afro-Uruguayan.
A list from the 1830s of thirteen salas de nacin in Montevideo shows six from West Africa, five from
the Congo and Angola, and two from East Africa. The salas bought or rented plots of land outside the city
walls, on which they built headquarters to house their religious observances, meetings, and dances. They
collected money for emancipation funds to buy the freedom of slave members, lobbied public officials, and
provided assistance in disputes and conflicts between slaves and their owners.
Free and slave Africans and Afro-Uruguayans served in large numbers in the independence wars of the
1810s and 20s and in the civil wars of the 1830s, 1840s, and the second half of the 1800s. Slave military
service was rewarded first by the Free Womb law of 1825 (under which children of slave mothers were
born free, though obligated to serve their mothers master until they reached the age of majority) and
then the final abolition of slavery in 1842.
Once free, Africans and Afro-Uruguayans demanded the full civic and legal equality guaranteed by the
Constitution of 1830. In theory, these rights applied equally to all citizens; but in practice, AfroUruguayans faced pervasive discrimination and racial prejudice. In response, Afro-Uruguayans created
the most active (on a per capita basis) black press anywhere in Latin America. Between 1870 and 1950
black journalists and intellectuals published at least twenty-five newspapers and magazines in Montevideo
and other cities. This compares to between forty and fifty black-oriented periodicals during the same
period in Brazil, where the black population is today some 400 times larger than Uruguays; and fourteen
in Cuba (black population twenty times larger than Uruguays).
This flourishing of Afro-Uruguayan journalism was at least in part a reflection of the countrys economic
and educational achievements during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Exports of meat and wool formed
the basis of one of South Americas most successful national economies. By 1913, Uruguay had the
highest per capita GNP and tax receipts, the lowest birth and death rates, and the highest rates of literacy
and newspaper readership, anywhere in Latin America. National educational reforms in the 1870s and
early 1900s made Uruguay a regional leader in educational achievement; under these conditions, AfroUruguayans were far more literate than their counterparts in, for example, Brazil.
Relatively high educational achievement in Uruguay provided favorable conditions for an active black
press, as well as for Afro-Uruguayan social and civic organizations more generally. Afro-Uruguayans
formed social clubs, political clubs, dancing and recreational groups, literary and drama societies, civic

organizations, and in 1936 a black political party, the Partido Autctono Negro (PAN). The PAN was one of
three such parties in Latin America, the other two being in Cuba (the Partido Independiente de Color,
1908-12) and Brazil (the Frente Negra Brasileira, 1931-38). The PIC and FNB were both eventually
outlawed by their respective national governments; the PAN, by contrast, was permitted to function freely
but never succeeded in attracting significant electoral support. During the 1800s and most of the 1900s,
Uruguayan politics was dominated by two main parties, the Blancos and Colorados. Afro-Uruguayan
voters split their allegiances between those parties, with most favoring the Colorados. Unable to make any
inroads into that two-party system, the PAN disbanded in 1944.
During the 1940s and 1950s Uruguay experienced its most intense period of economic growth and
expansion. Exports to the Allies during World War II, to a shattered Europe in the years after the war, and
to the US during the Korean War, sustained a boom period remembered today as a golden age, the years
of como Uruguay no hay (theres no place like Uruguay), a semi-official slogan at the time. Those years
should have provided ideal conditions for black upward mobility; but prejudice and discrimination
continued to obstruct black advancement. A celebrated case of discrimination in 1956, in which an AfroUruguayan schoolteacher suffered blatant harassment from two principals at schools to which she was
assigned, provoked a national debate on racial conditions in the country. A journalist investigating
employment conditions in Montevideo at that time found that of 15,000 service workers (hairdressers,
waiters, hotel chambermaids, bus drivers, etc.) in the city, only eleven were Afro-Uruguayanless than
one per thousand in a city that was probably 5-6 percent Afro-Uruguayan. The countrys leading
university, the publicly funded Universidad de la Repblica, was found to have awarded degrees to only
five Afro-Uruguayans between 1900 and 1950.
Conditions had apparently changed little by 1980, when a Uruguayan writer reported that in the downtown
commercial districts of Montevideo, in dozens and dozens of shops, the total number of black employees
does not reach ten There are no black hairdressers Except for very low-class bars, there are no black
waiters, nor in hotels, restaurants, or cafes. During the 1980s and 90s, however, Uruguay experienced
the same wave of black civic mobilization that swept over much of Latin America at that time. In
Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Peru, and other countries, Afro-Latin Americans organized to combat racism
and discrimination. The most important such group in Uruguay was Mundo Afro, founded in 1988.
Demanding that Uruguay recognize its black minority as an equal member of the national community,
Mundo Afro successfully lobbied the national government to gather racial data (for the first time since
1852) in the national household surveys of 1996 and 2006. Those surveys showed Afro-Uruguayans
constituting either 6 percent (1996) or 9 percent (2006) of the national population (3.3 million in 2006).
And as in Brazil and the United States, where racial data are routinely included in national censuses, the
two surveys left no doubt concerning levels of racial inequality in the country. Afro-Uruguayan incomes
are on average 60 percent of white earnings; whites are twice as likely as blacks to have a university
degree; black poverty rates are double those of whites; black unemployment rates are 50 percent higher;
and so on.
In the face of such conclusive data, and in preparation for the 2001 U.N. Conference against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, and Xenophobia, held in South Africa, Uruguays government committed itself to
policies aimed at combating racial discrimination and inequality. In 2003 the municipal government of
Montevideo created an advisory Unit for Afro-Descendent Rights; at the national level, President Tabar
Vzquez (2005-10) appointed a presidential advisor for Afro-Uruguayan affairs and created programs for
Afro-Uruguayan women and Afro-Uruguayan youth in the Ministry of Social Development.
Paralleling and at times converging with the history of Afro-Uruguayan civic mobilization is the history of
Afro-Uruguayans role in creating Uruguayan popular culture. To summarize very briefly, one of the
principal functions carried out by the African salas de nacin in the first half of the 1800s was to
hold candombes, public dances for their members. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Africans Uruguayan-born
children and grandchildren combined African musical elements (particularly the use of African drums and
other percussion instruments) with instruments, chords, and rhythms from Europe and
the Caribbean (especially Cuba) to create a new musical form called both tango and candombe.
This new, syncopated music proved wildly popularso popular that young white men wanted to get into
the act as well, creating their own tangos and candombes. The vehicle through which they did so were
the comparsas: musical groups that paraded in Carnival each February and March, playing music

composed especially for those events. Seeking to imitate their black models, the
white comparsas paraded in blackface make-up and African costumes. The result was a troubling hall
of mirrors, to quote historian John Chasteen, in which white performers imitated blacks while black
performers in turn imitated whites imitation of blacks.
By 1900, previously segregated black and white comparsas had fused into racially integrated groups that
in most cases were, and are today, majority white in composition. They present themselves to the
Montevideo public as sociedades de negros, black drummers, singers, and dancers performing the
black music of candombe. In so doing, they have become the most popular and applauded element of
Montevideos Carnival. But the images of black life that they present hark back a century or more to racial
stereotypes dating from the late 1800s. Blackness is presented in highly sexualized ways and as having a
special relationship to primitive powers of rhythm, dance, magic, and sex.
The worlds of politics and candombe have often intersected. Some of the best-known comparsas have
been closely tied to the Colorado party; in the 1960s groups of candombe drummers appeared with AfroUruguayan Senator Alba Roballo in her electoral campaigns. In 2006, Afro-Uruguayan Congressman
Edgardo Ortuo proposed the creation of a national holiday, the Day of Candombe, Afro-Uruguayan
Culture, and Racial Equality. Conceived as a Uruguayan version of similar commemorations in the United
States (Martin Luther King Day) and Brazil (Black Consciousness Day), the Day of Candombe (celebrated
on December 3) is intended to provide space for a day of reflection on racial conditions in Uruguay and the
road remaining to be traveled to achieve true racial equality. Whether the holiday will serve that purpose
remains to be seen; but certainly it provides clear evidence, if any were needed, of the centrality of
candombe and Afro-Uruguayan culture in Uruguayan national life.

Sources:
George Reid Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay (University of North
Carolina Press, 2010) and George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (Oxford University Press,
2004).
Contributor(s):

Andrews, George Reid

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