University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 7-17-2017 AFRO-PERUVIAN CREOLES: A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF AFRO- DESCENDED PERUVIANS IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM Daniel S. Cozart Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Cozart, Daniel S.. "AFRO-PERUVIAN CREOLES: A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF AFRO-DESCENDED PERUVIANS IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM." (2017). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ hist_etds/173 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Daniel S. Cozart Candidate History Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Judy Bieber , Chairperson Dr. Kimberly Gauderman Dr. Tiffany Florvil Dr. Carlos Aguirre i AFRO-PERUVIAN CREOLES: A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF AFRO-DESCENDED PERUVIANS IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM BY DANIEL S. COZART B.A., Spanish, University of Richmond, 2005 M.A., Latin American Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2011 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2017 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful for the support and guidance of my advisor and dissertation chair, Dr. Judy Bieber, for her expertise, dedication, and encouragement. Her thoughtful and detailed feedback on my work and her mentorship provided the guidance I needed to succeed as a graduate student, and her career is a model that I aspire to emulate. I also thank my committee members, Dr. Kimberly Gauderman, Dr. Tiffany Florvil, and Dr. Carlos Aguirre, whose research and teaching have been fundamental to my intellectual growth. I am honored to work under the guidance of such outstanding historians. The University of New Mexico Latin American and Iberian Institute and the Tinker Institute allowed me to conduct research in Peru through a 2013 Field Research Grant, for which I am heartily grateful. I thank the Conference on Latin American History for the honor of the Scobie Award, which also made my research possible. Many thanks to the archivists and staff of the National Library of Peru, the Casa/Museo Ricardo Palma, and the Museo Nacional Afroperuano in Lima. I also thank the archivists of the Archivo Regional de Piura for helping me access a large volume of documentation in a short period of time. Lilia Mayorga Balcazar of the Centro de Desarrollo Étnico provided helpful guidance and contacts in Yapatera, and José Portilla of the Museo Nacional Afroperuano went out of his way to help me research in Zaña. I am grateful for their help. To my parents, for supporting and taking an interest in my intellectual pursuits. And especially to my wife, Julia, for her patience and love. iii AFRO-PERUVIAN CREOLES: A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF AFRO-DESCENDED PERUVIANS IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM AND SCIENTIFIC RACISM by DANIEL S. COZART B.A., Spanish, University of Richmond, 2005 M.A., Latin American Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2011 Doctor of Philosophy, History ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the history of Afro-descended Peruvians after the abolition of slavery in 1854 until the census of 1940, which asserted that Afro-Peruvians comprised less than two percent of the national population. It combines analyses of primary and secondary sources to examine Afro-Peruvian historical agency, demographic erasure and the politics of censuses, contested definitions of race and citizenship, self- representation in politics, culture, and the arts, as well as the labor history of Afro- Peruvians. The dissertation builds on the framing of Atlantic History to revise prior assumptions that Afro-Peruvians nearly disappeared from census records in the twentieth century because they had positive incentives to adopt whitening strategies in their quest for social mobility. To the contrary, I argue that such universalist frameworks have contributed to the supposed “disappearance” of Afro-Peruvians by demonstrating how the construction of “Peruvian dualism” ignored the possibility of distinct Afro-Peruvian identities within the broadly conceived “Creole” culture along the Pacific coast. I analyze census records in post-abolition Lima, popular and elite discourses of race and citizenship along the Pacific coast, and situate Afro-Peruvians in broader class-based labor and iv political movements. While keeping the inherent limitations of the documentary record in mind, this dissertation analyzes a variety of sources to examine Afro-Peruvian realities and their agency in confronting entrenched social practices based on race and a history of slavery to demand an equal place in the nation after abolition. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1……………………………………………………………………20 Chapter 2……………………………………………………………………55 Chapter 3……………………………………………………………………79 Chapter 4……………………………………………………………………101 Chapter 5……………………………………………………………………130 Chapter 6……………………………………………………………………165 Chapter 7……………………………………………………………………208 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..230 Appendices………………………………………………………………….242 Bibliography………………………………………………………………...245 vi Foreword: Organization and Archival Research I. Afro-Peruvian Invisibility, Exclusion, and Activism I first became interested in the topic of Afro-Peruvian history while researching and writing my M.A. Thesis in Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. One chapter, “La madre coraje y sus enlaces: Remembering María Elena Moyano” analyzed the “autobiography” of an Afro-Peruvian woman and community activist who was assassinated by Shining Path rebels in 1992. Beyond the questions of representation, trauma, and memory I examined in the thesis, I became more focused on this history of Afro-Peruvian identity. Two years of reading about colonial and modern Peruvian history revealed that it was not a central question in the historiography. As a PhD student in History at the University of New Mexico, I delved further into the topic and came across several excellent studies of African slavery in Peru and its eventual abolition. These books, which I analyze in the introduction and first chapter of this dissertation, left me longing for more information regarding the demographic erasure of the Afro-Peruvian population following abolition, evident in the 1940 census (the last to include race labels). Did Afro-Peruvians mix increasingly with white Peruvians and adopt other “whitening” strategies to improve their social positions following abolition in 1855? If so, did this explain sufficiently the dramatic decline in Afro-descended Peruvians between late colonial Peru and the 1940 census, which identified less than two percent of the nation’s population as Afro-descended)? Did Afro-Peruvians maintain a collective identity based on connections to the African Diaspora, as in other Latin American countries? More recent anthropological studies suggested that Afro-Peruvian communities maintained unique cultural practices, some of which influenced national culture and vii Peruvian national identity. However, Afro-Peruvians continue to face racial discrimination and their historical contributions have largely been ignored. Their invisibility in the historical narrative seemed relevant to this persistent discrimination, leading me to seek answers to two central research questions: how were Afro-Peruvians erased from the national historical narrative? Secondly, how has the resulting invisibility shaped the questions historians have asked subsequently? The latter question drove me to seek answers regarding Afro-Peruvian social and political history between 1855 and 1940. When I first arrived to Lima to conduct research in June, 2013, I contacted two Afro-Peruvian activist organizations that have mobilized a strong resistance to racism, connecting it to an enduring legacy of slavery. Although the Lundú Centro de estudios y promoción afroperuanos was overwhelmed by outsiders (like me) taking an interest in the topic, perhaps because the Peruvian government publicly apologized to its citizens of African origins for centuries of abuse, exclusion, and discrimination in 2009, the Centro de Desarrollo Étnico (CEDET) welcomed me. The director, Lilia Mayorga, has organized academic conferences on the topic of Afro-Peruvian history and culture, many of which have resulted in published books and volumes. I explained my interest in the topic and my desire to contribute to her organization’s efforts through my academic pursuits, and Mayorga encouraged me to travel to archives beyond Lima: specifically to the northern coastal departments of Chiclayo, Lambayeque, and Piura. Afro-Peruvians were historically concentrated along the Pacific coast as slaves on haciendas (plantations), and some smaller communities there maintained clear Afro-Peruvian identities, she explained. Furthermore, my goal of restoring Afro-Peruvians to the nation’s history viii would contribute to activists’ continuing struggle against racial exclusion by showing their centrality to nation-state formation and the construction of national identity.