Country: Uruguay

Group: Afro-Urugayan

Finalized Date: 11/7/2020

Team: Ethan Pelland (lead), Johanna McCombs, Ann Thomas

Content Warning: racism

Approximate Time Period: 1500-1852

Afro-Uruguayans comprise approximately 4.6% of the population, at around 190,000 persons in Uruguay. Historically, Afro-Uruguayans were brought to Uruguay to work as slaves. Due to relative infeasibility of Uruguay’s climate to large scale plantation farming, most of these enslaved individuals worked as day laborers and house servants.  A census conducted in 1805 stated there were 9400 people in the capital city of Montevideo and one third of them were of African descent, 86 percent being slaves (Andrews, 2010). The slave trade continued in the nation from the early 1700s until 1842 when slavery was officially abolished, in spite of promises from the Uruguyan independence movement to abolish slavery in exchange for Afro-Uruguyan service in the struggle. However, the process was gradual and slavery would not be fully excised from the nation until 1852. Since the abolishment of slavery, Afro-Uruguayans have struggled to build social and political power in the nation. Political parties such as the Partido Autocono Negra in the 1930s attempted to organize the Afro-Uruguayan population into an organized voting bloc. Their efforts failed, and to this day Afro-Uruguayans are extremely underrepresented in most spheres of Uruguayan society. Afro-Uruguayans are twice as likely to be under the poverty line, have only 1 elected member in the legislature, and less than 6% graduate with a bachelor’s degree (Sharnak, 2014). The presence and importance of Afro-Uruguyans has also only been recognized by broader Uruguayan society in recent years. Uruguay advanced a national narrative which projected an identity of a white nation, ignoring the remnants of the indigenous and enslaved populations. Due to the availability of information from scholarly sources I would rate the confidence of this assessment as a 3.

Sources

  1. Minority Rights Group (n.d.) Afro-Uruguayans. Retrieved November 09, 2020, from https://minorityrights.org/minorities/afro-uruguayans/
  2. Andrews, G. R. (2010). Afro-World: African-Diaspora Thought and Practice in Montevideo, Uruguay y 1830-2000. The Americas, 67(1), 83–107.
  3. Andrews, G. (2019, July 31). Afro-Uruguay: A Brief History. Retrieved November 09, 2020, from https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/perspectives-global-african-history/afro-uruguay-brief-history/
  4. Monsma, K., & Fernandes, V. (2013). Fragile Liberty: The Enslavement of Free People in the Borderlands of Brazil and Uruguay, 1846-1866. Luso-Brazilian Review, 50(1), 7-25. Retrieved October 28, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43905251
  5. Sharnak, D. (2014, July 29). The Rights Abuses Uruguay Doesn’t Want You to Know About. Retrieved November 09, 2020, from https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/29/the-rights-abuses-uruguay-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about/