From the Other Side: Indigenous Perspectives on the Structures of Racism Against Afro-Peruvians

• In Event: Black Lives Matter, ¡Todas! Fugitive Formations in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

In this article, I examine aspects of racism against Afro-Peruvians and how society, through the usage of media and popular culture, has socialized and formed generations of people with anti-Black perspectives. In doing so, I follow the thought of the pioneers of Afro-Peruvian artistic expressions, Nicomedes and Victoria Santa Cruz. Specifically, I draw on the thematic foci of their works on the alliance and solidarity among Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants as siblings in a common fight and struggle against past harms and present obstacles of marginalization and racism.
The paper asks: How have we been raised anti-Black? What are the experiences that help us perceive this discrimination against Afro- Peruvians in Peru? These questions are contextualized through my personal experiences as a racialized person of diasporic Indigenous Peruvian and South Korean roots. I observe, analyze, and make visible the racism against Afro-Peruvians through personal stories from an Indigenous and global perspective using the conceptual frameworks from sociolinguistics and political science. The questions emerge from an interdisciplinary lens that consider the dynamics of politics, linguistics, and education in the construction of anti-Blackness in Peru. Television shows, commercials and poems constitute in this paper the material expressions that show how strategic social calculations render racism invisible. Racism against the afro-descendant population in Peru has been always visible; yet purposely hidden with the intention to erase the experiences of Black population in the processes of the construction of the Peruvian nation-state.

Author

• Ñusta Carranza Ko, University of Baltimore