Black Mosaic: The Assimilation and Marginalization of Afro -Peruvians in Post -Abolition Peru, 1854--1930

178 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.This dissertation tells the story of how Afro-Peruvians managed the contradictory processes of assimilation and marginalization in post-abolition Peru. My central argument is that Afro-Peruvians were important actors in the nation and identity-building building projects of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Peru in spite of their subaltern status. Methodologically, it views Afro-Peruvian history from the perspective of elites and from groups within the Afro-Peruvian community itself. Specifically, this includes examining the African diaspora in Peru, criminality, elite discourse, folklore, military roles, political participation, and popular religiosity. In the master narrative of post-abolition Peruvian history, their demographic demise has been exaggerated and their traditions and cultural expressions appropriated and subsumed in indigenous, mestizo, and creole culture. The central unifying analytical thread is the ways in which Afro-Peruvians engaged in everyday forms of self-determination. They articulated a racial and cultural identity to counter efforts to perpetuate their subaltern status socially conceived during the colonial era nd carried forward to the twentieth century. This study sheds light on the individual and collective struggles, successes, and failures of Afro-Peruvians, as well as address broad themes of nation-state and national identity formation with relevance to the comparative study of the African diaspora in Latin America.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD