Antecedentes
Afro-Latin American community's condition
Background
Actuality
"We hope that the governments in the Americas, as well as the international donor community will give their political, technical and economic support and will invest in AFROAMERICA XXI, to help us contribute to a better world in the next millennium eradicating extreme poverty."
Background
Blacks in the New World have retained elements of their African ancestral culture that survived the conditions of slavery which this population was brutally forced to exist for 400 years, generation after generation. These persisted even after the populations were forced to lose their ethnic and national distinctions and were allowed to retain only the color of their skin as their identification. The spiritually uplifting aspects of their culture were the Legacy passed on during their colonial coexistence with Europeans. This legacy includes spiritual beliefs, family and individual values, music, dance, storytelling, and also productive skills passed on from one generation to the next within maroon and rural communities, which had to rely upon themselves and the help of indigenous neighbors to survive in an unknown environment.
We believe that a diversity of cultures ensures diversity in the survival strategies of human beings in this planet, providing multiple solutions in the face of the environmentally hostile conditions that we have created in this century. Nature has taught us the high risk of uniformity, one adverse condition can annihilate the majority of a uniform species, and it is only the aberrations that survive to become the new uniformity.
Diversity is necessary for long term survival of the species, and genetic and cultural diversity among human beings provide an insurance to reduce the risk of our own extinction, in a world that is changing rapidly both socially as well as physically.
We believe that if as humans we respect and know all the other cultures of the world, perhaps many of our socials and poverty problems could be on their way to finding a solution. For these reasons we assign to ethno-cultural diversity a great respect, and value and use it to solve the problems that we face as a human society.
As a result of the European arrival in this hemisphere, Black and Indigenous peoples in Latin America have inhabited a world in which they have been forced to integrate into a dominant culture and way of life, one which was alien and hostile to their ancestral culture, role in which they have played the role of the vanquished in a battle to conquer territory and governance. Although after independence the idea was held that this conquest was over, the systems brought by the colonizers were retained and adjusted to transfer the power of dominance to their genetic descendants in colonies that became the independent nations.
The populations that were dominated remained in the same conditions at independence, and since then until this day, modernity for Latin America has overlooked the needs, contributions and survival strategies of these disadvantaged population groups, Indigenous, Blacks and the other minorities that arrived in the continent as indentured laborers [Chinese, South Asian Indians] who remain invisible still.
Poverty today has predominantly the face of Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and the mixed castes; and within them of women, youth and children. History explains that this is no coincidence. Neither is the fact that the most prominent and economically better off Blacks, indigenous and mestizo individuals are those who have been able to adapt and imitate to the best of their ability the European Creole way of life, value system and physical appearance.
