a secret history of coffee, coca and cola

An interesting discussion from CSPAN-2, around the book A Secret History of Coffee, Coca and Cola by Ricardo Cortes. A perspective you do not often hear articulated. More information about the book can be found at the Akashic books website.

latin america's message to the arab world

Al Jazeera: Latin America's message to the Arab world by Pepe Escobar
Latin Americans should share their experiences with democratisation with other countries in the global South.

is there islam in latin america?

Muslim Voices: Is there Islam in Latin America? by Rosemary Pennington, Program Coordinator for Voices and Visions is a graduate student in the School of Journalism at Indiana University.


There has been a lot of research and reporting on Muslim populations living in the United States and Europe. That work often centers around issues of identity and integration. And these issues are often portrayed as being unique to the “West.”

What that scholarship and reporting, has often overlooked is that there are Muslim populations in other non-majority Muslim regions. That includes Latin America.

A Social Science Research Council funded project at Florida International University’s Latin American & Caribbean Center is working to educate English speaking scholars and reporters about the Muslim populations in the region.

Beyond The Middle East

“I think Latin America has been one of the forgotten regions because of the Spanish and the Portuguese,” says Project Director Maria Logrono. She says most scholars who study Islam learn Arabic or Persian or focus on a traditional region in which to study the religion. “Most scholars approach the Middle East in area studies, not thinking about the larger geographic borders of it.”

Logrono says English-speaking media often ignore the Muslim populations in Central and South America until something bad happens.

“I guess we can say journalists have approached Islam in Latin America,” Logrono says, “But I think they have approached it only when there’s conflict and tension.”

Logrono says there is certainly tension in some parts of Latin America, especially where Islam chafes against Catholicism, but that’s not true of every country in the region or every Muslim group, either.

“The Muslim populations that you have in Latin America are, and this is especially the case of South America, mainly migrants and converts,” Logrono says. “When it comes to integration … what we have noticed is that Muslim migrants have integrated very well.”

Creolization Of Islam

In fact, there’s some debate whether a kind of “Creole” Islam has begun to develop in places like Brazil and Cuba.

“Scholars working on Islam in Cuba will tell you, ‘Yes, there is actually an attempt at Creolization of Islam, or creating a Cuban Islam,’ in which something as unthinkable as eating pork may be something that Muslims in Cuba are considering.”

Logrono and her project staff have been working on a short documentary for the last year about Islam in the region. It’s limited in scope, focusing on Argentina and Brazil, but Logrono hopes it will give viewers a taste of what life is like for Latin American Muslims.

“We went and filmed communities and their gatherings and their practices and their histories to show the diversity of Muslim communities in Latin America,” she says. “Because we couldn’t accomplish all Latin America…what we tried to do is take two of the most representative places but obviously trying to open questions for debate and, hopefully, for future research.”

You can find more find more information about Logrono’s work as well as view photos and the documentary at the project’s website.

drugs, inner cities and the us government

I think that some folks have a hard time believing in conspiracy theories because they tend to imagine them only in their most cartoonish versions. As if one morning they had a CIA staff meeting and some guy writes up on a dry-erase board:

Agenda
Brainstorm: How to keep the Black man down
Idea #1 Introduce drugs into the inner-city
Idea #2 Invent AIDS
Idea #3 Kill Biggie
Idea #4 Kill Tupac (for real this time)
Idea #5 Put Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace

The real conspiracies tend to be a bit more complex than that. Ronald Reagan wanted to fight Communism in Latin America, especially Nicaragua, so he gives support to the Contras. In 1982 the Boland amendment is passed by the US Congress which makes it illegal to give military aid to the Contras. So if you are a staunch anti-Communist and still want to give funds to the Contras, then that leaves illegal means of support. A quick and effective way to do that (especially if you have the power to tell the drug enforcement bodies to look the other way) is to sell drugs. And if you are a staunch anti-Communist then the benefits of overthrowing the Sandinistas will outweigh the negative blowback (which will mostly blow back onto Blacks anyway). And so it goes...



Salon: How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal

latin america and the arab world: resistance and occupation

Progressive Podcast: Tariq Ali, author of Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, delivers a lecture in Sydney, Australia entitled: Latin America and the Arab World: Resistance and Occupation on Hugo Chavez and the insights which the experience of Latin American leftist populism may hold for the Middle East.

A revolution is moving across Latin America. Since 1998, the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela has brought Hugo Chávez to world attention as the foremost challenger of the neoliberal consensus and American foreign policy. Tariq Ali shows how Chávez's views have polarized Latin America and examines the aggression directed against his administration. His lecture will guide us through a world divided between privilege and poverty, a continent that is once again on the march. The contrast with the Arab world could not be more striking. Here the resistance is divided and without the social vision required to unite a people.

the anti-imperialist left confronted with islam
Planet Grenada and Hugo Chavez
tariq ali

negro bembon

Mataron al negro bembón
Mataron al negro bembón
Hoy se llora noche y día
Porque el negrito bembón
Todo el mundo lo queria
Porque el negrito bembón
Todo el mundo lo queria

Y llegó la policia
Y arrestaron al maton
Y uno de las policias
Que tambíen era bembón
Le toco la mala suerte
De hacer la investigación
Le toco la mala suerte
De hacer la investigación

Y saben la pregunta
que le hizo al maton
Porque lo mato
Diga usted la razon
Y saben la respuesta
que le dio el maton :
yo lo mate
por ser tan bembón
El guardia escondio
la bemba y le dijo :
Eso no es razon



I was recently thinking about the ways in which race shows up in Latin music when the song "Negro Bembon" by Ismael Rivera popped into my head. The song makes me think of how Afro-Latinos in Latin America didn't really undergo US-style civil rights / Black power movement. So instead of making a loud and angry statement like NWA's "F*** tha Police" or a righteous and defiant statement like Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff", "Negro Bembon" gives us the muted and insufficient "Eso no es razon" from a Black cop who, even with a gun and badge, is still not strong or brave enough to truly challenge a racist system. Occasionally I wonder if the song's refrain is deliberately understated as way of making a powerful social critique, but most of the time I tend to think that the voice of protest is so muted because certain white supremacist assumptions are pervasive and taken for granted in Latin culture, even in the music of Afro-Latino artists like Ismael Rivera.

tego calderon: latin america needs its own civil rights movement
a rising voice: afro-latin americans

more on black jews

Over at ChickenBones: A Journal, I recently saw two articles by Adeyinka Makinde which discuss the possible Jewish descent in the Igbo of Nigeria: on the Igbos: A Lost Tribe of Israel? and The Igbo and Jewry. But really, these sorts of articles shouldn't be surprising. As I point out in another post:

...according to the Bible, Jacob (Israel) and his sons went into Africa as a group of 12 households and hundreds of years later they came out of Africa as a nation of millions. Either the children of Israel are really really really inbred or they intermarried with the people around them and became basically an African group. The Bible even explicitly says that Abraham, Joseph and Moses married African (Egyptian and Cushite) women [Genesis 16:3, Genesis 41:45, Numbers 12:1].

I think I need to read How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin which has been recommended to me on more than one occasion. There is so much history and politics behind racial classifications and I would like to have a better understanding of how the process unfolds. 

 See also: 

the lemba 

"i've seen ethiopians knocking out rome" (part 2) 

reclaiming jewish traditions in mexico 

are desis white?

a rising voice: afro-latin americans

The Miami Herald recently published a five-part series on the situation of Afro-Latinos in various countries (including Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia as well as the more typical Brazil, Dominican Republic and Cuba). The series is really good. I was half-tempted to just cut- and- paste the entire thing into here. The pieces paint a much more complex picture than I would have expected in this type of story. In the past, many such articles would stop short at pointing out Africanisms in the local culture and repeating myths of racial democracy. More recently I've seen (and linked to) stories which acknowledge something of the racism in Latin America in a general and abstract way. But the series A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans manages to cover a lot of ground with a surprising amount of richness and depth. I definitely recommend.