This book introduces English-language readers to the historical (1870–1960) Black newspapers and magazines of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay. In Latin America, the violence of enslavement, limited access to primary education and the world of publishing, and exclusion from regional archives and libraries make documents and texts produced by Afrodescendants themselves extremely rare.Footnote ¹ The majority of the abundant documentary evidence of the participation of Africans and their descendants in the region’s history was created by state and Church officials and institutions, lawyers, policemen, foreign visitors to the region, journalists, scientists, and others, most of whom were not themselves of African descent. Yet in their own periodical publications, Afro-Latin Americans eloquently expressed their thoughts on a host of social and political issues: slavery, race and racism, democracy, civic and social equality, gender, African-based culture, economic development, literature and the arts, parenting, and others. Those newspapers and magazines are the richest and most concentrated venue for Black voices in Latin American history.

Afro-Latin American newspapers are the direct analogue of, and were occasionally in dialogue with, the African American press in the United States. Yet they are virtually unknown in the English-speaking world and are in any case beyond the reach of audiences who do not read Spanish or Portuguese.Footnote ² These barriers have deprived readers of access to an invaluable source of Afro-Latin American thought, as well as a wealth of detail about Black community life and political activism across these diverse local contexts. Voices of the Race brings English-language audiences a translated and annotated selection of articles from those papers, and through them, fuller access to the community life and the intellectual production of people of African descent across Latin America.

As readers may have noticed, we use “Black” interchangeably with “Afro-Latin American” or “Afrodescendant” to designate people who were regarded by themselves and others as having some visible degree of African ancestry, indicated by skin color or other features. In so doing, we follow the present-day consensus among scholars and activists in both Latin America and the United States. Yet these were not necessarily the preferred terms of self-identification of the writers or readers of these newspapers. Indeed, the naming or not naming of racial communities, the different contours of these communities across different places and times, and the various ways that Black writers engaged with their respective nations’ guiding ideologies of race are at the heart of the story about Latin America’s Black press: what it is, where and why it emerged, who wrote and read it, and what forms it took.

What Is the Black Press of Latin America?

The Black press of Latin America consists of newsletters, newspapers, and magazines produced by Afrodescendant writers and directed primarily at a Black readership.Footnote ³ These publications were not designed to be a principal source of news and commentary. They were what scholars call a “complementary” press, meant to be read alongside broader-circulation local and national newspapers (often called the “mainstream” press). Writers and editors in the Black press were deeply engaged with periodicals edited primarily by White colleagues (as they were with other Black publications and colleagues), often quoting them extensively or writing in direct response to their coverage. Indeed, Black publications frequently addressed a broader public, including White journalists and politicians, in the name of a racial community. Black newspapers and magazines sometimes announced themselves as the “organs” or “defenders” of “the class of color,” “the Black race,” or “our community,” and sometimes they did not.

Brazil is the country with the most extensive, oldest, and best-known Black press in the region. It is also the country with the longest and most extensive experience of slavery in the Americas: slave traders brought more African captives to Brazil than to any other New World society, and it was the last country in the region to abolish slavery. Enslaved people toiled in almost all areas of Brazil’s economy, from booming plantations (primarily sugar and coffee) and mines to domestic work and street vending. Brazil remains the country with the largest Afrodescendant population in the hemisphere. At the time of the 2010 census, over 96 million Brazilians (just over half the total population) identified as preto (Black) or pardo (brown), confirming Brazil as a majority Afrodescendant country. By comparison, in the 2010 census of the United States, 39 million people identified as African American, about 13 percent of the population.Footnote ⁴

The first Afro-Latin American newspapers appeared in the newly independent Empire of Brazil in the 1830s (roughly contemporaneously with the first African American papers in the United States).Footnote ⁵ But the Brazilian Black press expanded especially rapidly after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the replacement in 1889 of the monarchy with a republic. Black writers and editors were particularly active in the cities and towns of the southeastern state of São Paulo, where Black Brazilians lived in spaces increasingly dominated by European immigrants.Footnote ⁶ Many Black publications began as newsletters associated with neighborhood-based social clubs for the “class of color (classe de cor),” and much of the coverage in papers like O Bandeirante, O Baluarte, O Kosmos, and others from the era focused on community or club events. Editors adopted variants of the phrase “organ of the men of color” on their mastheads, and called for Black Brazilians to assert full political, civil, and dignitary rights. They noted that the equality promised by republican laws was constantly threatened by racist ideas and practices. Many White writers in this period described Brazil as a unique “racial paradise” where, despite legacies of slavery and colonialism, three races (White, Black, Indigenous) lived in harmony. Black writers often invoked this shared ideal of interracial fraternity to support calls to remove real barriers to full Black citizenship.Footnote ⁷

By the mid 1920s, a new generation of Afro-Brazilian writers in São Paulo city and state created publications increasingly aimed at discussing and combating racism directly and asserting the existence of a national (and often Afro-diasporic) racial community linked by a shared past and destiny. Political involvement in these years reshaped editors’ sense of mission. Toward the end of the decade, for example, the editors of O Clarim da Alvorada (The Clarion of Dawn), initially a “literary, scientific, and humorous” publication, helped create the Centro Cívico Palmares in an effort to amalgamate the city’s disparate Black associations. After this experience, they declared O Clarim a publication “in the interest of Black men” and dedicated to “struggle [combate].” In the 1930s, the Frente Negra Brasileira, a civic organization that briefly gave rise to one of the region’s few Black political parties, further cemented the relationship between activism and São Paulo’s Black press. The Frente Negra distributed thousands of copies of its newspaper, A Voz da Raça (The Voice of the Race), throughout Brazil. During Brazil’s turbulent 1930s, the Black press expanded to occupy the full spectrum of political positions between fascism and communism, but fell largely silent with the onset of the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937–45), which shut down political parties and heavily censored the press.

In Brazil’s capital, Rio de Janeiro, fewer Black publications appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century. But in the wake of World War II, as Brazil’s government returned to democracy and as Black activists re-organized, influential new publications emerged there. Quilombo, dedicated to the “Life, problems, and aspirations of the Black man,” joined journals like Alvorada and Senzala, published in São Paulo (the latter with contributors from Rio and other states), as spaces for Black cultural criticism, political activism, and civil rights advocacy. The Black press of this era faced distinctive opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, the restoration of Brazil’s democratic institutions brought hope that the country might begin to fulfill its promise as an inclusive and egalitarian multi-racial state. On the other hand, fulsome celebrations of Brazil as a singular “racial democracy” to be emulated the world over threatened to undermine the work of Black writers by declaring racism a non-issue. Indeed, while some White Brazilians backed Black writers’ anti-racist demands, many others used the idea of racial democracy to represent Black organizations and publications as “reverse racists” who refused to subordinate their particular identities to the national whole.Footnote ⁸

In Argentina, journalists created a Black press in a society with a much smaller and less visible Afrodescendant population. In 2010, only about 150,000 Argentines identified as Afrodescendant, out of a total population of more than 40 million inhabitants, though the number of Argentines with unacknowledged African ancestry is surely much higher.Footnote ⁹ Yet the Black population had historically been much more significant, if never as large as Brazil’s. Buenos Aires had been one of the principal ports for the trade in African captives to Spanish America, and about one-third of the city’s population, and higher proportions of some interior provinces, was Afrodescendant when Spanish colonial rule came to an end in the early nineteenth century. The territory that became Argentina had relatively little plantation agriculture, with most Afro-Argentines, free and enslaved, working in domestic service, trades, ranching, and small-scale manufacturing.Footnote ¹⁰

The earliest known Afro-Argentine publications appeared in Buenos Aires in 1858, under the titles of La Raza Africana, o sea El Demócrata Negro (The African Race, or the Black Democrat), and El Proletario. Slavery had been abolished in 1853 (except in the province of Buenos Aires, where abolition came in 1860), and free Afro-Argentine men, many of whom were veterans of the military campaigns of the previous decades, were fully enfranchised as citizens and voters. Those two papers were short-lived, however. The bulk of Argentina’s Black press dates from the 1870s and 1880s, when the first generation of Argentines to benefit from a massive expansion of state-sponsored education came of age. Even as this small but dynamic Afrodescendant press flourished and found readers among a robust Black urban community, it was becoming difficult to know how many people of African descent lived in Argentina. After independence, and increasingly after midcentury, census officials and many other record-keepers stopped recording race or color categories (perceived as holdovers of a hierarchical colonial past) in the name of the nation’s guiding principles of liberal racelessness, universal citizenship, and legal equality.Footnote ¹¹

Citizenship without regard to race was a value that many Black Argentine men and women embraced, and for which many had fought. Indeed, this second generation of Afro-Argentine editors avoided references to race in their newspapers’ titles and descriptions, taking advantage of the openings that purportedly raceless liberalism appeared to offer to assert their belonging as full Argentine citizens. Mastheads announced these publications as the “organ of the working class” or a “weekly newspaper of general interest.” Yet the papers still largely reported on and directed themselves toward Afro-Argentine readers. In 1881, the editors of La Broma (The Jest) reflected on that newspaper’s evolution as it balanced its readers’ general concerns as Argentines with their specific concerns as Afro-Argentines. Though originally a satirical paper, they noted, in the course of reporting on several major incidents of racial injustice, La Broma had become “a space for airing issues of great social importance.” The editors added that “it is well understood that [La Broma] is the true and genuine organ of the humbler classes, the true interpreter of the beneficial social developments of the so-called people of ‘color’.”Footnote ¹² Editors’ forthright identification with Buenos Aires’ “humbler classes,” like their use of “so-called” or their placement of “color” in quotation marks, illustrates the reticence many in this generation felt toward racial identifications, and their aspiration to become unmarked Argentines (or ones marked at most by their identities as working people).Footnote ¹³

Yet if in the 1870s and 1880s, some Afro-Argentines expressed a hope that liberal principles of colorlessness would abolish racism and ensure full respect and recognition for people of African descent, the events of the next decades proved disappointing. The liberal practice of omitting race in population counts led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to repeated assertions among White Argentine writers and statesmen that Afro-Argentines had all but disappeared, victims of wars, disease, and intermixture with the European immigrants who began arriving in waves.Footnote ¹⁴ At the turn of the century, moreover, discourses of racelessness faded as Argentine elites increasingly equated Argentineness with Whiteness, and anti-Black racism became particularly virulent, backed by the era’s scientific racist discourses. In the first decades of the twentieth century, as Argentine elites remade Buenos Aires into the “Paris of Latin America,” urban renewal projects pushed Afro-Argentines out of the central neighborhoods they had inhabited since colonial times to outlying marginal areas.Footnote ¹⁵ Afrodescendant writers and readers did not disappear – a few Black papers (lost to researchers) emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century (see Figures 0.1, 0.2), while some veterans of the Black press went on to join labor or mainstream newspapers, or published books of their own.Footnote ¹⁶ But as the bonds of racial community dissolved through dispersion, state-enforced practices of assimilation, and shifting racial identifications in a nation that elites increasingly declared homogeneously White, the Afro-Argentine press went silent for the rest of the century.Footnote ¹⁷

Figure 0.1 The editor (identified as “Mr. Terreiros”) and administrator of the Argentine newspaper La Ortiga in the paper’s offices.

From Juan José de Soiza Reilly, “Gente de color,” Caras y Caretas (Nov. 25, 1905).

Figure 0.2 Oscar Ferreyra, second editor of La Verdad, in his home office, preparing to reissue the early twentieth-century La Verdad (founded by his father, Benedicto Ferreyra) after a hiatus.

From Martín Martirena, “Periodismo de color,” Caras y Caretas (Apr. 25, 1931).

Uruguay shares borders with both Brazil and Argentina, and the history and dynamics of its Black press combine key features of those of its neighbors.Footnote ¹⁸ In the national household survey of 2006 and the national census of 2011, 8–9 percent of Uruguayans identified themselves as having some African ancestry.Footnote ¹⁹ Like Buenos Aires, Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, was a major entry point for African captives in the Spanish colonial period and was home to a substantial Afrodescendant minority when Uruguay became independent in the early nineteenth century. Afrodescendant editors began publishing newspapers in the 1870s, three decades after the abolition of slavery (1842) and in the context of universal manhood suffrage. Frustrated by the patronage systems that tied Black voters to the two entrenched political parties and military factions, papers like La Conservación and El Progresista argued that education and constitutional and civic values were crucial for the advancement of the “interests of the society of color.” As in neighboring Argentina, Uruguay’s very high literacy rate helped support a flourishing Black press, one that paid close attention both to national- and local-level events affecting the Black community.

Like counterparts in Argentina, by the end of the century, White Uruguayan statesmen congratulated themselves on the success of their project to “Whiten” the nation through immigration. Yet White immigration to Uruguay never reached the levels seen in Argentina, nor did Afro-Uruguayans become statistically, socially, and culturally invisible after 1900 as they did in that neighboring country. Well-defined Black communities persisted in Montevideo and in Uruguay’s northern departments, which bordered Brazil and had close ties with Black communities across the border. Indeed, migration from the north replenished and reinforced Black communities, identities, and institutions in Montevideo. In this context, Afro-Uruguayan writers, like their Brazilian counterparts, produced one of the most prolific and long-lived Black presses in the region. By the 1920s and 1930s, Black newspapers had developed new forms of political radicalism that incorporated Marxism, anti-fascism, and anti-colonialism, while also articulating a strong sense of racial solidarity within Uruguay and with Black people in other parts of the Americas and the world. The editors of the newspaper Nuestra Raza (Our Race), which appeared regularly from 1933 to 1948, supported the unionization of female domestic workers. They also led an initiative, in 1936, to create the Partido Autóctono Negro (Autochthonous Black Party), focused on the rights of Black workers within a broader working-class coalition.

In the 1940s, Black journalists focused on racial discrimination in education and employment, which kept Afro-Uruguayans out of the growing middle class. As in neighboring Brazil at the same time, some White journalists joined this denunciation of racial discrimination, while others denied that any racism existed, blaming Afro-Uruguayans for their supposed failure to take advantage of equal opportunity. The Uruguayan Black press also worked to promote the visibility of Afro-Uruguayan culture, especially Carnival parades, in the national public sphere. A new appreciation for Black culture, writers reasoned, would reduce the disdain that White Uruguayans expressed towards their Black compatriots. This goal inspired extensive coverage of Black cultural production in the United States, Cuba, and elsewhere.

The Black press in Cuba emerged at roughly the same time as its counterparts in Argentina and Uruguay, but in a very different political, economic, and social context. Cuba remained a colony of Spain, with an economy dominated by plantation agriculture, until 1898. Beginning in 1868, a multiracial independence movement waged a sustained military insurgency against Spanish rule. At the time, official censuses counted about one-third of the population, roughly half a million people, as “of color.” Hundreds of thousands were still held as slaves. In the territory controlled by the revolutionaries, Afro-Cuban leaders and White allies successfully advocated for the abolition of slavery and full civil rights. The first nationalist insurrection was defeated in 1878, but the colonial government granted new freedoms of association and press, and shortly thereafter, the gradual abolition of slavery across the colony. This opening allowed for the proliferation of “societies of color,” many with their own publications. El Pueblo (1879), for instance, was first published at the headquarters of a newly created educational and recreational society in the city of Matanzas. By the middle of the 1880s, Afro-Cuban activists had begun an effort to coordinate these societies through a national civil rights organization, the Directorio Central de las Sociedades de la Raza de Color. Newspapers published by activists in this movement, most notably La Fraternidad in Havana, supported the effort to build solidarity among Black organizations affiliated with different political factions and located in the many cities and towns across the island.Footnote ²⁰

The evolution of the nationalist independence movement offered the opportunity for Afro-Cuban editors to participate in partisan publications. Black journalists served as editors-in-chief of nationalist publications in Key West, Florida, New York City, and Veracruz (Mexico), where substantial Cuban exile communities existed. But the nationalist ideal of a movement that would erase racial divisions, and the persistent accusation that Black Cubans sought to make war on Whites and establish another Haiti, also discouraged the naming of Black organizations and publications as such. In Havana, La Fraternidad, which announced on its masthead its commitment to the “defense of the interests of the race of color,” ceased publication. A nearly identical set of writers immediately began publishing La Igualdad, which called itself simply a “democratic newspaper.” While the pressure not to name publications in racial terms was certainly a constraint, Black editors also affirmatively demanded the right to speak in the name of the whole nation, rather than only for a racial community. Rafael Serra asserted, in response to accusations of racial division, that his La Doctrina de Martí was a “Cuban newspaper, nothing more.”Footnote ²¹ Still, both La Igualdad and La Doctrina de Martí continued, as did the organizations affiliated with them, to speak to and in the name of Cubans of African descent.

By the early twentieth century, slavery had been abolished, universal manhood suffrage had been instituted, and a national constitution declared equal citizenship without consideration for race, thanks in large part to the efforts of Black soldiers and Black journalists over the preceding decade. As in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, the Cuban government embarked on a successful project to encourage mass European immigration and “Whiten” the population. Nonetheless, Black Cubans were a substantial portion of the electorate, and several of the most successful Black journalists won elected office or received government jobs. They continued to face considerable pressure from White politicians not to create independent publications or organizations, which, as in Brazil several decades later, risked accusations of racial separatism and undermining the project of national unity. In this context, many continued the tradition of contributing to or editing party newspapers, including some that also functioned as Black newspapers, such as El Nuevo Criollo. Previsión, the official publication of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC, Independent Party of Color), a Black political organization established in 1908 to compete in elections and exert pressure on the mainstream parties, was a clear exception. Accused of racism, Previsión ceased publication due to government repression in 1910, and its editors were killed in state-led repression of the PIC two years later.Footnote ²²

Afro-Cuban writers in subsequent years lived in the shadow of that repression, while also participating in new ways in the broader field of Cuban publishing. In the 1910s and 1920s, Black journalists began editing regular, Black-themed sections in mainstream newspapers, a practice that expanded in later decades. In the 1930s and 1940s, Afro-Cuban journalists also took on editorial roles in communist publications as well as in leading literary, general interest, and academic periodicals.Footnote ²³ As Afro-Cuban editor Carlos A. Cervantes noted in 1938, “other individuals of the race of color have directed newspapers, and direct them still, but they are not, strictly speaking, publications of a specific ethnic character.”Footnote ²⁴ Yet many of these same writers also responded to the insufficient space granted by mainstream publications, creating their own literary and social magazines. They came together to contribute to Minerva and Labor Nueva in the 1910s, Adelante in the 1930s, and Nuevos Rumbos, Atenas and Amanecer in the early 1950s. Afro-Cuban writers did not adopt the increasingly assertive or combative names for these publications that were common in the Brazilian and Uruguayan Black presses in these years. Nonetheless, these magazines were venues for writing about community activities, racism, politics, and sophisticated criticism of Cuban arts.Footnote ²⁵

Where Was There a Black Press?

In the period covered by this volume, a sustained Black press developed in only four of the twenty Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. In all four, most Black newspapers and magazines were published in cities with White majorities – cities like São Paulo, Montevideo, Havana, and Buenos Aires.Footnote ²⁶ Although governments across Latin America launched projects to Whiten local populations and cultures through European immigration, they achieved greatest success in these four cities. For Black writers and readers, the role of race in shaping opportunity and inclusion in these cities was sharply evident and racial identities were highly salient.

At the same time, establishment newspapers, or what one Afro-Cuban writer called the “White” press, granted Black writers “very limited space for maneuver.”Footnote ²⁷ The mainstream press in these countries was not wholly White; in fact, Afro-Latin Americans often worked as typesetters, printers, copyeditors, or journalists and engaged deeply as readers.Footnote ²⁸ But it did little or no reporting on events in Black communities and organizations; when such reporting did appear, the tone was often condescending or derisive. Nor could Afro-Latin Americans typically appear in those papers’ social columns. Black newspapers allowed Black journalists to cover those topics, to build social and political networks, and to speak more freely about issues of race and racism.

Anti-Black racism permeated the world of publishing in all corners of Latin America, so other factors must be considered as well in explaining the rise of a Black press during the period covered in this book. One was almost certainly literacy. The emergence of Black newspapers depended on the presence of a substantial Black reading public whose subscriptions or appeal to advertisers could sustain the costs of publication. This may explain why a Black press did not develop in some predominantly rural parts of Latin America with Afrodescendant majorities or with Afrodescendant minorities far larger than those found in Argentina and Uruguay, such as the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, or northeastern Brazil. The need for a substantial readership may also explain why, with the exception of the English-language press developed by West Indian migrants on the Caribbean coast of Central America, there was no Black press in Mesoamerican and Andean countries, where majorities were Indigenous or of mixed Indigenous ancestry. Afrodescendant intellectuals and writers were not absent in these various settings, but they tended to publish their work in contexts other than a Black press. The Afro-Peruvian ethnomusicologist Nicomedes Santa Cruz, for instance, published extensively in a wide range of Peruvian newspapers and magazines, addressing a largely non-Black Peruvian audience. Afro-Costa Rican writer Quince Duncan and Afro-Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella published books of fiction and non-fiction that reached readers and critics beyond their respective countries more freely than a Black press would have.

The case is somewhat more complex in the region’s many cities and towns with Afrodescendant majorities or significant minorities. In the towns of Puerto Rico and along the Atlantic Coast of Colombia Afrodescendant typesetters and journalists contributed to and edited labor and partisan newspapers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Afrodescendant intellectuals took part in the broader development of publishing in Santo Domingo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia as well.Footnote ²⁹ But writers in these contexts did not typically create explicitly Black publications. In part, this may have reflected what one scholar has called a “deracialized consciousness that precluded ethnic self-affirmation” in some settings with Afrodescendant majorities or large minorities.Footnote ³⁰ Yet the absence of an avowedly Black press is not necessarily a mark of the absence of Black racial identifications. As other scholars note for nineteenth-century Brazil, the paucity of explicitly Black newspapers “should … not be seen as reflecting a lower degree of Afro-racial consciousness, but as perhaps more a reflection of the dominant modes of public politics” – politics that often enforced racial silence.Footnote ³¹ In these contexts, especially within nations that idealized racelessness, racial harmony, or racial democracy, success within the field of journalism required Afrodescendant writers to build public identities that did not emphasize their Blackness.

On the other hand, the substantial space for self-expression, professional advancement, and even anti-racist advocacy afforded by liberal, socialist, and communist publications in many of these locations also helps explain why some Black writers in Latin America did not feel the need to create distinct Black publications. Black writers in labor and partisan publications in Puerto Rico and Colombia, for example, sometimes took up themes that would have been familiar to readers of the Black press elsewhere. Some writers published translations from the Black press in the United States. Others wrote for non-Black publications in their own national contexts, while contributing to the Black press in other countries.Footnote ³² Since the 1970s, Black periodicals have emerged in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Panama.Footnote ³³

The Black press represented in this volume, then, though the richest vein of Black intellectual and textual production in the region, was but one very particular formation in a much broader spectrum. These publications reflect the particular political and social contexts of Montevideo, São Paulo, Havana, and Buenos Aires, their respective national narratives of race, and the pressures and incentives these contexts offered for naming or not naming Blackness at different times. Yet these cities and contexts were by no means wholly unique, and their differences with places that did not produce a Black press were more of degree than of kind. The conditions that gave rise to these Black presses were familiar and recurring components of ideologies, experiences, and expressions of Blackness shared across Latin America. And while principally national in scope, the Black presses of Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina contributed to networks of Black thought and conversation far beyond those confines.

Who Produced the Black Press?

In the early years, most of those who participated in the production of Black newspapers were self-taught journalists, editors, and contributors. They were overwhelmingly men, although women’s presence as readers, and as occasional contributors, was visible between the lines in the early papers and became increasingly so over time. The female editors who helped to found the Cuban magazine Minerva in 1888 were an important exception to this rule (see Figure 0.3). As we will see, women were central to organizing, running, funding, and fundraising for the clubs and organizations that supported the early publications.Footnote ³⁴

Figure 0.3 Original caption: “Úrsula Coimbra de Valverde, Founding Editor.”

Photograph published in Minerva (Sept. 1911).

Uruguayan and Argentine writers and contributors benefited from more extensive public education systems in the last quarter of the nineteenth century than did their Brazilian or Cuban counterparts. In all cases, however, publishing these community papers was a labor of love. Writers and editors in Latin America’s Black press were rarely, if ever, able to rely on journalism for economic survival. Most depended on their income as craftsmen, musicians, municipal employees, office workers, and other working-class jobs.

By the early twentieth century, Cuba became an exception to this rule. Some of the most prominent Black journalists – Martín Morúa Delgado, Juan Gualberto Gómez, Rafael Serra, Lino D’ou – held elected office, were appointed to government jobs, or had important positions within party structures. Journalism did not itself necessarily produce enough income to support these men. But Black journalism was embedded in the broader field of politics and patronage in ways that did support a lucky few.

By the 1930s and 1940s, a growing number of writers in the Afro-Cuban press, and a few in the Afro-Brazilian press, held university degrees as lawyers, architects, engineers, sociologists, or other professions. Some of the women who wrote in the Cuban magazine Adelante, or the Brazilian magazine Quilombo, had professional degrees and careers as educators or social workers. Although some writers expressed socialist or communist sympathies, they nevertheless thought about racial questions from a relatively privileged class position.

Anatomy of the Black Press

The formats of the papers tended to be similar across the region. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, almost all Black periodicals were small weekly, biweekly, or thrice-monthly publications. They were usually four pages in length, frequently consisting of a single large sheet, printed on both sides and folded in half. Below a masthead, front pages typically contained editorials commenting on community affairs or on national or international events that affected the Black population. Text in these early publications was generally arranged in four columns, occasionally embellished with more sophisticated design elements, illustrations, or photographs of writers and editors (see Figures 0.4, 0.5).

Figure 0.4 Front page from the Brazilian newspaper O Menelik (Jan. 1, 1916), featuring a standard four-column layout and an inset poem, and decorative line drawings throughout.

Figure 0.5 Front page from the Brazilian newspaper O Clarim da Alvorada (Jan. 25, 1925), featuring a standard four-column layout with portraits of the two founding editors as well as other decorative elements.

The middle pages offered news of local social clubs, civic organizations, and cultural events, and extensive social notes on weddings, births, deaths, travel, and parties. These pages often also included letters from readers or regular correspondents in other cities or overseas, and, not infrequently, poems, short stories, or a serialized work of fiction or non-fiction. The final page or two was usually devoted to advertisements, both from Black-owned businesses and from businesses targeting a Black clientele, sometimes in the form of a directory with names and addresses of businesses and clubs (see Figures 0.6, 0.7). In many cases, this page was reproduced from edition to edition with few changes, which undoubtedly saved time and resources for typesetting.

Figure 0.6 Advertisement page from the Argentine newspaper La Broma (Oct. 26, 1882).

Figure 0.7 Front page from the Cuban newspaper La Igualdad (Feb. 14, 1893), which unusually featured advertisements on its front page rather than its back page.

Very few of the Black papers achieved lasting financial stability. While a number of African American papers in the United States became successful business enterprises, virtually all of the Afro-Latin American newspapers lost money; indeed, fundraising campaigns and appeals to subscribers to please pay their overdue bills were regular features in the papers. Some ceased publication after only a handful of issues; very few lasted more than four or five years.

Beginning with Minerva, a ladies’ magazine produced in 1910s Cuba, some editors shifted from a newspaper format to a magazine layout. In Cuba, the literary and general interest magazines Labor Nueva, Adelante, Atenas, and Amanecer all adopted similar formats, featuring visually arresting covers and including many more pages with less text on each page (Figures 0.8, 0.9). The Cuban magazines also dedicated more space to advertising, which was interspersed throughout the publications. These included advertisements for mass-market commercial products, such as condensed milk or beer. Uruguayans made a similar transition in the 1930s, choosing a twelve-page monthly magazine layout for Nuestra Raza and Revista Uruguay (Figure 0.10). Brazilians made the transition several decades later, after World War II. Quilombo, a twelve-page magazine laid out in five columns, included extensive coverage and images of theater and film, lending it the look of a show-business magazine (Figure 0.11). The magazine format, and shifting technologies, allowed for many more illustrations and photographs, which lent greater visibility to a community of Black editors, writers, readers, and members of associations, and played an important role in the aesthetic valorization of Blackness (Figures 0.12, 0.13, 0.14, 0.15; see also Figures 5.1 and 5.2). In the twentieth century, the Cuban Black press often included sports coverage, with special attention to baseball and boxing.

Figure 0.8 Cover from the Cuban magazine Minerva (Apr. 15, 1911), showing both the use of photojournalism and art nouveau illustration in the new magazine format.

Figure 0.9 Cover from the Cuban magazine Adelante (June 1936), showing the influence of social realism.

Figure 0.10 Cover from the Uruguayan magazine Nuestra Raza (Jan. 1934).

Figure 0.11 Cover from the Brazilian magazine Quilombo (July 1949), showing the juxtaposition of news coverage (the nomination of African American scholar and diplomat Ralph Bunche for a Nobel Prize) with content and design reminiscent of a show-business publication (a staged photograph of the actress Ruth de Souza).

Figure 0.12 A “Social Chronicle” spread from the Cuban magazine Minerva (Oct. 15, 1912) illustrates the enhancement of this regular feature of the Latin American Black press through the inclusion of photography.

Figure 0.13 Caricatures from the literary page of Minerva (June 1, 1912) show Black critics expressing opinions on the work of illustrious White authors.

Figure 0.14 Photograph from Nuestra Raza (Jan. 1934). Original caption: “The members of the Artigas [Drama Club] pose smiling for Nuestra Raza.”

Figure 0.15 Photographs from Nuestra Raza (Jan. 1934). Original caption: “The editors of Nuestra Raza.”

The Organization of This Book

To compile this volume, we surveyed thousands of articles in a wide array of publications. Those included the eight newspapers published in Argentina, forty in Brazil, and seventeen in Uruguay for which full or partial collections exist, either in public libraries and archives or in private hands. Digital facsimiles of many of these are freely available online (see the Appendix on Black Periodicals in this volume). Cuban newspapers and magazines, most housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí, are more difficult for researchers outside of Havana to consult. Of the forty-six titles that appear in available library catalogues, we were able to survey thirteen, thanks to digital images or photocopies shared by colleagues and to digital or microform collections available in the United States (see Appendix).

As we considered articles to translate, we followed two main criteria. First, we chose articles that addressed themes or topics that appeared frequently in the papers, even (or especially) if the perspectives on those topics differed substantially from article to article, publication to publication, country to country, and over time. Second, we chose articles that we believe will engage readers and make them want to read more. Our hope is that readers will find the articles sufficiently compelling to warrant further exploration, either through the work of the historians who have researched the newspapers or perhaps even by looking at the papers themselves, most of which are available in digital form through the national libraries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.Footnote ³⁵

We have organized our selection of 113 articles into chapters reflecting the most prominent themes that emerge from Latin America’s Black press. Chapter introductions provide guidelines for reading the selected articles along thematic lines, briefly situating the pieces in their geographic and temporal contexts. The discussion questions at the end of each chapter introduction encourage readers to make deeper connections among the articles and to engage in comparison and contrast. The articles in each chapter proceed in chronological order.

Although we have chosen this thematic grouping as the book’s main organizing principle, no article can be said to address only one theme, as readers will quickly perceive. Questions of race, gender, citizenship, politics, aesthetics, diaspora, family, and community life were experienced as entangled and simultaneous, or, in today’s scholarly terms, as intersectional and co-constitutive. Individual headnotes thus situate each piece and its author more precisely in their time and place, while suggesting thematic connections within and across chapters and national cases.