Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
Ideally, the study of the political economy of Afro-Latin America should be part and parcel of that of the political economy of Latin America as a whole. Unfortunately, true to the tendency toward fragmentation and specialization in the human as well as in the physical sciences, that has not generally been the case. The problem has been made worse by the low salience of the nonwhite races in the Americas, due to their low socioeconomic and political status. It is further compounded by the ambiguity and evasiveness of the Latin American racial ideology, especially in its Brazilian form, which leads both local and foreign observers and social scientists to conclude first that there is no racial problem (though such a position is no longer seriously held by scholars) and then that race is irrelevant to the study of the region's political economy.
This article was written as part of the work done in preparation for the Symposium on the Political Economy of the Black World held at the UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies on 10–12 May 1979, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It also developed in the context of a research project on career mobility of Afro-Brazilians supported by the UCLA Committee on International and Comparative Studies (Ford Foundation), UCLA Institute of American Cultures, and the Center for Afro-American Studies. Summer research support was provided by the UCLA Faculty Development Program. I am grateful for all these contributions. I also wish to thank Michael Mitchell for important advice and suggestions; Zé Maria Nunes Pereira for letting me use the library of the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiático (Rio de Janeiro); Clotilde Blake for valuable research assistance; and the three anonymous reviewers from the LARR. None of these persons or institutions is responsible, however, for any errors in this article.