Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture.Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition.Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

The book’s conclusion considers its implications for histories of the Americas more broadly. The persistence of both intrapersonal and institutional racial discrimination in nations historically considered racial democracies has long been of interest to historians of the region. Hierarchies at Home contributes to a field of literature that uses the domestic sphere as a starting point to understand how racialized attitudes persist in and shape supposed “racial democracies.” It builds on that body of work by simultaneously considering how racial politics embedded in domestic service affects the archive and the documents to which historians have access, and by pointing out strategies to counteract the archival dearth. The conclusion also suggests directions for scholarship that builds on the book and briefly explores the complex situation of domestic service in Cuba in the twenty-first century.

Measures that address racial and ethnic inequalities have been an important subject of legal and political discussion in many countries over the last decades. The legal questions include the meanings and purposes of equality, adequate methods of legal interpretation, and the possible role of constitutional courts in promoting social transformation. Participants in this debate also raise issues such as the role of the state in a democracy, the changing nature of racism, the social meanings of race and its correlation with national identity. This broad range of questions reveals the immense relevance of this topic for comparative analysis. An adequate understanding of this complex subject requires an examination of how law and race interact in different jurisdictions to produce and legitimate particular social arrangements. This is the case of Brazil, a country that implemented large scale affirmative action policies in the last fifteen years, a process that generated an intense debate about the social importance of race in a country that has historically represented itself as a racial democracy.

I introduce readers to Raúl Grigera, to master narratives of race (Whiteness and Blackness) in Argentina, and to the hundreds of defamatory stories by which Raúl came to be known and remembered. I use this corpus to sketch the composite story of his life that the book goes on to debunk and rewrite: his supposedly unknowable or inexplicable origins, his early orphandom and wayward youth, his spurious fame as a buffoon of the city’s elite, his oft-anticipated decline and death. Engaging with literature in psychology, critical race studies, literary theory, and other fields to explore narrative’s singularly persuasive power, the introduction develops the concept of “racial stories” and makes the case for the urgency of crafting new, critical counter-stories. It goes on to explore the problem of Black celebrity in a White nation where that idea was almost a contradiction in terms. Finally, it considers my own role as one more narrator of Raúl’s tale – yet another racial storyteller – and provides an overview of the book’s arguments and structure.

This introductory chapter unpacks and integrates the study’s key concepts, theories, and fields to situate the analyses laid out in subsequent chapters. It devotes detailed attention to the inextricable and co-constitutive relationships linking societies, environments, and power. It connects Afro-Brazilian cultures with the myths of racial democracy that helped to shape their emergence in the twentieth century. It discusses concepts of cultural landscapes within economies of transatlantic exchange, and links theories of relational power with Afro-Brazilian resistance and environmental change. It frames the colonial plantation and its monocultures as the ongoing socioecological framework of coloniality, in contrast to the complex biodiverse palm oil landscapes of Northeast Brazil. Along the way, the chapter introduces the real and conceptual places involved in the study, and their interrelations, especially Bahia, the Atlantic World, and the African diaspora. It concludes with a discussion of methods and methodology and an outline of the book’s structure.