Law and race in Latin America: Brazil and Peru in an echo of two stories

Abstract

This study presents a legal-historical analysis on discourses of nation and citizenship in Brazil and Peru to demonstrate the persistence of racial normativity during post-independence that still informs contemporary forms of racism as the “afterlife of racial slavery” (Hartman 1997). The choice to undertake this historical analysis is to confront the recurrent argument that race and racism were not institutionalised in Latin America. Looking at how the concept of race was mobilised in theoretical and legal-political debates over time unveils racist presumptions and reflects their modulation of institutional practice and theory, challenging the supposed innocence of the law in the region (Hernández 2013). Based on a literature review and the analysis of legal frameworks produced during colonial rule and the beginning of the Republic, I relate Brazil and Peru as echoes of two stories of a shared experience of Amefricanos (Gonzalez 1988). To study race and racism as “constitutive of the colonial condition” (Goldberg 2014) implies an effort to broaden our analysis from just states’ circumscriptions. Consequently, in transcending the artificiality of state borders, it is possible to conclude that colonial technologies of conquest were always shared and that racism was/is an efficient colonial tool to guarantee forced labour, expropriation, and white life/wealth.