neither came about by accident nor meant that people of African descent believed it. Women of African descent may have constituted a visible and sizable segment of Brazilian society, yet in a Brazil that ostensibly lacked race, the category of black women did not exist as an officially recognized population. Black women challenged these historical interconnections between ideas about race and Brazil’s nation-building project as setting the stage for the erasure of Afro-Brazilian women.
Black feminists’ ongoing criticisms of racial democracy and advocacy for the needs of black women provided a foundation for the new generation of activists to organize Latinidades. These intergenerational social movement ties enabled younger black women to highlight the connections between gender, race, and class that were advanced within intergenerational networks of black feminist activists. In this context, Latinidades’s expressed purpose of promoting “racial equality and tackling racism and sexism” both continued the legacy of an earlier generation and showcased the use of intersectionality as an analytical category within Afro-Brazilian feminism. For example, Conceição Evaristo, Afro-Brazilian author and professor of Brazilian literature, attended the festival. Her novel Ponciá Vicencio, a landmark in black Brazilian women’s literature, remains a classic in examining the challenges and creativity of an ordinary black woman who faces multiple expressions of oppression (Evaristo 2007). Evaristo’s presence spoke both to the synergy of arts, activism, and academic work among Afro-Brazilian feminists, and also to the significance of intergenerational intellectual and political engagement for the black women’s movement in Brazil.
The festival cultivated a range of relationships that typically were seen as separate. As is the case with intersectionality, the festival accommodated people from all walks of life. Community organizers, professors, graduate students, parents, artists, schoolteachers, high-school students, representatives of samba schools, government officials, and music lovers, among others, all made the journey to Brasilia to attend Latinidades. The festival centered on women of African descent, but many men and members of diverse racial/ethnic groups from all areas of Brazil’s states and regions, as well as from Costa Rica, Ecuador, and other Latin American and Caribbean nations, also attended. This transregional and transnational heterogeneity enabled participants to share their strategies for tackling how racism and sexism affected Afro-Latin women.
But the festival’s inclusivity also highlighted an expansive understanding of intersectionality that reflected the synergy of intellectual and activist work. Black women’s activist traditions informed both its sessions and its special events. Latinidades did not just talk about the need for relations across social divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and ability; it promoted opportunities to do so. Community organizers rubbed shoulders with academics, as did young people with revered elders. For example, Angela Davis’s keynote address got the audience on its feet, many with fists raised in the Black Power salute. The festival also set aside time for a planning meeting to educate attendees about the upcoming Black Women’s March for a National Day of Denouncing Racism. Another programming strand emphasized the significance of African diasporic cultural traditions, especially in Brazil. Writers, artists, activists, and academics learned from one another. From the content of academic sessions, to a workshop for girls on black aesthetics and beauty, to a session on the art of turbans and their connections to black beauty, to a capoeira workshop, and a tree-planting ceremony of the seedlings of sacred baobab trees, Latinidades saw culture as an important dimension of Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women’s lives. After two days of intensive workshops, talks, and films, festival participants spilled out of the museum onto its expansive plaza to enjoy two nights of live music. Latinidades was a festival where serious work and play coincided.
Latinadades’s use of intersectionality as an analytic tool for structuring the conference illustrates broader issues concerning how Afro-Brazilian women’s longstanding commitment to challenging racism and sexism reflects the specific social context of their experiences. Notwithstanding its myth of racial democracy, Brazil’s specific history with slavery, colonialism, dictatorship, and democratic institutions has shaped its distinctive patterns of intersecting power relations of race, gender, and sexuality. Sexual engagements, both consensual and forced, among African, indigenous, and European-descended populations created a Brazilian population with varying hair textures, skin colors, body shapes, and eye colors, as well as a complex and historically shifting series of terms to describe them. Skin color, hair texture, facial features, and other aspects of appearance became de facto racial markers for distributing education, jobs, and other social goods. As Kia Caldwell points out, “popular images of Brazil as a carnivalesque, tropical paradise have played a central role in contemporary constructions of mulata women’s social identities. Brazil’s international reputation as a racial democracy is closely tied to the sexual objectification of women of mixed racial ancestry as the essence of Brazilianness” (2007: 58). For Afro-Brazilian women, those of mixed ancestry or with more European physical features are typically considered to be more attractive. Moreover, women of visible African ancestry are typically constructed as non-sexualized, and often as asexual laborers or, conversely, as prostitutes (Caldwell 2007: 51). Appearance not only carries differential weight for women and men, but different stereotypes of black women rest on beliefs about their sexuality. These ideas feed back into notions of national identity, using race, gender, sexuality, and color as intersecting phenomena.
Intersectionality’s framework of mutually constructing identity categories enabled Afro-Brazilian women to develop a collective identity politics. In this case, they cultivated a political black feminist identity politics at the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, national history, and sexuality. The political space created by reinstalling democracy in the late 1980s benefited both women and black people. Yet there was one significant difference between the two groups. In a climate where women’s rights encompassed only the needs of white women, and where black people experienced an anti-black racism in a context of alleged racial democracy, Afro-Brazilian women experienced differential treatment within both the feminist movement and the Black Movement. Clearly, women and men had different experiences within Brazilian society – there was no need to advocate for the integrity of the categories themselves. Yet the framing of the women’s movement, even around such a firm subject as “woman,” was inflected through other categories. Because both upper- and middle-class women were central to the women’s movement, their status as marked by class, yet unmarked by race (most were white), shaped political demands. Brazil’s success in electing women to political office reflected alliances among women across categories of social class. With the noteworthy exception of Benedita da Silva, the first black woman to serve in the Brazilian Congress in 1986 and the Senate in 1994, feminism raised issues of gender and sexuality, but did so in ways that did not engage issues of anti-black racism that were so important to Afro-Brazilian women.
Unlike white Brazilian women, black Brazilians of all sexes and genders had to create the collective political identity of “black” in order to build an antiracist social movement that highlighted the effects of anti-black racism. Brazil’s history with transatlantic slavery left it with a large population of African descent – by some estimates, 50 percent of the Brazilian population. Those who claimed an identity as “black” seemed to contradict the national identity of racial democracy, and thus ran the risk of being accused of disloyalty and not being fully Brazilian. In this sense, the Black Movement that emerged in the 1990s did not call for equal treatment within the democratic state for an already recognized group. Rather, recognition meant both naming a sizable segment of the population and acknowledging that it experienced anti-black racial discrimination (Hanchard 1994).
Neither Brazilian feminism led by women who were primarily well-off and white, nor a Black Movement that was actively engaged in claiming a collective black identity that identified racism as a social force could by itself adequately address Afro-Brazilian women’s issues. Black women who participated in the Black Movement found willing allies when it came to antiracist black activism, but much less understanding of how the issues faced by black people took gender-specific forms. Indeed, they found little recognition of the special issues of living lives as black women in Brazil at the intersections of racism, sexism, class exploitation, second-class citizenship, and heterosexism. Brazil’s history of class analysis,
