African-Descended Americans,Displacement,and Neoliberalism

The two articles that follow are meant to contribute to a growing conversation about the relationship between development, ethno-racial politics, and environmental justice movements among African-descended people in Latin America. Sharlene Mollett’s article, “A ‘Modern’ Paradise: Land, Labor, and Displacement-in-Place,” addresses current efforts in Honduras to bring Garifuna people into the development framework through natural resource extraction and tourism. The government’s attention to Garifuna communities does not derive from its concerns about Garifuna well-being or the way Garifuna might define development for themselves. It is motivated by the fact that they reside on coastal lands that foreign investors find valuable for their high-end resorts. Irene Vélez-Torres and Daniel Varela’s contribution, “Between the Paternal and the Neoliberal State: Resistance and Dispossession in Black Communities of the Upper Cauca, Colombia,” also focuses on displacement and community resistance to state-led development projects imposed on local populations. The displacement of Afro-Colombians from their traditional communities, farms, and customary agricultural practices is directly tied to the Colombian state’s efforts to cultivate extractive economies such as industrialized agriculture and mining. In both cases, state intervention has left people bereft of their livelihoods and access to lands they have called home for centuries.

While the Garifuna and the Afro-Colombians live in very different environments—one coastal, the other mountainous—and constitute distinct ethnicities, these articles suggest that a comparative study of African descendants, their social movements around sustainable development, and the use of ethno-racial political discourse as a strategy in those mobilizations can contribute to political change across the hemisphere. Such an effort necessarily begins with research on African-descended peoples and their affective and cultural ties to rural and urban landscapes. Having been among the hemisphere’s most exploited laborers in agriculture and mining, African-descended people in the Americas have transformed various ecosystems into habitable, profitable spaces for human production and consumption. The articles published here demonstrate the need to show African-descended people in a different light: as fishermen and fisherwomen or as farmers who build irrigation systems and establish agricultural cooperatives to market their goods—in other words, as productive economic agents. Extending Dianne Glave’s (2010) important insights about African Americans and the environment in the United States, in addition to seeking “healing, kinship, resources, escape, refuge, and salvation” from ancestral territories, African-descended peoples also gain food security and community autonomy. Their environmental histories are especially important for an understanding of their contemporary demands for environmental justice. ¹

The articles published here, in addition to the growing scholarship on these questions, show that African-descended peoples, like their indigenous counterparts, are at the forefront of environmental justice movements because the coastal regions, ore-rich zones, and tropical rain forests that they inhabit have suffered tremendously from appropriation, overexploitation, and reckless management. For example, since the early 2000s, Garifuna women and men in Honduras have formed land defense committees and coordinated their efforts with the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras) to pursue their land claims. One community in Sambo Creek received title to a plot of land only after Honduras’s agricultural ministry purchased it (Anderson, 2009). Along Ecuador’s Pacific Coast, in black-majority Esmeraldas, the Inter-American Fund donated over US$200,000 to help the Foundation for Technology and Latin American-Ecuadoran Development implement a training program that turned Afro-Ecuadorans into community leaders demanding more government attention to infrastructure development (Shilken, 2007). In Brazil, African-descended communities that can establish hereditary, cultural, or historical ties to quilombos (runaway slave communities) can receive state protection for their land rights. One such community, Santana, demonstrated that it is descended from freed slaves who, in the years after emancipation in Brazil (in 1888), remained on their former plantation and had earned the property where their families had resided since the nineteenth century (Brandão, 2007). The struggle for land rights in Brazil also includes urban areas; Keisha-Khan Perry (2013) has shown that black women, in particular, fight to secure deeds and titles to urban plots on which generations of their families have lived and that are threatened with destruction by urban development projects. In Puerto Rico, fishermen and environmental activists fought against the United States Navy for nearly three decades to end its occupation of Vieques (Valdés, 2006).

A consensus is emerging that forced removal, internal displacement, and land loss constitute an environmental crisis, violate community and human rights, obliterate due process, undermine the protections and privileges of citizenship, and exacerbate antiblack racism (Asher, 2009; Ng’weno, 2007). It is not at all surprising that modernizing states, especially those whose top administrators remain enamored with neoliberal economic policies, would make large-scale extractive projects that rely heavily on foreign investment their development priorities. Although neoliberalism’s advocates crow about the diminishing role of the state in regulating the economy, what they really mean is the decreased role of the state in funding the public sector. As many writers and activists have demonstrated, the implementation of neoliberal economic policies requires a heavy-handed state to guarantee the judicial interventions that provide both constitutional and institutional support for de-regularization and privatization—two key principles of neoliberal economic theory and practice. Neoliberalism has engendered “unprecedented inequality, mass immiseration, and vulnerability for the multitude around the world” (Johnson, 2011: xxiii). Across the Americas, neoliberal economic reforms have placed African-descendent lives, lifeways, cultures, and access to economic independence and food security in danger.

Neoliberal economic policies not only intensify existing inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, gender, citizenship, and sexuality but require their permanence and reconfiguration according to the needs of a wealthy transnational elite and foreign investors whose attention poor countries seek out to sustain niche development projects. Those fighting for environmental justice in the Americas, then, test the limits of the political promises of inclusion and demand the end of economic policies that diminish their ability to support their families. Environmentalist politics that make conservation a priority are not enough. As these articles show, African-descended activists for environmental justice influence norms regarding citizenship, shape racial/ethnic categories and categorization, and contribute to their communities’ survival by adopting strategies of resistance that ensure the continuation of their lifeways, means of production, and autonomy. ²

Indeed, another instructive finding of this research includes evolving definitions of race and ethnicity. African-descended peoples’ demands for territorial rights intersect with new legal definitions governing ethno-racial categories. Garifuna in Honduras and Afro-Colombians benefit from some constitutional provisions because they are designated as ethnic, autochthonous peoples with, as part of their cultural heritage, territorial rights. Access to land is understood as vital for their survival as communities; as a result, territories and their productive capacities are considered natural, economic, and cultural resources whose exploitation and conservation should be managed by the people most dependent upon them. At the same time, international lending institutions such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank have provided funding to local organizations to assist activists in making their territorial claims. This intervention shapes racial/ethnic identities at the grassroots by “territorializing” ethnicity (Ng’weno, 2007). Since the 1990s, the World Bank has incorporated “ethnodevelopment” as part of its development portfolio in Latin America. Ethnodevelopment or “participatory development,” according to its literature, “is based on ‘bottom-up’ or ‘grassroots’ initiatives” and the “premise . . . that indigenous peoples and ethnic groups have the right to self-determination and self-development” (Griffiths, 2000). Ethnodevelopment policies funded by the World Bank assist local groups to gain titles to lands and, in the process, demarcate territories that complement their identity as an ethnic group. Despite its democratic and culturally sensitive appearance, according to Karl Offen (2003: 65), the ethnodevelopment approach furthers the World Bank’s resolve to promote economic growth with the private sector. Communities, he writes, “could turn to third parties to exploit natural resources in exchange for social or economic improvements.”

It is too soon to draw broad conclusions about whether black communities, so often bereft of basic essentials such as electricity and potable water, will succumb easily to foreign investors and other third parties who promise them benefits in exchange for access to the valuable natural resources they hold. For this reason, more research is needed, and future scholarship in this area will certainly benefit from comparative systemic analysis. What lessons could be learned, for example, from the significant gains of African-descended activists in Latin America who tie their ethnoracial identity to territoriality by African Americans in post-Katrina New Orleans or a gentrified Harlem? Would we consider black women’s activism in reclaiming urban plots to garden and create food security in Detroit’s food deserts differently if it were evaluated alongside black Brazilian women’s mobilizations around infrastructure development (White, 2011)?

Across the Americas, blackness signifies the “other,” whose dominant characteristic is displacement and dispersal. This bias, as Mark Anderson explains, stems from the contrasting definitions of blackness and indigenousness. As early as the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne noted the difference: ‘Negroes . . . were . . . all transported from Africa . . . and are not indigenous or proper natives of America” (Anderson, 2009: 1). This assumption persists in scholarship. For example, the Institute for Southern Studies’s comprehensive report about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans residents described land loss as both an environmental crisis and a human rights issue for Native Americans while designating displacement as a civil rights issue that negatively affected the black community (Kromm and Sturgis, 2008). This presumed lack of rootedness in the Americas makes it difficult to imagine black attachment to American lands and undermines black communities’ struggles for autonomy, food security, and land. The articles published here and the burgeoning scholarship in this area accomplish the important work of reimagining African-descended peoples as having histories attached to landscapes and to the natural resources therein. Research can help explain why African-descended peoples fight for their homelands and demand the right to economic self-sufficiency and community autonomy.