Latin America’s “Black Belt” #AfroLatino #African #LatinAmerican #Black

What is Latin America’s Black Belt? No, we’re not talking about karate, but rather history, geography and demography. The Spanish, Portuguese and other European powers began using the indigenous people of the Americas as slave labor shortly after they arrived in the continents and this contributed to catastrophic population collapse in many regions, especially around the Caribbean. As the natives were no longer a sustainable source of slaves, the Europeans turned to slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa, who were cheap, abundant and seen as the Europeans as more robust and fit for the harsh working conditions in the mines and plantations of the New World. Whether that last one was true or not is debatable, as the first generations of African slaves in Latin America and the Caribbean faced some of the harshest conditions out of anyone in the Western Hemisphere and this led to an extremely high mortality rate and lower population growth compared to other regions where slaves were brought such as the US & Canada. Miscegenation was also a major factor in the stagnation of the self-identified Black population in the region, yet today there are at least tens of millions of Afro-Latinos throughout North and South America and possibly a hundred million more of partial ancestry in what I dub Latin America’s “Black Belt.” Thanks for watching

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