George Reid Andrews has produced an important book about a country that garners far too little attention from historians of Latin America. Indeed, Uruguay is so neglected that Andrews devotes a section of his introduction to explaining his decision to write the work. While his justification will surely help to draw in readers unfamiliar with the region, historians as a whole will simply be grateful that Andrews has dedicated his considerable historical talent to another country in the Southern Cone.
Andrews' recent work on Afro-Latin America has served him well in writing this volume; he is adept at framing debates in broad terms and providing well-placed comparative context. Thus his analysis of Uruguay is balanced by treatment of what may be representative across Latin America as well as careful attention to the exceptional. As he writes, the question for Uruguay is how and why it came to ‘embrace African-based cultural forms’, a central concern for many nations of modern Latin America (p. 1). This question is all the more fascinating, however, in light of the long-standing perception of Uruguay as a ‘white’ nation. Emphasising early efforts to downplay African influence, Andrews cites the euphoric nationalistic poem of a Uruguayan textbook reader, ‘How White Your White Whiteness’, used from the 1920s to the 1960s. The delirium of the work – in which the mere repetition of the word ‘white’ becomes poetry worthy of imparting to young children – reveals that the road to acceptance for Afro-Uruguayans has been complex, and the extensive history of blackface performance in Montevideo's Carnival gives further support to this notion. The scope of the book, from the 1830s to the present, allows Andrews to follow this long trajectory.
The time frame of the study is also partly dictated by necessity. One of the difficulties of discussing race in Uruguay has been that the state failed to collect data on race for over 100 years, from 1884 to 1996. In fact, 1884 data come from Montevideo only, and thus the national gap effectively ranges from 1852 to 1996. Further complicating the picture is the fact that even the most recent demographic data provide often contradictory results. Andrews deals with this dilemma as well as he can, and in the end, whether Afro-Uruguayans make up 6 per cent (1996) or 9 per cent (2006) of the population, we can certainly conclude that numerically they have not been dominant in the modern period. In contrast, Montevideo's non-white population has always been denser than elsewhere, and Andrews has focused his study accordingly on the capital alone. Yet the lack of statistics cannot help but produce some silences in the text. While Andrews asserts that Uruguay is certainly ‘blacker’ than Argentina (p. 9), it is not clear what this means, and as we move through the text and the twentieth century, the reader is often left wondering about some basic patterns of population, growth and discrimination. The statistics on discrimination that do emerge in recent years are shocking and are treated in detail at the end of the book. Although Andrews is undoubtedly right to conclude that such patterns must have been present (and perhaps worse) throughout the century, it is unfortunate that there is so little quantitative documentation for much of Uruguay's modern period.
In comparison, the qualitative sources for Uruguay are rich, including an energetic black press, one that Andrews cites as the most active in all of Latin America (p. 5). This journalistic record forms the base for his first chapter, where the book begins by tracing the dilemma for Afro-Uruguayans in the aftermath of independence, as well as for his third chapter, covering the period from 1920 to 1960. While the black press proved an important advocate for change in the later nineteenth century, it also made efforts to celebrate its adherence to a ‘civilised’ ideal through society dances. These dances, as Andrews describes them, became key to much larger social developments.
The second chapter examines the dances, and the music that accompanied them, candombe, in greater detail. Indeed, the topic is traced through most of the chapters: the music of candombe provides the pulse of this book. Andrews explores the oft-repeated idea of candombe ‘in the blood’, as something particular to African heritage, and examines how this formulation came to be rewritten in positive terms while still remaining problematic. Taking a balanced view of the dynamic, he both celebrates the way in which candombe brought Uruguayans together in carnival festivities over the twentieth century and highlights its limitations as a unifying national force. As Andrews argues, the idea of inherited rhythms, a concept used by black and white alike, continues to essentialise Afro-Uruguayans. As he concludes, ‘Whatever the road to Uruguayan racial democracy turns out to be, it will not, I suspect, run through the throbbing realms of candombe’ (p. 173).
The choice to make candombe the centre of the book appears to stem in part from a transformative experience that Andrews underwent as part of a drumming crew in Montevideo. Andrews has clearly done his drumming homework, and his personal experience surely helps shape his understanding of candombe as a collective form of movement with tremendous force. Yet, inevitably, its extensive treatment does mean that some elements in this broader national story get less attention. For instance, although Andrews documents the black response to white discrimination in all sorts of arenas, we never truly understand the shift in white elite attitudes that allows candombe to go from being illicit to being a source of national pride. And while the focus on candombe is revealing in many ways, to use it as a primary emphasis in the book means that other potential tensions in the black community remain less clear.
In the end, however, these quibbles do not change the fact that the trajectory of racial ideology and candombe in Uruguay makes for fascinating reading. George Reid Andrews contributes an important work of research and synthesis that brings 200 years of history together in a well-written, vibrant narrative.
