Comment on van den Berghe's 'The African Diaspora in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States'

Abstract

In a and rather essay Pierre van den Berghe attempts to explain why people of African descent have shown different rates of acculturation, and different degrees of 'racial' distinctiveness in Mexico, Brazil and the United States. This question (the African diaspora and cultural survivals) has been posed before: in fact, it was the very essence of the Frazier-Herskovits debate. What these debates did underscore was that the importance of African survivals in the New World could be either overstated or understated depending on the commitment of the researcher to disregard survivals or to find them in almost every black activity or institution. Van den Berghe has explored the question of African survivals in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, quite admirably; but what is distressing is the fact that he has ignored much of the recent literature on New World blacks.' Had he shown a greater sensitivity to this literature he would most certainly have emerged with some very different interpretations. In this comment I want to show where these interpretations are possible. Before I do this I would like to qualify my use of the adjectives curious and unwieldy (they were not meant in any perjorative sense). What is about the essay and eventually leads to its appearing unwieldy, is van den Berghe's attempt to utilize the differential rates of cultural assimilation of blacks (in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States) to explore the nature of the relationship between cultural and social pluralism in plural societies. This is not a very useful undertaking and it remains partially unfulfilled, for the essay loses itself in its concern with the facile explanations of Brazilian race relations a la Freyre, Pierson and de Azevedo. What is also is van den Berghe's continued commitment to the concepts of pluralism and the plural society (he earlier rejected the notion of the plural society-see van den Berghe) especially since these concepts have fallen into relative disuse of late.2 But I do not wish to remind us of yet another debate (the plural society debate) for van den