How Are Races Defined in Uruguay?

The concept of race and distinction between what it means to be black or white varies greatly between countries in Latin America. Unlike certain countries where there is a large scale between what it means to be black or white, in Uruguay race is far less gradient. In 1956, Brazilian anthropologist Paulo de Carvalho-Neto found that members of a black civic organization in Montevideo were unwilling to classify themselves or fellow group members as negros or pardos (browns) . “They affirmed that they had never thought about who was more or less black” (Andrews 11). When conducting more research at a local high school, Carvalho-Neto discovered that students in Montevideo saw little difference between who was black and who was brown (12). As explained in 1982 by white writer Francisco Merino, “the concept of who is ‘negro’ is the following: whoever has a ‘negro’ grandparent, no matter how light brown that grandparent may be, is considered…to be ‘of the race’”(12).

However, this collectivity of grouping everyone with African ancestry into the category of ‘negro’ has not always been the case in Uruguay. In May of 1760 the council of Montevideo “passed a series of acts governing pardos (mulatos, usually lighter-skinned) and morenos (‘full-blood blacks, usually darker skinned’),” which allowed pardos to take up new professions as tradesmen, such as tailors and cobblers (Appiah 1999, 1928). The acts also forbade morenos from entering any profession other than physical or domestic labor.

After the emancipation of slavery and the increase of white European immigrants to the country, Afro-Uruguayans began to form into a more collective group, leaving the strict distinctions between pardos and morenos in the past. In African Experience in Spanish America, Leslie B. Rout shows how the Afro-Uruguayan press began to call for racial unity as far back as 1872, with the first publication of the journal La Conservación. For the rest of the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth century, racial unity was at the forefront of the topics spearheaded by the Afro-Uruguayan press (202-3).