Latin America offers a wonderfully complex racial and ethnic landscape for U.S. observers, so familiar in its Eurocentered civilization and organization, so alien in its complicated multiracial social structure. We come to this landscape in the hope of understanding the terrible racial dilemmas that confront our own society, in the hope of encountering a model of racial democracy that we might adapt to our own needs. Winthrop Wright’s imaginative and graceful study offers a perceptive tour of race relations in one of Latin America’s most racially mixed countries. His broad sweep from colonial to modern times places the often misunderstood racial interaction of Venezuelans into perspective. Using economic, social, political, and literary perspectives, Wright seeks an explanation for Venezuela’s racial context. While he fails to find a clear set of principles for understanding race relations in the Americas, his discussion gives a superb view of Venezuela’s conflicting racial sentiments and behaviors.
Part of the great difficulty of this subject, of course, comes from our differing perspectives. As Wright points out, most Venezuelans fail to see race as a one-dimensional individual characteristic. Thus, race serves as one of many characteristics used to classify individuals within a social and economic matrix. While visible African ancestry may be judged a bad thing, its significance depends on an individual’s other visible characteristics such as wealth, education, and professional status. Prejudice related to race may not always translate into behaviors based on race. In the United States, we use visible racial characteristics to sort people into definable groups, and then we apply other characteristics such as wealth or education to determine an individual’s status within groups. Ironically, Latin America, which originally defined race as an immutable caste category, has created a flexible system that rejects explicit racial categories, while the United States, with the most aggressive ideology of equality, created a legislatively invented caste system defined by race. Although Wright’s definitions of Venezuelan racial categories lack precision, his elegant review of Venezuelan race relations and attitudes provides an excellent perspective on an endlessly fascinating topic.
