Latin American blacks rarely mobilize as voting blocs where Indians do

Evidence

Yet blacks – or those of mixed racial background, for that matter – have seldom achieved the status of a coherent political force in Brazil or any other Latin American state, almost never amounting to an effective voting bloc in the way we are now seeing among Indians, for instance, in societies such as Ecuador or Bolivia, or more recently Peru. Organizing around Indian land claims has proved to be somewhat more straightforward, in good part because the land claims are less easily denied, if yet still heavily contested, in their historical linkage to indigeneity and their dislocating disentitlement. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1206

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader theme of how identity claims anchor political organizing — land-based indigeneity out-performs race-based claims.
• SEED: Essay angle: why land-claim politics crystallizes into voting blocs for indigenous groups but not for black populations across Latin America.