Venezuela’s constitutions excluded Africans and indigenous people from citizenship

Evidence

The local response to Hugo Chavez’s presidency in this context is as revealing racially as it is politically and economically, a touchstone of the complex history of racial politics in the country. Historically, both the first and second constitutions of independent Venezuela in the 1820s and 1830s excluded African-descended and indigenous people from citizenship. A century later African and indigenous Venezuelans were still being characterized as lazy. Today, school textbooks continue to talk of both groups in the past tense, thus naturalizing their condition as fixed in some irretrievable and regressive past, as though having nothing to contribute to nor forming a constitutive part of the vibrancy of contemporary Venezuela. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1176

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’/‘On Sacrifice’ body of work on how state ideology naturalizes exclusion — here the past-tense textbook treatment as a mechanism of racial erasure.