'Skip' Gates' 'Black in Latin America'
BLACK IN LATIN AMERICA is a new four-part series on PBS on the influence of African descent on Latin America, the latest documentary film from renowned Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., shown here, in Cuba. The series journeys to the countries sharing the legacy of colonialism and slavery, marked with vivid stories and people whose roots are African. Credit: Inkwell Films / WNET/
Gates -- or "Skip" Gates, as he's more congenially known from his many prominent PBS series ("African American Lives") -- heads to the island of Hispaniola tonight for the first of four programs on black identity in Latin America. Cuba is next week, followed by Brazil, Mexico and Peru. The key question asked throughout: How do the descendants of some 11 million African slaves now see themselves? The vast majority of slaves were transported (as Gates notes) "south of Miami," while this series tries to understand the intricacies of their self-identity; as the host notes in a PBS Q&A, "color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating." Hispaniola is a divided island -- the Dominican Republic in the east, Haiti in the west. The two couldn't be more profoundly different. Ninety percent of the Dominican Republic's population has some African ancestry, but because of culture and history, it views itself largely as a European nation; Haiti, the world's first black republic, does not.
MY SAY Gates is far and away TV's best and most thoughtful tour guide of the color divide -- that strange and barely invisible demarcation zone separating people of African ancestry from those of European ancestry. His cup runneth over in Latin America. There are so many different types of demarcation zones that he's like an explorer at the edge of a new and particularly mystifying continent. That seems to be the strength and weakness of the series, if Tuesday night is representative. Of the two, the Dominican story is most revelatory, and interesting. Haiti is less so. He's so enamored of its past that he struggles to understand its present -- or the "present" before the 2010 earthquake, exemplified by a succession of failed states and spectacularly corrupt dictatorships. His chief culprits? The West, including Thomas Jefferson, though some blame is placed where blame is especially due -- Papa Doc Duvalier, but remarkably, no mention of equally culpable "Bébé Doc."
BOTTOM LINE Fascinating series and subject -- even if tonight's Haiti feels incomplete.
GRADE B+
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