ABSTRACT
Ideally, the study of the political economy of Afro-Latin America should be part and parcel of that of the political economy of Latin America as a whole. 1 Unfortunately, true to the tendency toward fragmentation and specialization in the human as well as in the physical sciences, that has not generally been the case. The problem has been made worse by the low salience of the nonwhite races in the Americas, due to their low socioeconomic and political status. 2 It is further compounded by the ambiguity and evasiveness of the Latin American racial ideology, especially in its Brazilian form, which leads both local and foreign observers and social scientists to conclude first that there is no racial problem (though such a position is no longer seriously held by scholars) and then that race is irrelevant to the study of the region's political economy. 3
This is, to some extent, a problem of the sociology of knowledge. It is a reflection of the structure and distribution of knowledge in the Americas, which is in turn a reflection of the structure and distribution of wealth, power, and status in the region. To put it more directly, this situation reflects the fact that Afro-Latin Americans, for reasons of their low wealth, status, and power, have had little input into the shaping and development of the study of the political economy of Latin America (Bryce-LaPorte 1979). The consequences of this situation for Brazil and the need to remedy it were long ago pointed out by the Brazilian sociologist Guerreiro Ramos (1954).
