Hey, {{first_name | Fam}}!

So I just got back from a sponsored trip to Chile 🇨🇱. It was great! And between the empanadas and beautiful Andes landscape, I was able to do some digging to answer the question I'm always asking: "Where the Black people at?"

I expected to hear something along the lines of "Chile didn't traffic as many African people as other countries, so there aren't a lot of Black people," which is true, even though it doesn't really answer my question as to where the ones that are in Chile actually reside.

But the response I heard often actually surprised me:

The common narrative was that it was "too cold" in Chile, so after slavery ended, enslaved Africans and their descendants supposedly just left.

Yea… na.

That, my friends, isn't a quirky historical footnote. I’m not saying no Black people left because of the climate. But what people who say this likely don’t realize is that that statement echoes an old stereotype that Black people are naturally suited to warm climates and can't tolerate colder ones (the Black Nova Scotians would like to have a word). Versions of that idea have appeared in racial climate theories for centuries.

While Chile didn't traffic as many enslaved Africans as some other countries, according to Chile's National Library, in 1600, people of African descent made up a third of Santiago’s population. Up north in Arica, the region that holds the country's largest concentration of Afro-descendant communities today, the history runs even further back and through a different country entirely: enslaved Africans were brought there under Spanish colonial rule, when Arica belonged to the Viceroyalty of Peru, not Chile. It stayed Peruvian territory until Chile annexed it in the War of the Pacific in the 1880s, by which point slavery had already been abolished in both countries for decades.

So the "too cold to stay in Chile" claim doesn't even hold up on its own terms: Arica is a mild desert nicknamed the "City of Eternal Spring," not some brutal cold that drove anyone out.

Once it became Chilean, there was an active assimilation campaign, and Afro-Chilean organizers today call that period blanqueamiento or whitening.

But this story isn't unique to Chile, and if we only traveled to places with perfect histories of race relations, we'd go nowhere. I really enjoyed my time in Chile and felt very comfortable. And if anything, learning about this makes me want to go back and spend real time in Arica.

What are your thoughts? How does the history of blanqueamiento in Latin America make you feel about traveling there?

Reply with your thoughts. I promise I actually read all my emails.

Thoughtfully,

Nicole