new American identities that confirm an Other in political , social and epistemic dimensions ." ( p . 61 ). Unlike Quijano , Gonzalez was not able to escape from the common-sense traps following that centuries-old racialization . In the following paragraph , he paints the American racial picture as a result of the European invasion and minimizes one of the colors of the palette : black . He excludes not only the South-African presence , almost as old as the European one , by reducing from three to two the continents involved in our post- Columbian history . He also leaves the inference to the reader by mentioning mulattos and zambos just in passing among the biological results of miscegenation . It goes more confusing through the repeated use of the category race , as if it could be plural in the human being , and furtherly affirms that such blood outcomes are precise and scientific , when they were created , imposed and socially perpetuated by conjunctural factors always in favor of the white people , who were designated so due to their social status and wealth . In other words , being a mulatto or zambo in colonial America was a matter of consensus and / or imposition in a social order crossed by inequalities that both the European and the Creole provoked around such ancestry , along with the dictum of nature . The explained reduction of three and a half centuries of African genocide — which others call slave trafficking or , worse , The Slave Route — and five centuries of Afro-Latin-American or Latin-Afro-American history would not be so incongruous with the alleged impropriety of including black color in our sociocultural palette . It has been the ungrateful hard currency given to Afrodescendants for both the cultural and the material benefits obtained from them by all possible means of violence . In the refractory narrative on the Afroculture by Gonzalez , it is more disturbing that he celebrates the arrival of " new European migratory flows and their associated ethnic groups from the 1870s (...) immigrants from the now far and near East , which will further diversify the Latin American melting pot "( p . 62 ). Without denying the quantitative importance of this immigration — in some countries , regions and times more than in others —, its contribution to the American musical mix is not proportional , but rather punctual and exceptional ; therefore , irrelevant . However , the strangeness of such a reference is soon revealed , since it had no other motive than to prepare the ground for introducing one of the great thinkers on post-coloniality : the Palestinian Edward Said , who inaugurated this theory with his book Orientalism ( 1978 ). Gonzalez could have sharpened his mind by citing Said rather than celebrating the migration of his continental fellows . Said ’ s academic weight was enough to force the American musical reality into an obeisance to Asian immigrants . In weighing both the sub-Saharan and Eastern presences in America , we notice that the 100 million Africans — a conservative estimate — used as biological fuel to position Europe as the first world and trapped in their silence — are more relevant than a thinker with Americanist intentions . The Argentine historian Judith Farberman has specialized in popular religiosity with respect to the magic and sorcery in Santiago del Estero and Tucumán during the colonial era . She has published two books , one academic ( 2005 ) and one ( 2010 ) for dissemination , dealing with the Salamanca , the legendary venue of witches and demons . Her sources are overflowed with blacks and mulattoes , zambos and pardos ( per the terminology by that time ), especially females . But in her analysis , they seem to be a mere
113