Afro-World: African-Diaspora Thought and Practice in Montevideo, Uruguay, 1830-2000
Were one to sit down to compile a list of the great cities of the African diaspora, Montevideo, Uruguay, would not be one of the first names to come to mind. Yet during the period of Spanish colonial rule, thousands of Africans arrived in the city, brought on slaving vessels from Africa and Brazil. By 1810, the population both of Montevideo (9,400) and the larger colony of the Banda Oriental (an estimated 30,000) was one-third black and mulatto. Two centuries later, as a result of large-scale European immigration during the 1800s and early 1900s that proportion had fallen to 6 percent, with Afro-Uruguayans numbering approximately 180,000 people in a national population of 3 million.