Notes on Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America"

Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America.” International Sociology, vol. 15, no. 2, 2000, pp. 215-232.

Quijano begins by discussing the role of world capitalism in the development of the idea of race, particularly in what is now known as Latin America, and the role of race in capitalism. He describes a "racist distribution of new social identities" that "combined ... with a correspondingly racist distribution of forms of work and exploitation of colonial capitalism" (217). Slavery in the Americas, he argues "was deliberately established and organized as a commodity to produce commodities for the world market, ... and it was structurally articulated with one specific 'race'" (218). Race was also a way to "homogenize" different peoples and erase their identities.  

He then moves into a discussion of the development (largely unsuccessful) of democratic nation-states in post-colonial Latin America. He argues that there is a certain dependence in Latin America on Europe in terms of social interests; that is, in some of the "Iberian countries" (the former Latin American colonies of Western Europe, mainly Portugal and Spain), there's more identification by the people in power with Europe than there is with Indigenous and Black fellow citizens: "So they [the "tiny minority who controlled the independent states and colonial societies"] did not have any 'national interests,' and they were, from the beginning as well, dependent powers, in the specific sense that they were followers of the ways and interests of foreign--but similar "racial"--powers" (227).

"In a clear way," Quijano writes, "the process of the independence of states without corresponding liberation of societies was not a process of the development of nation-states, in the European sense, but a rearticulation of the coloniality of power upon new bases" (227-8).