“Negra, ándate a tu país, vienes a puro prostituirte!” These words — “Black, go back to your country, you come here just to prostitute yourself!” — were part of a string of insults directed at Gloria María Grueso Mina, an Afro-Colombian woman residing in Chile. According to her, two women approached her on a street in the northern Chilean city of Arica on November 17, 2013 and, unprovoked, yelled racist invectives at her and shoved her, apparently intent on compelling Grueso Mina to move herself and her car from the spot where she had been waiting. Her accosters, she later realized, were Carmen Ocaya Grandon and her daughter Lissette Sierra Grandon, the latter an elected city council member in Arica (Lumbanga de Arica, 2013).

Incidents such as this, in which individuals of African descent are subject to verbal and physical aggression simply for the color of their skin, are hardly unique to Chile. When combined with disparities in education, income, health, and housing observable between African descendants and majority mestizo (mixed Indian and European ancestry) populations throughout Latin America, it is no wonder that Afro-Latin Americans are moved to act, in the form of identity based collective organizing and activism, in pursuit of equality (Hernández, 2013; Mullings, 2009; Rahier, 2012). In Chile, hostility of the sort faced by Grueso Mina had reportedly been on the rise at the beginning of the twenty-first century, not only for blacks but also for others perceived as “not Chilean” in some way. This rise corresponds with what has been described as “the most important migratory influx of the last forty years,” originating primarily from other Latin American and Caribbean countries (United Nations, 2013). Despite the unfortunate familiarity of Grueso Mina's experience, it was nevertheless an opportunity to draw public attention not only to racism, but also to the very real presence of African descendants in present-day Chile. The latter might seem of lesser significance than the act of racism itself were it not for the fact that the presence of African descendants in this particular nation is regularly overlooked and even denied outright in both official and popular representations of the country.