'The difference between other countries and Uruguay?' Expat

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The difference between other countries and Uruguay?

If you look for the differences and what is "lacking" compared to your home country you are bound to be disappointing. Come and see how things work (or don't work here) to see how you fit in.

Expert Page: Quick Tips for Getting Settled in Uruguay

Each country is unique in many ways. The culture. The food. The language.

For example beef... people will say that Costa Rica beef is grass fed and they said Uruguayan beef is grass fed. It may be... but few seem to like Costa Rican beef and most adore Uruguayan beef.

I think the answer for you is to spend more time and maybe one trip you'll just never go home...

Expert Page: Quick Tips for Getting Settled in Uruguay

Having said that, I live a rural life so my experiences may vary greatly from those living in the cities.

The only way you'll find out whether or not the ROU is for you is to spend as much time as you can here. You've visited us in July so you don't need to be warned about our winters. :-)

To me the greatest attractions are the slow pace of life, the friendly but reserved people and the clean air/empty skies but most of all, the lack of the "security" and constant surveillance which is now part of everyday life in the UK and much of Europe. Roads without cameras every 2 kilometers, no drones/helicopters flying overhead taking photos, no regular stops and searches, no microchips in my dustbin to check on what I throw away etc (I could go on for pages) are delightful experiences after the over-regulated hell that is modern Europe.

Nevertheless, Uruguay is a beautiful country, too. It has a great weather and it has terrific views as well. As an expat I have learned to love this place and adjusted to the differences.

I'm MUCH happier here in my new homeland :-)

Example: a middle aged first generation Albanian immigrant to Italy, who was born in Tirana but as a young child moved to Rome and lived most of his life there, was educated in Italian schools, formed a family in the host country, and speaks Italian far better than Albanian, may actually feel more Italian than Albanian. He may still feel a strong affinity with the Albanian people and their culture, but his true "home" is indeed Rome. Of course, this depends on how fast and to what degree each individual immmigrant integrates to the host country.

How true is this? Any input?

Thanks

I'm brownish-pink myself so can't offer personal experience wrt racial prejudice but I haven't seen or heard evidence of any.

In my view, your best option is to come on down and see for yourselves.

Margie and Ron

as far as I can see (I am open to correction), Uruguayans are very open and have no special racial prejudice. As Patrick says there might be some political prejudice for historical reasons. The time of US supported Right-Wing Military Dictatorship is not so far back in time. Also if you are interested read the "open veins of latin america" by Eduardo Galeano. On a less serious note, I found this little piece of Info:

Uruguay were the first team to ever feature black players in an international game, international tournament and in the World Cup.

Come and enjoy your time and tell us then of your experiences.

• First team to internationally feature black football player...

I am from the US, living here four years.

Uruguay seems terribly homogeneous to me. There are few 'black' people here; some Brazilian I think and at times the occasional Yanqui (local spelling of Yankee, a mild slur on us North Americans). This lack of diversity encourages, I think, peoples natural aversion to people different then themselves. Local people will stare unabashedly at someone speaking English even. They are not at all accustomed to black Americans, but as it's been mentioned often, the people are very friendly and welcoming.

Your investigation of Uruguay is a good idea. They are prejudiced, but in that unassuming and harmless way that is so common here.

You can fit in easily. Expat numbers are growing and if you can go with the flow this can be paradise, for anybody.

See you here.

About racial discrimination... First let me correct Contra Veta in that THERE ARE black Uruguayans (they are not Brazilians living in Uruguay). Montevideo used to be a center of distribution of african slaves during colonial times, and the black Uruguayan population cames mostly from that time, at least in Montevideo. In the North of the country there may be many having a remote Brazilian origin, since slavery was overruled in Uruguay short after it became independent, while in Brazil it lasted until 1888, and many Brazilian slaves crossed the border to escape. Black population in Uruguay is estimated in about 6-8%; but nobody knows exactly cause "race" is not a datum to be filled up in our census. That would certainly be seen as discriminatory in Uruguay. Besides, as is the case of most of LA, black population in Uruguay has historically mixed a lot with other races (white in the case of Uruguay, where there's almost no indian population left). So today, it would be very difficult to say how many black or white ancestors has a "dark-skinned" Uruguayan. So race classification would really result missleading and inexact, and would be more a subjective "morphologic" matter than genetic one. Now, this is not the case of the black population in the US, where it has remained separated from the white population for most of their history; and where interratial marriage is uncommon. That's why and African or an American black person will always stand out in Uruguay, and will be recognized as non-Uruguayan. For the same reason, people in the streets would probably stare at a black American more than at a white American. But that is not discrimination, it's simple curiosity. Black African or American people in our streets are just... extrange.

Now, back to the question. Is there racial discrimination in Uruguay? Well, there's always some degree of racial discrimination everywhere. I don't think that Uruguay is an example of strong discrimination. And that may be because it's so homogenic. Racial minorities simply don't pose any risk or uneasyness to the mainstream, nor they form cultural islands that can be a source of mutual discrimination. Culturally, any black Uruguayan is exactly the same as a white Uruguayan. There are no black ghettos, no black neighbourhoods, no black "groups of friends". Black Uruguayan intermix with the rest of the population, and interracial marriage is quite common. However, THERE IS some social discrimination with an economic base that can have some relation with racial discrimination. Let me explain this. Uruguay is not a society with much social mobility. The black population started as slaves, continued as poor, and 150 years later, is still mostly poor. I dont know any rich black person, and though they are many middle class afrouruguayans, most of them are still poor, and thus, a black family in a upscale house or on an expensive car will be seen as a extrange thing. On the other hand, while even if most poor people in Uruguay is still white because of the demographics of the races, a white person in the same situation would be seen as natural.

In the US some "positive discrimination" actions have been taken and the situation, at least for some, has changed a lot during the second half of the XX century. The fact that afrouruguayans were always thought, at least theoretically, as equal citizens as the whites, have made "positive discrimination" be seen as discriminating. The other face of the coin is that this may have prevented Uruguay to help afrouruguayans be, not only theoretically equal from the citizenship point of view, but actually equal from the economic and social points of view. This unwanted effect of the "benign" tone of the way the Uruguayan mainstream treats the minorities, has been discussed by the afrouruguayan organizations during the last couple of decades with no clear conclusions, and no consequence at all on the polical system. Hope this long explanation don't add more uncertainty to your doubts!

National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities

The country's Afro-Uruguayan minority continued to face societal discrimination. A National Bureau of Statistics study stated that Afro-Uruguayans comprised 9 percent of the population and indigenous descendents constituted another 3 percent. A July study concluded that 43 percent of Afro-Uruguayans were poor, with 5 percent living in extreme poverty. The study concluded that race is one of the factors responsible for socioeconomic inequality in the country. The NGO Mundo Afro stated that the percentage of Afro-Uruguayans working as unskilled laborers was much larger than for members of other groups in society, despite equivalent levels of education. Afro-Uruguayans were underrepresented throughout government and academia and in the middle and upper echelons of private-sector firms.

As part of a government initiative to increase visibility and improve communication, Mundo Afro was able to name Afro-Uruguayan advocates for appointments in each ministry and in the northern department of Rivera, which has a relatively large population of Afro-Uruguayans. The government also continued its outreach to the Afro-Uruguayan community for participation in the Quijano Scholarship Program for postgraduate work and increased that participation during the year. Afro-Uruguayan community representatives, however, sought programs focused more on undergraduate education, noting that only 1 percent of Afro-Uruguayans attend college. Civil society groups and local governments conducted five regional workshops and one national conference for police and citizens to increase awareness of minority rights and the national and international laws protecting minorities.

Source: US Department of State

I tried to find the equivalent report of the US Department for the US so you could compare to a known situation but apparently the US Government analyses all countries except the US itself.

Dan's post was informative; as statistics however biased can help us form a clearer view, but those are just the cold hard facts of a reality we all can see. Dark skin plays a critical factor in not only the opportunities you are born with, but how the rest of society sees you.

I was speaking with friends (Uruguayan) at La Llamadas festivities last night about this very topic. I said how I'd read the statistic of 6-8% black population in ROU, but we all agreed that with this race distinction missing on any census reports it can only be a guess. Also, with so many with a mix of race over generations and the many people who are out of the system and not counted, it is exceedingly hard to quantify.

However, other than at this event, I rarely see someone of color, most visitors notice it immediately.

"Despite improvements in cultural awareness, the majority of Afro-Uruguayans continue to live in humiliating social environments. The quality of housing is still a major problem for those living in the poorer areas of Montevideo, as it is for those living in the countryside – they are often without access to safe water and sewage. Local human rights organisations express a particular concern for Afro-Uruguayan women, who are victims of double discrimination."

• United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Report

This is what makes the efforts of black Uruguayan women to move back "home" to these areas especially meaningful.

Over recent decades, a sustained process of evictions and discrimination pushed black families out of these urban neighbourhoods towards poor neighbourhoods on the city’s outskirts, where they were largely out of sight, and cut off from essential services as well as their cultural roots.

In more recent years, however, the concerted efforts of the Afro-Uruguayan community, combined with positive signs from the country’s first ever leftist government, led by President Tabaré Vázquez, have paved the way for the first steps on the road to reparations that will allow black Uruguayans to return to the birthplace of Afro-Uruguayan society and culture.

Much of the momentum behind this movement stems from the need of black women to provide a decent home for their families.

"We have always faced discrimination for three reasons: we are women, black and poor. Most of us are the heads of our families, because our community has historically developed under a matriarchal model, " said Alicia García of Mundo Afro, an Afro-Uruguayan organisation founded in 1988.

"One of the biggest challenges we face is the difficulty of providing our families with decent housing, " García told IPS.

To tackle this problem, a group of women joined together to promote the creation of housing cooperatives, with the support of Mundo Afro, in the southern Montevideo neighbourhoods where the Afro-descendent population was historically concentrated: Barrio Sur, Palermo and Cordón.

These neighbourhoods were originally settled by immigrant labourers and freed slaves who rented lodgings in "conventillos" or tenement housing, in which entire families shared a single room.

The conventillos were the birthplace of Afro-Uruguayan culture and particularly candombe, a percussion-based musical genre with African roots that has become quintessentially Uruguayan.

In the 1970s, however, the rising property values in this central area of the city spurred the forced eviction of many black families to make room for growing urban development - a gentrification process that was further stepped up during the 1973-1985 military dictatorship.

"As far as we are concerned, what happened during those years was an act of genocide and outright racism. Many of the houses in the neighbourhoods where we lived had been built many years before. The de facto government at the time issued an announcement that repairs would be made to run-down houses if the occupants reported the poor conditions of the places where they were living, " recalled García, who was 12 years old at the time.

"People went to file reports so that their houses would be repaired, but it was all a trick: the military government gathered up all these reports and used them to condemn the houses as uninhabitable, and then started evicting the occupants based on these grounds. It was all a terrible deception, " she added.

From forced eviction to a dignified return

García highlighted the dramatic case of the Ansina conventillo, located in the Palermo neighbourhood, where many of her relatives lived. "Ansina" was the nickname of Joaquín Lenzina, a freed slave and poet who is best known as the "right-hand man" of national hero José Artigas, whom he served until his death in exile in Paraguay.

"It was near the end of the year, when people were getting ready for the holidays, when the eviction notices started to arrive. Everyone was crying, and a few people even died before it was time to leave, because they couldn’t bear to be uprooted from something that was such a major aspect of their life, " she recounted.

"It was terrible to watch them carrying everyone off in trucks. I was separated from my family and friends for a long time, because I stayed back in the neighbourhood, but there was no one else left, " she explained.

García reminisced about what was once a tightly knit neighbourhood, where solidarity eased the sting of poverty and "everyone shared everything."

"There were more than 300 families, most of them really big families, who lived together in a single room, in very cramped quarters, " she recalled.

"It broke my heart to see the trucks taking my relatives and friends away. They took them to the outskirts of the city, to places like storage sheds and old factories, where the living quarters were divided with shower curtains or pieces of furniture, and people had to report in every time they entered or left the premises, " she added.

"After a while they gave them emergency housing in Cerro Norte (a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Montevideo), where there was a whole mix of all kinds of things, because they took people there who had been evicted from other places in the city, and they were all mixed up together, " García noted.

The arrival in power of the leftist Broad Front government led by Vázquez in 2005 inspired the women of Mundo Afro to step up their efforts to reclaim their place in the neighbourhoods from which the Afro-Uruguayan community had been forcibly uprooted.

Their first success was the government’s decision to compensate the last residents of the Ansina conventillo, who were evicted by the dictatorship in 1978 and 1979.

With the assistance of García as a representative of the Afro-Uruguayan community in the Ministry of Housing, an agreement was signed between the national government and the local government of Montevideo for the construction of a 15-unit housing complex in the Palermo neighbourhood, specially designated for former inhabitants of Ansina and their children.

"The reparations programme was a major step forward and was met with full agreement. In the past when we brought up the subject of reparations with previous governments (led by the conservative National and Colorado Parties), it was like we were talking about something evil, " commented García.

In fact, these efforts to reclaim a space in the birthplace of Afro-Uruguayan society and culture date back to 1998 and the creation of a housing cooperative project known as Mundo Afro Family Units (UFAMA). The initial goal was to build a housing complex in Barrio Sur on the site of Medio Mundo, another conventillo that fell victim to the dictatorship.

Very little progress was made until 2007, when a representative of the Afro-Uruguayan community was designated within the Ministry of Housing. This speeded up the process significantly, and it is hoped that by the end of the year, new housing will be available for 36 black families.

More recently, the women of Mundo Afro created the UFAMA Cordón cooperative to build housing for the former occupants of the Gaboto conventillo in Cordón, also forcibly evicted by the dictatorship.

Where the drums still beat

The dictatorship uprooted a large part of the black population from Barrio Sur and Palermo, "but they couldn’t take away our drums and our culture, " García states with pride.

"On days that are important to us we always go back to those neighbourhoods, because that’s where the heart of our community is. Now we want to make up for all of the lost time, reclaim a part of our culture, and be able to live closer to one another, " she said.

For his part, Broad Front lawmaker Edgardo Ortuño, the first Afro-Uruguayan member of parliament in this country's history, told IPS that the neighbourhoods of Barrio Sur and Palermo have major symbolic importance for the black community.

"This is where they made their cultural, social and economic contribution, " he stressed. "This is where the Afro-Uruguayan community developed its most significant cultural expression, candombe."

These neighbourhoods combine both tangible heritage, in the form of historic buildings "that should have been protected and not destroyed, " as well as the intangible heritage of candombe and other Afro-Uruguayan cultural expressions, said Ortuño.

"We no longer live there, but we have managed to keep up a series of pilgrimages to these places, where we have developed our culture, a whole symbolism that they were not able to destroy, " he stated.

Ortuño emphasised that in addition to the efforts to begin a process of reparations for the forced evictions and other acts of racial discrimination dating back to the dictatorship, progress has also been made in raising awareness of the discrimination that Afro-Uruguayans continue to face today.

"The government and parliament have embarked on a line of action to promote the recognition and appreciation of Afro-descendent society and culture, as a means of overcoming our invisibility and the false conception that the Uruguayan population is essentially European, a view that ignores the presence of people of black and indigenous descent, " he said.

"The damages suffered by African descendents during the dictatorship, which were violations of human rights, just as other abuses were, were not fully recognised as part of the damages suffered during this period, " he added.

Ortuño underlined that the advances made have largely been achieved through the efforts of Afro-Uruguayan organisations to place this issue on the public agenda, with important support from international organisations such as the United Nations.

The shift in government to the left and the election of the first Afro-Uruguayan to parliament have also played a part.

"We are trying to make our way back, and part of the government’s policies are geared towards paving the way for a return to these neighbourhoods. We have a long way to go, but the process of reparations has begun, and things have been done that were never done before, " said Ortuño.

Nevertheless, he noted, although "a lot of progress has been made, there is still a lot left to do."

"More resources need to be allocated, in order to benefit a greater number of people. It’s a good start, and now we need to keep moving in this direction, " he concluded. (END)

• Afro-Uruguayan Women Find Their Own Way Home

Contra Veta, this is what I read, and interpreted that you were meaning our black people were very few and most people you see in the streets were of Brazilian origin. Sorry for the missunderstood. My intention was not to correct you, but to inform the ones not living here.

I agree with you in the importance of statistics. They are another source of knowledge, that always have to be at hand. Though reality cannot completely be described by numbers, other information and experience that is available only for people living in the country have to be cross checked with the numbers. For example, let's take the numbers of the US Dep. of State about poverty. They say 43% of blacks were poor; and 5% were in extreme poverty. If all whites were rich, that would be an impressive number. However Uruguay is not a rich country, by 2009, about 30% of Uruguayans were poor and 3% were in extreme poverty. So the numbers, if they are correct, were not that different from the general population. As I said in my post, social mobility in Uruguay is very slow, and blacks started at the bottom of the scale being slave. If all poor white were pinted in blue in the XIX century, you would see that a percentage of "blues" similar to that 43% were still poor today. So numbers can be tricky. They certainly are needed to confront the theories. Even my "blue" theory. However, they are not the only source of information.

You now live with us and have friends with whom to talk to get other information apart from numbers, and as I can see you are using all that information to get your own conclusions. Even for people living here, experience can vary. My own experience is that there is very little discrimination. I've never seen anyone being discriminated because of race in jobs, neighbourhoods, or socially. Of course, as anyone, I've heard about such cases but have experienced none. But of course, this is a "white" experience. I have had black friends and colegues, with whom I've talked about the matter and none of them seem to have had any discrimination incident. Again, it was midle class blacks' experience. If you walk the streets you will see that groups of black youngsters are very rare. Generally, you will see a black guy or girl (or adult), within a group of whites. Interracial marriage, wich I think is one of the real signs of lack or little discrimination, is very common in Uruguay. Far more common than in other mostly white countries. These are the other sources of information that gives as a clear understanding of the status of the matter.

Of course, even in Uruguay they will be other views. I respect a lot our Afro organizations, since they help reduce discrimination with their militance, and most of all, they make a very good job to rescue and reinforce the afro culture in Uruguay. However, these organization, as any other themed organizations, live around their objective. You cannot imagine an anti-discrimination organization to say discrimination is not a problem, as you cannot imagine an ecological organization to say the environment is quite OK.

For the rest of the post, of course one can always find negative information on the web if one tries hard. The IPS article, for example, tells us about something that happened during our infamous 12 years of Dictatorship 30 years ago. It was a dark era. I could posted a hundred stories more terrible than that. Death, torture, rape, humilliation. The victims were not choosed by race, but by political reasons, and of course, most of them were white. Our current president (and other political leaders) spent 6 years with no contact with humans, and no contact with light, in the bottom of an dried aljibe (a water hole). By the way, the US Dep. of State report didn't mention any violations of Human Right by that

time... Whatever, if one wants to show a reality as negative, one can find enough negative material on the web about practically anything.

What I can say to Margaret, is come, see, and experience. You will be welcome. Maybe, you will attract more glances than in the States. Make use of it, make yourself pretty and the glances will reinforce your ego!

I'm sure, discrimination in Uruguay will be much less that you have already experience in other places. You can live with it. It's their problem, not yours.

Even though the ISP article makes reference to the 1975-1985 military dictatorship period, its focus is clearly the present, and how things are --apparently-- improving under the Broad Front's government for Uruguay's racial minorities. So this report is actually rather positive.

Concerning organizations that strive to eradicate discrimination (of any type) and improve the lives of people who suffer from it, I personally believe that they can serve a good purpose since they point to social needs that may not have been fully addressed by the leadership and/or society in general.

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