In the conclusion, I return to two central arguments: the importance of studying Black organizing in spaces of Black invisibility and that we cannot understand social movement mobilization, solidarity, and outcomes from a solely macro- or solely micro-level analysis. Pain into Purpose shows that by putting international, national, local, and interpersonal histories in conversation we can come to understand how even in a country where the disenfranchised group includes a small minority that is largely invisible, a social movement can indeed emerge, gain traction, and achieve some of its goals. Finally, the conclusion explores new directions that the Movimiento Negro and research on the movement may take given its increasing visibility and representation amid the simultaneous persistence and widespread denial of racism.

Chapter 5 covers the tradition of the apotheosis in North America, principally the North East. It outlines the earliest encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and considers how the former were interpreted as shamans, as powerful spirits called manitou, or as the returning dead. The Europeans’ magnificent vessels conveyed an impression of extraordinary power, but not divinity. The chapter considers what a “first encounter” might mean where coastal natives had already had (sometimes decades of) experience of Europeans by the early seventeenth century. It then considers the extent to which European voyagers, such as Francis Drake, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Raleigh, engaged in self-apotheosis. The final section analyzes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century first encounters in the North American North West, the emergence of prophetic narratives and the significance of oral traditions.

This chapter introduces Argentina’s Black movement and situates it within discussions of Black movements in Latin America and social movements theory more broadly. I introduce evidence that the movement has made progress in combating historical erasure and racism and show that despite societal denial, activists mobilize collective emotions to raise awareness, increase participation, and access state resources. The book argues that emotions, both at the societal and interpersonal levels, play a crucial role in the efficacy of transnational Black social movements in spaces of invisibility. Focusing on Argentina’s understudied Black movement, I employ critical race theory and Black feminist perspectives to examine racialization processes, challenge myths of homogeneous Whiteness, and highlight Afrodescendants’ marginalization in Argentina. Additionally, I show that this study contributes to understanding emotions in social movements by analyzing emotional opportunity structures and the role of emotions in mobilization, particularly within the context of Black feminist activism.

There is an enduring tradition that the first Europeans in the Americas and Hawai’i were perceived as gods, a phenomenon known as “apotheosis” or “the act of turning men into gods.” The tradition is especially strong in relation to two historical figures: the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the British navigator Captain James Cook in Hawai’i. It is, however, by no means confined to these two figures. Furthermore, considerable explanatory power is attributed to this divine identification: indigenous peoples apparently submitted before the demonstration of godly power. In the heyday of European imperialism – the nineteenth century and early twentieth century – this tradition was accepted uncritically by western historians. In the wake of decolonization, from the 1950s and 1960s, increasing interest in non-European perspectives on these early encounters caused historians to call this interpretation into question. Three key issues emerge: what evidence is there that such an apotheosis took place? If it did not, how did the tradition arise? And how did native peoples in fact perceive Europeans?

Chapter 4 continues the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (II), exploring the intellectual framework employed by Europeans (specifically Spanish, French, and British) to situate native peoples within a European worldview, taking the narrative from the sixteenth century, through the seventeenth century, and into the early eighteenth century. The chapter considers the use of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to characterize indigenous peoples, traditions of millennial thought and prophecy among the Franciscan friars, theories of demonology and witchcraft as applied to native inhabitants, and the myth of the so-called pre-Hispanic evangelization of the Americas and the identification of the Christian St. Thomas with the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the myth of indigenous peoples as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and finally the myth of the noble savage.

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.

In Chapter 3, I illustrate the macro-level role of a society’s emotional history, defined as the collective emotional response to historical events, in galvanizing state support. I argue that by leveraging the opportunities offered by the Kirchner moment and the bicentennial, with its opening toward new histories of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities, Black activists successfully employed discursive and emotional repertoires of the human rights movements in interactions with the state. For example, societal shame and haunting tied to the concept of “the disappeared” provided the political currency to achieve state-level recognition by calling on the government to address the historically attempted genocide of Afro-Argentines as a human rights issue. This strategic activism resulted in Law 26.852, the National Day of Afro-Argentines and Black Culture, as well as other Movimiento Negro successes at the state level.