across the region. The abundance of labels should not be thought to indicate the existence of an equally large number of ethnic-racial categories; the latter are, in fact, much fewer in number, as demonstrated in the scholarly literature. For instance, even though Marvin Harris found 138 ethnic-racial labels in his study in Brazil in 1963, most scholarship points to the existence of three categories between black and white, namely, branco (white), pardo (mulatto), and negro (black). ${ }^{14}$  
By the nineteenth century, the term negro had become a positive signifier of identity within the Africana world, as people "living behind the veil" became black positively through cultural expression, collective actions and political interventions throughout Spanish-speaking America. ${ }^{15}$ In the literature of the formerly enslaved Juan Francisco Manzano in Cuba and in the poetry of Candelario Obeso in Colombia, there are racial self-affirmations of negro. ${ }^{16}$ Likewise, black and mulato generals in the independence wars, such as Jose Prudencio Padilla in New Granada, as well as Antonio Maceo and Quintín Banderas in Cuba, positively identified as negro, mulato or pardo. In the nineteenth century, the hegemonic ethnic-racial discourse of the casta system shifted to that of scientific racism, which continued until around the 1920s, when discourses of mestizaje and racial democracy gained prominence. These served as a foundation for official articulations of nation, race, and ethnicity wherein the purported black and Indian problems were to be solved through whitening strategies, that is, Afrodescendants and indigenous peoples were subordinately integrated into the national self. ${ }^{17}$  
In the long sixteenth century, from the very beginnings of modern chattel slavery, zones known as cumbes, quilombos, or palenques, which had been liberated from slave regimes and created primarily by enslaved peoples who had escaped  
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