The signifiers negro (in Spanish and Portuguese) and 'black' (in English) are much older than their racial significations, which are products of the invention of racial classification and stratification and the establishment of racist regimes as keystones of the modern/colonial capitalist world-system and the ensuing process of globalization starting in the long sixteenth century. ${ }^{10}$ In a careful historical and philological review of the meanings and uses of labels and categories to name and classify peoples in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, Forbes (1993) shows how, in the Middle Ages, negro was often equivalent to moro (Moor, in English), and in the Americas became a racial category along with indio. ${ }^{11}$ In turn, Hering Torres in a genealogy of the meanings of negro and negritud develops a well-documented and analytically sound argument that, before modernity, dark skin colour tended to have more positive meanings than light skin colour, and that the negrophobic significations linked to anti-black racisms emerged in the context of the conquest and colonization of the Americas.  
The first societal laboratories for the historical production of ethnic-racial categories were the territories, peoples, and bodies colonized by the Spanish and European empires that now comprise the regions of the Caribbean and Latin America. The lumping together of dozens of diverse cultural communities under single racial rubrics, such as indio and negro, resulted from the enormous  
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[^0]:    8 On these intertwined inventions and their significance for modern/colonial regimes of power and knowledge, see, among others, Lewis and Wigen, Lowe, Mudimbe, O'Gorman, Pagden, Rabasa, and Said. On the concept of peoples without history, see Hegel and, for a critique, Wolf.
9 For a critique of occidentalist geohistorical categories, see Coronil, Balibar, and Trouillot.