In 2014, when I first heard of Newen Afrobeat, a band from Santiago, Chile, I was intrigued for two reasons:  First, the popular myth portrayed Chile as a “white” country where very few Blacks lived. As the subterfuge goes, African slaves and their descendants either died in war or fled Chile because of cold weather. However, as I discovered through recent research, Black people lived all across Chile, though their existence was denied until 2019, when the enactment of Law 21.151 officially recognized Afro-Chilenos as an indigenous people, about 400 years after they reached Chile as slaves. Afro-Chilenos and indigenous people suffered the whitewashing of their historical existence and culture for centuries. As elsewhere in South America, state-sanctioned “racial whitening” or “blanqueamiento” eliminated or replaced indigenous nations and Black people with European immigrants, and destroyed the formers’ cultures.  In Chile, the process intensified during and after the War of the Pacific with Peru, the so-called Pacification of Araucanía, and continued until the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship.

The second reason Afrobeat in Chile intrigued me is that I could not apprehend how this particular genre could have political presence and agency in the country. Chile lies so distant from Afrobeat’s birthplace, and it is deeply and historically marked by the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement and other more culturally rooted and popular genres such as Chilean rock, Andean music, Cueca, and Cumbia, among others. So, how did Afrobeat reach Chile? How was Newen created and why? What’s its place in Chilean culture, and what are its trajectory and future?