Jaqueline Fernandes

Through the Instituto Afrolatinas, Jaqueline is challenging the racism and misogyny embedded in the cultural production sector by enabling Black women to take up powerful positions and eliminate the inequitable premises in the culture marketplace.

Jaqueline works against racism and sexism by combining the usual solutions of awareness-raising, power analysis, and cultural heritage affirmation with systemic solutions such as open learning, professional apprenticeships, the creation of fair labor standards, and public policy reform in a new way through a successful cultural festival, and related educational and professional training programs in the sector. After twenty years of accumulated work, the originality and impact of Jaqueline's work are seen more clearly when understood as a coherent and complete set of projects necessary to keep a movement alive all year round for the dignity and inclusion of black people, especially women, in the cultural sector.

From the organization she founded, the Afrolatinas Institute, Jaqueline weaves three threads into everything she does: (1) she raises awareness about the roots of racism and sexism in society, specifically in the cultural sector; (2) she increases the confidence and capacity of black women as artists, musicians, dancers, and producers of cultural entertainment to challenge structural inequality; and (3) she invites government and business to tackle racism and sexism through new policies, practices and funding.

These three lines of work are clearly visible in its main project, the annual Latinidades Festival. The Festival began 16 years ago in Brasilia, the country's capital, to address the fact that Brazil's active calendar of cultural festivals neglect black culture in general and black female artists in particular. To turn an annual festival into a "movement", Jaqueline realized that a permanent base with visibility was needed. To do this, she created Casa Afrolatina (Afrolatina House) in Varjão, a peripheral neighborhood of 6,000 people in Brasília, where 80% of the population is black and poor. Casa Afrolatinas in Brasília has become a fertile and welcoming space for various events, such as the 50th anniversary of hip-hop culture and its recognition as a Brazilian cultural heritage. The Afrolatina House is also the production base for the Institute's activities, which include, among others, Serviço de Preta, Afrolatinas University, and the Afroteca.

Historically in Brazil, black women have benefited the least in all areas of public policy, from health, education, income, employment and housing to culture and leisure. These are clear remnants of slavery, racism and misogyny, issues deeply rooted in the history of Brazil's formation. It is the quintessential intersectional problem.

The creative economy, the economic sector of cultural activities in the country, was responsible for 4.0% of all formal jobs in the Federal District. In other words, around 40,715 formal contracts were directly related to cultural activities. As a result, this sector employed more than 22,000 workers in 2016, a year marked by the country's economic crisis.

In Brazil, there are two main government grants that support culture, the Rouanet Law (1991) and the Paulo Gustavo Law (2022). The Paulo Gustavo Law is a response to the pandemic effects on the cultural sector, and it is the largest government investment in culture in the country, a total of R$3.8 billion. It was divided between municipalities and states upon the submission of a distribution plan within the region. As it is a new law, there is not much evidence of the consequences of this fund’s distribution and its capillarity. The Rouanet Law, on the other hand, has been one of the country's main sources of investment in culture since its creation in 1991 and it has been the target of much criticism in terms of distribution and transparency. It is a tax incentive law through whereby projects approved by the government can be financed by different companies or private donors in exchange for a tax deduction.

Geciane Porto, a professor of economics at the University of São Paulo (USP), points out that the autonomy of the investor in choosing the project they want to support, the lack of transparency in the government's approval process and the absence of know-how on the part of emerging artists to write competitive and quality proposals favor well-known artists and proponents. It's no surprise, then, that the profile of those who receive Rouanet subsidies reflects the country's history of racial and gender discrimination. The traditional cultural practices of black and indigenous populations were illegal for a long time. Capoeira, a dance-marital arts, for example, was illegal until the 1920s, and its practitioners could be imprisoned or even receive physical punishment. State exclusion mechanisms are historically determined and, if these issues are not resolved, new subsidies, such as the Paulo Gustavo law, may never reach vulnerable communities as intended.

The lack of entry into the market and of learning opportunities is a key factor for keeping women, mainly Black women, marginal to the work in the cultural sector especially in areas like directorship, curation, and technical production – beyond the position of artists. According to research carried out by Thabata Arruda (a music researcher and content creator) in partnership with the Social Service of Commerce (SESC), when analyzing the gender presence in some of the main Brazilian festivals that took place between 2016-2018, only 19% of artists were women. The research only included artists – and not workers – and it did not consider a racial breakdown. This points to another issue: the lack of data outlining discrimination against black people in the cultural sector.

In terms of race, 57.6% of Brasília's population is black; on average, blacks have a 40% lower income than non-blacks; and 64% of the black population lives in neighborhoods where the total average of household income is less than R$3,101.00 (US$618.00) (Codeplan, 2018). Racial inequalities are also deeply expressed when filtered by gender. Three-quarters of women (66.6%) in the highest-income population are white, and this proportion drops significantly among the lower-income groups. In the low-income population, 68.1% of women are black. In terms of occupation, 15.8% of black Brazilian women work as housekeepers, while only 7.5% of white women work in this field.

For Jaqueline, culture is both a means and an end to combating racial and gender discrimination. That's why, through the Afrolatinas Institute, she works primarily on three elements needed to combat racism and sexism in the cultural sector: (1) strengthening black identities; (2) political advocacy; and (3) training black people. The Afrolatinas Institute's strategy combines these three strategies to great effect.

The Afrolatinas Institute seeks to demonstrate how the cultural sector is just as racist and sexist as other parts of society, and perhaps even more so. The origin of all the work carried out by the Institute, the Latinidades Festival, is a shining example of how an anti-racist cultural festival is organized. Nothing raises awareness of racism and sexism more than experiencing its antidote. Held since 2008, the festival is an open and free space where the public has access to performances, discussions, art, literature, lectures, and products directed to and produced by black people. It is also creating and strengthening black symbols at the same time as they become a tool for advocacy. In 2014, seven years after the festival was created, July 25 was established by law as Black Women's Day, echoing the principles of the International Day of Latin American and Caribbean Black Women. The Latinidades Festival played a decisive role in this achievement, alongside Brazil's black women's movements. The date has existed internationally since 1992 and, once sanctioned by national law, it honors Tereza de Benguela, an enslaved woman who fled to a quilombo where she led an important center of resistance, giving refuge to other enslaved fugitives and indigenous people during the colonial period. The festival is held during this time of year to celebrate this day and remember the important black female and male heroes of Brazilian history. The 2023 festival was held in four major Brazilian cities, as well as talks about the festival in other countries.

The festival is also important to foster workers’ dignity in the cultural sector, as they fully respect the labor laws and provide training for the laborers. It is such a reference in the emerging field of diversity, equity and inclusion in the cultural sector that it now travels all over the country speaking on the subject and offering consultancy for companies. Jaqueline is now exploring how to influence all the cultural festivals in Brazil through some kind of norms and standards initiative to change the way programming and hiring decisions are made.

Education and training are core to the Institute’s strategy. As a bottom-up strategy, Afrolatinas has designed and runs capacity building programs for the creation and development of cultural projects and for the entry of its students into the cultural market.

The Afrolatinas University is one of the other activities carried out within Casa Afrolatina. It is an open, hybrid and Afrocentric institution with the mission of contributing to the democratization of technical, instrumental, political and philosophical knowledge about black histories, arts and culture. Its aim is to strengthen alternative paradigms for teaching, learning and integrating art, culture and education. They are using new tools, processes and integrative practices to train black people in cultural production, mainly on how to digitize music, understand copyrights, develop artistic careers, think about the social and intersectional participation of black people in the cultural sector and about black cultural memory and heritage in Latin America. There is also the Afroteca, an open, mobile and freely accessible library with more than 200 titles of Afrocentric books.

Another program run in a hybrid format (online and/or face-to-face) is "Serviço de Preta" (Black Service), named as a subversion of the expression "serviço de preto" commonly used to refer to poorly done services. In this program, they train black women as entrepreneurs to work in the creative economy, through courses, workshops, mentoring, and potential individual grants, demonstrating that black people can offer services of excellence. According to Jaqueline, most of the time, black labor in cultural productions is concentrated in manual labor. This is a way of changing that scenario, as it focuses on a micro-political strategy to bring black people into positions of power and promote greater equity. For example, one of the students who did her first training at the age of 17, became one of the Institute's directors, working with both the festival and the educational programs, and later became the Head of the Advisory Office for Social Participation and Diversity at the Brazilian Ministry of Communications.

The festival also included activities for and with black children, empowering them about their ancestry and giving them the stage to share their own lived experiences as black children. Later, the activity evolved into the so-called Latinidades Kids, an effort to offer a version of the festival and activities for primary and secondary school students in Brasília's public schools. Unfortunately, the program was discontinued due to lack of funding.

Jaqueline feels comfortable working both with her community and with actors in the government and businesses. Some of her greatest successes have come from lobbying the public sector to implement affirmative action in government cultural grants. Her success is based, partly, on her understanding of how ideas come in and out of fashion in government and that long-term sustainable gains come from deep work to move bureaucracy. She personally created new opportunities for people from the peripheries, women, indigenous people, and vulnerable cultural groups while working for the government from 2014 to 2018. During the Bolsonaro years, these examples were cited by civil society to resist government's backsliding. Jaqueline teaches that politics and culture are inseparable and considers that her role is to fight for a more equal distribution of funding. She strongly defends affirmative action, specifically as a form of historical reparation for the lack of access to resources and the criminalization of black culture. Due to her commitment to providing free access to all Afrolatinas activities, including the festival, the Institute relies on government grants, donations and funding from foundations. In the last three years (2020-2022), around two-thirds of their funding has come from government grants and one-third from international foundations. They adopt an active partnership approach to sustain educational programs, working in partnership with various social organizations in and outside Brazil.

The Institute's impact profile is impressive and growing. In 2023, the festival had 10,000 people participating in educational and artistic activities and generated 700 jobs for black women and 10 for people with disabilities. It also generated income for 40 black women entrepreneurs through the Afro Fair. The Afrolatinas University has paid 90 professionals and published six books. The latest publication, which condensed 15 years of the festival's history, and consequently ,15 years of black memory, was published in three languages, Portuguese, Spanish and English, due to Jaqueline's recent engagement with black universities in the United States and other initiatives in South America. All of which are aligned with her vision of the Afrolatin Diaspora.

Jaqueline's goal for the next 10 years is to systematically increase these numbers and expand her social and economic impact in the creative economy. At the moment, she is working on partnerships with other Afro-diasporic festivals in Latin America and generating more data on Brazil's cultural production sector to understand the participation of black people in the creative economy (especially black women) and also to better portray the inequalities in the sector. She hopes to create more sustainable models for the festival and the courses. Jaqueline also aims to restart Latinidades Kids in public schools and wants to turn the courses taught at the university into books to increase the collection on Afro-Latina Women matters.

Jaqueline's entrepreneurial profile from childhood reflects the battles that one has to fight and win to express an Afro-Latina identity in a society that systematically discriminates against it. Daughter of a domestic worker and an absent father, Jaqueline grew up on the outskirts of Brasília, in Planaltina, the last administrative region in the northern part of the Federal District. Domestic violence, street violence, and death were part of her daily life. There was a sense of community in the periphery, even though there was no shared awareness of their class or racial conditions.

Her political awareness began around the age of 13, when she joined the anarcho-punk movement. Although it was very white centered and based on European references, it gave her important macro-political notions about her own reality. Later, she started playing bass in a band and producing fanzines about her teenage discontentment. This led to her first forays as a cultural producer, a profession she would later pursue for most of her life. At 17, she got to know the hip-hop movement. Unlike anarcho-punk, hip-hop focused on the micro-politics of the black community, explaining some of the things she was experiencing and feeling at the time. It also brought her black references and the oral culture, mainly through RAP.

At the beginning of her adult life, Jaqueline decided to study journalism. Through FIES, a government program that helps poor students finance their educational journey at private universities, she got a scholarship to study at IESB, a private university in Brasília. During her internship, she began working with cultural productions, immersing herself for the first time in the lives of professional artists. However, she suffered humiliation and exploitation because of her race and gender identities, leading her to sue the company after she left. In addition, she realized that there weren't many black artists at the agency where she worked, and those that there were, were treated differently from white artists. After finishing college and leaving her internship, she founded Griô, Brasília's first agency made by and for black artists, with a focus on black women.

Griô was the beginning of Jaqueline's attempt to create a decolonized cultural project, putting many black artists in the media and making them known in the cultural production sector. With the need to broaden her impact and spread black culture even further, in 2008 she started the Latinidades Festival. Based on Jaqueline's recognition and influence in the cultural sector, she became Undersecretary for Citizenship and Cultural Diversity between January 2015 and December 2018. After leaving the government, looking to take the next step beyond the impact of the Festival, she dedicated herself exclusively to Afrolatinas Institute and fighting race and gender inequalities in the Brazilian and Latin American cultural sector.