Afro-Chileans
Chilean ethnic group
Afro-Chileans or Black Chileans are Chilean people of Black African descent. They may be descendants of slaves who were brought to Chile via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or recent migrants from other parts of Latin America, the Caribbean or Africa.
History
Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic African slaves were first brought to what is now Chile in 1536 as part of Diego de Almagro's expedition to the region. About a hundred black slaves are estimated to have departed with Almagro south from Cusco in 1535. Almagro's African concubine Malgarida was the first non-Amerindian woman to enter the territory of what is today Chile. Almagro's expedition did however not result in any Spanish or African settlement in Chile. After crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the western coast of Africa, two overland routes trafficked many enslaved Africans to the colony: one crossing west from the northern coast of South America, and another traveling north from Buenos Aires over the Pampas and the Andes. Many slaves did not survive the difficult journey in captivity. The port of Valparaíso was also utilized in the slave trade for maritime transport of captives.
Given that the type of economic activity in colonial times, for climatic reasons, was never any large tropical plantations (cotton, sugar and tobacco, among others), Europeans did not see the need to import a large contingents of black slaves, like that of the Caribbean.
The public source identifies “Afro-Chileans” as chilean ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Afro-Chileans, Chilean and ethnic.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2657644. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1536 and 1535.
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This entry incorporates text from “Afro-Chileans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.