Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Latin And The Negro Common: An Interview With Dr. Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas

Racialicious
2012-09-05

Lamont Lilly

Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas is the Interim Chair of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at North Carolina Central University, where his interests lie in Transatlantic and Diaspora Studies. He is the author of five books, including The Africanization of Mexico from the Sixteenth Century Onward (2010) and Africa in Mexico: A Repudiated Heritage (2007). He is the founder and director of the Mexican Institute of Africana Studies. Read along as we discuss: Colonialism, Gaspar Yanga, Ivan Van Sertima and Mexico’s Little Black Sambo.

Marco Polo Hernández-Cuevas: Well, the reason you haven’t heard many refer to themselves as Afro-Mexican is because this is a relatively new term that was first coined by Eurocentric scholars like Melville Herskovits. It was Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán who coined it in 1945 in Mexico City, during the foundational meeting of the Institute for African American Studies. However, that doesn’t mean that a color consciousness didn’t exist in Mexico. Prior to that, we had a host of names such as “Casta,” “Chilango,” “Jarocho,” and “Boshito,” all terms that refer to the lack of blood cleanliness of non-white persons. That would explain why many people in Mexico do not identify themselves as Afro-Mexican. They refer to themselves as Casta, or any of the other names previously mentioned. Recently however, there’s been a movement in the South Pacific side of Mexico whereby Afro-Mexicans do not want to be called Afro-Mexican. They just want to be called Nĕgro — Black. It erases the science and intellectuality of such embedded complexities…

…LL: Whether Maroon, Zambo or so called Negro, most persons of color throughout the Western Hemisphere are all “African Hybrids” of some varying degree. Considering such, how has colonialism maintained a successful barrier of division among our similar groups?

Hernández-Cuevas: These divisions you speak of Lamont, are engrained mostly through language. With the Spanish deploying a series of words that were heavily charged, yes, divisions were created. People were classified from the get-go when so-called “miscegenation” began. We were classified by the degree of whiteness we possessed. I don’t believe in this miscegenation business. Though all human beings are really one, various social constructs were invented to perpetuate European supremacy. Within a social pyramid, “pigmentocracy” was then introduced.

In the case of Mexico’s 500 years of colonization, which began in 1521, the physical colonization may have ended, but the mental “hold” continues to a certain degree. Many Spanish Eurocentric mental prejudices linger today as healthy as ever. Just look at the Mexican public school books our children use. We should examine more critically the one or two paragraphs that refer to African ancestry and their contribution to the building of the Americas. I can assure you, you’ll find very little, especially in Mexico. These barriers are nothing but the product of ignorance and manipulation. The trick is to unravel knowledge–to create connections by exposing similarities rather than exploiting differences…

Read the entire article here.

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. [González Review]

H-Net Reviews
February, 2012

Fredy González
Yale University

Robert Chao Romero. The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. xii + 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-8165-2772-4.

Moving across the Transnational Commercial Orbit

Robert Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico, the first English-language monograph on the subject, makes an important contribution to the existing literature on the topic of immigration and race in Mexican history. Previous work on the Mexican Chinese has mostly highlighted the 1930s anti-Chinese violence in the northern part of the country. Romero departs from this historiography by focusing instead on the economic links that the Chinese in Mexico maintained with other regions of the Americas as well with home communities in Guangzhou. In addition, he offers a substantive social history of the pre-1940 Chinese community in Mexico. His work argues that the Chinese in Mexico were not passive victims of anti-Chinese violence and instead possessed a greater amount of agency than previously acknowledged. In both the United States and Mexico, the Chinese took concrete steps to resist and adapt to anti-Chinese movements and legislation.

Central to Romero’s work is the transnational commercial orbit, an economic network created by the Chinese on both sides of the Pacific and extended to Mexico after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It allowed the Chinese to smuggle and recruit migrant labor, collect capital for investment, and import goods for sale to Chinese businesses, all “in resistance, and adaptation, to the Chinese exclusion laws” (p. 5). The transnational commercial orbit helps explain why, after the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexico would become an important nexus in the Chinese migrant networks of North America and the Caribbean. One aspect of this was the practice of substitution, in which Chinese workers who landed at U.S. ports of entry and obtained a transit visa en route to Cuba or Mexico switched places with Chinese merchants already based in the United States. By exchanging an undocumented Chinese migrant for a documented one, Chinese workers circumvented immigration restrictions under the Exclusion Act. The practice required coordination between Chinese communities across the Americas. In his discussion, Romero makes a case for the significance of the Chinese community in Mexico to other Asian migrations to the Americas…

Read the entire review here.

Chinese-Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2012-11-24

Olga R. Rodriguez, Mexican Correspondent
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father’s hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.

Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.

Chiu’s father took a job at a relative’s bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.

They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese-Mexicans after President Adolfo López Mateos, trying to improve Mexico’s global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.

Twenty-one of those Chinese-Mexicans and their descendants celebrated for the first time on Saturday the anniversary of their return. Gathering at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City, they shared emotional memories of their lives in China and paid tribute to the late Lopez Mateos…

…Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.

But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.

Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.

“Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat,” said Fredy González, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying 20th century Chinese migration to Mexico.

In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China…

Read the entire article here or here.

Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 25: Conference on Latin American History 3
Thursday, 2012-01-03: 13:00-15:00 CST (Local Time)
Conti Room (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Matt D. O’Hara, University of California, Santa Cruz

Papers:

• “Picturing Families in Black and White: Race, Family, and Social Mobility in Colonial Minas Gerais, Brazil” / Mariana L. Dantas, Ohio University
• “On ‘Infected Roots’ and ‘Foul Origins’: Social Mobility and the Memory of Race among Ranching Families in Late-Colonial Western Mexico” / Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College
• “A Family Story: Seven Generations of Africans and Afro-Descendents in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais” / Douglas Libby, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• “Between Freedom and Slavery: Articulating Kinships and Achieving Manumission in Colonial Peru” / Rachel Sarah O’Toole, University of California, Irvine

Comment: Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, University of Kansas

Over the last three decades, scholars of colonial and early national Latin America have worked to organize archives and compile quantitative data relative to the demographic composition and patterns of social interaction that marked those societies. Thanks to their efforts, we now have a better understanding of the impact Iberian, African and Indigenous peoples had on the formation of a colonial population; what the dominant patterns of family formation and population growth were; how the social and economic behavior of colonial elites supported the social reproduction of white privilege; how the social and economic behavior of Blacks and Indios challenged or at least complicated the existing social and racial hierarchies. These efforts, moreover, have now resulted in rich datasets that allow historians to follow individuals and their families over time to understand better the impact family formation and their various social and economic behaviors have had on the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups, as well as the history of particular localities, in this formative period of Latin American societies. The papers in this panel employ the study of families in a generational perspective as a new methodological approach to explore further issues of social mobility among persons of non-Iberian of mixed descent and their relevance to the development of a colonial or early national social order in Latin America. Through their focus on specific families and their local connections, moreover, the papers help to elucidate questions about the long term impact of individual social improvement on, and the importance of local practices and circumstances to, the social standing of families whose members transcended the social boundaries between free and slave, black/indio and white. Together these papers advance the current scholarship on race relations and social mobility in colonial and early national Latin America in two fundamental ways. First, they integrate historical narratives of black, white, and indigenous social experiences—which still tend to be developed separately—and demonstrate that certain social practices and behaviors that shaped social orders in the past resulted sometimes from the coordinated (and not oppositional) actions and efforts of members of mixed-race family and social units. Second, they highlight how socio-economic practices and behaviors that influenced local realities first, and broader regional, national, or imperial realities second, were born out of strategies individual families pursued generation after generation to ensure the well-being of their members.

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

• “‘I Do Not Know at Times What To Do, Everything Turns Out Wrong’: Mixed Children Negotiating Anglo and Californio Worlds in Post-Conquest California” / Erika Perez, Loyola Marymount University
• “Major E. C. Watkins’ Frustrating Adventure: Defining Family in the Post-Civil War North American West” / Anne Hyde, Colorado College
• “The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900–50” / Andrew R. Graybill, Southern Methodist University

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Ethnohistory
Volume 59, Number 4 (2012)
pages 713-738
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1642725

Robert C. Schwaller, Assistant Professor of History
University of Kansas

One of the most interesting aspects of sixteenth-century Mexico is the predominance of native languages, Nahuatl in particular, among all members of colonial society. Conquistadors, encomenderos, estancieros, missionaries, and even tradesmen learned native languages because it helped further their interests in a society divided between two cultural spheres, Hispanic and indigenous. This article highlights the unique position of sixteenth-century mestizos and mulatos as bearers of indigenous culture and language in colonial Mexico. These individuals born of mixed unions were often acculturated in both Hispanic and indigenous cultures. As people in the middle of colonial society, they were uniquely positioned to navigate within and between the two dominant cultural spheres of colonial Mexico. Using Inquisition documents, criminal records, and petitions to the crown, this article analyzes how these individuals served as more than just intermediaries between each cultural space. It suggests that mestizos and mulatos were much more prominent cultural actors than has generally been assumed. Their linguistic and cultural fluency helped shaped many aspects of New Spain’s evolving culture and society.

Read or purchase the article here.

Travels of self-discovery: African heritage in Mexico

American Observer: American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine
American University, Washington, D.C.
2009-11-12

Carmen Castro

Cesareo Moreno clearly remembers his family visit to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2004.

He was on a mission to learn more about his Mexican heritage. Moreno told his uncle he wanted to learn more about the African culture.

His uncle thought Moreno was talking about a project [what project? Is it African-related?] on the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, Moreno says. When he told his uncle his research was about [African in?] their home state of Guanajuato, Moreno says his gave a look of disbelief.

“He tells me in a dead serious way … just no there isn’t. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Not in our backyard. Not in our family. Not in our hometown,” Moreno said.

It’s reactions like this that have motivated Moreno to put so much time into learning about the history of Afro-Mexicans, descendants of African slaves.  They were brought to Mexico during the Spanish colonization era in the early 16th century. It is a study that emerged in the 1940s with the groundbreaking research of anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán…

Read the entire article here.

Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 1, July 2012
pages 1-36
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2012.0060

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family’s honor, reputation, and good lineage.

Genealogical and character investigations were common in the early modern Spanish world, part of the required process for those seeking access to elite institutions and associations. Among other indicators of high social status, aspirants often cited noble ancestors in Spain, both real and invented, as proof of their blood quality. Yet don José was not Spanish and could not credibly establish such a pedigree. Instead, he hired a scribe in the primarily Nahuatl-speaking city of Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City, to consult its noble registry (becerro) and confirm that he was descended from don Bartolomé Citlalpopoca, a Tlaxcalan leader at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival two and a half centuries earlier (Figure 1).

The scribe also reported that subsequent generations of Salazars, up to and including don José’s own brother, had served honorably with the Tlaxcalan cabildo, or municipal governing council. Finally, lest his indigenous origins raise suspicions among Spanish officials, the petitioner also submitted copies of royal decrees explicitly equating the legal status and rights of caciques, the hereditary lords in America’s native communities, with those of Spain’s hidalgos, gentlemen who enjoyed the privileges of minor nobility. “I am a cacique,” don José concluded, and “caciques are . . . eligible for all the ecclesiastical and secular employments and dignities customarily conferred upon the hidalgos of Castile, and can participate in any communities that require nobility.” Satisfied, the overseer confirmed that don José was indeed “a cacique Indian of the Tlaxcaltecos,” and, following a successful practical examination, the viceroy certified him as a master goldworker. Ironically, upon conferring his new rights, they required him to swear that he would never accept non-Spanish apprentices.

Don José was not the first of his family to find success in a social and professional realm normally reserved for Spaniards and creoles (American-born Spaniards). Nor was he the first cacique to gain access to the privileges of Spanish hidalgos, which was not entirely unusual by the end of the eighteenth century. Yet the Salazars of Tlaxcala stand out, inasmuch as their participation in the elite institutions of New Spain did not entirely replace the political offices they held and the historical identities they proclaimed as Tlaxcalan aristocrats. That is, they were not creoles boasting (as some did) of distant and mostly abstract cacica great-grandmothers. Rather, they were both caciques and hidalgos, performing each role simultaneously: Nahua nobles living as Novohispanic gentlemen, Tlaxcalan aristocrats wielding intellectual, political, and legal authority within the Spanish empire.

The Salazars belonged to a handful of families in central Mexico that had managed to escape the general decline of the Mesoamerican hereditary elite by the eighteenth century. The late-colonial plight of the indigenous nobility was such that in…

Thrall, Poems

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2012-08-28
96 pages
6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547571607; ISBN-10:0547571607
E-Book ISBN-13/ EAN:9780547840420; ISBN-10:054784042X

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

By unflinchingly charting the intersections of public and personal history, Thrall explores the historical, cultural, and social forces—across time and space—that determine the roles consigned to a mixed-race daughter and her white father. In a vivid series of poems about interracial marriage depicted in the Casta Paintings of Colonial Mexico, Trethewey investigates the philosophical assumptions that underpin Enlightenment notions of taxonomy and classification, exposing the way they encode ideas of race within our collective imagination. While tropes about captivity, bondage, inheritance, and enthrallment permeate the collection, Trethewey, by reflecting on a series of small estrangements from her poet father, comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America.

Thrall not only confirms that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.

Indigenous Nationalities and the Mestizo Dilemma

Indian Country Today Media Network
2012-07-24

Duane Champagne, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles

Mestizo. Métis. Mixed bloods. Though clearly different, all these terms are used to racially classify people with Indian ancestry. However, the definitions vary—and none is wholly satisfactory.
 
Part of the problem is the widely varying histories of these people. The U.S. and Canada, for example, are settler states, where immigrants who took the land went on to form the majority. There, Indian and mixed-blood populations are a distinct minority.
 
However, many other countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have majority mixed-blood and indigenous populations, or mixed-blood leadership over indigenous majorities. Here, indigenous and mixed-blood identities and political relations come into sharper focus.
 
Officially, racial classifications were officially discouraged in so-called Latin America after Spain lost control over most of its colonies there in the early 1800s. Just the same, many governments, like Mexico’s, promoted a mestizo national identity based on a mix of European and indigenous heritages. In the United States and Canada, we call this process assimilation.
 
In Mexico, by contrast, it is called mestizaje. Mestizaje policies ask Indigenous Peoples to join the national community and economy, adopt the Spanish language, and abandon their traditional tribal communities, culture, language and dress.

Read the entire article here.