Mixed Race Studies

Identity A Challenge For Latinas Who Are Black

WUSF News
WUSF Public Media
Tampa, Florida
2016-02-03

Naomi Prioleau

Evelin Diaz is Afro-Dominican and a Spanish teacher’s assistant at Lennard High School in Ruskin. Naomi Prioleau/WUSF

When people think of famous Latina women, Jennifer Lopez or Sofia Vergara come to mind.

Not Zoe Saldana or Rosario Dawson.

The difference between these pairs of Latina actresses isn’t one of talent or fame. Saldana and Dawson also happen to identify as Black – a reality some Tampa-area Afro-Latinas say is difficult to navigate.

“People respect our (Latino) community but for the Afro-Latinas, people just like to group us as Black and stuff and want to deny that we’re Spanish,” said University of South Florida student Jessica Roberts, who is Puerto Rican and Dominican. And Black.

Roberts said she doesn’t speak Spanish, and as a result is told that she’s not “truly” Latina. People say she should only identify as Black…

…However, it’s not so easy to break down the number of Afro-Latinos here – or elsewhere. The U.S. Census doesn’t currently give the option for Latinos to identify as another race, meaning even if someone is Afro-Latino or Asian-Latino, they can only mark Latino.

USF sociology professor and author Dr. Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman said the inability to count Afro-Latinos isn’t the big problem. Latinas who are also Black struggle to find acceptance in both the Latino and Black communities, as well as with themselves…

Read and listen to the story here. Download the story (00:04:19) here.

Dominican, Black, and Afro-Latino: A Confession/Dominicano, Negro, y Afro-Latino: Una Confesión

La Galería Magazine: Voices of the Dominican Diaspora
2015-04-10

Jonathan Bolívar Espinosa (Jay Espy)
Bronx, New York

“What? Black people in the Dominican Republic?” Yes amig@*, there are Black Dominican people whose ancestors descend from the African motherland. However, the question is not so much, “Are there Black people in the Dominican Republic?” as it is “Are Dominican people Black?” Ask that to a Dominican person and you might get cursed out. Contrary to popular belief, most Dominican people are in fact Black or African-descended, but Blackness tends to be defined in socially different ways depending on where you are in the world. For example, anyone from the United States who visits the Dominican Republic will find that most people there would qualify as Black if they lived in the states. Yet Dominican people see Blackness in a different way, and some of the most melanated Dominicans do not even claim their Blackness and instead default to “indio.” In reality, many Dominican people are as black as café, while others are as mixed as sancocho, as layered as cebollas, and a few as white as azúcar…

…As a brown-skinned Dominican, the idea that I was somehow Black never crossed my mind. But what does it mean to be Black? Who is considered Black, and who is not? Am I Black? If I’m Dominican, can I be Black too? Am I Black enough? These are questions I struggled to answer as I embarked on a journey to come to terms with my European, Indigenous, and African ancestry and define my racial and cultural identity. Eventually, after deep study and reflection, I had discovered a racial and cultural fusion and finally admitted that I am the following: an Afro-Latino, or a Latino of African-descent, who identifies with their African roots; and an Afro-Dominican, which is simply a nationalized Afro-Latin@ identity. An Afro-Latin@ embraces four elements of African identity: their racial African features, like my thick, Black, curly afro; their cultural traits, which descend from African traditions such as music, food, language, and dance; their political identity, which is molded by their shared experience within a racist, anti-Black, system of white supremacy; and their social characteristics and personalities, which are African in nature. A Latin@ is simply someone mixed with African, European, and Indigenous blood…

Read the entire article here.

The Relationship of Identity to the Organizational Development of FLECHAS: Perceptions of Race from a Puerto Rican Perspective

The Forensic Examiner
June 2015

Raul A. Avila

The Puerto Rican preoccupation with “whitening” and incidents of black racism obfuscate Puerto Rican identity. The “deliberate amnesia” regarding their genetic and cultural connection with Black African slaves compels Puerto Ricans to disassociate themselves from “blackness” and everything that “blackness” unjustifiably represents among many: inferior intelligence, poverty, and a lack of ability to perform well in high-level positions. Puerto Rican whitening is the answer to the racial profiling of Blacks by law and society, especially in the United States. The resulting disassociation with the African Black heritage impedes the resolution of the Puerto Rican identity crisis.

FLECHAS is an organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977 to challenge this identity disorder among Puerto Ricans. FLECHAS is an acronym for “Feast of Loiza in Connecticut in Honor of Saint James the Apostle.” It is significant that Loiza, a city in northern Puerto Rico, was the Port of Call for Black African slaves. The founders of FLECHAS, natives of Loiza, grew up with positive images of being black and a strong sense of history rooted in their blackness. In fact the legend of Saint James, celebrated by the town for over two hundred years, runs parallel to that of the African god, Chango, who symbolizes strength and the peoples’ battle against slavery and injustice. Founders did not experience negative portrayals of blackness as Blacks in their day were policemen, elected officials, or teachers. It was not until they left Loiza that they experienced racism, so they founded FLECHAS to reestablish blackness to its rightful place of honor among the Puerto Rican community.

FLECHAS is a Puerto Rican organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977. (Appendix A) The founders are a group of citizens, who in the late 1960s migrated from the town of Loiza, Puerto Rico, the center of African slave trade during the period of Spanish colonialism in the New World. With membership composed of primarily Black Puerto Rican descendants, FLECHAS was created in response to the conviction that the Black Puerto Rican heritage has been either misrepresented or generally omitted in any discussion of Puerto Rican identity.

The African influence on Puerto Rican culture is obvious. That influence can be found in Puerto Rican music, dance, art, food, and religion (Galvin, 2005). Moreover, DNA tests conducted by geneticists in 2000 found that 27% of Puerto Ricans on the Island have mitochondrial DNA from the people of Africa (Martinez-Cruzado, 2003). However, the Census of 2010 indicates that only 12% of Puerto Ricans self-report as being Black, while most scientists report that, for Puerto Ricans on both the island and in mainland United States, 47% have African blood (Kinsbruner, 1996). Although these findings are hotly contested, Via (2011) reports that the percentages of Puerto Ricans with African DNA average 20%. Apparently, Puerto Ricans have made a concerted effort to disassociate themselves from their Black African heritage.

For Puerto Ricans, the issue of identity formation has been complicated by five hundred years of colonialism, four hundred of which were under Spanish rule. The issues of racism, Black and White intermarriage, and Puerto Rican identity today can be traced all the way back to the 8th century Moors, who ruled Spain for 800 years. During that period there was no discrimination against Blacks. Historians, such as Robert Martinez of Baruch College, indicate that society in Spain was devoid of racism toward Blacks, and this attitude carried over to Puerto Rico by the conquistadores. As a matter of fact, Martinez notes, racial intermarriage was not frowned upon. He writes:

In the 8th century, nearly all of Spain was conquered (711-718) by the Muslim Moors who had crossed over from North Africa. A section of the city of Seville, which was a Moorish stronghold, was inhabited by thousands of Blacks. Black women were highly sought after by Spanish males. Therefore, it was no surprise that the first conquistadors who arrived to the island intermarried with the native Taino Indians and later with the African immigrants (Martinez, 1990, p. 3).

Conversations with founders of FLECHAS indicate this was indeed the case in the province of Loiza on the island of Puerto Rico, where they were born and raised. There was neither discrimination nor racism in Loiza, as many descendants of African Black slaves like themselves held prestigious positions in Loiza as politicians, writers, teachers, and law enforcement officers. It was not the same situation outside of Loiza on the island, according to the founders of FLECHAS, and when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, Puerto Ricans experienced the same racist effects of “blackness” as African Americans. This writer’s role in composing this article as a participant observer is important and critical to consider since I am of Black Puerto Rican ancestry, a current member of FLECHAS, and a professional therapist for the Greater New Haven community in Connecticut…

Read the entire article here.

How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

University of California Press
January 2014
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520280076
Paperback ISBN: 9780520280083
Adbobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520957190
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520957190

Natalia Molina, Associate Dean for Faculty Equity, Division of Arts; Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies
University of California, San Diego

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I. Immigration Regimes I: Mapping Race and Citizenship
  • Chapter One: Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the U.S.
  • Chapter Two: “What is a White Man?”: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship
  • Chapter Three: Birthright Citizenship Beyond Black and White
• Part II. Immigration Regimes II: Making Mexicans Deportable
  • Chapter Four: Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability: Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s
  • Chapter Five: Deportations in the Urban Landscape
• Epilogue: Making Race in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography

Daughters of Interracial Couples are More Likely To Say They are Multiracial

TIME Magazine
2016-01-28

Carey Wallace

Study suggests it’s because they’re considered “intriguing.”

One of the fastest growing racial groups in the country isn’t a single racial group–it’s people from multiracial backgrounds, the children of interracial unions. A new study has found however, that young women are much more likely to call themselves multiracial than young men are.

Since 1967, when the Supreme Court declared state laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional in Loving vs.Virginia, the rate of interracial marriages in the United States has climbed from below one percent to 10% of all new marriages today.

And by 2050, as those numbers continue to rise, social scientists estimate that one out of every five Americans will be mixed-race.

How will this growing population choose to identify themselves? Will they embrace one parent’s background more than the other? Will they create a blend of the two? Or will they create something completely new?

To find out, Lauren Davenport, professor of political science at Stanford, sifted data from tens of thousands of incoming college freshmen with multi-racial backgrounds across the country…

Read the entire article here.

The Role of Gender, Class, and Religion in Biracial Americans’ Racial Labeling Decisions

American Sociological Review
Volume 81, Number 1, February 2016
pages 57-84
DOI: 10.1177/0003122415623286

Lauren D. Davenport, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University

Racial attachments are understood to be socially constructed and endogenous to gender, socioeconomic, and religious identities. Yet we know surprisingly little about the effect of such identities on the particular racial labels that individuals self-select. In this article, I investigate how social identities shape the racial labels chosen by biracial individuals in the United States, a rapidly growing population who have multiple labeling options. Examining national surveys of more than 37,000 respondents of Latino-white, Asian-white, and black-white parentage, I disentangle how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity influence racial labeling decisions. Across biracial subgroups and net of all other influences, economic affluence and Jewish identity predict whiter self-identification, whereas belonging to a religion more commonly associated with racial minorities is associated with a minority identification. Gender, however, is the single best predictor of identification, with biracial women markedly more likely than biracial men to identify as multiracial. These findings help us better understand the contextual nature of racial identification and the processes via which social identities interact with racial meanings in the United States.

Read the entire article here or here.

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans

Policy Press (Available in North America from University of Chicago Press)
2016-01-13
226 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781447316459
Paperback ISBN: 9781447316503

Edited by:

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans is the first book to look at the impact of multiracial people on race policies—where they lag behind the growing numbers of multiracial people in the U.S. and how they can be used to promote racial justice for multiracial Americans. Using a critical mixed race perspective, it covers such questions as: Which policies aimed at combating racial discrimination should cover multiracial Americans? Should all (or some) multiracial Americans benefit from affirmative action programmes? How can we better understand the education and health needs of multiracial Americans? This much-needed book is essential reading for sociology, political science and public policy students, policy makers, and anyone interested in race relations and social justice.

Contents

• Introduction ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Multiracial Americans throughout the History of the U.S. ~ Tyrone Nagai
• National and Local Structures of Inequality: Multiracial Groups’ Profiles Across the United States ~ Mary E. Campbell and Jessica M. Barron
• Latinos and Multiracial America ~ Raúl Quiñones Rosado
• The Connections among Racial Identity, Social Class, and Public Policy? ~ Nikki Khanna
• Multiracial Americans and Racial Discrimination ~ Tina Fernandes Botts
• “Should All (or Some) Multiracial Americans Benefit from Affirmative Action Programs?”~ Daniel N. Lipson
• Multiracial Students and Educational Policy ~ Rhina Fernandes Williams and E. Namisi Chilungu
• Multiracial Americans in College ~ Marc P. Johnston and Kristen A. Renn
• Multiracial Americans, Health Patterns, and Health Policy: Assessment and Recommendations for Ways Forward ~ Jenifer L. Bratter and Chirsta Mason
• Racial Identity Among Multiracial Prisoners in the Color-Blind Era ~ Gennifer Furst and Kathleen Odell Korgen
• “Multiraciality and the Racial Order: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”~ Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and David L. Brunsma
• Multiracial Identity and Monoracial Conflict: Toward a New Social Justice framework ~ Andrew Jolivette
• Conclusion: Policies for a Racially Just Society ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen

The Audacity to be Black

The Chicago Maroon: The independent student newspaper of The University of Chicago since 1892.
2016-01-18

Vincente Perez

The word African American masks the political strife and oppression that comes with the word Black.

“Black is hurt.
Black is pain.
Black is strong.
Black is Love
Worked hard and long
Black is deserving
Black is unnerving
Because it is so Goddamn powerful
No matter what side of Blackness you represent
Remember
Always
Black is beautiful.”

—excerpted from B(lack)NESS & LATINI(dad)

I remember the first time I was teased for being Black. I was trying to fit in with the kids—all Mexican—so I wore my hair gelled down, but no amount of mousse or gel could hide my nappy curls. It was my turn to get roasted. They threw out the word Mayate (a slur for Black people) and laughed at how much product my hair required. I wasn’t “really” Mexican like they were. My father was Black and my mother Mexican, so I was something caught in between. “Mayate.” The word rang in my ears. For some reason, it hurt just like n***er did, but more than that, it threw me into a state of alienation. This word was flung at me from a language that shouldn’t be foreign to me, but is.

So where did I fit in? African American didn’t feel right. My mestizo family migrated to the U.S. in the 20th century and my mother didn’t meet my father until the 1990s. I’d never felt American. So what was I then? My mom told me: “You’re Black. There’s no need to be ashamed of it, it just is what it is.”…

Read the entire article here.

Who’s Hispanic? Who’s Filipino?

The Multiracial Activist: Covering news of interest to multiracial individuals and interracial couples since 1997.
2016-01-15

Emily Monroy

A few years ago, I wrote an essay called ‘Who’s White?’ I asked this question about several individuals, both famous (controversial shooter George Zimmerman) and not-so-famous (two boyfriends of mine). I ended the piece by discussing whether my daughter, who is part American Indian on her father’s side (he’s from Nicaragua), would be considered White or not. Conclusion: maybe, maybe not.

Since then, a few new developments have occurred. Members of a Scandinavian club whose events I occasionally attend seem to think that my daughter looks Italian – which doesn’t surprise me because both her father and I have some ancestry from Italy. I wasn’t so prepared, though, when at least two people asked me if my daughter was part-Filipino (both were Filipino themselves, incidentally). In one case, the question came after I mentioned that my daughter had a Spanish last name from her father: having been under Spain’s rule for more than 300 years, most surnames in the Philippines are Spanish. One of my daughter’s surnames is Ramos, the name of the Philippines’ 12th president. In the other instance, a man working at my daughter’s school thought she might be Filipino because of her eyes.

I’ll concede that my daughter could probably ‘pass’ as a Filipino mestiza (Spanish word used in Latin America and the Philippines for a woman of mixed racial origins). These exchanges also got me asking my own questions: How Spanish are Filipinos? Are they an Asian people who just happen to have Spanish names? Or are they, like most of the inhabitants of Spanish America, all mestizo?…

Read the entire article here.

Bendición: The Complete Poetry of Tato Laviera

Arte Público Press
2014-11-30
346 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55885-800-8

Tato Laviera (1950-2013)

Introduction by: Laura Lomas
Preface by: Nicolás Kanellos

“i think in spanish / i write in english / i want to go back to puerto rico / but I wonder if my kink could live / in ponce, mayaguez and carolina.” Born in Puerto Rico but raised in New York City, Tato Laviera’s poetry reflects his bilingual, bicultural Nuyorican existence while celebrating the universality of the human condition and his European, indigenous and African roots.

Tato Laviera explores identity, community, urban life, oppression and much more in these multi-layered pieces that spanned his too-short life. Many deal with themes specific to the immigrant experience, such as the sense of alienation many feel when they are not accepted in their native or adopted land. In “nuyorican,” he writes about returning to his native island, only to be looked down upon for his way of speaking: “ahora regreso, con un corazón boricua, y tú / me desprecias, me miras mal, me atacas mi hablar.”

Music and dance, an integral part of Puerto Rican life, permeate Laviera’s verse and pay homage to the Caribbean’s African roots. “i hear merengue in french haiti / and in dominican blood, / and the guaracha in yoruba, / and the mambo sounds inside the plena.”

Including all of his previously published poems and some that have never been published, these are bold expressions of hybridity in which people of mixed races speak a combination of languages. He skillfully weaves English and Spanish, and frequently writes in Spanglish. The importance of language and its impact on his identity is evident in poems entitled “Español,” “Bilingue” and “Spanglish.” Known for his lively, energetic poetry readings, Bendición represents an internationally recognized poet’s life work and will serve to keep Tato Laviera’s words and the issues he wrote about alive long after his death.