Mixed Race Studies

When it Comes to Latinidad, Who Is Included and Who Isn’t?

Remezcla
2019-07-30

Janel Martinez

At the top of November 2018, an Instagram meme created by writer Alan Pelaez Lopez went viral. The Afro-Indigenous (Zapotec) activist placed the term Latinidad on a car making a sharp right turn at an exit. At the top of the image, the road sign that points ahead lists, “admitting racism & anti-Blackness exists & a commitment to build solidarity with Black and Indigenous people.” The arrow pointing right notes, “mestiza supremacy & your insistence that your great-great-great-great grandmother was Black.” The car, which moved in the latter direction, symbolizes the ideologies of Latinidad.

A few days later, Pelaez posted on their Instagram account that “Latinidad is canceled.”

With each repost or share, Latinxs, a large percentage identifying as Afro-Latinx and/or Indigenous, championed Pelaez Lopez’s meme and called for cancellation. Others, many who would be racialized as white or mixed-raced (mulatto or mestizo) Latinxs, contested the message.

Though positioned as an all-inclusive cultural identity, Latinidad has historically proven to be a term beneficial to a select few. Gauging one’s proximity to whiteness – gender, sexual preference and able-bodied privileges included – Latinidad incites the question, who is included and, ultimately, excluded from its definition?…

Read the entire article here.

Sabrina & Corina: Stories

One World (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2019-04-02
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525511298

Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.

In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.

Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.

That little Mexican part of me: race, place and transnationalism among U.S. African-descent Mexicans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published online: 2019-06-05
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2019.1626016

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

This article uses semi-structured interviews and participant observation to examine transnationalism and notions of race among first- and second-generation young adult Afro-descended Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the United States. I suggest that transnationally inflected understandings of race encourage both generations to privilege place-based over ancestry-based racial identities. For the first generation, which is mostly undocumented, place is part of their socialization as Mexicans and a way to forge a more secure sense of belonging in the United States. For members of the second generation, place resolves their position as an anomalous “race” not recognized in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Inheritance of Haunting, Poems

University of Notre Dame Press
March 2019
108 pages
6.00 x 9.00in
Paperback ISBN: 9780268105389
Hardcover ISBN: 9780268105372
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 9780268105396
eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 9780268105402

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival.

The driving forces behind Rhodes’s work include a decolonizing ethos; a queer sensibility that extends beyond sexual and gender identities to include a politics of deviance; errantry; ramshackled bodies; and forms of loving and living that persist in their wild difference. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. In these poems, haunting is a kind of memory weaving that can bestow a freedom from the attenuations of the so-called American dream, which, according to Rhodes, is a nightmare of assimilation, conquest, and genocide. How love unfolds is also a Big Bang emergence into life—a way to, again and again, cut the future open, open up the opening, undertake it, begin.

These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.

New Academic Minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies

San Francisco State University
College of Ethnic Studies
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco, California 94132-4100

2019-06-05

Professors Wei Ming Dariotis and Nicole Leopardo have founded a new academic minor in Critical Mixed Race Studies (in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. This is the first degree-granting program in the field of mixed race studies in the United States!

Critical Mixed Race Studies emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. Critical Mixed Race Studies addresses local and global systemic injustice rooted in systems of racialization.

Total Units for Minor: 18
Introductory Course (3 units)

• ETHS 110: Critical Thinking in the Ethnic Studies Experience^*

Ethnic Focus (9 units)
Choose three courses, no more than one from each of the sections A through D)^*

• Section A: Asian American Studies
  • AAS 301: Asian Americans of Mixed Heritage
  • AAS 330: Nikkei in the United States
• Section B: American Indian Studies
  • American Indian Studies 350/AFRS 350/LTNS 355: Black-Indians in the US
• Section C: Latina/Latino Studies
  • LTNS 380 Afro/Latina/o Diasporas^* (has not been taught in the last 5 years)
  • LTNS 278: History of Latinos in the U.S.
• Section D: Africana
  • AFRS 401: Pan African Black Psychology: A North American, South American and Caribbean Comparison

Comparative/Elective (3 units)
Choose one course from the following)

• RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies⁺
• AAS 522: Transracial Adoptee Experience⁺

Applied Courses (at least 3 units; choose one from below; must be with CMRS Faculty)

• ETHS 685: Projects in Teaching Critical Mixed Race Studies (must be for one of the courses listed above or any course with a; repeatable for 1-4 units)
• ETHS 697: Field Research or Internship in Critical Mixed Race Studies (repeatable for 1-6 units)
• ETHS 699: Special Study^*

Key: ^*Required Course ⁺Elective Course

For more information, click here.

Escaping Culture – Finding Your Place in the World

TheBookPatch (an imprint of Wilshire Press)
2019-04-05
168 pages
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1092860482

Frederico Wilson
Sumner, Washington

Freedom is a mindset more powerful than any assemblage, faction or group.

Born to a Mexican/Yaqui Indian mother, and Mexican/Anglo father, the author shares life-altering events and the people that shaped his mixed-race “American” experience.

For as long as he can remember, identity by choice or force has wrought conflict and contradictions. Who is he? What is he? Where did he come from? Where does he belong? Where is he going?

His surname implies he’s white, but his brown skin begs to differ. Is he Mexican? His Mother’s family tree most certainly is, but his Father’s Celtic, Iberian branch bears his Anglo surname. Is he more culturally white European than ethnically Latino? Is he a Native American, rooted in his beloved Yaqui Abuela? To which ethnic tribe does he belong?

The author asks readers to think of this book as explanatory theater; as a three-act play providing racial and cultural context, commentary, and value to the social interaction paradigms we all share, but often fail to recognize in ourselves and one another.

His essays testify, an authentic telling of naivety, consequence, rebellion, and evolutionary awareness. And of life discovered, marinated in an introspective stew of love, fear, indulgence, compassion, humility, and redemption.

He intends to affirm and provoke, and open our eyes to a world seen through an independent and different colored lens. Let your guard down. Consider his
observations a handshake between friends. Relax in a comfortable chair, have a glass of wine and peruse. He won’t bite. Well, maybe, a little.

I’m Darker Than My Daughter. Here’s Why It Matters.

NYT Parenting
The New York Times
2019-05-21

Norma Newton

Norma Newton and her daughter at their home in Los Angeles. Carolina Adame

Breaching colorism with my little girl sent me reeling back into my childhood shame.

Our bedtime routine that night started off like so many others, harried but mostly sweet. After making our way through brushing teeth and getting into pajamas, my daughter and I lay down on her bedroom floor to sing songs, the final step before crawling into bed.

When I tried to curl up next to my 4-year-old, though, I sensed her hesitation. She wiggled her little body away from mine each time I inched closer. “Do you not want mommy close to you, sweetie?” I asked, assuming she was initiating a game to extend our nighttime ritual. Her light-brown eyes locked in on me as she brushed her honey-colored locks aside with her hand.

In a casual on-the-edge-of-sleep voice she cooed, “Your skin is dark. I don’t want you to touch me.”

My brown Indigenous Latina body stiffened; I labored to breathe, outraged and confused. She rendered me speechless…

Read the entire article here.

The Seeker of Stories

Christina Torres: Teacher. Runner. Writer.
2019-05-23

Christina Torres, Teacher
Punahou School, Honolulu, Hawai‘i

“So… what are you? Like, where are you from?”

Like many mixed-race and/or “ethnically ambiguous” people, I’ve spent quite a bit of time explaining myself. I grew up in a mostly white suburb in Southern California, I’ve spent a lot of my time (and writing) trying to explain who I am (my dad is Chicano and my mom is Filipina. My brother and I call it “Mexipino/a”).

Being mixed-race in the U.S. was and is confusing at times. In a society desperately trying to slip an easily-read label, we struggle to fit that narrative. We get told we’re “not-_______ enough,” or not really _______ , as if our mixed status means there’s a quantifiable amount of culture we’ll never be able to maintain.

And, like it did for a lot of mixed race folks, those words hurt. A lot. They made me question myself and my identity, they made me feel less than to my community in a world that already looked at Brown people as less than. Yes, my parents helped me try to navigate these waters and helped me be proud of both cultures, but it was hard when people I thought would get me still made me feel alone. It made me feel as if I had nowhere to go…

Read the entire article here.

These Photos Celebrate the Beauty of Panama’s Afro-Latinx Community

Vice
2019-03-27

André-Naquian Wheeler

Kayla Reefer

Photographer Kayla Reefer’s new series, “Identidad,” explores her family’s roots in Panama.

Black people are everywhere, my mother once told me. I was sharing my anxieties about studying abroad in Europe, of sticking out like a sore thumb. In my head, blackness was something that began and ended in America. My history classes only ever talked about the slaves stolen and taken to the Deep South. But my mother was right. The African diaspora reaches far and wide: the Afro-Caribbean communities of London, Black Canadians, Afro-Brazilians, and on and on. The problem is how rarely the wide, far-reaching spectrum of blackness is taught, shown, celebrated, and acknowledged.

Photographer Kayla Reefer grapples with the ramifications of this everyday. She is Afro-Latina, the daughter of Panamanian immigrants. Growing up in California, Reefer talks about feeling the need to prove her heritage and identity to her black and Latinx friends. To show them she is not simply one or the other, but an amalgamation of histories. “Eventually, I learned to embrace both worlds,” she says. “Because they’re both me.”

Sadly, not all Panamanians take ownership of their Afro roots, Reefer says. She once saw a Panama census stating only 9 percent of the country was Afro-Latinx. The small statistic does not match up to Reefer’s reality, the people she sees riding the bus during her visits to the Central-American country, of her family and friends. “That statistic is absolutely not true,” she argues, anger in her voice. “It just feeds into the lack of awareness and knowledge of what an Afro-Latinx person is. There’s this erasure happening.”…

Read the entire article here.

Open Auditions for Casta by Adrienne Dawes

Dougherty Arts Center
1110 Barton Springs Road
Austin, Texas 78704
Telephone: (512) 974-4000
Tuesday, 2019-03-19 17:00-22:00 CDT (Local Time)

Salvage Vanguard Theater announces open auditions for the world premiere of Casta by Adrienne Dawes. Casta will be directed by Jenny Larson and feature music by Graham Reynolds.

Casta is inspired by a series of casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera, a mixed-race painter from Oaxaca. Casta paintings were a unique form of portraiture that grew in popularity over the 18th century in Nueva España/colonial Mexico. The paintings depicted different racial mixtures arranged according to a hierarchy defined by Spanish elites. When a lowly apprentice is commissioned to paint a casta series for a wealthy patron, he tries to conform his work to a set hierarchy. The images revolt, illuminating a complex portrait of fluid Latinx identities.

For more information, click here.