Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation, Racialization and Gender (Mestiçagem, Racialização e Gênero)

Sociologias
Number 21 (Porto Alegre Jan./June 2009)
pages 94-120
DOI: 10.1590/S1517-45222009000100006
ISSN 1517-4522

Rosely Gomes Costa, Pós-doutorado em Ciências Sociais pela
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e pela Universidade Autônoma de Barcelona (Espanha)

This paper reflects on the paradox of a mestizo Brazil and the close relationship between racialization and gender through the analysis of classic and current authors. The article discusses the different processes involved in these authors’ study of racialization, based both on theory and their empirical researches; and considers the intertwining of these two concepts with that of gender. Throughout the paper, the author draws comparisons and makes comments on her own field research on the subject.

O artigo contém uma reflexão sobre o paradoxo do Brasil mestiço e sobre as estreitas relações entre racialização e gênero a partir da análise de alguns autores clássicos e outros atuais. O artigo analisa os processos distintos de elaboração da racialização por que passam esses autores, às vezes de forma teórica e outras vezes baseada em suas pesquisas empíricas e, ainda, uma reflexão do entrelaçamento desses dois conceitos com o de gênero. Em alguns momentos, faço comparações e comentários relativos à minha própria pesquisa de campo sobre o tema.

Read the entire article (in Portuguese) here.

Ciphering Nations: Performing Identity in Brazil and the Caribbean
 
University of Minnesota
June 2011
197 pages

Naomi Pueo Wood, Assistant Professor of Spanish
The Colorado College, Colorado Springs, Colorado

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation explores the interaction of theories of hybridity, mestizaje, mestiçagem and popular culture representations of national identity in Cuba, Brazil, and Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century. I examine a series of cultural products, including performance, film, and literature, and argue that using the four elements of Hip Hop culture—deejay, emcee, break, graffiti—as a lens for reading draws out the intra- American dialogues and foregrounds the Africanist aesthetic as it informs the formation of national identity in the Americas.

Hip Hop, rather than focus solely on its characteristic hybridity, calls attention to race and to a legacy of fighting racism. Instead of hiding behind miscegenation and aspirations of romanticized hybridity and mixing, it blatantly points out oppressions and introduces them into popular culture through its four components—thus reaching audiences through multiple modalities. Tropes of mestizaje or branqueamento—racial mixing/whitening—depoliticize blackness through official refusal to cite cultural contributions and emphasize instead a whitened blending. Hip Hop points blatantly to persistent social inequalities. Diverse and divergent in their political histories, the geographic and nationally bound sites that form the foci of this study are bound by their contentious relationships to the United States, an emphasis on the Africanist aesthetic, and a rich history of intertextual exchanges. Rather than look at individual nation formation and marginalized bodies’ performances of subversion, this study highlights the common tropes that link these nations and bodies and that privilege an alternative way of constructing history and understanding present day transnational bodies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction: De-Ciphering
• Chapter 1: Ciphered Nations
• Chapter 2: Defining Nation from the Outside-In: Las Krudas and Célia Cruz
• Chapter 3: Brasileiras no Palco: Brazilian Women on Stage
• Chapter 4: Breaking Time: Sirena Selena and Fe en disfraz
• Conclusions: Re-Freaking
• Works Cited:

Read the entire dissertation here.

Dominican Republic Country Profile

BBC News
2011-12-06

Once ruled by Spain, the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, a former French colony.

OVERVIEW…

…The Dominican Republic is inhabited mostly by people of mixed European and African origins. Western influence is seen in the colonial buildings of the capital, Santo Domingo, as well as in art and literature. African heritage is reflected in music. The two heritages blend in the popular song and dance, the merengue.

No blending of fortunes, however, is evident in the distribution of wealth between ethnic groups.

The Dominican Republic is one of the poorest countries in the Caribbean. There is a huge gap between the rich and the poor, with the richest being the white descendants of Spanish settlers, who own most of the land, and the poorest comprising people of African descent. The mixed race majority controls much of the commerce. …

Read the entire profile here.

Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times

University of New Mexico Press
2009
296 pages
6 x 9 in, 21 halftones, 4 maps
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-4701-5

Edited by:

Ben Vinson III, Professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from “New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico,” a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.

Contributors:

Joan Bristol, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Patrick Carroll, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Jean-Philibert Mobwa Mobwa N’djoli, Congolese native living in Mexico City
Frank “Trey” Proctor III, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
Alva Moore Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Bobby Vaughn, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California

Creating and Contesting Community: Indians and Afromestizos in the Late-Colonial Tierra Caliente of Guerrero, Mexico
 
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2006
E-ISSN: 1532-5768
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0030

Andrew B. Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1783 the parish priest of Tetela del Río, Br. don Nicolás Vásquez, rested in the hamlet (cuadrilla) of Cacalotepeque as he prepared to trek back to his parish seat. Father Vásquez had arrived only an hour earlier to minister to the ailing daughter of Capitán Luis de la Cruz, the mulato leader of the settlement. Cacalotepeque was but one of a number of informal communities scattered across the mid-Balsas River Valley of western Mexico. Consisting mostly of mulato farmers, the hamlet was neither recognized by the colonial state as an Indian pueblo nor held as a private estate. The land it occupied did not belong to its inhabitants, but rather comprised part of the contested territorial limits of two rival Indian pueblos, Tetela and Apaxtla, situated roughly equidistant from both. Much as Afromestizos lacked a stable and recognized position within colonial racial hierarchies, a semi-autonomous Afromestizo community likewise confronted a precarious existence. This reality was made abundantly clear to Father Vásquez on that fateful afternoon. As he conversed with the hamlet’s residents, some sixty indigenous villagers from Apaxtla approached on horseback. Several local men informed Vásquez that the villagers had arrived to steal away the cuadrilla’s corn, inducing…

Read or purchase the article here.

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

A Mestizo and Tropical Country: The Creation of the Official Image of Independent Brazil

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80 (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 25-42

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

The objective of this article is to consider how Brazil, in the first official images of it as a nation, was characterized by symbols that reflected its singularity and universality: a tropical monarchy with representations of indigenous peoples, flora and fauna mixed with the traditional elements of European monarchies. This makes use of original iconographic sources and texts emblematic of the Brazilian imperial period, which stretched from 1822 to 1889. There are hundreds of images, texts, coins, coats of arms, etc., that picture the country from the standpoint of miscegenation, while at the same time exposing a hierarchy of peoples: in a nation where 90 per cent of the population were African slaves, the selected national representation emphasized the environment of Brazil and its indigenous peoples.

In 1838, sixteen years after the political independence of Brazil, a new institution was created—the IHGB (Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute)—dedicated to the drafting of a new historical agenda, one more clearly identified with the young country now emancipated from its former Portuguese metropolis. Even more interesting was its first open competition, organized in 1844, whose title, ‘How to write the History of Brazil’, already revealed the institution’s intentions. First prize went to the acclaimed German scientist Karl von Martius, who advocated the idea that the country should define itself through its unrivalled mix of peoples and colours: ‘The focal point for the historian ought to be to show how, in the development of Brazil, established conditions are to be found for the perfecting of the three human races, placed here side by side in a manner hitherto unknown’. Drawing upon the metaphor of the Portuguese heritage as a powerful river that should ‘absorb the streams of the races India and Ethiopica’, he envisaged the emergence of a Brazil characterized by its unique miscegenation. It is no accident that the then recently installed Brazilian monarchy invested so much in a tropical symbology that mixed the traditional elements of European monarchies with some indigenous peoples and a few Blacks, and included a lot of fruit. Though it was complicated to highlight the Black participation because of the memory of slavery, this did not prevent the royalty from painting a picture of a country characterized by its own distinct racial colouration.

And thus was provided a model through which to think ‘and invent’ a local history, one formed from the view of the foreigner and the good old rigmarole of the three races. The Empire was prodigious in the production of a series of official images linking the State with representations of a miscegenated nation. From the first engraving produced by the independent country—the ‘Stage Curtain’, painted by the French Neo-Classic artist Debret in 1822—up to the paintings celebrating abolition in 1888, the Empire took great care to produce a well-woven representation. There are hundreds of images, texts, coins, coats of arms, etc., that picture the country from the standpoint of miscegenation as much as they expose a hierarchy: in a nation where 90 per cent of the population were African slaves, the selected national representation emphasized nature and the indigenous peoples…

Read the entire article here.

‘Pretos’ and ‘Pardos’ between the Cross and the Sword: Racial Categories in Seventeenth Century Brazil

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80 (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 43-55

Hebe Mattos, Professor of History and Coordinator of the LABHOI/UFF Memory of Slavery Oral History Project
University Federal Fluminense, Brazil

This paper discusses the meanings of ‘race’ in the Portuguese empire on the basis of two historical case studies. The twin processes of miscegenation, in the biological sense, and cultural intermixing has engendered intermediate strata that have long stimulated the imagination of historians. In Brazilian historiography, considerable emphasis has been given to the invention of the ‘mulato’, as proposed by Alencastro (2000, 345-356), and the ethnogenesis of the ‘pardo’ in Portuguese America, as described in an article by Schwartz (1996). Compared to these interpretations of the emergence of these intermediate categories in Portuguese America, the two cases presented here appear to suggest a more central role for the early demographic impact of access to manumission in colonial society and the possibilities for social mobility among the free peoples of African descent.

Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire

Mixing between Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire produced hierarchical categories for racial gradations during the seventeenth century. Only in this period were the categories ‘mulato’ and ‘pardo’ included in the regulations for Purity of Blood (Estatutos de Pureza de Sangue), which determined who could have access to the same honours and privileges that the old Christian Portuguese received. From the seventeenth century onwards, those regulations stipulated that ‘no one of the race of Jew, Moor or Mulato’ (Raça alguma de Judeu, Mouro ou Mulato) was eligible to receive certain honours and privileges from the crown (Carneiro 1988, cap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520).

At least up to the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of the Portuguese empire was based on a corporativist conception of society and power. Society was considered an integrated organism, with a natural order and hierarchy created by divine will. The king, as the head of this body, was responsible for distributing favours according to the functions and privileges of each of its members, thereby exercising justice in the name of God. According to Xavier and Hespanha (1993, 130), ‘from a social point of view, corporativism contributes to the image of a strictly hierarchical society, because in a naturally ordered society, the irreducibility of social functions leads to the irreducibility of legal and institutional statutes’.  In historical reality, the continuous expansion of Portuguese society in the colonial period tended to create a myriad of subdivisions and classifications within the traditional representation of the three medieval orders (clergy, nobility and the common people), by expanding the nobility and its privileges, redefining functions, and subdividing the common people into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ states (the latter included the ofícios mecânicos, or manual trades).

This ongoing transformation was not limited to territory in Europe, but had ramifications throughout a vast empire, which expanded in the name of spreading the Catholic faith. In this process of contact with other peoples, legal concepts were developed to deal with the new groups who converted to Catholicism and thus integrated into the body of the empire. Since at least the fifteenth century, in addition to restrictions on those who practiced the ‘manual trades’, the concept of cleanliness of blood determined differentiations among the common people and limited the expansion of the nobility, imposing a range of restrictions on the descendants of Jews, Moors and Gypsies. The restrictions based on the ‘purity of blood statutes’, enacted later in Portugal than in Spain, date back to the Ordenações Afonsinas of 1446-7 (Carneiro 1988, chap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520)…

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Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru

University Press of Colorado
2010
320 pages
5 line drawings, 1 map
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60732-018-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60732-019-7

Alcira Dueñas, Assistant Professor of Latin American History and World History
Ohio State University, Newark

Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the “lettered city” as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society.

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, criticized colonial injustice and exclusion, and articulated the ideas that would later be embraced in the Great Rebellion in 1781. Their movement extended across the Atlantic as the scholars visited the seat of the Spanish empire to negotiate with the king and his advisors for social reform, lobbied diverse networks of supporters in Madrid and Peru, and struggled for admission to religious orders, schools and universities, and positions in ecclesiastic and civil administration.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” explores how scholars contributed to social change and transformation of colonial culture through legal, cultural, and political activism, and how, ultimately, their significant colonial critiques and campaigns redefined colonial public life and discourse. It will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, colonial literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Foundations of Seventeenth-Century Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 3. Andean Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century: Writers, Networks,and Texts
• Chapter 4. The European Background of Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 5. Andean Discourses of Justice: The Colonial Judicial System under Scrutiny
• Chapter 6. The Political Culture of Andean Elites: Social Inclusion and Ethnic Autonomy
• Chapter 7. The Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 8. Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Index