Culture: The face in the mirror is mestizo

Posted in Articles, Arts, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico on 2011-09-13 22:06Z by Steven

Culture: The face in the mirror is mestizo

San Antonio Current
San Antonia, Texas
2006-02-22

Elaine Wolff, Current Editor
Plaza de Armas

A two-day roundtable takes a big eraser to identity lines

“I’m looking for the mestizo eye, the mestizo subjunctive, the mestizo soul,” says author John Phillip Santos as we wander through Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin-American Portraiture at the San Antonio Museum of Art. He pauses before “Retrato de un Matrimonio,” by 19th-century painter Hermenegildo Bustos. Husband and wife have light brown eyes and dark brown hair, but where she is decidedly European in appearance, with pale skin and delicate features, his ancestry seems more indigenous: broad cheekbones and a chiseled nose. The work reflects “mestizo compassion,” suggests Santos.
 
“Compassion” is not a concept frequently associated with “mestizo,” a word that has spent much of its 600-odd-year history wielded as either a derogatory description for the children of European and Native American unions, or as a battle cry in the Chicano identity movement.

Circa 1523, in a creation myth that is equal parts fact and mystery, La Malinche—the mysterious Mexican Pocahontas—and Hernán Cortés founded the mestizo race with their first-born son, Martin Cortés, who would return to Spain with his father to further serve the aims of colonial-era Europe. Mexican and Chicano ambivalence over the legacy of La Malinche illustrates the problem with fully embracing mestizo identity: It means embracing the white conqueror father as well as the subjugated, but re-ascendant, indigenous mother. While La Malinche is celebrated by some as the mother of the Mexican people, she is alternatively known as La Chingada—the fucked.

In a sense, embracing the Virgen de Guadalupe—a mestiza Virgin Mary—is embracing an alternative mestizo birth, a virgin who conceived a new race without being defiled by the “other.”
 
But for Santos and an increasing number of Latino scholars, mestizo is the face of an optimistic future. “We are all mestizo. Our heritage is global. It quarrels with borders; it quarrels with demarcations,” he says, echoing his mentor, Virgilio Elizondo, the San Antonio priest who wrote The Future is Mestizo in 1986. Elizondo and Santos are two members of the organizing committee for the “Revealing Retratos,” Taller Popular, a private, two-day conference that will be held this weekend at SAMA and Trinity University, and includes such participants as Henry Estrada of the Smithsonian Latino Center, author and artist Ito Romo, Sandra Cisneros, and Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. A public conference will follow April 22 at SAMA…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,

Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, History, Live Events, Media Archive, Mexico, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-12 02:29Z by Steven

Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Auditorium of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York
Monday, 2011-09-12, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

Discussant: Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU

Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. She teaches extensively on these topics. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group) and Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación (INAH, UNAM, CEMCA and IRD), and has two forthcoming chapters in Contesting Recognition (Palgrave) and Cultures of Colour (Berghahn Books).

Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this paper presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. Mestiza is a racial category that emerges as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. Mestiza refers to those who represent Mexicaness and, therefore, those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism. Mestiza is then seen as term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implies possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. Such setting has given way to a process of racial and racist normalization that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the commonly spread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because we are all ‘mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status.

The title for the CLACS Fall 2011 Colloquium Series is Contemporary Racisms in the Americas. This colloquium will explore emergent racisms in the Americas as integral to the multicultural and what some have called “post racial” present defined within larger processes of economic and cultural globalization and transnational migration. It will also deepen the understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racism as major obstacles to the construction of intercultural relations, racial and economic justice, and democracy. In this way, it will complement the themes covered by the seminar on Racisms and anti-racist strategies in the Americas. It will become an opportunity for students to benefit from latest contributions to the analysis of racism in the hemisphere and develop a thematic and methodological comparative perspective. It will also become an opportunity for a larger audience to benefit from the information and analysis of cutting-edge scholarship which is also preoccupied with the construction of anti-racist strategies.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Social Science on 2011-09-10 22:37Z by Steven

Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Paper presented at XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gothenburg, Sweden
July 2010
21 pages

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo

Two paradigmatic cases of the building process of post-slavery societies in the Americas were, without a doubt, Brazil and the United States. While the United States had an exceptional and singular development, the Brazilian case can be generalised, with certain caveats, to other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean in terms of the incorporation of Afro-descendent and Amerindian populations into the free work regime, the formation of a class society, as well as the development of racial and national ideologies. Whereas in Brazil racial democracy was cultivated, segregation still presents a problem in the United States; whilst the former perpetuates pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and precarious employment, the latter provided for the formation of a modern black society, albeit separate from the rest of the nation; if in Brazil we have turned colour into the basic unit of a complicated symbolic system of status attribution, in the U.S. race was built into a descent status group.

In this article I aim to clarify the way in which Brazil has, since abolition, been developing a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendents. Not only do I intend to show how this system has developed through time, but how it is also shaped by the mobilization of the black population around the notion of race—as a group of solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. My strategy is to trace the terms “colour” and “race” and their meanings through time, as used or systemised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. Certainly, this is a preliminary and incomplete study, but I hope that it can serve as a guide to future and more systematic investigations about specific periods, places and social agents…

Read the entire paper here.

Tags:

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

Posted in Books, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science on 2011-09-10 19:57Z by Steven

Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

Duke University Press
2003
312 pages, 41 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3070-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3058-5

Jerry Dávila, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health.

Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. Building the “Brazilian Man”
  • 2. Educating Brazil
  • 3. What Happened to Rio’s Teachers of Color?
  • 4. Elementary Education
  • 5. Escola Nova no Estado Novo: The New School in the New State
  • 6. Behaving White: Rio’s Secondary Schools
  • Epilogue: The Enduring Brazilian Fascination with Race
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Tags: , ,

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Communications/Media Studies, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Science on 2011-09-10 19:32Z by Steven

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Number 21 (November 1979)
pages 20-22

Joan R. Dassin

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos Milagres), says its director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a clear direct film that confronts a human question—that of racial discrimination—with great frankness and humor.

Completed in December 1975 and first shown in Brazil in October 1977, Tent of Miracles, based on Jorge Amada’s novel, is indeed a richly-peopled, plain-speaking, and even light-hearted picture about the persecution and survival of black African culture in Brazil. With this focus, Nelson Pereira—the patriarch of nationally-minded filmmakers in Brazil for nearly 25 years—has challenged the most widely-held false belief in his society: the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

…This visual parable of “whitening” reveals the ideology implicit in the film’s defense of racial crossbreeding. It also undercuts the energetic and upbeat presentation of an autonomous Afro-Brazilian culture. Unwittingly, perhaps, Nelson Pereira repeats the error of both his literary source (Bahian novelist Jorge Amado’s 1969 novel, Tent of Miracles) and an earlier classic of Brazilian social history (Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves of 1933). Both works uncritically advocate miscegenation.

Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character. In contrast, the recognition that in siring the Brazilian race the Portuguese colonizers brutally imposed their will on black female slaves—after largely exterminating or subjugating recalcitrant Indian laborers—has spread very slowly. Indeed, historical truth has only recently made inroads into the national myth that Brazilians are the harmonious products of these three races, and live in an untroubled racial democracy.

As Brazilian culture critic Sergio Augusto has pointed out, miscegenation—both as a practice and as a widely espoused doctrine—has had two pernicious effects. Rather than fostering egalitarianism, miscegenation has promoted “whitening.” Most seriously, it has denied to blacks (Indians being long out of the picture) the opportunity to develop their cultural identity as an independent group. Another Brazilian commentator, Muniz Sodré, seconds this view. Miscegenation’s hidden value of “whitening,” he asserts, is in fact a rejection of black culture in Brazil, a relegation of the Afro-Brazilian inheritance to a “source of sensationalism, a plethora of genital tricks, and an eternal supplier of recipes.”

Lamentably, Tent of Miracles does not explore these negative consequences of miscegenation for black cultural survival in Brazil. On the contrary, the philosophy of “whitening” that lies behind supposedly egalitarian racial crossbreeding is visually and emotionally reinforced by the “success story” of Tadeu Canhoto. The U.S. viewer will probably miss the subtle racist implications of lauding miscegenation, because here the “mixed” population is considered black, and as such, is clearly subject to the will of the white majority. But in Brazil, the color line is not drawn so sharply. Indeed, the “democratic” mixing of races is the cornerstone of the dominant national ideology of race, ironically described by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes as “the prejudice of having no prejudice.”

Defenders of the doctrine of miscegenation and the myth of racial democracy come from all quarters in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, who with Jorge Amado is the greatest popularizer of Brazil for North Americans, has proudly noted that Brazil is growing ever “browner.” Freyre sees this trend as “proof” that the Brazilian “meta-race,” supposedly formed in equal parts by blacks, Indians and whites, is at last emerging.  Even some Brazilian blacks have themselves proposed miscegenation so that “the negro will disappear and we will not have racial conflict like they do in the United States.” As the young black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento recently reflected, the 18th century dictum that “Brazil is a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattos” is still the accepted national vision. The vision has only one catch: it is predicated on the “total disappearance” of those who live in “hell.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Forthcoming Media, History, Live Events, United States on 2011-09-08 21:30Z by Steven

Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

For more information, click here.

Tags: , ,

Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-09-03 17:33Z by Steven

Blood Simple: The politics of miscegenation

Slate Magazine
1996-08-22

Eric Liu

The “Negro problem,” wrote Norman Podhoretz in 1963, would not be solved unless color itself disappeared: “and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation.” Coming after a lengthy confession of his tortured feelings toward blacks—and coming at a time when 19 states still had anti-miscegenation statutes on the books—Podhoretz’s call for a “wholesale merging of the two races” seemed not just bold but desperate. Politics had failed us, he was conceding; now we could find hope only in the unlikely prospect of intermarriage.

Podhoretz’s famous essay was regarded as bizarre at the time, but 33 years later, it seems like prophecy. We are indeed intermarrying today, in unprecedented numbers. Between 1970 and 1992, the number of mixed-race marriages quadrupled. Black-white unions now represent 12 percent of all marriages involving at least one black, up from 2.6 percent in 1970. Twelve percent of Asian men and 25 percent of Asian women are marrying non-Asians. Fully a quarter of married U.S.-born Latinos in Los Angeles have non-Latino spouses. We are mixing our genes with such abandon that the Census Bureau is now considering whether to add a new “multiracial” category to the census in the year 2000. This orgy of miscegenation has not yet brought the racial harmony for which Podhoretz longed. But recent publicity about the intermarriage figures has stirred hope once again that our racial problems might be dissolving in the gene pool…

…Race, you see, is a fiction. As a matter of biology, it has no basis. Genetic variations within any race far exceed the variations between the races, and the genetic similarities among the races swamp both. The power of race, however, derives not from its pseudoscientific markings but from its cultural trappings. It is as an ideology that race matters, indeed matters so much that the biologists’ protestations fall away like Copernican claims in the age of Ptolemy. So the question, as always, is whether it is possible to break that awful circle in which myth and morphology perpetually reinforce one another…

…One possibility is that all multiracials, over time, will find themselves the intermediate race, a new middleman minority, less stigmatized than “pure” blacks (however defined) but less acceptable than “pure” whites. Their presence, like that of the “coloreds” in old South Africa, wouldn’t subvert racialism; it would reinforce it, by fleshing out the black-white caste system. Again, however, the sheer diversity of the multiracials might militate against this kind of stratification.

Yet this same diversity makes it possible that multiracials will replicate within their ranks the “white-makes-right” mentality that prevails all around them. Thus we might expect a hierarchy of multiracials to take hold, in which a mixed child with white blood would be the social better of a mixed child without such blood. In this scenario, multiracials wouldn’t be a distinct group—they would just be distributed across a continuum of color.

Sociologist Pierre van den Berghe argues that such a continuum is preferable to a simple black-white dichotomy. Brazilians, for instance, with their mestizo consciousness and their many gradations of tipo, or “type,” behold with disdain our crude bifurcation of race. Yet no amount of baloney-slicing changes the fact that in Brazil, whitening remains the ideal. It is still better for a woman to be a branca (light skin, hair without tight curls, thin lips, narrow nose) than a morena (tan skin, wavy hair, thicker lips, broader nose); and better to be a morena than a mulata (darker skin, tightly curled hair). Subverting racial labels is not the same as subverting racism.

Still another possibility is that whites will do to multiracials what the Democrats or Republicans have traditionally done to third-party movements: absorb their most “desirable” elements and leave the rest on the fringe. It’s quite possible, as Harvard Professor Mary Waters suggests, that the ranks of the white will simply expand to engulf the “lighter” or more “culturally white” of the multiracials. The Asian American experience may offer a precedent: As growing numbers of Asian Americans have entered the mainstream over the last decade, it is increasingly said—sometimes with pride, sometimes with scorn—that they are “becoming white.”…

…These cautionary scenarios demonstrate that our problem is not just “race” in the abstract. Our problem is the idea of the “white race” in particular. Scholar Douglas Besharov may be right when he calls multiracial kids “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” But even as a “multiracial” category blurs the color line, it can reaffirm the primacy of whiteness. Whether our focus is interracial adoption or mixed marriages or class-climbing, so long as we speak of whiteness as a norm, no amount of census reshuffling will truly matter…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Though Many Have White Skin, their Veins Flow of Black Blood: Afro-Argentine Culture and History during the Twentieth Century in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-09-01 01:41Z by Steven

Though Many Have White Skin, their Veins Flow of Black Blood: Afro-Argentine Culture and History during the Twentieth Century in Buenos Aires, Argentina

McNair Scholars Journal
Volume 7, Issue 1 (2003)
Article 8
11 pages

Erika D. Edwards, Grand Valley State University

Although the Afro-Argentine population continued to decline during the twentieth century, the people played an integral role in shaping Argentina’s culture through their contributions in the field of dance, literature, and religion. Unfortunately, their vibrant culture and history are often ignored and overlooked because of Argentina’s subtle efforts to whiten its population. The purpose of this project is three-fold. First, it aims to recognize the survival of the Afro-Argentine community during the twentieth century. Second, it recaptures the means used to preserve African traditions. Finally, it reveals efforts of Afro-Argentine groups such as La Fundación Africa Vive that have dedicated themselves to reconstructing the Afro- Argentine role in Argentina’s culture and history.

Introduction

One of the first things I noticed while studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was that there were few, if any, blacks among the city’s inhabitants. I lived there for six months and people always assumed that I was Brazilian because of their popular belief that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. However, this is a lie: Afro-Argentines do indeed exist. Africans began arriving in Argentina as slaves in 1534, two years after the foundation of Buenos Aires, and since then they have shaped and transformed Argentina. This paper seeks to draw attention to the contributions of Afro-Argentines to the country’s culture and history. To this end, I will recognize their existence despite the country’s denial of its black population. Then, I will address the ways in which Afro-Argentines recapture their African past through dance, music, religion, and literature. Finally, I will discuss what Afro-Argentines are doing to reconstruct their history and, in the process, correct lies, misconceptions, and myths about them. In denying Afro-Argentine culture and history, many Argentines may not learn about their families’ and country’s past. Though many have white skin, their veins flow of black blood.

Recognizing the Existence of Afro-Argentines

Statisticians often claim, “the numbers never lie.” Yet in the case of census information for Argentina over the course of the twentieth century, the existence of the country’s black population is often denied or its size is underestimated. The noted Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges remembered that in 1910 or 1912 there was a tenement of blacks on the corner of Uriburu and Vicente López streets and another on Sarmiento Street in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1946, Nicolás Besio Moreno calculated that there were “one and a half million people with black blood [in Argentina]” and further stated that they could be classified as blacks based upon the United States guidelines, which suggest that people who have a lighter complexion and often might pass for whites would still be classified as blacks. The following year, in 1947, a national census identified the presence of 15,000 blacks, (5,000 blacks and 10,000 mulattos).  By 1963, Afro-Argentines were estimated to number 17,000. Their population declined over the next four years to 3,000 in 1967 but increased to 4,500 in 1968 for reasons which remain unclear. However, some people have estimated that there were as many as 10,000 blacks “not counting those mixed with dark skinned people in the provinces.” The journalist Narciso Binayan Carmona stated in 1973 that “if all Argentines with black blood were accounted there would be 2-3 million.” Based upon this information, one can see there are discrepancies involving the size of Argentina’s black population; their true number probably lies somewhere between what the census counted and people’s perceptions.

Present-day statistics tend to agree with what people saw during the twentieth century. This could be due to El Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (INDEC) which forgot to include a box for citizens to identify their descent (descendencia) during the last national census in 2001. INDEC later denied that it had forgotten to include the box. It is interesting to note that when the last national census was undertaken, INDEC included a category for the first time to check if one was of indigenous descent, a change from the last national census conducted in 1991. Their failure to inquire about people of African descent further perpetuates the myth that Afro-Argentines no longer exist. In stark contrast, La Fundación Africa Vive, an Afro-Argentine group dedicated to promoting black culture and history, believes that there are currently two million Afro-Argentines (descended from slaves) in the country. Thus, regardless of how a person may appear (dark- or light-skinned) and whether or not they are aware, many Argentines have black blood.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, miscegenation served to lighten the complexion of the country’s black population. Argentina’s black male population was already in decline as a result of wars for independence and territorial expansion as well as diseases. Then, from 1880 to 1930, a mass of European immigrants arrived in the country. Most European immigrants were male, thus their arrival led to a surplus of white males and a shortage of white females. Given the pre-existing scarcity of black males, prospective black brides often married white grooms, many of whom were European immigrants. Interracial marriages became common. The children of such unions often had lighter skin giving them access to better education and employment opportunities thereby facilitating their ability to pass themselves off as white.

However, not all blacks who wished to marry selected white spouses. There were black couples, such as the Monteros. The couple had three daughters but due to miscegenation in their family’s past, each of the girls was a different shade of brown: the eldest looked black, the middle child resembled a mulatto, and the youngest appeared to be entirely white. “So great were the physical differences… people refused to believe they were family.” However, the Monteros considered themselves black and “had a shelf of books on race and a stack of Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, and Ike and Tina records to prove it.” At the time they were interviewed in 1973, the girls were dating white boys. Were they to have married and had children, they too would have contributed to the whitening of the country’s black population. As the black population becomes lighter through miscegenation, it will become harder to identify its existence…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Blacks, the white elite, and the politics of nation building: Inter and intraracial relationships in “Cecilia Valdes” and “O Mulato”

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Dissertations, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-08-30 06:00Z by Steven

Blacks, the white elite, and the politics of nation building: Inter and intraracial relationships in “Cecilia Valdes” and “O Mulato”

Tulane University
May 2006
274 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275113
ISBN: 9780549253327

Geoffrey Scott Mitchell

A Dissertation Submitted on the Twenty-Sixth day of May 2006 to the Department of Spanish and Portugues in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirments of the Graduate School of Tulate University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This project is an examination of the novels O Mulato (Aluísio Azevedo, 1889) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde, 1882) and their call for social reform and a re-examination of the place of blacks in the emerging republics of Brazil and Cuba. Both novels question and criticize social constructs of race while pressing for an improved treatment of both free and enslaved blacks.

This project provides an intellectual history of eighteenth and nineteenth century rac(ial)ist theories that exerted a pronounced influence on Azevedo and Villaverde. Specifically, this section examines physiognomy, phrenology, and craniometry in addition to sociological and anthropological approaches to racial hybridism, the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Spencer, and the geographical determinism of Buckle. Finally, the chapter provides a close reading of Comte’s positivism and its reception by the intelligentsia in Cuba and Brazil.

Azevedo’s O Mulato purports to discredit racial discrimination by white society and the destructive influence of the Catholic clergy in Brazil’s northern province of Maranhão during the 1870s by deploying the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a wealthy and educated mulatto and his white, aristocratic cousin. Although Azevedo endeavored to illustrate the problematic nature of racial discrimination and the social compartmentalization of blacks in Brazil—both relics of Portuguese colonialism—he nevertheless succumbed to the racialist ideologies of the nineteenth century and imbued his protagonist with stereotypical characteristics. Although blacks were rising socially via education and the military, Azevedo nevertheless envisioned a future, positivistic republic necessarily led by a white elite.

In Cecilia Valdés, Villaverde deploys an unsuccessful, interracial relationship involving a poor but beautiful, nearly-white mulatta and her aristocratic, half-brother as agents of the policy of whitening. As in O Mulato, the metaphor of an unsuccessful, interracial relationship reveals the difficulty in crossing racial and social castes and thus uniting different socio-economic sectors of the imagined community. Only one intraracial romance involving whites proves to be successful in the novel. This relationship serves as a metaphor indicating that only enlightened whites are capable of leading Cuba out of colonialism and into independence.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  • 1. INTRODUCTION: SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
  • 2. RACISM’S ROOTS: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF SELECT RACIALIST THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
  • 3. BLACK MEN, WHITE WOMEN, AND THE FORMATION OF THE POSITIVIST STATE: ALUISIO AZEVEDO AND O MULATO
  • 4. FAILED RELATIONSHIPS, FRAGMENTED SOCIETIES: RACE, SEX, AND METAPHOR IN CECILIA VALDES
  • 5. CONCLUSION: BLACKS, THE WHITE ELITE, AND PROJECTS FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY
  • ENDNOTES
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

Tags: , , , , ,

Studied in race crossing VI. The Indian remnants in Eastern Cuba

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive on 2011-08-28 20:59Z by Steven

Studied in race crossing VI. The Indian remnants in Eastern Cuba

Genetica
Volume 27, Number 1 (1954)
pages 65-96
DOI: 10.1007/BF01664155

R. Ruggles Gates
Department of Anthropology
Harvard University

A preliminary account was given at the 30th International Americanist Congress, Cambridge, England, August, 1952. Received for publication July 27, 1953

This paper is in one aspect a study of the later stages of absorption of a race surviving in small numbers in a more numerous population of another race. In that respect it resembles the study of a small Negro element being partly absorbed into a Caucasian population in Canada (Gates 1953a). But in the present case the miscegenation of the Indians in Cuba has been first with the Spaniards and more recently with Negroes. It shows that the absorption of small numbers of one race in another requires many centuries before it is complete. The history of the Basques in Western France and Northern Spain shows that, even where the physical differences are of a very minor character, the differences in customs and in location will lead to the persistence of a race within a larger population for many millenia. The physical differences, where they exist, will persist indefinitely, long after the cultural differences have disappeared.

It has frequently been stated that the Indians of Cuba were exterminated by A.D. 1600, but this is not strictly true. Pichardo Moya (1945), who gives a full bibliography of Cuban history and archeology, quotes Morrell, who wrote before 1760, that traces of the last Indians still existed in the vicinity of Bayamo, Canéy and Jiguaní, possibly in Pinar del Río, around Alquízar, and certainly in Oriente. Pichardo…

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: , , ,