Category: Caribbean/Latin America

  • Stunning Self-Portraits Make You Think Twice About Interracial Identity In South America The Huffington Post 2014-04-25 Katherine Brooks, Arts & Culture Editor Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão has been exploring themes of interracial identity through an unlikely medium—self-portraits. To confront and challenge concepts like colonialism and miscegenation in her home country, she turns her own visage…

  • For dark-skinned Mexicans, taint of discrimination lingers McClatchy DC: Watching Washington and the World 2013-08-22 Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff MEXICO CITY — Flip through the print publications exalting the activities of Mexico’s high society and there’s one thing you rarely find: dark-skinned people. No matter that nearly two-thirds of Mexicans consider themselves moreno, the…

  • This assimilationist ideology, commonly called “whitening” by the elite after 1890 (Skidmore 1974), had taken hold by the early twentieth century, and continues to be Brazil’s predominant racial ideology today. In effect, the Brazilian elite argued that Brazil, unlike the U.S. to which they frequently (and unfavorably) compared it, had no racial problem: no U.S.…

  • Chinese Cubans: A transnational history by Kathleen Lopez (review) [Roopnarine] Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2014 DOI: 10.1353/cch.2014.0018 Lomarsh Roopnarine, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi López, Kathleen, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013) Without…

  • Immigrants Stir New Life Into São Paulo’s Gritty Old Center The New York Times 2014-04-14 Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief SÃO PAULO, Brazil — For obvious reasons, many Paulistanos still consider this megacity’s decrepit old center a no-go zone. Carjacking and kidnapping gangs prey on motorists at stoplights. Squatters control dozens of graffiti-splattered apartment buildings.…

  • 5 Nations That Imported Europeans to Whiten The Population Atlanta Black Star 2014-03-10 Andre Moore After the trans-Atlantic slave trade was officially abolished toward the end of the 19th century, many whites felt threatened and feared free Blacks would become a menacing element in society. The elites spent a great dealing of time mulling over…

  • Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering The American Historical Review Volume 115, Issue 5 (December 2010) pages 1364-1394 DOI: 10.1086/ahr.115.5.1364 William Max Nelson, Assistant Professor of History University of Toronto A minor nobleman from Alsace, traveling in French colonial Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) on the eve of the French and Haitian revolutions, expressed  surprise that…

  • The Mestizo Concept: A Product of European Imperialism Onkwehón:we Rising: An Indigenouse Perspectic on Third Worldism & Revolution 2013-08-29 Jack D. Forbes, Professor Emeritus of Native American Studies University of California, Davis What is the concept of Mestizaje? What are its origins? What role does it have to play in the liberation, or rather the…

  • Ancestry Informative Markers Clarify the Regional Admixture Variation in the Costa Rican Population Human Biology Volume 85, Number 5, October 2013 pages 721-740 DOI: 10.1353/hub.2013.0041 Rebeca Campos-Sánchez Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica Henriette Raventós, Associate Professor and Researcher Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica Ramiro Barrantes, Professor of Biology Universidad…

  • Playing Chinese Whispers: The Official ‘Gossip’ of Racial Whitening in Jorge Amado’s Tenda dos Milagres Forum for Modern Language Studies Volume 50, Issue 2, April 2014 pages 196-211 DOI: 10.1093/fmls/cqu006 Helen Lima de Sousa, Santander Post-Doctoral Senior Studentship in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies Clare College, University of Cambridge This article explores the possible inauthentic…