Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality by Anita González (review)

Latin American Music Review
Volume 34, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2013
pages 288-291
DOI: 10.1353/lat.2013.0019

Alex E. Chávez, Visiting Assistant Professor
Latin American and Latino Studies Program
University of Illinois, Chicago

Anita González, Afro-Mexico: Dancing between Myth and Reality. With photographs by George O. Jackson and José Manuel Pellicer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. 183 pp. ISBN 978-0-292-72324-5.

In a mixed-race country like Mexico, being “black” means being part of an ethnic group, but in addition to the unstable inhabitations of racial identities, the richness of expressive culture therein also has much to do with carving out senses of community. With this understanding, González explores the cultural negotiations of Afro-Mexican identity in terpsichorean traditions throughout Mexico—with specific focus on Veracruz and the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca. She elaborates on various quotidian dance practices embedded with an African cultural subtext of influence that demonstrates how socially and historically constituted ethno-racial constructions are voiced through performance. Taking cues from methodologies in performance, theater, and dance studies, she homes in on the communicative potential of the gesticulant. Moreover, she incorporates ethnography and relies on photographs to illustrate the dance forms.

Although there is existing scholarship that privileges broader socio-historical questions concerning the African diaspora in Latin America, studies focused on African-derived expressive forms in Mexico are few (Cruz Carretero, Martínez Maranto, and Santiago Silva 1990; McDowell 2000; Pérez Fernández 1990). In her efforts to show how Afro-Mexicans have been instrumental in cultural life in that country, González skillfully attends to the mobile history of ethnic encounter and exchange among Africans, indigenous groups, and the Spanish that has informed the hybridity of expressive forms and subjectivities over time. This approach in some ways gestures toward the types of analyses offered in Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness (1997) and John Chasteen’s National Rhythms, African Roots (2004) in their own interrogations of the complicated nexus of performance, nation, and racial formation in Cuba and South America, respectively.

Mexico’s own fraught ideologies of mestizaje and mexicanidad constitute an officialized discursive field that has promoted a unified national culture by way of de-emphasizing localized and pluri-ethnic productions of subjectivity; and as it pertains to González’s study, this ideological scaffolding has obfuscated—if not entirely excluded—the African component. In this regard, apart from considering phenotype, González suggests that racial identities are also defined by geographic locale to the extent that “most Afro-Mexicans are unaware of the historical circumstances that explain their presence in Mexico,” which places particular importance on the cultural negotiations of social location as such (37).

At the core of Afro-Mexico lies González’s ambition to present a “diversity of perspectives about blackness” (103). She succeeds in this ambition as it relates to the dance forms in question. And by returning to the issues of archetype and stereotype repeatedly, she opens the door for considering the iterative relationship between racialization and performativity. Yet bringing the implicit connections between everyday life and institutionalized racial knowledges to the surface early in the book would have served in demonstrating more clearly how expressive culture fits within the arch of broader racial ideologies with implications for understandings of embodiment, performance, and the viscosity of race.

Nonetheless, the unique contribution of the book emerges from González’s own position of expertise as an artist and dancer so that when she contends that “the bent body posture and looseness of the upper body” in certain forms have aesthetic roots in African dance (66), her own bodily knowledge is involved in making that statement. Dances, she argues, consist of gestures within musical phrases. Possibilities for storytelling exist therein that “express social outlooks” (46). These stories unfold at different levels, from personal to communal, from political to mythical—often simultaneously. Her analysis likewise operates on several levels—form and content of the dance, musicality, historical roots, and ultimately the playing out of contemporary politics, since many of the dances are “theatrical scenarios that include attacks, public whippings, sexual overtones, and other disreputable acts” (40). Still, her descriptions in some ways beg for a more in-depth ethnographic rendering of these expressive flows to illustrate how they communicate beliefs and ideas, the very representations that become myths about blackness over time and how they unfold in relation to larger and contested understandings of nation and racial formation. Afro-Mexico is premised on the contention that in a society where ethno-racial identities are disputed, myths contain within them…

The symbolics of blood: Mestizaje in the Americas

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 3, Issue 4, 1997 (Special Issue: Race and Place)
pages 495-521
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1997.9962576

Carol A. Smith, Professor Emerita of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

Mestizaje, a significant process of identity formation in Latin America based on presumed race mixture, rests on certain sustaining ideologies about race, class, gender, and sexuality that are specific to Latin America. This essay attempts a preliminary discussion of how mestizaje has affected marriage and gender relations in several Latin American regions as the marital/kinship pattern, together with its sustaining ideologies, changed over time. Questions are asked about differences in beliefs held by different kinds of individuals (mestizos and “whites,” lower classes and elites, women and men) about mestizaje and the sexual and/or kinship relations appropriate between different races and classes. Examination of a few well documented historical cases suggests that what lower-class mestizos believe about race, class, gender, and sexuality involves resistance to as well as acceptance of elite beliefs about them. It appears that there are also significant differences in beliefs held by mestizo women and men about appropriate female and male sexuality, though we have less information about this.

Read or purchase the article here.

Scripts of Blackness and the Racial Dynamics of Nationalism in Puerto Rico

Papers of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey
Volume 6 (2009)
38 pages

Dr. Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the Western World, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional substance out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized.

This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the precursors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican man or woman. (See Fig. 1).

The Taíno, Spaniard and African “roots” depicted in this national imagery, represent heritage symbols. They do not stand for contemporary ethnic constituencies, such as “Afro-Puerto Ricans”, “Indo-Puerto Ricans” or “Euro-Puerto Ricans.” Rather they are commonly understood as origin groups (roots) – that mixed during the period of Spanish colonization to conform “lo Puertorriqueño” in the present. As the mural says: “Tres Razas: Una Cultura.”

My book-project examines the different meanings Puerto Rican people—namely, intellectuals, politicians, government officials, and community residents—attribute to the black component of that mixture in their on-going process of constructing a Puerto Rican national identity.

Unlike the concept of mestizaje developed in many countries of mainland Latin America, blackness is not completely erased or excluded in discourses about the nation in Puerto Rico. Notions of race-mixture in Puerto Rico are more similar to those that developed in Brazil or Cuba where blackness is simultaneously excluded but also strategically included in the contemporary narrative of nation. Scholarship on race and racism in Afro-Latin America has made clear that the implicit goal of this narrative of mixture is whitening or blanqueamiento. Perhaps, the most obvious evidence of the prevalence of the ideology of blanqueamiento in Puerto Rico is the 2000 census, as only 8% of Puerto Ricans living in the Island declared themselves to be black, while an overwhelming majority of 80.5% identified themselves as white (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). Elsewhere (Godreau 2008) I discuss how these results evidence popular understandings of whiteness as an inclusive, flexible, category that can encompass mixture and blackness as an undesirable category that is understood as extreme and pure, not mixed enough. In any case, the point is that—despite the rhetorical inclusion of an African influence in nationalist discourses—a growing body of Puerto Rican scholarship has documented how blackness is often socially marked as an inferior, ugly, dirty, unintelligent, backward identity–that is also reduced to a primitive hyper-sexuality (particularly in the case of black women), equated with disorder, superstition, servitude, danger, and heavily criminalized. Puerto Rican scholars have done important work on these different aspects and manifestations of racism and the exclusion of blackness from nationalist narratives – particularly in the late 1990’s and 2000. (c.f. Alegría and Ríos 2005; Cardona 1997; Díaz-Quiñonez 1985; Findlay 1999; Franco and Ortíz 2004; Giusti 1996; Godreau 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Guerra 1998; Rivera 2003; Rivero 2005; Santiago-Valles 1994, 1995; Santos-Febres 1993; Torres 1998; Zenón-Cruz 1975 among others)…

Read the entire paper here.

The Symbolic Power of Color: Constructions of Race, Skin-Color, and Identity in Brazil

Humanity & Society
Volume 35, Numbers 1-2 (February 2011)
pages 62-99
DOI: 10.1177/016059761103500104

Marcia L. Mikulak, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of North Dakota

Some current cultural anthropologists define race as a social construct, yet explorations of the socio-historical constructions that give form and structure to racial identities perpetuating notions of “race” are rarely discussed. This study explores the theory of racial formations proposed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant as it applies to Brazil’s racial project, arguing that Brazil’s rhetoric on race and national identity during the late 19th to early 20th century culminated in a racial project ultimately known as democracia racial. As a result, I propose that Brazilian racial consciousness is symbolically pluralistic, encompassing race, social class, and social position, generating a particularly virulent, yet silent form of racism. I expand upon racial formation theory through analysis of my fieldwork carried out in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, in 2004. This analysis illustrates how contemporary Brazilian social structure and daily cultural discourses on race, skin-color, racial identity, and social marginalization reflect the nation’s early racist ideology, yet contest its reality. Informants discuss self-identifications of skin-color, the meanings attributed to color tonalities, and the impact racism has on their daily lives.

Read or purchase the article here.

Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 9,  Issue 3, 2002
pages 281-304
DOI: 10.1080/10702890213969

Isar Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Antón, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government’s approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.

In March 1995, The San Juan Star, one of Puerto Rico’s leading newspapers, announced that “Puerto Ricans will ‘bleach away’ many of the physical traces of its African past by the year 2200, with the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean following a few centuries later” (Bliss 1995:30). The article, which was written to commemorate the 122nd year anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the island, also seemed to be commemorating the future “abolition” of blackness itself, “in two centuries.” said one of the experts interviewed, “there will hardly be any blacks in Puerto Rico” (historian, Luis Diaz Soler, in Bliss 1995: 30).

This racial forecast and concomitant claims to the gradual disappearance of black cultural manifestations reinforces ideologies of blanqueamiento well known and thoroughly documented in Latin America (Burdick 1992; de la Fuente 2001; Lancaster 1991; Martinez-Echazabal 1999; Skidmore 1974; Stephan 1991; Wade 1993,1997; and Whitten and Torres 1992. among others). Scholars and activists have demonstrated that such notions of whitening often go hand in hand with…

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Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba [Williams Review]

Association for Feminist Anthropology
Book Reviews
2012-12-21

Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Nadine T. Fernandez, Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010)

In this insightful and well-written ethnography, Nadine Fernandez explores a central paradox: if mestizaje (racial mixing) is the “essence” of the Cuban nation, then why are interracial couples, the purported “engines of mestizaje” (184), still perceived with disdain? Why are interracial couplings – particularly those between black and white Cubans – so infrequent and often met with resistance? A deeply historical and ethnographic account, Revolutionizing Romance advances the compelling argument that “nowhere is race more salient than in romance” (50). Moreover, Fernandez argues that the conflicts surrounding interracial relationships actually highlight “the ideological aspects of racism at work” (53).

This important and timely book documents the shifting meanings of interracial relationships over time in Cuba. The first half of the ethnography provides the historical and conceptual background that sets the stage for the rest of the book by unpacking the history of whitening ideologies and the ideological construction of Cuba as a mestizo nation. Fernandez analyzes how the “revolution’s ideological insistence on ‘racelessness’…provided a sociocultural and ideological space for interracial couples” (68). For instance, Sofia, a mulata engineer and Fernando, a white art historian, are an interracial couple who were both born in the early 1950s and who met while studying in the former Soviet Union. Their families supported their relationship in part because of the color-blind ideology that the revolution had fostered. Interestingly, while race scholars are often dismissive of the concept of color-blindness (rightly so, I might add), Fernandez points out that in the context of Cuba, this concept has some redeeming qualities…

Read the entire review here.

A Racial Paradise? Race and Race Mixture in Henry Louis Gates’ Brazil

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 8,  Issue 1, 2013
pages 88-91
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2013.768464

Chinyere Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

In this documentary, Henry Louis Gates explores the extent to which the notion of being a racial paradise applies to Brazil. He introduces Brazil’s contradictions of being the last country to abolish slavery’ in the New World in 1888, yet the first to declare that it was free of racism. He explores a variety of cities in Brazil in order to understand the history of early race mixture, contemporary valorization of Blackness, and attempts to address racial inequality. As a viewer, we watch how Gates’ fascination with the Brazil’s African heritage and race mixture at the beginning of the film turns into a questioning of the myth of racial democracy.

The film is useful in terms of providing a primer on race in Brazil for novices on race in Latin America. Geared towards the general public, this is a film that could be used in an introductory course for undergraduates about race in Brazil or Latin America more broadly. Its strengths are in illuminating the nature of slavery and race mixture in Brazil’s history while introducing the racial ideologies of whitening and racial democracy. Gates introduces scholars such as Manoel Querino and the more renowned Gilberto Freyre to discuss their scholarship on black contributions to Brazilian society. Gates’ film also has vibrant images of Carnaval, capoeira, and a Candomblé ceremony, providing opportunities for students to gain exposure to these African-influenced cultural practices.

This film is somewhat problematic in terms of illuminating racial and color categories in contemporary Brazil. Gates indirectly cites a 1976 Brazilian National Household Survey study that found people used over 100 terms to describe their color. Gates says: ‘In the U.S., a person with any African ancestry is legally defined as black. In Brazil, racial categories are on steroids.’ However, this perspective has been discredited by scholars who argue that most Brazilians only use a handful of terms to describe themselves. In fact, re-examinations of the same 1976 survey found that 95 percent of Brazilians used only six terms to describe themselves: branco, moreno, pardo, moreno-claro, preto and negro (Silva, 1987; Telles, 2004). The 10 most common terms were the aforementioned as well as amarela, mulata, clara, and morena-escura. All together, these 10 terms account for how 99 percent of all Brazilians think of their race/color. These findings have been replicated using more national survey data (Petruccelli, 2001; Telles, 2004). However, the myth of the hundreds of racial and color terms that Brazilians use to identify themselves will not die, and now Gates aids in perpetuating it…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Martinican concept of “creoleness”: A multiracial redefinition of culture.

Mots Pluriels
Number 7, (July 1998): Third Space and Cross-Cultural Identities—Mestissage – Tiers Espace – Identite

Beverley Ormerod, Associate Professor of French
University of Western Australia

In the 1930s, black and coloured intellectuals from the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane sought for the first time to define their cultural identity in terms of their historical and racial affiliations with Africa, rather than their political and educational ties with France. During centuries of colonial rule, class barriers had effectively separated darker-skinned from lighter-skinned West Indians; the school system had reinforced European aesthetic norms, and had demanded the repudiation of Creole, the language associated with black slaves, in favour of French. The Négritude movement, inaugurated with L.-G. Damas’ Pigments (1937) and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to my Native Land, 1939), rejected this cultural predominance of France and emphasized the writers’ membership of the African diaspora. To the Martinican Césaire is attributed the neologistic term, Négritude, which stressed the vital importance to the poet’s ideology of his adherence to the black race. He and Damas brandished the terms “Negro”, “Africa”, “instinct” and even “savage” in their verse, delineating a new Caribbean cultural profile in truculent defiance of the prejudices of their likely public. For their message was addressed not only to French readers, but (and perhaps primarily) to the Francophile coloured and black bourgeoisie in the West Indies which had acquiesced in Europe’s dismissal of Africa as a site of racial and cultural inferiority.

For the Caribbean inventors of Negritude, Africa was more than simply an emblem of ethnic authenticity. Their invocation of this distant, unknown continent was intended to heal psychological wounds passed down from the first black West Indians, those generations of Africans exiled from their native lands and forced into captivity in a white-dominated society on the far side of an uncrossable ocean. In praising Africanness, early twentieth-century Caribbean writers were rejecting European stereotypes of race, colour, mental and physical attributes. Their belief in a cosmic connection with Africa expressed the hope of future acceptance in a spiritual homeland. Their blackness of skin, traditionally devalued by the white race, became the passport to kinship with a newly valorized African world of cultural difference.

Where did this leave the substantial part of the Caribbean population that, after centuries of African-European sexual relations and the 19th-century importation of Indian and Chinese labour, was neither white nor black? Césaire, whose demands for social justice were as eloquent in his literary as in his later political career, claims in his Cahier an affinity with all victims of racial oppression, asserting his solidarity with “the Jew-man, the Kaffir-man, the Hindu-man in Calcutta, the Harlem-man who doesn’t vote” – the worldwide victims of prejudice, verbal abuse, famine, torture and pogroms. But, speaking from the viewpoint of a black West Indian, Césaire holds up African culture as the single great alternative to European culture, the sovereign remedy for the alienation provoked by European colonialism. The founders of Negritude make an unspoken assumption that the Caribbean non-white individual will opt to be assimilated into the African cultural sphere. While invoking the Hindu in Calcutta, for example, Césaire does not consider the different cultural position of the large number of West Indians descended from coulis or “East Indian” indented labourers, whose syncretic life-style may combine Eastern religious practices with West Indian social elements. It is noticeable that French Creole, the linguistic link between the diverse elements of the French Caribbean population, is given no role in Negritude. Even standard French, for that matter, has an ambiguous status in the Cahier: linguistically it is a showcase for Césaire’s verbal subtlety and erudition, but thematically it is rejected as Césaire ostentatiously turns away from the French rationalist tradition towards the kinetic energy of African sorcery. African culture is equally embraced by Damas: it is symbolized by the banjo that his Guyanese mother vainly attempts to make him replace by the more socially acceptable violin (“mulattos don’t do that/leave that to blacks“); this imposition is angrily refused by the poet, just as he refuses identification with the white side of his ancestry: “How can they possibly dare/to call me “whitened”/when everything in me/aspires only to be Negro/as black as my Africa/that they stole from me”. Only a rare voice, like that of the mulatto poet Gilbert Gratiant, expresses a divergent view at this time—choosing to celebrate the double fusion (cultural and biological) of Africa and France in his veins, and at the same time making Creole his literary language of choice…

Read the entire article here.

Emilio Fernández: Pictures in the Margins

Manchester University Press
October 2007
192 pages
216 x 138 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7190-7432-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7190-8844-5

Dolores Tierney, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Emilio Fernández: Pictures in the Margins is the first book-length English language account of Emilio Fernández (1904-1986) the most successful director of classical Mexican Cinema, famed with creating films that embody a loosely defined Mexican school of filmmaking. However, rather than offer an auteurist study this book interrogates the construction of Fernández as both a national and nationalist auteur (including racial and gender aspects e.g. as macho mexicano and indio). It also challenges auteurist readings of the films themselves in order to make new arguments about the significance of Fernández and his work.

The aim of this book is to question Mexico’s fetishisation of its own position on the peripheries of the global cultural economy and the similar fetishisation of Fernández’s marginalisation as a mixed race (part white and part indigenous) director. This book argues that, as pictures in the margins, classical Mexican cinema and specifically Fernández’s films are not transparent reflections of dominant post Revolutionary Mexican culture, but annotations and re-inscriptions of the particularities of Mexican society in the post-Revolutionary era.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. ‘Poor reception’ and the popular in classical Mexican cinema
• 2. ‘El Indio’ Fernández, Mexico’s marginalized golden boy and national auteur
• 3. Calendar María – hybridity, indigenismo and the discourse of whitening
• 4. Gender, sexuality and the Revolution in Enamorada
• 5. Gender, sexuality and the Revolution in Salón México, Las abandonadas and Víctimas del pecado
• 6. Progress, modernity and Fernández’ ‘anti-modernist utopia’: Río Escondido
• Epilogue: Mexican Cinema and Emilio Fernández post the Golden Age – From Golden Boy to ‘the man in black’
• Filmography

There’s a long story behind ‘anti-Haitianismo’ in the Dominican Republic

PRI’s The World
Public Radio International
2013-11-14

Christopher Woolf, Producer

Tens of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic are being stripped of their citizenship, on the grounds that they or their ancestors were illegal immigrants.  Thousands have already been deported across the border to Haiti, because it is assumed all illegal migrants come from there.

The court ruling applies to anyone whose family arrived in the country after 1929 and can’t document their status. Being born in the Dominican Republic doesn’t make a difference.

Some are calling it the latest manifestation of “anti-Haitianismo” in the Dominican Republic. Both countries are on the same island of Hispaniola.

Their relations are a story of race, identity, and money. The Dominican Republic is not a rich country, but it’s a lot better off than its neighbor, Haiti.

In terms of per capita GDP, it’s about six times richer. So thousands of Haitians go to the Dominican Republic to find work. Haitians and their descendants may make up as many as one in ten of the Dominican Republic’s population. Some Dominicans are unhappy about that, as they see Haitians as different, and some fear for the identity of their nation.

Haitians are different from their Dominican neighbors in several ways. Firstly, language: most Dominicans speak Spanish, while most Haitians speak Creole, based on French. Then, there’s the issue of race.

Haiti is overwhelmingly black; whereas Dominicans identify more with the European part of their heritage, rather than the African part. Most Americans would describe most Dominicans as black. And DNA tests taken over the last decade confirm that most Dominicans have black ancestry in their family history to varying degrees.

But race in the Dominican Republic and in other parts of the Caribbean does not mean the same thing as it does in the United States. Dominicans use a variety of words to self-identify, such as moreno, trigueno, and blanco-oscuro, indicating different colors or different types of mixed racial origins. But not many will choose the term “black.”…

Read the entire article and listen to the story here.