Mixed Race Studies

On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American

University of California Press
July 2012
366 pages
Illustrations: 19 b/w photographs, 1 map, 1 table
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520272385
Paperback ISBN: 9780520272392
eBook ISBN: 9780520951341

Edited by:

David Wallace Adams, Professor of History
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio

Crista DeLuzio, Associate Professor and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor of History
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed. The essays show how family life figured prominently in relations to larger struggles for conquest and control.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio
• PART ONE. DIVERSE FAMILIES AND RACIAL HIERARCHY
  • 1. Breaking and Remaking Families: The Fostering and Adoption of Native American Children in Non-Native Families in the American West, 1880–1940 / Margaret Jacobs
  • 2. Becoming Comanches: Patterns of Captive Incorporation into Comanche Kinship Networks, 1820–1875 / Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez
  • 3. “Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife”: Families in the Federal Indian Service, 1880–1925 / Cathleen D. Cahill
  • 4. Hard Choices: Mixed-Race Families and Strategies of Acculturation in the U.S. West after 1848 / Anne F. Hyde
• PART TWO. LAW, ORDER, AND THE REGULATION OF FAMILY LIFE
  • 5. Family and Kinship in the Spanish and Mexican Borderlands: A Cultural Account / Ramón A. Gutiérrez
  • 6. Love, Honor, and the Power of Law: Probating the Ávila Estate in Frontier California / Donna C. Schuele
  • 7. “Who has a greater job than a mother?” Defining Mexican Motherhood on the U.S.-Mexico Border in the Early Twentieth Century / Monica Perales
  • 8. Borderlands/La Familia: Mexicans, Homes, and Colonialism in the Early Twentieth-Century Southwest / Pablo Mitchell
• PART THREE. BORDERLAND CULTURES AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
  • 9. Intimate Ties: Marriage, Families, and Kinship in Eighteenth-Century Pueblo Communities / Tracy Brown
  • 10. The Paradox of Kinship: Native-Catholic Communities in Alta California, 1769–1840s / Erika Pérez
  • 11. Territorial Bonds: Indenture and Affection in Intercultural Arizona, 1864–1894 / Katrina Jagodinsky
  • 12. Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: “The Family,” “The West,” and Their Chroniclers / Susan Lee Johnson
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index

Brit Bennett: ‘Last week was truly the wildest week of my life’

The Guardian
2020-07-05

Simran Hans

‘I’m Californian, so nobody really reads me as anxious’: Brit Bennett. Photograph: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

The US author on topping the bestseller charts with her new novel, why being right is overrated, and the TV show bringing her joy in lockdown

Brit Bennett, 30, was born and raised in southern California. She attended Stanford University and earned an MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her acclaimed first novel, The Mothers, was published in 2016, when she was 26. Her follow-up, The Vanishing Half, has spent the past three weeks in the top five of the New York Times bestseller list and the screen rights have been optioned by HBO in a seven-figure deal.

HBO had to outbid 17 rival TV companies in the race to adapt your book for the screen. How does that feel?
Last week was truly the wildest week of my life. It was my birthday week, so I’ve never been sent so many bottles of champagne or bouquets of flowers in my life, and probably never will be again.

And that was on top of your book debuting at No 1 in the NYT bestseller list. What were you doing when you heard the news?
It was maybe 5 o’clock in the evening and I was just sitting on my couch, and my editor called out of nowhere. We were optimistic, but I never imagined that. The people who are No 1 are household names, like Stephen King!

Describe The Vanishing Half.
It’s a story about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who decide to live their lives on opposite sides of the colour line – one as a white woman and one as a black woman…

Read the entire interview here.

HBO Wins ‘The Vanishing Half’ Auction In 7-Figure Deal; 17 Bidders Pursued Brit Bennett Bestseller

Deadline
2020-06-29

Mike Fleming Jr

HBO

EXCLUSIVE: HBO won a wild auction that sources said saw 17 bidders vying for The Vanishing Half, the novel by Brit Bennett that is currently atop The New York Times bestseller list. Sources said HBO will pay low seven-figures for the book and the author will be executive producer of what HBO will develop as a limited series.

The novel focuses on the Vignes sisters, identical twins who, after growing up together in a small, southern black community, run away at age sixteen. It’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, hiding her identity from her husband, who knows nothing of her past. Even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?…

Read the entire article here.

Shadow Child

Grand Central Publishing
2018-05-08
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781538711453
eBook ISBN-13: 9781538711446

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

For fans of Tayari Jones and Ruth Ozeki, from National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Rizzuto comes a haunting and suspenseful literary tale set in 1970s New York City and World War II-era Japan, about three strong women, the dangerous ties of family and identity, and the long shadow our histories can cast.

Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and 1960s, so close they shared the same nickname. Raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving but unstable mother, they were fatherless, mixed-race, and utterly inseparable, devoted to one another. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent, nearly fatal betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever–until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hana’s lonely Manhattan doorstep with a secret that will change everything.

Told in interwoven narratives that glide seamlessly between the gritty streets of New York, the lush and dangerous landscape of Hawaii, and the horrors of the Japanese internment camps and the bombing of Hiroshima, Shadow Child is set against an epic sweep of history. Volcanos, tsunamis, abandonment, racism, and war form the urgent, unforgettable backdrop of this intimate, evocative, and deeply moving story of motherhood, sisterhood, and second chances.

Sister Mine

Grand Central Publishing
2013-03-12
346 pages
Paperback ISBN-13: 9781455528400
eBook ISBN-13: 9781455517732

Nalo Hopkinson

Andre Norton Nebula Award, 2013

Nalo Hopkinson–winner of the John W. Campbell Award, the Sunburst Award, and the World Fantasy award (among others), and lauded as one of our “most inventive and brilliant writers” (New York Post)–returns with a new work. With her singular voice and characteristic sharp insight, she explores the relationship between two sisters in this richly textured and deeply moving novel . . . Sister Mine We’d had to be cut free of our mother’s womb. She’d never have been able to push the two-headed sport that was me and Abby out the usual way. Abby and I were fused, you see. Conjoined twins. Abby’s head, torso, and left arm protruded from my chest. But here’s the real kicker; Abby had the magic, I didn’t. Far as the Family was concerned, Abby was one of them, though cursed, as I was, with the tragic flaw of mortality.

Now adults, Makeda and Abby still share their childhood home. The surgery to separate the two girls gave Abby a permanent limp, but left Makeda with what feels like an even worse deformity: no mojo. The daughters of a celestial demigod and a human woman, Makeda and Abby were raised by their magical father, the god of growing things–a highly unusual childhood that made them extremely close. Ever since Abby’s magical talent began to develop, though, in the form of an unearthly singing voice, the sisters have become increasingly distant.

Today, Makeda has decided it’s high time to move out and make her own life among the other nonmagical, claypicken humans–after all, she’s one of them. In Cheerful Rest, a run-down warehouse space, Makeda finds exactly what she’s been looking for: an opportunity to live apart from Abby and begin building her own independent life. There’s even a resident band, led by the charismatic (and attractive) building superintendent.

But when her father goes missing, Makeda will have to discover her own talent–and reconcile with Abby–if she’s to have a hope of saving him . . .

The Role of Black Women in the Making of a White Argentine Republic

Black Perspectives
2020-07-02

Christina Proenza Coles, Lecturer of American Studies
University of Virginia

Erika Denise Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2020)

The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing,” observed W.E.B. Du Bois, “a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”¹ The exposition of whiteness as a novel social construct and political tool masquerading as a natural category has been ably elaborated by several scholars in the last forty years. Erika Denise Edward’s new book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic, is both innovative as well as firmly grounded in the rich tradition of scholarship that illuminates the manifold processes, policies, sites, and situations in which notions of whiteness were negotiated, reified, and contested across the New World.

Hiding in Plain Sight counters conventional narratives about the demographic decline of Afro-Argentines as it centers the initiatives of African-descended women in capitalizing on the privileges of whiteness. Edwards, an Associate Professor of colonial Latin American History at UNC Charlotte, addresses broad questions regarding the complex relationships between race and class in Latin America, including “how the caste societies of the colonial and early national periods were gradually transformed into the class societies of the twentieth century.”²…

Read the entire review here.

Brit Bennett on her New Novel ‘The Vanishing Half” and the History of Racial Passing

CBS This Morning
2020-06-26

Best-selling author Brit Bennett is following the success of her critically-acclaimed debut, “The Mothers,” with a “The Vanishing Half,” a novel exploring the American history of racial passing. She joins CBS News’ Errol Barnett to discuss how the story, which opens in 1968, is particularly timely today. Bennett also shares her reaction to J.K. Rowling’s controversial statements on transgender women and how the trending #PublishingPaidMe has uncovered inequities within the publishing industry.

Listen to the episode (00:26:00) here. Download the episode here.

Maria Campbell on the pain and relief of re-releasing Halfbreed with uncut account of RCMP rape

As It Happens
CBC Radio
2019-11-29

Métis author and playwright Maria Campbell has re-released her seminal 1973 memoir Halfbreed with previously censored pages intact. (Sheena Goodyear/CBC )

Métis author says the published version of her 1973 memoir ‘didn’t tell the complete story’

Nearly five decades after Maria Campbell first published her seminal memoir Halfbreed, she says she finally feels like it’s finished.

That’s because the first version of the book was incomplete. Two integral pages detailing her account of being raped by a Mountie when she was 14 years old had been excised.

Those long-lost pages were discovered last year in an unpublished manuscript, and now the memoir has been re-released intact for the first time.

“I feel like it’s finished now, because it never felt finished for me,” Campbell said. “I always felt like there was a part of it that was missing, and that it didn’t tell the complete story.”

The Métis author, broadcaster and filmmaker joined As It Happens host Carol Off in studio to discuss Halfbreed’s legacy and continued relevance today…

Listen to the story (00:27:32) here. Read the transcript here.

As a White Mom to Black Children, I Question Other Parents’ Intentions 24/7

Working Mother
2020-06-12

Audrey Goodson Kingo, Deputy Editor

I must protect my 4-year-old son and 9-month-old daughter.

To be a good mom to my kids, I must be their fiercest advocate at all times, because the world won’t be.

I remember my biggest parenting mistake with perfect clarity. The shame still turns my stomach when I recall the moment I sided with white parents, who look like me, instead of my Black son…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 100, Issue 1 (2020-02-01)
pages 3-34
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-7993067

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Assistant Professor of History
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

This article focuses on the experiences of women of African descent who were made captives (and, in some cases, recaptives) after the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, the most important port in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico). Although the raid is well known to historians of piracy, its implications for women’s history and African diaspora studies have not been properly contextualized in a period of expanding Atlantic slavery. This article proposes a close reading of contraband cases, parochial registers, slave codes, and eyewitness accounts centered on Afro-Mexican women who were kidnapped to Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). A focus on displacement and resilience opens new narratives through which to understand women who transcended their captivity by becoming spouses to French colonists and free mothers to Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur (people of mixed race).

Read or purchase the article here.