Mixed Race Studies

Discovering Early California Afro-Latino Presence

Heyday
November 2010
24 pages
Paperback, 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-1-59714-145-1

Damany M. Fisher, Professor of History and Political Science
Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, California

California’s Afro-Latino heritage

Although it is not generally apparent from paintings and other depictions of early California, many members of the pioneering Anza expeditions and Spanish California’s most prominent families were of mixed race—Hispanic, Indian, and African. At a time when slavery was still legal in the United States, these Afro-Latinos made major contributions to early California. They were landowners, soldiers, judges, governors, and patriarchs of some of the state’s most influential families. They opened up trails, led rebellions, and established ranchos and pueblos that would become the basis for many of today’s cities.

This pamphlet, produced in conjunction with the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail, provides an overview of these remarkable families, describes their backgrounds, and investigates the ways in which they reshaped early California. It also provides us with an image of a society in which the relationships between races, and racism itself, were far different, and perhaps less rigidly understood, than they are today.

The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis. A Narrative Biography

Esquiline Hill Press
2012
567 pages (est.)
mobi ISBN: 978-1-58863-450-4
PDF ISBN: 978-1-58863-451-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-58863-452-8

Harry Henderson

Albert Henderson

Edmonia Lewis was the first famous “colored sculptor” and the first to idealize her African and American Indian heritages in stone. She flourished from 1864 through 1878, and, as an artist, was a rare instrument for social change in the aftermath of the Civil War. She pressed her case for equality from her studio in Rome, Italy, and with annual tours of the United States.

Our new narrative of Lewis’s life and art updates many “established facts” – well beyond erroneous birth and death dates – with more than 100,000 words, 50 illustrations, 800 references, bibliography, index, and a reference list of more than 100 works with notes on museum holdings. It is based on private letters, public documents, essays, hundreds of news items, reviews of her work, museum collections, and more than two dozen published interviews. It reveals how a world biased against her color, class, gender and religion received her. Of special interest to African-American and American-Indian studies, as well as art, women’s, and American history, the narrative opens an abundance of previously unrecognized sources, reinterprets important relationships, names missing works, and corrects the identification of an important portrait. Students of the nineteenth century will find it a cool counterpoint to the bitter rage of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Readers familiar with her legendary icons of race may be surprised by her many portraits and her untold moves to Paris and London. They will also find answers to long-standing questions: Where, when, and how did she die? Why did her encounter with a bronze Ben Franklin leave her reeling? Why did she idealize a woman with African features only once in her career? Why did she never cite the now-famous Forever Free after her first interviews in Rome? Why did she have to stalk Henry Wadsworth Longfellow through the streets to make his portrait? Where was her studio? How often did she tour America? How did she enter her work in the 1876 Centennial expo, which had barred colored people absolutely? What were her relationships with fans, mentors, and fellow sculptors? Who were her rivals, her best friends, and her worst enemies? Fresh evidence, never before collected and collated, argues a novel motive for her erotic masterwork, the Death of Cleopatra, which sits apart in her œuvre like a hussy in a small town church. Newly realized sources also change our view of her childhood and provide ample support to refute distortions of her personal character, sexuality, and appearance.

A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis

Oxford University Press
1997-06-05
336 pages
1 linecut, 5 maps
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780195097115
Paperback ISBN: 9780195097122

Peter Bakker, Associate professor
Department of Aesthetics and Communication
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The Michif language—spoken by descendants of French Canadian fur traders and Cree Indians in western Canada—is considered an “impossible language” since it uses French for nouns and Cree for verbs, and comprises two different sets of grammatical rules. Bakker uses historical research and fieldwork data to present the first detailed analysis of this language and how it came into being.

Naia Reborn: See the Surprising Face of a First American

NBC News
2015-01-05

Alan Boyle, Digital’s Science Editor

Timothy Archibald / National Geographic

Researchers and artists have reconstructed the face of a teenage girl who lived 12,000 years ago in Mexico, and it’s not the kind of face a person might typically associate with Native Americans.

The remains of the girl, nicknamed Naia (after the Greek term for a water nymph), were recovered from an underwater cave on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Naia is regarded as one of the earliest known residents of the Americas — but her skull has a shape associated with African or South Pacific populations rather than the typical Siberian look.

Despite that different look, researchers say Naia is genetically related to Native Americans who came to America later, from Siberia via the Beringia land bridge…

Read the entire article here.

White? Black? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier

The New York Times
2014-12-24

Carl Zimmer

In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.

The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”

There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.

So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.

People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.

In the United States, there is a long tradition of trying to draw sharp lines between ethnic groups, but our ancestry is a fluid and complex matter. In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people…

Read the entire article here.

The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States

The American Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 96, Issue 1, 2015-01-08
Pages 37–53
DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.11.010

Katarzyna Bryc, Research Fellow in Genetics (EXT)
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Eric Y. Durand
23andMe, Inc., Mountain View, California

J. Michael Macpherson, Assistant Professor
School of Computational Sciences
Chapman University, Orange, California

David Reich, Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Joanna L. Mountain, Senior Director of Research
23andMe, Inc., Mountain View, California

Over the past 500 years, North America has been the site of ongoing mixing of Native Americans, European settlers, and Africans (brought largely by the trans-Atlantic slave trade), shaping the early history of what became the United States. We studied the genetic ancestry of 5,269 self-described African Americans, 8,663 Latinos, and 148,789 European Americans who are 23andMe customers and show that the legacy of these historical interactions is visible in the genetic ancestry of present-day Americans. We document pervasive mixed ancestry and asymmetrical male and female ancestry contributions in all groups studied. We show that regional ancestry differences reflect historical events, such as early Spanish colonization, waves of immigration from many regions of Europe, and forced relocation of Native Americans within the US. This study sheds light on the fine-scale differences in ancestry within and across the United States and informs our understanding of the relationship between racial and ethnic identities and genetic ancestry.

Read the entire article here.

The corporate institution of mixed race: Indigeneity, discourse, and Orientalism in Aboriginal policy

Critical Race and Whiteness Studies
Volume 10, Number 1, 2014
17 pages

Camie Augustus
Department of History
University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Contradiction in Aboriginal policy, especially the oscillation between assimilation and segregation, is often viewed as inconsequential. The suggestion has been that inconsistency is typical of governments and even expected of administrations that have little time, money, or motivation to be overly concerned with Aboriginal matters. However, I posit that ambiguity has meaning. I propose that utilizing Said’s concept of the corporate institution of Orientalism reveals a ‘mixed-race’ discourse in government records during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that in fact gives meaning to this contradictory nature. I examine the ways in which the texts of Aboriginal law and policy in Canada, the US, and Australia constitute a specific mixed-race discourse of ambivalence and ambiguity, in contrast to a racial discourse of certainty. Based on a discourse analysis of key policy texts, I conclude that ambiguity and ambivalence constitute part of a colonial structure based on racial binarisms where an absence of space for ‘those in between’ reflected the perceived transitional and transient nature of ‘mixed-race’ as a temporary category, and the impetus to eliminate it. This discourse is surprisingly similar and persistent across a broad span of time and space, suggesting that questions about racial mixing and the presence of mixed-ancestry Natives constituted a major determining factor in the shaping of Aboriginal law and policy in these three countries between 1850 and 1950.

Read the entire article here.

“Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families” a lecture by Dr. Anne Hyde

Colorado State University
Cherokee Park Ballroom, Lory Student Center
Fort Collins, Colorado
2014-12-04, 16:30-18:30 MST (Local Time)

Please join us for a public lecture and book signing/reception by Dr. Anne Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. The title of her talk is drawn from her prize-winning book, Empires, Nations, and Families: The North American West, 1800-1860, which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer…

For more information, click here.

Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America

University of North Carolina Press
October 2014
320 pages
59 figs., 4 maps, 23 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-1783-1

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

and

The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)
Princeton University

Pigmentocracies—the fruit of the multiyear Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA)—is a richly revealing analysis of contemporary attitudes toward ethnicity and race in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, four of Latin America’s most populous nations. Based on extensive, original sociological and anthropological data generated by PERLA, this landmark study analyzes ethnoracial classification, inequality, and discrimination, as well as public opinion about Afro-descended and indigenous social movements and policies that foster greater social inclusiveness, all set within an ethnoracial history of each country. A once-in-a-generation examination of contemporary ethnicity, this book promises to contribute in significant ways to policymaking and public opinion in Latin America.

Edward Telles, PERLA’s principal investigator, explains that profound historical and political forces, including multiculturalism, have helped to shape the formation of ethnic identities and the nature of social relations within and across nations. One of Pigmentocracies’s many important conclusions is that unequal social and economic status is at least as much a function of skin color as of ethnoracial identification. Investigators also found high rates of discrimination by color and ethnicity widely reported by both targets and witnesses. Still, substantial support across countries was found for multicultural-affirmative policies—a notable result given that in much of modern Latin America race and ethnicity have been downplayed or ignored as key factors despite their importance for earlier nation-building.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America (PERLA): Hard Data and What Is at Stake
• 2. The Different Faces of Mestizaje: Ethnicity and Race in Mexico
• 3. From Whitened Miscegenation to Triethnic Multiculturalism: Race and Ethnicity in Columbia
• 4. ¿El pals de todas las sangres? Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Peru
• 5. Mixed and Unequal: New Perspectives on Brazilian Ethnoracial Relations
• 6. A Comparative Analysis of Ethnicity, Race, and Color Based on PERLA Findings
• Notes
• References
• About the Authors
• Index

Marni Soupcoff: A law that bans ‘mixed race’ couples? Yes. In 2014. In Canada

National Post
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
2014-11-06

Marni Soupcoff, Deputy Comment Editor

A Canadian woman falls in love and joins her life with that of a man of a different race. As a direct result of this union, she is harassed, receives notice of eviction, and is told she must leave her home.

What century are we talking about? This one, I’m afraid; and the culprit is not some errant racist landlord trying to throw one tenant out of a building. It’s the Kahnawake Mohawk council, which has a law that bans all “mixed race” couples from living anywhere in its Montreal-area territory.

Waneek Horn-Miller is half of one of those “mixed race” couples who has been told to get out. Horn-Miller may be a Mohawk, but because her common-law husband (and the father or her two children) is white, the aboriginal activist and former Olympian is no longer welcome or permitted to live on Kahnawake territory.

This is happening in 2014. Which, to put things in context, is 47 years after the United States Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation (or race-mixing) laws unconstitutional in that country…

Read the entire article here.