Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2011-06-19

Velina Hasu Houston

Recently I was honored with a Loving Award from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival (held June 11-12 at the Japanese American National Museum). The award and the meaning behind it has caused me to reflect on multiracial identity.

My parents married in 1954 after a nine-year courtship in Japan. When they left Japan, they arrived in the U.S., a country in which their marriage was illegal in 17 states and would remain so until 1967, two years before my father’s death.

In the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down laws against interracial marriage, honoring the marriage of Afro-Indian Mildred Loving and her white husband Richard (who also were second cousins).

I grew up in a community where being mixed race was a natural thing, at least for those of us who had foreign mothers and American fathers. We were multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural — and often, like me, transnational. The idea of having a foot in at least two countries and being a blend of three or four ethnicities was par for the course…

Read the entire article here.

Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974

University of Michigan
2010
218 pages

Andrea Leigh Dewees

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan

“Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974” engages the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate’s literary production over five decades, beginning with his portrayals of the Maya and expanding to include his representations of the mulatto, female and God. I am primarily concerned with close readings of Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), Mulata de Tal (1963) and El árbol de la cruz (1997) but I draw also from others of Asturias’s novels, as well as historiography, postcolonial and feminist theory, to show how Asturias narrates the nation through literary figures of the Other.

Chapter 2 begins with an intellectual history of Asturias as a “Maya” author, tracing the roots and permutations of this myth through biography, autobiography, and literary criticism. I then show how his appropriative creation of a Maya indigenismo is central to his political and aesthetic conception of Latin American literature. However, Asturias’s novels extend beyond this fictive Maya center. Chapter 3 analyzes a non-Maya, untranslated phrase associated with a mulatto character in Asturias’s Banana Trilogy. I analyze an emerging negrista aesthetic and argue that the interruptive repetition of the phrase structures the novel’s account of the recent history of revolution, land reform and democratic rupture in Guatemala, as well as the more distant legacies of the conquest, colonialism and slavery.

Mulata de tal also features a mulatta character and in Chapter 4 I explain how Asturias connects land to the female body through a complex series of fragmentations, profanations and redemptions. In contrast to the more historical concerns of the Banana Trilogy, this novel is encased within an apocalyptic framework, marking a shift in Asturias’s attention from a Maya origin to the end of days.

Finally, I examine a sketch published after Asturias’s death, El árbol de la cruz, calling attention to Asturias’s connection between the female Other and the cross in what amounts to a brief treatise on communion. I show how this text, read accumulatively through popular religiosity in others of Asturias’s novels, balances between definitive origin and conclusive end.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction Mimesis and Guatemalan National Literature
• Chapter 2 Asturias and lo maya
• Appendices
• Chapter 3 Irrupted History: 1944, 1954 and Los ojos de los enterrados
• Chapter 4 Fragments between hell and heaven: land, the female body and the text in Mulata de tal
• Chapter 5 Crosses, Origins, Communions
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

What Is The Real Issue With Obama Choosing Black?

The Atlanta Post
2010-05-04

Yvette Carnell

During candidate Obama’s run for Presidency, he said “I self-identify as an African-American. That’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed. And I’m proud of it.” Case closed right?  One would think so, but now that President Obama has checked “black” on his Census form, some of his detractors are criticizing him for running away from his heritage. So please allow me to set the record straight….

President Obama checked “black” on his Census form because, well, he is black.

It is a mark of evolution that Americans are allowed to identify themselves as “some other race” on their Census forms, but aren’t most of us multi-racial?  If Obama’s critics have decided that he should adhere to the strictest of rules where his race classification is concerned, then shouldn’t all Americans be held to that same standard?  And if we’re all held to that standard, won’t that make the task of completing the Census form an act in futility for many, if not most, Americans? We are a melting pot, and as such, a significant number of us are an amalgamation of a wide variety of races and are therefore, by definition, multiracial.  The only distinction is that race isn’t as much about definition as it is about identification…

…Some observers have even made the case that Obama’s choosing “black” on his Census form was a marginalization of his white mother and grandparents.  It was not. It was, however, an acknowledgment of the visual queues associated with race, and to a larger extent-racism.

What’s more, isn’t it a bit hypocritical for those who’ve fought for the right of multiracial and biracial people to choose a race category which more suitably fits the way in which they self identify, i.e. a choice more ethnically encompassing than purely Black, White, or Asian to now force President Obama into their preferred “multiracial” box?…

Read the entire essay here.