Mixed Race Studies

Asians in S.A. claim multiracial identity

San Antonio Express-News
2011-06-26

Elaine Ayala and Kelly Guckian

San Antonio’s Asian residents are more likely to self-identify as being of more than one race or ethnicity than their U.S. and Texas counterparts, according to new 2010 Census data. The trend indicates not only intermarriage with whites and Hispanics since World War II, experts said, but more of a willingness or opportunity among Asians to intermarry outside their group.
 
Data compiled by the San Antonio Express-News points to the impact of a strong military presence in San Antonio over several generations, among them Anglo and Hispanic soldiers who brought home “war brides,” said Mitsu Yamazaki of the Alamo Asian American Chamber of Commerce, who studies demographic trends.
 
San Antonio stands out from other U.S. and Texas cities in another way that may fuel more intermarriage among Asians, said Texas state demographer Lloyd Potter: It doesn’t have an Asian enclave…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American / Hispanic Political Thought

Oxford University Press
November 2011
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199746668; ISBN10: 0199746664

Diego A. von Vacano, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M University

The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.

Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simón Bolívar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic—a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.

Features

• Advances an alternative concept of race as inherently mixed, unstable, fluid, and politically potent
• Links approaches to race in Latin American thought to canonical Western political discourse
• Posits “race” as a central component of modernity and of political theory

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Paradox of Empire: Las Casas and the Birth of Race
• 2. Mixed into Unity: Race and Republic in the Thought of Simon Bolivar
• 3. Race and Nation in the Democratic Caesarism of Vallenilla Lanz
• 4. The Citizenship of Beauty: Jose Vasconcelos’s Aesthetic Synthesis of Race
• Conclusion: Making Race Visible to Political Theory

Cultural Representation in Native America

AltaMira Press
August 2006
192 pages
Cloth 0-7591-0984-2 / 978-0-7591-0984-1
Paper 0-7591-0985-0 / 978-0-7591-0985-8

Edited by:

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
San Francisco State University

Today as in the past there are many cultural and commercial representations of American Indians that, thoughtlessly or otherwise, negatively shape the images of indigenous people. Jolivétte and his co-authors challenge and contest these images, demonstrating how Native representation and identity are at the heart of Native politics and Native activism. In portrayals of a Native Barbie Doll or a racist mascot, disrespect of Native women, misconceptions of mixed race identities, or the commodification of all things “Indian”, the authors reveal how the very existence of Native people continues to be challenged, with harmful repercussions in social and legal policy, not just in popular culture. The authors re-articulate Native history, religion, identity, and oral and literary traditions in ways that allow the true identity and persona of the Native person to be recognized and respected. It is a project that is fundamental to ethnic revitalization and the recognition of indigenous rights in North America. This book is a provocative and essential introduction for students and Native and non-Native people who wish to understand the images and realities of American Indian lifeways in American society.

Table of Contents

• PART I: Contestation and Representation, Chapter 1: Mapping Contests in Unknown Locations
  Paula Gunn Allen

• Say Hau to Native American Barbie
  Kim Shuck

• Liquor Moccasins
  Philip Klasky

• (Dis)Locating Spiritual Knowledge: Embodied Ideologies, Social Landscapes, and the Power of the Neoshamanic Other
  Sara Sutler-Cohen

• Mascots in the New Millennium
  Winona LaDuke

• PART II: Contestation and Politics, Chapter 6: Native American Resistance and Revitalization in the Era of Self-Determination
  Troy Johnson

• Identity, Oral Tradition, and Inter-generational Healing in the Southern Paiute Salt Songs
  Melissa Nelson

• In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
  Winona LaDuke

• Part III: Contestation and Mixed Race Identity; Chapter 9: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman
  Norma Alarcon

• Chapped with Weather and Age: Mixed-Blood Identity and the Shape of History
  Sara Stuler-Cohen

• Dunn Playing Indian
  Carolyn Dunn

• Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
  Andrew Jolivette

Webinar: Mixed Identity and the Arts

Runnymede Trust
2011-07-05, 10:30-12:30Z

Runnymede Trust is hosting an online seminar (webinar) discussing mixed identity and the arts. The webinar will take the form of a live-streamed discussion between the photographer and visual artist Mark Sealy, the arts consultant and creative producer Samina Zahir and playwright Roy Williams. Their discussion will last about an hour, with the second half devoted to answering questions from participants who have pre-registered for the event.

Panellists will discuss the idea of mixed and migrant identity in art. Whether it is possible to have art that addresses a mixed race or a migrant audience as it can a Black audience? If not why not? Is it possible to have art that does not come from a mixed background? Are any minority groups well represented in the Art world? Is it important that they should be? In what sense have discussions about art and race moved forward in the past two decades? What can be done to encourage this process?

The arts and mixedness project is a collaboration between the Arts Council and the Runnymede Trust. The RunnymedeTrust is the UK’s leading race equality think tank. The project was designed to examine the extent to which mixed race people are catered for by and in the arts in the UK. It was also intended to examine the ways that arts can address the issue of mixed race identity. This next stage of the project has begun to focus more directly upon audiences for works of art. It has broadened the focus of the project to examine how migrants relate to mixed identity and how art can address issues of migration.

The webinar will start at 11:30 am [BST] and will last approximately 2 hours. If you would like to participate in this event or for further information please email Kamaljeet Gill at kam@runnymedetrust.org.