Mixed Race Studies

Woman Crush(ing the Patriarchy) Wednesday: Omaris Zunilda Zamora

Latina
2016-05-18

Raquel Reichard, Politics & Culture Editor

Black and Latina/Chicana feminisms are life-affirming for countless women of color, but in both movements, AfroLatinas are left at the periphery, if acknowledged at all. This week’s #WCW Omaris Zunilda Zamora wants to change that.

The Chicago-born, New York-livin’ dominicana is a literary scholar who looks to AfroLatina knowledge producers to help bridge the gap between theory and practice. When she’s not teaching at Brooklyn College or completing her Ph.D. in Afro-Latino Cultural & Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Zamora is bringing her AfroLatina feminism to the interwebs.

Ahead, learn how this mujer arrived at her AfroLatina feminist thought and how she uses it to crush the anti-Black, xenophobic, classist patriarchy.

Can you tell our readers a little more about your work as a scholar?

As an AfroLatina and Dominican literary scholar, my work looks to bridge the gap between theory and practice by first acknowledging AfroLatina women as knowledge producers. Our knowledge is informed through our bodies and the relationships that we have with ourselves and other women in our communities. The idea is that our bodies as Black women take up space in a very particular way. Furthermore, I look at the narratives and stories by transnational Dominican women to further understand how the African diaspora can expand how we think about blackness, gender and sexuality…

Read the entire article here.

Mestizaje in the Age of Fascism: German and Q’eqchi’ Maya Interracial Unions in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala

German History
Volume 34, Issue 2 (June 2016)
pages 214-236
DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghw017

Julie Gibbings, Assistant Professor of History
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

In contemporary Guatemala, Q’eqchi’ Mayas of German descent are reclaiming identities as ‘the improved race’ (la raza mejorada), which allows them claim both tradition and authenticity as well as racial whiteness and modernity. While surprising to contemporary observers, these identities have longer histories, rooted in the interwar period, when Guatemalan urban intellectuals and statesmen looked to German-Maya sexual unions as the racial solution to Guatemala’s failure to forge a modern and homogenous nation. Like national racial mixing (mestizaje) projects found in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Guatemalan intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s argued that racial mixing with Anglo-Saxons led not to racial degeneration, but—potentially—to new and more vital races. While long ignored by historical scholarship, hybrid Q’eqchi’-Germans, however, unravel a priori assumptions of German diasporic political and social insularity. By examining the potent symbolic and cultural dimensions Guatemala’s unique mestizaje project had for the formation of both German and Guatemalan nationalist projects during the rise of German National Socialism and Guatemala’s own populist dictatorship under President Jorge Ubico (1931–1944), this article argues for an understanding of German diasporas in Latin America that places them squarely in the transnational space between competing nationalisms and political agendas. By further examining the important material and social dimensions of mixed-race families, this article reveals the crucial ties Germans forged in Latin America and how who counted as German and by what measure was a subject of considerable debate with important political consequences.

Read or purchase the article here.