Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • He’s Not Black

    He’s Not Black

    The Washington Post
    2008-11-30
     
    Marie Arana

    He is also half white.

    Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

    We call him that—he calls himself that—because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

    That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

    The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

    To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

    Mapping the liminal identities of mulattas in African, African American, and Caribbean literatures

    Pennsylvania State University
    December 2006
    285 pages
    AAT: 3343682
    ISBN: 9780549992738

    Khadidiatou Gueye

    Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2006

    In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.

    The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation. Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.

    My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic studies.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgements
    • Chapter One
      • Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux
      • Introduction
      • Black/White Polarization
      • Racial Hybridity
      • Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality
    • Chapter Two
      • Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes
      • Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise
      • Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
    • Chapter Three
      • The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the Problematic of Respectability
      • Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
      • Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche
      • Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual Empowerment and Disempowerment
    • Chapter Four
      • Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the Mulatta
      • I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power
      • Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity in Nella Larsen’s Passing
    • Chapter Five
      • The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris
      • The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal
      • Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis martiniquaise and La négresse blanche
    • Conclusion
    • Works Cited

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Crossing borders, erasing boundaries: Interethnic marriages in Tucson, 1854-1930

    Crossing borders, erasing boundaries: Interethnic marriages in Tucson, 1854-1930

    University of Arizona
    392 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3398995
    ISBN: 9781109735864

    Salvador Acosta

    A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate College The University of Arizona

    This dissertation examines the interethnic marriages of Mexicans in Tucson, Arizona, between 1854 and 1930. Arizona’s miscegenation law (1864-1962) prohibited the marriages of whites with blacks, Chinese, and Indians—and eventually those with Asian Indians and Filipinos. Mexicans, legally white, could intermarry with whites, but the anti-Mexican rhetoric of manifest destiny suggests that these unions represented social transgressions. Opponents and proponents of expansionism frequently warned against the purported dangers of racial amalgamation with Mexicans. The explanation to the apparent disjuncture between this rhetoric and the high incidence of Mexican-white marriages in Tucson lies in the difference between two groups: the men who denigrated Mexicans were usually middle- and upper-class men who never visited Mexico or the American Southwest, while those who married Mexicans were primarily working-class westering men. The typical American man chose to pursue his own happiness rather than adhere to a national, racial project.

    This study provides the largest quantitative analysis of intermarriages in the West. The great majority of these intermarriages occurred between whites and Mexicans. Though significantly lower in total numbers, Mexican women accounted for large percentages of all marriages for black and Chinese men. The children of these couples almost always married Mexicans. All of these marriages were illegal in Arizona, but local officials frequently disregarded the law. Their passive acceptance underscores their racial ambiguity of Mexicans. Their legal whiteness allowed them to marry whites, and their social non-whiteness facilitated their marriages with blacks and Chinese.

    The dissertation suggests the need to reassess two predominant claims in American historiography: first, that Mexican-white intermarriages in the nineteenth-century Southwest occurred primarily between the daughters of Mexican elites and enterprising white men; and second, that the arrival of white women led to decreases in intermarriages. Working-class whites and Mexicans in fact accounted for the majority of intermarriages between 1860 and 1930. The number of intermarriages as total numbers always increased, and the percentage of white men who had the option to marry—i.e., those who lived in Arizona as bachelors—continued to intermarry at rates that rivaled the high percentages of the 1860s and 1870s.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • LIST OF FIGURES
    • LIST OF TABLES
    • ABSTRACT
    • INTRODUCTION
    • CHAPTER 1: ARIZONA’S MISCEGENATION LAW AND THE VULNERABILITY OF ILLICIT MARRIAGES
    • CHAPTER 2: THE DISCOURSE OF MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE MEXICAN QUESTION
    • CHAPTER 3: UNDERMINING MANIFEST DESTINY: AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES
    • CHAPTER 4: THE MEXICAN QUESTION REACHES ARIZONA
    • CHAPTER 5: INTERMARRIAGES IN TUCSON, 1860-1930
    • CHAPTER 6: MARRIAGES BETWEEN MEXICANS AND NON-WHITES
    • CHAPTER 7: MARITAL EXPECTATIONS: PROPERTY, NETWORKS, AND VIOLENCE AMONG INTERETHNIC COUPLES
    • CONCLUSION
    • APPENDIX A
    • APPENDIX B
    • REFERENCES

    LIST OF FIGURES

    • Figure 5.1. Interethnic unions for men and women of white ancestry and men and women of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Figure 5.2. Average number of years by which men were older than their interethnic partners, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Figure 5.3. Occupations of men involved in interethnic relationships, excluding those listed as retired or with no occupation, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Figure 5.4. White man-Mexican woman couples versus other kinds of interethnic unions between whites and Mexicans, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Figure 5.5. Interethnic unions involving white, Mexican, and mixed (white-Mexican) men and women, 1930. N=279
    • Figure 5.6. Ethnic background of the spouses of men of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
    • Figure 5.7. Ethnic background of the spouses of women of white-Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1900-1930
    • Figure 5.8. Mexican (M) and white (W) households as a percentage of total households in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: white 53.6%, Mexican 36.7%)
    • Figure 5.9. Interethnic couples as a percentage of all couples in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 7%; 228 of the 236 couples were between Mexicans and whites)
    • Figure 5.10. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of white ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 12%)
    • Figure 5.11. Mexican-white couples as a percentage of all couples involving people of Mexican ancestry in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: 18.2%)
    • Figure 5.12. Geographic distribution of Mexican households, 1930. N=2304
    • Figure 5.13. Single white women as percentage of the total population, United States and Tucson, 1870-1930
    • Figure 5.14. Single white women sixteen years and over as a percentage of the total population in each census district, Tucson, 1920 (citywide: n=574 or 2.8%, average age=26.6 years; nationwide for whites: 4.9%)
    • Figure 5.15. Probable marital status of white men in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=927
    • Figure 5.16. Percentage of interethnic unions for white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
    • Figure 5.17. Probable marital status of foreign white men involved in endogamous relationships, Tucson, 1910. N=166
    • Figure 5.18. Percentage of interethnic unions for foreign white men according to probable marital status when residing in Arizona, Tucson, 1910
    • Figure 6.1. Distribution of black and Chinese residents per census district, Tucson, 1930. Citywide: 484 black men (BM), 477 black women (BW), 152 Chinese men (CM), and 60 Chinese women (CW)
    • Figure 7.1. Charges cited in divorce petitions of intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

    LIST OF TABLES

    • Table 1.1 Interethnic unions involving blacks, Chinese, Mexicans, and descendants of these combinations, Pima County, 1860-1930
    • Table 5.1. Population, couples, and single men and women, Tucson, 1860-1880
    • Table 5.2. Interethnic couples as percentages of all couples, Tucson, 1860-1880
    • Table 5.3. Population, households, and single white women, Tucson, 1900-1930
    • Table 6.1. Black men and women and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Table 6.2. Chinese immigrants to the United States by decade, and Chinese residents in Tucson by census year, 1870-1930
    • Table 6.3. Chinese adult residents and interethnic couples, Tucson, 1860-1930
    • Table 6.4. Chinese men sixteen years old and over, Tucson, 1880-1930
    • Table 6.5. Racial classification for people of Mexican ancestry, Tucson, 1930
    • Table 7.1. Intermarriages and divorce cases among intermarried couples, Pima County, 1873-1930

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • The Enigma Of Jefferson: Mind and Body In Conflict

    The Enigma Of Jefferson: Mind and Body In Conflict

    The New York Times
    1998-11-07

    Dinitia Smith

    For contemporary historians, Thomas Jefferson has always been an enigma, and the new DNA evidence that he fathered at least one child by his young slave Sally Hemings simply deep ens the mystery of the man. On the one hand, Jefferson was the author of some of the most glorious sentences in the English language, his ringing affirmation of the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence. On the other, he was a slaveholder who wrote some of the vilest sentiments of racism in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785. Blacks, Jefferson wrote, have “a very strong and disagreeable odor,” they are incapable of uttering more than “a plain narration.” Jefferson also said that racial amalgamation “produces a degradation… to which no one can innocently consent.”

    Most historians now believe that his relationship with Hemings probably endured for many years, if not from 1787, when Hemings, then 13 or 14, arrived in Paris as a “nurse” to Jefferson’s daughter.

    Now that the new evidence is in, how can the inconsistencies in Jefferson’s character be explained?…

    …But how could Jefferson have sustained a relationship with Hemings that may have lasted for 38 years if he thought that black people smelled, that they were stupid and childlike? “In general, in order to retain someone in slavery, you have to dehumanize them,”  said Edmund Morgan, author of “American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.”  “It was a standard thing that went with slavery.” 

    Jefferson was also surrounded by examples of sexual relationships between masters and slaves. He had witnessed the relationships of two men he deeply admired, his father-in-law, John Wayles, and his law professor, George Wythe, with enslaved women.

    Another reason Jefferson may have been able to reconcile his relationship with Hemings with his opposition to miscegenation, Ms. Gordon-Reed points out in her book, was that Hemings was his wife’s half sister, the daughter of John Wayles and his slave consort. Jefferson had been devastated by his wife’s death, and he had promised her he would never remarry. Perhaps Hemings, who was known to be beautiful, bore some of his wife’s characteristics.

    But perhaps most important, Hemings, under Jefferson’s notions of race mixing, may have been in some way “white”  in his eyes. Indeed, in the 1830 census of Monticello, Hemings was listed as white. Jefferson also believed that blacks became “white”  when they had a certain amount of white blood in them, a theory he illustrated once in a complex mathematical chart drawn up in a letter to a friend. “Let ‘h’ and ‘e’ cohabit,”  Jefferson wrote, and “the half of the blood of each will be q/2 + e/2 +a/8 + A/8…”  He concluded that the more white blood they had, the more “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind.” …

    Read the entire article here.

  • The “Melting Pot” A Myth

    The “Melting Pot” A Myth

    The Journal of Heridity
    Volume 8, Number 3 (March 1917)
    pages 99-105

    Study of Members of Oldest American Families Shows that the Type is Still Very Diverse—No Amalgamation Going on to Produce a Strictly American Sub-Type—Characteristics of the Old American Stock

    America as “The Melting Pot” of peoples is a picture often drawn by writers who do not trouble themselves as to the precision of their figures of speech.

    Dr. Ales Hrdlicka has been investigating the older contents of this pot, and finds that even the material which went into it first has not yet so melted. Several hundred members of the old, white, American stock have been most carefully measured and examined in many ways, to find whether the people making up this stock are tending to become alike—whether a new sub-type of the human race is being formed here in America, with intermarriage, environment, and under the pressure of outward circumstances.

    Dr. Hrdlicka finds very definitely that as yet such is not the case. The force of heredity is too strong to be radically altered in a century” or two, and even the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, the Virginia cavaliers, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Huguenots, while possibly not as much unlike as their ancestors probably were, are still far from a real blend.

    “The Melting Pot” is a figure of speech; and, as far as physical anthropology is concerned, it will not be anything more in this country, at least for many centuries…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness

    Untragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness

    American Literary History
    Volume 8, Number 3 (Fall 1996)
    pages 426-448
    DOI: 10.1093/alh/8.3.426

    Stephen P. Knadler

    Among Charles Chesnutt’s earliest political essays is a little studied piece that he wrote for the New York Independent entitled “What Is a White Man?” (1889). At a time when he was, it has been argued, at best accommodating—at worst, pandering to—the taste of his genteel Northern readers for the exotic local colors of plantation fiction (Brodhead 204), Chesnutt was reinterpreting race as less a stigma against blacks, or an advantage for whites, than a cultural practice by which all are marked. The little-known Cleveland lawyer’s entrance into racial polemics was prompted by Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady’s series of speeches on the material progress of the New South. Although many Southerners viewed the economic development’ of the South with hope and apprehension, Grady had appeased their misgivings and sanctioned industrial advancement through a recurrent rhetorical appeal to “white supremacy.” In his speech “The South and Her Problems,” delivered at the Texas State Fair (1887), for example, Grady had recruited the implacable rise and expansion of the Anglo-Saxon spirit as a guarantee for a New South of industrialism and urban growth. This “transcending achievement” of the New South, Grady argued, could not be impeded, for the “supremacy of the white race must be maintained forever… This is the declaration of no new truth. It has abided forever in the marrow of our bones, and shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts” (53; emphasis added)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of Hybridity

    Dougla, Half-doogla, Travesao, and the Limits of Hybridity

    Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
    Volume 7, Issues 1 & 2 (Fall 2009)
    30 paragraphs
    ISSN 1547-7150

    Jennifer Rahim, Senior Lecturer in English
    University of the West Indies, St. Augustine

    Discourses on Caribbean culture and identity have been, if anything, prolific and energetic in their manufacture and circulation of a virtual plethora of signs, an entire vocabulary of terms recruited to articulate the concept of the hybrid, whether biological or cultural, as a corrective, if not redemptive possibility for the region and beyond. Indeed, cultural discourses throughout the Americas have at one time or the other looked to hybridity like a raised standard to heal Empire’s poisonous legacy of Manichean systems of value applied to race and ethnic difference. Without a doubt, these discourses have been deployed in sometimes naïve, sometimes cunningly politicized ways. If anything, they have been most productive in providing an instructive archive of narratives that reveal the far from idyllic and democratic histories of forced and consensual interracial mixings and cross-cultural aesthetic practices that characterize the region’s evolution.
     
    Whatever the names with which the ever expanding family of hybrid identities have been baptized—Mulatto, Mestizaje, Creole, Spanish, Cocoa Payol, callaloo, Travesaou, Dougla, and so on—all share the following features: their origination in the diasporic multiracial, multiethnic make up of Caribbean societies; their particular histories and politics of application in contexts of privilege associated with colour, class, gender, and physical appearance; their role in the promotion of a rhetoric of nationalist accommodation to salve tensions among diverse race and ethnic groups; their elevation as signifiers of a regional and/or planetary destination that will be the radical reconstitution of demeaning stereotypes instituted under colonialism; and finally, their shared histories of failure to convincingly realize the very possibilities for which they have been embraced given the uneven weighting of differences that comprise the “mix.”

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Mulatto Problem

    The Mulatto Problem

    The Journal of Heredity
    Volume 16, Number 8 (August 1925)
    pages 281-286

    Ernest Dodge
    Washington, D. C.

    The numerous races and subraces of mankind could hardly have maintained their distinct existence to so late a date in history save for the geographical barrier generally found between different stocks. The only other bulwarks against amalgamation are artificial caste distinctions and such degree of mutual repulsion or lessened attraction as may exist when racial characteristics differ in the extreme.

    Whenever and wherever the one dependable barrier of geographic separation between two radically different types is swept away, it should be the business of Eugenics to investigate the biological results of crossing. If these prove to be beneficial or even neutral, then artificial walls of caste should be discouraged, as these are always inconvenient and may become intolerable. But if the results of amalgamation are found to be markedly injurious, then eugenic research will not only strengthen the force of social inhibition but lift it from the plane of mere prejudice or pride to the level of an ethical mandate. In the United States a problem exists which demands extensive and impartial eugenic research,’ but which unfortunately has never received it on any adequate scale. Nine-tenths of our population are a heterogeneous mixture of many European races which collectively we call by the misnomer of “Caucasian.” The other one-tenth belong to a type so different and so prepotent for perpetuating their differences in mixed offspring, that present-day sentiment is strongly crystalized against amalgamation of the two populations.

    We should err, however, if we assumed that caste barriers now existent keeping black and white America distinct throughout all centuries to come. Past history would point to a different expectation. Probably one in five of the Afro-American people has enough of the Caucasian in his makeup to be noticed by an observer, while doubtless many considered to be full blacks have one-eighth or one-sixteenth part of white ancestry. True it is that the major part of this influx of white blood occurred a considerable time ago, having been tolerated by a- sort of patriarchal moral code under slavery and in the earlier years after emancipation. Improvement in education, economic condition, and racial self respect has doubtless reduced the number of colored mothers willing to consent to extra-legal unions; and the sentiment also of the majority race is probably less tolerant than formerly toward such alliances. As for legal intermarriage, it has always been too infrequent to be the leading factor in the problem.

    But the saying is a true one that “you can’t un-scramble eggs.” Unless it should be a fact that the children and grandchildren of mulattoes are inferior to pure negroes in fertility and viability, the composite complexion of the Afro-American community must inevitably grow lighter as the centuries succeed one another. For it cannot be expected that the interbreeding of two contiguous populations will ever be reduced to zero. And every child that shall ever be born of a mixed union increases permanently the percentage of European blood in the colored population. The process might indeed be slow, but it could work in only one direction.

    It becomes, therefore, a matter of real importance to learn what the ultimate results of past or future intermingling will be. The present article is meant in part as a plea for the endowment of scientific research in ways that will be indicated before we close…

    …(IV.) There is one final possibility that must be reckoned with, though it is contrary to all prevailing ideals. That is that race and caste barriers may sometime in the long centuries be quite swept away and the entire American people become a race of quintroons. Such a thing will not come about by any cataclismic break in existing customs. But the foregoing discussion points the way to its final possibility—unless eugenic researches should prove such a result to be so radically undesirable that society would erect against miscegenation a bulwark of caste thrice stronger even than now…

    …And then as for the white race: if impartial research should conceivably prove that’even the smallest admixture of colored blood is a pronounced racial handicap, lessening the mental processes, the moral fiber, fecundity and the resistance to disease, then it would become a duty to the future to maintain and further strengthen at any cost all barriers against amalgamation. But if, on the other hand, the most careful research should indicate that the results of an ultimate “quintroonifying” of America would be at the utmost no worse – than neutral, then would our people be justified in ceasing to worry about the future and in letting each coming generation handle its own caste problem with whatever degree of laxity or vigor shall best suit its own predilections, immediate conditions, or conscience…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “A Whole New Race”: Chinese Cubans and Hybrid Identities in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

    “A Whole New Race”: Chinese Cubans and Hybrid Identities in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

    Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
    Volume 7, Issues 1 & 2 (Fall 2009)
    14 paragraphs
    ISSN 1547-7150

    Ann Marie Alfonso-Forero, Dissertation Editor
    Graduate School, University of Miami

    More so than its predecessors Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters, Cristina García’s 2003 novel Monkey Hunting establishes her sense of Cubanness within the broader context of the Caribbean experience. More importantly, it seeks to create an inclusive and diverse sense of what it means to be Cuban that destabilizes the very notion of racial identification, which fails to account for the dynamic nature of identity and the importance of adopted cultural and religious traditions. What Monkey Hunting offers as an alternative is a process of identification through self-chosen cultural and religious hybridities that provides a source of agency in a time and place fraught with various forms of brutal and racialized socio-political oppression.
     
    García, a Cuban-born novelist who has spent all but her first two years of life in the United States, addresses issues of race and identity in her previous novels, but does so in a way that makes use of themes and historical events closer to her own experience. These narratives take on Castro’s revolution, the condition of exile, and family politics and division, and are equally concerned with Cuba as they are with Cuban-American culture in the United States. Monkey Hunting surprised critics with its broader concerns and unusual subject matter. When asked during an interview in L.A. Weekly what made her choose to write about the legacy of a Chinese man in Cuba, García answered:

    Monkey Hunting probably came from my first visit to a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, circa 1965. “You mean I get to order the black beans and the pork fried rice?” That blew my mind. Later, I got to thinking more seriously about compounded identities. My own daughter, for example, is part Cuban, Japanese and Russian Jew, with a little Guatemalan thrown in on my paternal grandmother’s side. Traditional notions of identity don’t work for her. I don’t think they work for a lot of people anymore. I wanted to explore this. (Huneven 38)

    This response calls attention to García’s preoccupation with hybridity, which is evident throughout the text’s various narrative threads. Spanning over 150 years, four generations, and at least three continents, the novel concerns itself with issues of slavery, indentured servitude, colonization, the sugar plantation, and Cuba’s complex racial and political history, and presents readers with a Cuban identity that is inclusive of the Asian and African presences on the island. This paper argues that through the narrative of Chen Pan and his family, García explores the ways in which self-chosen hybridities allow for the inclusion of both Chinese and African cultures in Cuban identity and function against patriarchal Spanish colonial paradigms that tend to restrict identification along the lines of race and gender. Privileging cultural and religious hybridities over fixed racial identifications, García celebrates her characters’ ability to create fluid and dynamic identities, even if she is at moments ambiguous about the role of racial politics in their choices. Moreover, this preoccupation allows the novel to participate in Caribbean discourses surrounding race since, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo points out, “the Caribbean area… [is the] most extensive and intensive racial confluence registered by human histories” (199), and Cuba is no exception. Reading the novel as distinctly Caribbean, while also acknowledging it as a product of the Cuban-American exile community, requires that due attention be paid to issues of race and hybridity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Skin Color of Mulattoes

    Skin Color of Mulattoes

    Journal of Heridity
    Volume 5, Number 12 (December 1914)
    pages 556-558

    Charles B. Davenport, Director
    Department of Experimental Evolution
    (Carnegie Institution of Washington)
    Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

    Apparently Four Factors Involved—Segregation in Second Generation—Skin Pigment Developed After Birth—No Correlation Between Color of Skin and Curliness of Hair in Offspring of Mulatto Marriages.

    The method of heredity in negro-white crosses has long been cited as a demonstration of the failure of modern principles of heredity in their application to some specific cases. Skin color is said to show a typical blending, as in the mulatto, and it is generally assumed that all of the offspring of two mulattoes resemble their parents in skin color; and if a mulatto be crossed with a white that all of the offspring will be of a shade still lighter than the mulatto parent, namely, of a quadroon color. The current theory also has a great social importance because according to it, “once a negro, always a negro;” since the negro characteristics can not be wholly eliminated even by successive matings with white. However, as a concession, certain States even in our South permit the offspring of a person containing one-eighth negro blood and a pure white to pass as a white citizen and to marry, legally, a white person. That is, after matings of a mulatto and her offspring for two further generations with white persons the final generation may pass for white…

    VARIATION IN MULATTO PROGENY
    The family of a white man of colored ancestry, and a mulatto woman. All seven sons and daughters are shown in the photograph. The infant is the lightest, with 8% black in the skin; this will doubtless darken with age. The son at the extreme right of the picture has 22% black in his skin; the boy at the extreme left has 26% black. (Fig. 17.)

     

    OFFSPRING OF WHITE X MULATTO MATING
    Part of the “W” family, including a medium colored mother and six of her seven children by a white man; also a little first cousin of the other children, who is directly in front of the mother. Note the great variation in the facial coloration of full brothers and sisters. The skin color of the youngest child is the same as that of a typical white infant, namely, 5% black, whereas the oldest boy of the group has a skin color of 32%black, considerably darker than his mother. (Fig. 18.)

    Read the entire article here.