Mixed Race Studies

Ethnicity and Earnings in a Mixed-Race Labor Market

Economic Development and Cultural Change
Volume 55, Number 4 (July 2007)
pages 709-734

Hugo Ñopo
Inter-Amerian Development Bank

Jaime Saavedra
World Bank

Máximo Torero
International Food Policy Research Institute

This study examines the relationship between earnings and racial differences in a context in which various races have coexisted and mixed during several centuries, as is true in many parts of the postcolonial world and specifically urban Peru. Coarse indicators of racial differences do not suffice in capturing this relationship; therefore, we introduce a score-based procedure of white and indigenous racial intensities that allows us to approximate these mixed racial heritages. We introduce a score-based procedure of white and indigenous racial intensities that allows us to approximate the heterogeneity within the mestizo population. We construct two types of indicators of racial intensities using a score-based procedure: a single-dimensional indicator of degrees of whiteness and a two-dimensional indicator combining degrees of both whiteness and indigenousness. This second indicator allows us to study nonlinearities in earning differences across mixed white and indigenous racial characteristics. Our estimates from a semiparametric model show evidence of a race premium for whiteness on earnings, statistically significant among wage earners but not among the self-employed. These results may be consistent with a story of employer discrimination.

The Racial Politics of Culture and Silent Racism in Peru

Paper prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) Conference on Racism and Public Policy
Durban, South Africa
2001-09-03 through 2001-09-05
13 pages

Marisol de la Cadena, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Davis

In this talk mestizaje is both the topic and a pretext. Treating it the topic of the paper, I want to explain why, in contrast with other Latin American countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador mestizaje—or the project of racial mixing—never became an official national ideology in Peru. But I also want to use mestizaje as a pretext to analyse the historical production of the Peruvian culturalist scientific definition of race, which is partially similar to what analysts of contemporary European forms of discrimination have called ‘racism without race’ or “new racism.” I call it silent racism, because in the case of Peru, as we shall see, culturalist forms of discrimination are neither new, nor without race. The debate about racial mixture (or mestizaje) that took place in Peru in the first half of the 20th century, is a good window to explore the reasons that Peruvian intellectuals might have had in developing this presumably peculiar definition of race which eventually allowed for the current denial of racist practices in Peru. Illustrative of these denials Jorge Basadre, one of Peru’s most eminent historians declared in the mid 1960s.

Historically, racism as it is understood in South Africa or in parts of the Southern United States has not existed in Peru. (…) This is not to say that there do not exist prejudices against Indians, cholos, and blacks, however these prejudices have not been sanctioned by the law and more than a profound racial feeling, they have an economic, social, and cultural character. Colour does not prevent an aborigine, mestizo, or Negroid from occupying high positions if they can accumulate wealth or achieve political success. (If there exists a distance between them and us) it is not racial, (…) rather it corresponds to what can be termed an historical state of things.

Basadre acknowledges the existance of prejudices, but acquits those prejudices of the charge of racism because they do not derive from biological race. This acquittal, which continues to characterize the Peruvian racial formation, is not a whimsical national peculairity. Rather, I argue that it is historically rooted in the scientific definition of race that Peruvian intellectuals coined at the turn of the century. Then they used it to contest European and North American racial determinisms which positioned intellectuals from my country (and Latin Americans in general) as hybrids and thus potentially–if not actually–degenerates. During this period Peruvian intellectuals delved into the scientific interconnection of “culture” and ‘race,” and produced a notion of “race” through which—borrowing Robert Young’’s words— “culture” was racially defined and thus historically enabled to mark differences. When, roughly in mid-century, the international community rejected race as biology, it did not question the discriminatory potential of culture, nor its power to naturalize differences. Then Peruvian intellectuals—like Basadre— dropped race from their vocabulary and criticized racism, while preserving culturalist interpretations of difference to reify social hierarchies, and to legitimate discrimination and exclusion…

Read the entire paper here.

Miscegenation Illustrated

Columbus Daily Enquirer
Columbus, Georgia
1865-10-27
page 2, column 3

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

Extracts from a new Book of Travel, by an American Physician.

The Mixture of Race in Peru.

The aboriginal race was the Indian; and subsequently there came into the country the Spaniard, the negro, and more recently the Chinaman; to enable one to come to tolerably correct conclusions as to results, when it is addded that the proposal of North American miscegenation has in South America been practically applied. To wit:

• The white and Indian have given to Peru to mestizo.
• White and negro, the mulatto.
• White and Chinese, the chino-blando.
• Indian and Chinese, the chino cholo.
• Negro and Chinese, the zamto-chino.
• Indian and negro, the chino.
• White and mulatto, the courteron.
• White and mestiza, the creole—so called here, but altogether different from the creole of the Southern States of North America.
• Indian and mulatto, the chino-oscuro.
• Indian and mestiza, the zambo-negro.
• Negro and mulatto, the zambo-negro.
• Negro and mestiza, the mulatto oscuro.

With these data, and knowing that the created distinctions of the primary races have been shamelessly disregarded by man, and that the baser passions have subverted reason, sentiment and sympathy, the many modifications of admixture and relative proportions of blood may be surmised which characterize a population presenting a greater variety of tints, of physical and mental endowments, than can be found probably elsewhere in the world.

Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 25: Conference on Latin American History 3
Thursday, 2012-01-03: 13:00-15:00 CST (Local Time)
Conti Room (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Matt D. O’Hara, University of California, Santa Cruz

Papers:

• “Picturing Families in Black and White: Race, Family, and Social Mobility in Colonial Minas Gerais, Brazil” / Mariana L. Dantas, Ohio University
• “On ‘Infected Roots’ and ‘Foul Origins’: Social Mobility and the Memory of Race among Ranching Families in Late-Colonial Western Mexico” / Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College
• “A Family Story: Seven Generations of Africans and Afro-Descendents in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais” / Douglas Libby, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• “Between Freedom and Slavery: Articulating Kinships and Achieving Manumission in Colonial Peru” / Rachel Sarah O’Toole, University of California, Irvine

Comment: Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, University of Kansas

Over the last three decades, scholars of colonial and early national Latin America have worked to organize archives and compile quantitative data relative to the demographic composition and patterns of social interaction that marked those societies. Thanks to their efforts, we now have a better understanding of the impact Iberian, African and Indigenous peoples had on the formation of a colonial population; what the dominant patterns of family formation and population growth were; how the social and economic behavior of colonial elites supported the social reproduction of white privilege; how the social and economic behavior of Blacks and Indios challenged or at least complicated the existing social and racial hierarchies. These efforts, moreover, have now resulted in rich datasets that allow historians to follow individuals and their families over time to understand better the impact family formation and their various social and economic behaviors have had on the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups, as well as the history of particular localities, in this formative period of Latin American societies. The papers in this panel employ the study of families in a generational perspective as a new methodological approach to explore further issues of social mobility among persons of non-Iberian of mixed descent and their relevance to the development of a colonial or early national social order in Latin America. Through their focus on specific families and their local connections, moreover, the papers help to elucidate questions about the long term impact of individual social improvement on, and the importance of local practices and circumstances to, the social standing of families whose members transcended the social boundaries between free and slave, black/indio and white. Together these papers advance the current scholarship on race relations and social mobility in colonial and early national Latin America in two fundamental ways. First, they integrate historical narratives of black, white, and indigenous social experiences—which still tend to be developed separately—and demonstrate that certain social practices and behaviors that shaped social orders in the past resulted sometimes from the coordinated (and not oppositional) actions and efforts of members of mixed-race family and social units. Second, they highlight how socio-economic practices and behaviors that influenced local realities first, and broader regional, national, or imperial realities second, were born out of strategies individual families pursued generation after generation to ensure the well-being of their members.

Blood Flowed Here Before Water Did

Trinidad Express
2012-09-14

Jan Westmaas

The writer continues his series on Peru and South Africa after visits to these countries in July and August

I’ve just read this morning in the daily press a story about Spanish energy company Repsol’s major oil and natural gas find in the Peruvian Amazon. This news  has put a smile on President’s Ollanta Humalla’s face but, at the same time, for prophets of doom,   it spells plunder and mayhem unparalleled even by the likes of Pizarro six centuries ago.
 
But travellers to Peru hardly ever get to the Amazon and often bypass Lima as they make for the sierra. In their estimation, it’s in the highlands that the real Peru begins — a land of dramatic, snow-capped mountains and  colourful poncho-wrapped peasants of pure Inca origin. The capital city was, and to some extent still is, seen as a western enclave on the Pacific from which  Spanish creoles could survey a vast hinterland peopled mainly by “untutored Indians” speaking another language and practicing another religion. The great 19th century German explorer Humboldt summed it up well when he said that “Lima is more remote from Peru than London”.
 
A parallel, if a little strained, is that many visitors to South Africa, once they get there, make straight for Wild Life Reserves  and a Safari Lodge. It’s as if the only reality worth experiencing is witnessing a leopard lazing under a tree with the remains of his recently caught prey, an impala, strung up on a branch overhead! At the crack of dawn in Kruger Park it was, indeed, an exhilarating experience for us to be privy to such a sight. Spectacles like this one can eclipse, for a moment, the complex human drama that has unfolded ever since the first European landed in Southern Africa.
 
Peru’s reality is that while Cusco and Machu Picchu may offer to the world a window to the achievements of a great indigenous—mainly highland — civilisation, the Inca, this country today is largely mestizo (mixture of European and Indian) with a far smaller proportion claiming pure indigenous blood than before. In addition, at least 1/3 (10 million) of its diverse population, including descendants of  Chinese and Japanese immigrants, now live in the throbbing, thriving, if sometimes chaotic, metropolis of Lima. It’s also interesting that despite significant miscegenation, descendants of  Europeans, as is the case in South Africa, still account for some 15 per cent of the population of both countries.

A walk through Plaza Mayor in Lima and a visit to the V&W Waterfront in Cape Town are indeed lessons in ethnic diversity. What an irony that a black face is a rarity in Lima when in Spanish colonial times 45 per cent of the population of that city were of African descent! It’s only in the middle of the 19th century that the trade in African slaves who replaced the indigenous people in the mines and plantations was declared illegal.

Nowadays Afro-Peruvians account for less than 1 per cent of the general population. Faced with the prospect of post abolition marginalisation in a Spanish-creole dominated post Independence Lima, many blacks, according to one commentator, opted to lighten the coffee in order to achieve social mobility, or in order, simply, to survive…

…And so it was that not long after the conquest but centuries before diversity became a buzz word, Peru gave to the world the Patron Saint of Social Justice, the Dominican San Martin de Porres. By birth “illegitimate”, this son of Lima has come to symbolise inclusion and diversity as he ministered faithfully to the poor, the sick, and the marginalised while embracing his mixed Afro-European heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru

University of Pittsburgh Press
April 2012
272 pages
6 x 9
Paper  ISBN: 9780822961932

Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Associate Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

Bound Lives chronicles the lived experience of race relations in northern coastal Peru during the colonial era. Rachel Sarah O’Toole examines how Andeans and Africans negotiated and employed casta, and in doing so, constructed these racial categories. Royal and viceregal authorities separated “Indians” from “blacks” by defining each to specific labor demands. Casta categories did the work of race, yet, not all casta categories did the same type of work since Andeans, Africans, and their descendants were bound by their locations within colonialism and slavery. The secular colonial legal system clearly favored indigenous populations. Andeans were afforded greater protections as “threatened” native vassals. Despite this, in the 1640s during the rise of sugar production, Andeans were driven from their assigned colonial towns and communal property by a land privatization program. Andeans did not disappear, however; they worked as artisans, muleteers, and laborers for hire. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Andeans employed their legal status as Indians to defend their prerogatives to political representation that included the policing of Africans. As rural slaves, Africans often found themselves outside the bounds of secular law and subject to the judgments of local slaveholding authorities. Africans therefore developed a rhetoric of valuation within the market and claimed new kinships to protect themselves in disputes with their captors and in slave-trading negotiations. Africans countered slaveholders’ claims on their time, overt supervision of their labor, and control of their rest moments by invoking customary practices. Bound Lives offers an entirely new perspective on racial identities in colonial Peru. It highlights the tenuous interactions of colonial authorities, indigenous communities, and enslaved populations and shows how the interplay between colonial law and daily practice shaped the nature of colonialism and slavery.

Contents

• acknowledgments
• introduction: Constructing Casta on Peru’s Northern Coast
• chapter 1. Between Black and Indian: Labor Demands and the Crown’s Casta
• chapter 2. Working Slavery’s Value, Making Diaspora Kinships
• chapter 3. Acting as a Legal Indian: Natural Vassals and Worrisome Natives
• chapter 4. Market Exchanges and Meeting the Indians Elsewhere
• chapter 5. Justice within Slavery
• conclusion. The Laws of Casta, the Making of Race
• appendix 1. Origin of Slaves Sold in Trujillo over Time by Percentage (1640–1730)
• appendix 2. Price Trends of Slaves Sold in Trujillo (1640–1730)
• explanation of Appendix Data
• notes
• glossary
• bibliography
• index

Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the “Purity” of Blood

South Americana: The History and Culture of the World’s Most Exotic Continent
2012-03-20

David Gaughran

It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat’s blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy—Robert Lacey, Aristocrats
 
The historical Spanish obsession with the purity of blood evolved into an elaborate caste system which reached its apogee with the colonization of South America and the subsequent intermingling of settlers with both South American Indians and imported African slaves, all of whose mixed offspring needed a separate classification, of course.
 
It was an intricate system—designed to pit sections of society against each other and play on the subsequent fear of overthrow by the lower classes, so that Spain could continue to exert its top-down control. But it also signified the relative social importance of the caste members, usually in a pejorative sense, meaning that only certain rights, occupations, and institutions were open to them.
 
If you had been born in Spain, then you automatically qualified as a member of the elite. If you had been born in South America, but your bloodline was “pure” then you were accorded privileged status, but of the second order, and the most influential posts were out of reach. However, if your ancestors had the temerity to dally with the Indians or blacks, then a complicated algorithm was brought to bear….

…Caste membership didn’t simply determine what occupation you could hold, but also whether you could bear arms, attend university, or even the clothes you were allowed wear…

Read the entire article here.

Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru

Social Problems
Volume 57, Number 1 (February 2010)
pages 138-156
DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.1.138

Tanya Golash-Boza, Professor of Sociology and American Studies
Kansas University

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no “mulatto escape hatch,” no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America.

Read the entire article here.

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

Read the entire article here.