Mixed Race Studies

Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 9,  Issue 3, 2002
pages 281-304
DOI: 10.1080/10702890213969

Isar Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

In this article, I critique some of the discursive terms in which blackness is folklorized and celebrated institutionally as part of the nation in Puerto Rico. I examine a government-sponsored housing project that meant to revitalize and stylize the community of San Antón, in Ponce, as a historic black site. Although government officials tried to preserve what they considered to be traditional aspects of this community, conflict arose because not all residents agreed with this preservationist agenda. I document the controversy, linking the government’s approach to racial discourses that represent blackness as a vanishing and distant component of Puerto Rico. I argue that this inclusion and celebration complements ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and race-mixture that distance blackness to the margins of the nation and romanticize black communities as remnants of a past era. I link these dynamics to modernizing State agendas and discourses of authenticity that fuel cultural nationalism worldwide.

In March 1995, The San Juan Star, one of Puerto Rico’s leading newspapers, announced that “Puerto Ricans will ‘bleach away’ many of the physical traces of its African past by the year 2200, with the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean following a few centuries later” (Bliss 1995:30). The article, which was written to commemorate the 122nd year anniversary of the abolition of slavery on the island, also seemed to be commemorating the future “abolition” of blackness itself, “in two centuries.” said one of the experts interviewed, “there will hardly be any blacks in Puerto Rico” (historian, Luis Diaz Soler, in Bliss 1995: 30).

This racial forecast and concomitant claims to the gradual disappearance of black cultural manifestations reinforces ideologies of blanqueamiento well known and thoroughly documented in Latin America (Burdick 1992; de la Fuente 2001; Lancaster 1991; Martinez-Echazabal 1999; Skidmore 1974; Stephan 1991; Wade 1993,1997; and Whitten and Torres 1992. among others). Scholars and activists have demonstrated that such notions of whitening often go hand in hand with…

Read or purchase the article here.

Who is Black?

The Final Call
2001-07-10

Rosa Clemente, Guest Columnist

Rosa Clemente

Yesterday, an interesting thing happened to me. I was told I am not Black.

The kicker for me was when my friend stated that the island of Puerto Rico was not a part of the African Diaspora. I wanted to go back to the old skool playground days and yell: “You said what about my momma?!” But after speaking to several friends, I found out that many Black Americans and Latinos agree with him. The miseducation of the Negro is still in effect!

I am so tired of having to prove to others that I am Black, that my peoples are from the Motherland, that Puerto Rico, along with Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, are part of the African Diaspora. Do we forget that the slave ships dropped off our people all over the world, hence the word Diaspora?…

Read the entire article here.

‘Las Caras Lindas’: To Be Black And Puerto Rican In 2013

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2013-05-25

Jasmine Garsd

I am a black man
Who was born café con leche
I sneaked into a party, to which I had not been invited.
And I got kicked out. They threw me out.
When I went back to have fun with the black girls
All together they said ‘Maelo, go back to your white girls’
And they kicked me out. They threw me out.”

– Ismael Rivera, “Niche“

In “Niche” (“Black Man”), iconic Puerto Rican singer Ismael Rivera navigates the labyrinth of race and ethnicity in the Caribbean. A light-skinned “café con leche” black man, he wanders through his island like a ghost of a colonial Spanish past, shooed off by both blacks and whites uncomfortable with his presence and what he represents.

In another iconic and deeply melancholy song, “Las Caras Lindas” (or “The Beautiful Faces”), Rivera sets aside the discomfort and pens an ode to his people: “The beautiful faces of my black race, so much crying, pain and suffering, they are the challenges of life, but inside we carry so much love.”

I was recently in Puerto Rico reporting on the island’s troubled economy and reignited diaspora. During that time, I had the chance to visit legendary rapper Tego Calderón. In his studio in Santurce, Puerto Rico, I found the entire place wallpapered with photographs of Ismael Rivera…

Read the entire article here.

Statehood Issue Stirs Passions About Puerto Rican Identity

Puerto Rico: Unsettled Territory
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Arizona State University
2012-10-29

Kailey Latham
Cronkite Borderlands Initiative

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — What does it mean to be Puerto Rican?

For over 500 years, the people of this island have struggled with the answer to that question. This November, the question will follow them into the voting booth.

As the rest of the United States goes to the polls to elect a new president, the big issue for Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens but can’t vote for president unless they live in a U.S. state, is whether to vote for a change in their territorial status. They can decide to remain as they are, become an independent nation, or apply to become the 51st U.S. state. If statehood wins at the polls Congress will eventually have to decide Puerto Rico’s political fate.

But much more than meets the eye rides on the vote. The question on the ballot goes to the heart of what it means to be Puerto Rican. A question that has hung over the island since the U.S. acquired it in 1890.

These days, citizenship links Puerto Ricans to the United States on paper but culture and history separate the two.

“Puerto Rico is not a nation-state, not an independent … country, but still it has its own history, language, territory, culture and autonomy,” said Jorge Duany, a dean and anthropologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. “And perhaps more importantly, the awareness people do have of being separate from other people of the world, including the United States.”…

…Puerto Rican Racial Identity and the U.S. Paradigm

Under the leadership of Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico in 1960 removed the racial identification question from the territory’s version of the U.S. census. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Puerto Rico Planning Board worked together to develop a specific census that met the needs of the territory, and did not include stateside topics such as race and Hispanic origin.

Professor Juan Manuel Carrion, from the University of Puerto Rico, says that this change is representative of a traditional view about race on the island.

“The governments of Puerto Rico and of the Popular Democratic Party defended that on the idea that we are all Puerto Rican here, we don’t make distinctions about race,” Manuel said.

The race question remained off the Puerto Rican version of the census until 2000, when the Puerto Rican government sent a letter to the U.S. Census Bureau requesting to receive the same decennial census that is distributed within the continental United States.

However, the reinstatement of this question has posed some challenges because racial categories in the United States are not reflective of the racial identities used in Puerto Rico.

In 2010, approximately 76 percent of the Puerto Rican population identified as ‘white’ and 12.4 percent identified as ‘black.’

“If you took the more recent census statistics seriously, Puerto Rico would look more like a Scandinavian country than a Caribbean country in terms of the large proportion of people that have African origin and are not reflected in the census,” Duany said.

Milagros Denis-Rosario, a professor at Hunter College at the City University of New York, says that the racial identification question does not provide Puerto Ricans on the island the flexibility to identify using the terms they are familiar with.

“There are race categories in Puerto Rico, but people self-define,” she said. “It’s not like the U.S., like a binary system where you are black or white. But on the island, there is this flexibility.”

Manuel agrees, saying that race is more than black and white in Puerto Rico; it is about the shades in between.

“According to North American criteria, all Puerto Ricans would be black no matter how light their skins are,” Manuel said.

Duany says that because the census has been translated from the U.S. version it has created a big issue for Puerto Ricans who may not understand where they fit in.

“Every 10 years, Puerto Ricans get their census questionnaire and they have to figure out exactly how to fill out the form,” he said.

Vasquez, the student from the University of Sacred Heart, says that racial distinctions in Puerto Rico are not as important as they are in the United States. He feels that the census is an effort to make Puerto Ricans fit within a mold that they never came from.

“All of this really boils down to is that we don’t give such an importance to race, because at the end of the day we are all Puertoriquenos,” Vasquez said. “I don’t care what your color is, or where you come from. What I care about is that we have a common cultural background.”

Vasquez believes that Puerto Rico’s mixed heritage is the reason why racial differences are not a concern for the Puerto Rican people.

“Even from within the family nucleus we are always sharing space with someone that looks different, and when you are sharing space with someone that looks different than you, those differences start melting away and you don’t see them anymore,” he said.

Joglar Burrowes, the student from the University of Puerto Rico, agrees as she has witnessed these sentiments in her own family.

“I am white, but my grandparents are more dark,” Joglar said. “They are almost black. It is almost like we are not very defined. I may look white, but I don’t feel like it.”

Manuel says the same racial pride you find in the United States cannot be found in Puerto Rico.

“If you think that is something that should be cultivated at least for some racial categories, then the situation in Puerto Rico is not very likeable,” he said.

While Barack Obama in 2008 made history as America’s first black president, Luis Lopez Salgado, a senior at the University of Puerto Rico, says the President wouldn’t necessarily be considered black in Puerto Rico.

“Here, he wouldn’t necessarily be deemed black,” Lopez said. “He would be called mixed race, because he is mixed race. If he were competing for governor here, there wouldn’t be that much attention paid to his racial identity.”

Lopez says that the issue of race on the census is one huge problem without a solution.

“I think it’s kind of absurd to ask people to identify themselves,” he said. “It’s very a personal thing how you identify yourself, and it should be left up to the person. Not fill out whatever category you think because what you think you are may not even be in those categories.”

With all of Puerto Rico’s challenges in defining identity, the upcoming election season has added extra pressure on the people of this nation to let the world know exactly who they are…

Read the entire article here.

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico

Palgrave Macmillan
October 2012
330 pages
DOI: 10.1057/9781137263223
ebook ISBN: 9781137263223
Paperback ISBN: 9781137263216
Hardback ISBN: 9781137263230

Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History
University of Washington

In their quest for greater political participation within shifting imperial fields—from Spanish (1850s–1898) to US rule (1898-)—Puerto Ricans struggled to shape and contain conversations about race. In so doing, they crafted, negotiated, and imposed on others multiple forms of silences while reproducing the idea of a unified, racially mixed, harmonious nation. Hence, both upper and working classes participated, although with different agendas, in the construction of a wide array of silences that together have prevented serious debate about racialized domination. This book explores the ongoing, constant racialization of Puerto Rican workers to explore the ‘class-making’ of race.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico
• I. Slavery and the Multiracial, Racially Mixed Laboring Classes
  • 1. Becoming a Free Worker in Post-Emancipation Puerto Rico
  • 2. Liberal Elites’ Writings: The Racial Dissection of the Puerto Rican Specimen
  • 3. Race and the Modernization of Ponce after Slavery
• II. Changing Empires
  • 4. US Rule and the Volatile Topic of Race in the Public Political Sphere
  • 5. Racial Silencing and the Organizing of Puerto Rican Labor
  • 6. Deflecting Puerto Rico’s Blackness
• Conlusion: The Heavy Weight of Silence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

INTRODUCTION: Racial (Dis)Harmony in Puerto Rico

It is a theory with no foundation. She does not know what bomba is. Our bomba is a fusion of many races and cultures: Indigenous, Spanish or European, and African. This is the only authentic one. Everything else is just an invention.
—Puerto Rican performer Modesto Cepeda, April 13, 2005

After my first semester in the United States, I was desperate to leave the mainland and return to my home at the urban core of the northern city of Bayamón, Puerto Rico. My family and friends welcomed me with many gatherings, some in the San Juan area and others in my family’s hometown of Yaucoin the southern part of the island. Everyone peppered me with questions about life away from home. On one of these occasions, a relative asked me if I had become friends with other Puerto Ricans. I answered that I had become very close to a Puerto Rican black woman. I did not realize that I had spoken openly about blackness, instead of the customary muffled modalities that many islanders often employ, until my relative responded, “Then she is not Puerto Rican! Only the americanos would make reference to a person’s skin color.” My relative’s response was surprising to me because in our extended family, antiblack racism had been at the heart of many conflicts, despite (or because of) our racially mixed heritage.

After years of archival research on racial struggles in Puerto Rico, I find myself repeatedly recalling this one exchange, one of many others that have a similar pattern. Perhaps I recall it because of the array of important questions my relative’s response elicits about Puerto Rican immigration, US colonialism, national identities, constructions of whiteness/blackness/racial mixture, and gender (all of which I will explore in the pages of this book). But, most probably, this moment is fixed in my mind because I was struck by the quick and effective way in which my cousin silenced me when I acknowledged my friend’s cherished sense of self as a black Puerto Rican woman. There was no better strategy to shut down a possible conversation about the historical and contemporary realities of racialized marginalization than (a) to deem race, racialization, and racism as foreign matters, specifically as US phenomena, and (b) to question one’s commitment and love to the Puerto Rican nation. My own commitment was already in question; I too was quickly becoming an outsider. Given this oft deployed silencing device, this book is particularly attentive not to reify a Latin American paradigm of race relations or a US model. Instead, Puerto Rico’s move from Spanish to US rule provides a unique opportunity to flesh out some of the sociocultural and political processes that made necessary the organization of knowledge about racialized marginalization along the lines of opposite racial paradigms. To do so, it is imperative to look at silencing and racialization practices historically, as well as investigate the many struggles that elicited these practices. In the following pages, I explore a few key historical moments between the 1870s and 1910s when silencing became especially urgent in politics. It is worth noting that the reasons for and the modes of containing race talk have continued to shift and change after the period under scrutiny in this study…

…I aim to uncover the ways in which the history of slavery, the processes of emancipation, and the nature of colonialisms in Puerto Rico contributed to the contradictory construction of national and racial discourses at different historical moments since the late nineteenth century. For more than a century after emancipation in 1873– 76, government institutions, academic studies, and cultural organizations have reproduced the idea that Puerto Rico is a unified nation—despite its colonial relation to Spain and later the United States—whose people originated from a mélange of three cultural roots: the indigenous Taínos, Africans, and Spaniards. This national discourse holds that because these races mixed harmoniously to create the Puerto Rican race/nation, racial conflict has never existed on the island. In fact, the lack of racial conflict defines Puerto Ricanness. Therefore, to address issues of racialized exclusion or to express/embrace a racialized sense of self is understood by most Puerto Ricans as antinational. Paradoxically, the Puerto Rican dominant classes have persistently underscored the white, Hispanic experience as the main thread that provides coherence to the history of the Puerto Rican people. In this discourse of the nation, the presumptively racially mixed, harmonious society ensures the unity of all social classes. Yet that discourse also preserves the rights of white Creole men as political and social superiors, and consequently, the struggles and aspirations of those deemed or self identified as black continue to be systematically marginalized.

The attempts to silence discussions about racialized domination (especially the persistent denial of racism) and the corollary suppressions regarding individual and communal racialized histories coexist with Puerto Ricans’ everyday antiblack racist practices and racialized talk. Most Puerto Ricans, however, do not recognize their everyday references to racialized markers of difference— mostly derogatory remarks about blackness— as a product of and form sustaining racialized domination. To explore this tension I have chosen the analytics of silence, where silence means something other than total absence. I am here interested in both the attempts to shape or prevent talk and the partial and fragile silences produced through such endeavors. Hence, as I explain later in this introduction, silence is communicative in nature, comprising a wide array of practices that were, in fact, generative of more talk.12 The many disruptions of silences and the other idioms elaborated to advance mobilization for social justice also fostered talk on race. As such, the practices of censorship shaped (creating gaps, voids, misrecognition, and euphemisms, among others) but did not impede the talk of race. Conversely, efforts at repressing the talk of race have indeed prevented sustained conversations about racialized domination because these could crystallize into projects for sociopolitical transformation. This book seeks to track both the fraught processes through which silences are constantly reconstituted and the overall effect of a plurality of silences, intended and unintended, which have prevented open discussions about racialized domination…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Race Migrations: Latinos and the Cultural Transformation of Race

Stanford University Press
April 2012
268 pages
6 tables, 1 figure, 20 photographs
Cloth ISBN: 9780804777957
Paper ISBN: 9780804777964
E-book ISBN: 9780804782531

Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of British Columbia, Canada

In this groundbreaking study of Puerto Rican and Dominican migration to the United States, Wendy D. Roth explores the influence of migration on changing cultural conceptions of race—for the newcomers, for their host society, and for those who remain in the countries left behind. Just as migrants can gain new language proficiencies, they can pick up new understandings of race. But adopting an American idea about race does not mean abandoning earlier ideas. New racial schemas transfer across borders and cultures spread between sending and host countries.

Behind many current debates on immigration is the question of how Latinos will integrate and where they fit into the U.S. racial structure. Race Migrations shows that these migrants increasingly see themselves as a Latino racial group. Although U.S. race relations are becoming more “Latin Americanized” by the presence of Latinos and their views about race, race in the home countries is also becoming more “Americanized” through the cultural influence of those who go abroad. Ultimately, Roth shows that several systems of racial classification and stratification co-exist in each place, in the minds of individuals and in their shared cultural understandings of “how race works.”

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. How Immigration Changes Concepts of Race [Read an excerpt here.]
• 2. Beyond the Continuum: Race in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico
• 3. Migrant Schemas: Race in the United States
• 4. Transnational Diffusion
• 5. Multiple Forms of Racial Stratification
• 6. Performing Race Strategically
• 7. Is Latino Becoming a Race?
• Cultural Change and Classifications
• Appendix: Notes on Methodology
• Notes
• Index

BLACK, TRIGUEÑO, WHITE…? Shifting Racial Identification among Puerto Ricans

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 2, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 267-285
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X05050186

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The use of U.S.-oriented racial categories in the 2000 decennial census conducted by the Census Bureau in Puerto Rico provided results that may not accurately reflect social dynamics in Puerto Rico, more generally, and inequality based on race, in particular. This work explores how variations in racial typologies used for the collection of data in Puerto Rico and the methodology used to collect such data produce widely ranging results on racial identification that in turn affect the measurement of the impact of “race” on social outcomes. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the omission of locally based and meaningful racial terminology from census questionnaires leads to results on racial identification that differ markedly from those found in survey data that include such terminology. In addition, differing strategies to record the racial identification of Puerto Ricans on the island (i.e., self-identification versus identification by others), lead to variations that highlight the changing effect of race on socioeconomic status. Who identifies a person’s race affects analyses of how race affects the life chances of individuals in Puerto Rico.

“Which box am I?”: Towards a Culturally Grounded, Contextually Meaningful Method of Racial and Ethnic Categorization in Puerto Rico

Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey
August 2009
59 pages

Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

This report represents a first step in attempting to ascertain a culturally valid and efficient method of racial and ethnic categorization for Puerto Rico, which may be used to document and track discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity in employment. Research conducted for this study was developed in close collaboration with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in support of their efforts to ascertain the extent of race and ethnic discrimination in the workplace in Puerto Rico. Results outlined herein summarize the views of 33 experts on the subject on race and racial discrimination in Puerto Rico who were interviewed for these purposes. Findings are preliminary and draw on the analysis of 33 individual questionnaires and 3 focus groups coordinated by Dr. Godreau at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey in March 2009.

Read the entire report here.

The lessons of slavery: Discourses of slavery, mestizaje, and blanqueamiento in an elementary school in Puerto Rico

American Ethnologist
Volume 35 Number 1 (February 2008)
pages 115-135
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00009.x

Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Mariolga Reyes Cruz
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Mariluz Franco-Ortiz
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Sherry Cuadrado
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

On the basis of ethnographic research conducted in an elementary public school in Puerto Rico, we maintain in this article that subduing and narrowing the history of slavery is instrumental in the reproduction of national ideologies of mestizaje in Afro-Latin America. We explore how school texts and practices silence, trivialize, and simplify the history of slavery and conclude that these maneuvers distance blackness from Puerto Rican identity and silence racism while upholding racial democracy and blanqueamiento as a social value.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on an average school day, one of us (Isar) walked into the small air-conditioned social worker’s office at the Luisa Rodrıíguez Elementary School in Cayey, Puerto Rico. A young, uniform-clad teenage girl sat at the desk, talking in flirtatious tones on the school’s phone. Isar greeted the social worker as she stood next to her commandeered desk, and they began to discuss an upcoming conference about the history of slavery in Cayey. “There were slaves in Cayey?” the social worker asked, “Really!?” Before Isar could answer, she heard the young girl telling her phone interlocutor in a high-pitched voice: “I am not prieta!” (prieta is a popular synonym for black) “I am not prieta!” The social worker turned to Isar and said, “You see? That is related to what you study.” The girl looked up to ask what theywere talking about. Isar explained she was conducting a study about racism in schools. “I am not racist,” she said, “but this guy is calling me prieta and I am not prieta!”

These two events—a young girl’s rejection of a black identity and a school official’s unawareness of the history of slavery in her community—might seem apparently unrelated. However, this article maintains that the silencing of slavery and the distancing of individuals from blackness are, in fact, key interdependent manifestations of the ideology of race mixture (mestizaje) in Afro-Latin America.

Researchers of national ideologies of mestizaje in Latin America and the Caribbean have underscored how notions of race mixture operate within very specific structures of power that often exclude blacks, deny racism, and invalidate demands for social justice against discrimination (cf. Burdick 1992; Hale 1999; Helg 1995; Price 1999; Whitten and Torres 1998; Wright 1990). Scholars have pointed out, for example, that the celebration of racial mixture through an ideology of mestizaje serves to distance Afro-Latinos from blackness through the process of blanqueamiento, or “whitening.” They have also highlighted the ways in which the idea of mestizaje is mobilized as evidence for national ideologies of racial democracy that claim that because the majority of the population is mixed, “race” and racism are almost nonexistent in these societies (cf. Betances 1972; Hanchard 1994; Sawyer 2006; Telles 2004; Wade 1997). This article contributes to this literature by arguing that one important, albeit underexplored, area of inquiry for understanding the social reproduction of such national ideologies in Afro-Latin America is the “containment” or “taming” of the history of slavery. Specifically,we maintain that national ideologies of mestizaje in Latin America, and particularly in the Hispanic Caribbean, are sustained by dominant politics of public representation that silence, trivialize, and simplify the history of slavery and its contemporary effects.

Slavery is a thorny, problematic topic for nation building projects. Although ideas of slavery, “race,” modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism are historically and conceptually bound (see Anibal Quijano in Santiago-Valles  2003:218), Western narratives about the past produce their legitimacy precisely by silencing those connections (Trouillot 1995). National discourses of mestizaje in Afro-LatinAmerica are no exception. Thus,we argue that one important mechanism through which discourses of mestizaje deny legitimacy to experiences of racism and to the affirmation of black identities is by silencing the historical connections between slavery and contemporary racial disparities.

Depending on how the history of this period is told, slavery can destabilize nationalist representations that celebrate mixture and the so-called whitening of the nation from various standpoints. To evoke slavery is to recognize that one racial segment of the population used “race” to exploit and dehumanize another sector of the population for more than 300 years in the Americas. Racial mixture did take place during this time, but mostly through violent means, such as rape, which provide little motive for celebrating mestizaje. Furthermore, the history—not just of men and women in bondage but also of the large and vibrant communities that were formed by free people of color during the slave period—challenges nationalist renditions of history that belittle the impact of African heritage in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Finally, an awareness of the socioeconomic legacies of the system of slavery on contemporary society can serve to challenge “colorblind” arguments that characterize black people’s failures in the socioeconomic order as the result of a lack of individual achievement, and not as the product of historical–structural inequalities.Understanding the history of slavery, its long-termeconomic and ideological repercussions repercussions, elucidates the roots of contemporary racial inequalities and related racial identities. Addressing the ideological effects of slavery can thus challenge nationalist premises of celebrated mixture, desired blanqueamiento, and declared colorblindness by bringing to the fore the tensions, cracks, and dissonances of nations that are not as harmonious, whitened, or democratic as discourses of mestizaje would suggest…

Read or purchase the article here.

Clara como el Agua

PBS Online Film Festival
2012-03-05
Duration: 00:12:20

Fernanda Rossi, Director

She’s white. She’s also black. Mostly, she’s rejected.

Clara is the only light-skinned and clear-eyed girl in an all-black neighborhood in Puerto Rico. The children tease her endlessly, telling her that her father is some “gringo” tourist with whom her mother had an affair. However, her grandmother tells her a different story.

Watch Clara como el Agua on PBS. See more from PBS Online Film Festival.