Mixed Race Studies

And if We Weren’t Genetically Mixed Race?

Cubanow
Havana, Cuba
2013-12-23

Luis Toledo Sande (Translated by Dayamí Interián)

To effectively fight racism, it’s necessary to know everything about it and expose its tricks. Otherwise, we run the risk of getting trapped by them, since they are powerful, able to “innocently” camouflage themselves in the interstices of language, which isn’t a simple code of signs but the natural medium – the easiest and most regular, together with behavior – for expressing the conscience. The mentioned tricks have an effect even when opting for “the equality of the human races,” because these terms imply accepting the existence of races within the species, and this is central to the heart of the deception. The name of the evil, racism, reinforces prejudices, even when it’s used to fight the reality it designates, because it originated from the erroneous imposition of racial divisions on the human race and carries it implicitly.

Cuba has a special and honorable responsibility in cultivating an enlightening legacy – there have been some – the one that José Martí bequeathed to this country and to the world as part of his thinking, more than a hundred years before science proved, with discoveries related to the human genome, that humanity is one only, regardless of external differences among its members. In Nuestra América (Our America), an essay published in January 1891, Martí categorically and with good reason denied the existence of races among humans. This opinion has been cited countless times, but the persistence in the world and the country of the fallacies he repudiated confirms the urgency of reiterating it more often, as the revolutionary concept it is:

“There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. Puny, arm-chair minds string together and reheat the library-shelf races that the honest traveler and the cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of Nature, where the universal identity of man leaps forth in victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against Humanity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba [Williams Review]

Association for Feminist Anthropology
Book Reviews
2012-12-21

Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Nadine T. Fernandez, Revolutionizing Romance: Interracial Couples in Contemporary Cuba (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010)

In this insightful and well-written ethnography, Nadine Fernandez explores a central paradox: if mestizaje (racial mixing) is the “essence” of the Cuban nation, then why are interracial couples, the purported “engines of mestizaje” (184), still perceived with disdain? Why are interracial couplings – particularly those between black and white Cubans – so infrequent and often met with resistance? A deeply historical and ethnographic account, Revolutionizing Romance advances the compelling argument that “nowhere is race more salient than in romance” (50). Moreover, Fernandez argues that the conflicts surrounding interracial relationships actually highlight “the ideological aspects of racism at work” (53).

This important and timely book documents the shifting meanings of interracial relationships over time in Cuba. The first half of the ethnography provides the historical and conceptual background that sets the stage for the rest of the book by unpacking the history of whitening ideologies and the ideological construction of Cuba as a mestizo nation. Fernandez analyzes how the “revolution’s ideological insistence on ‘racelessness’…provided a sociocultural and ideological space for interracial couples” (68). For instance, Sofia, a mulata engineer and Fernando, a white art historian, are an interracial couple who were both born in the early 1950s and who met while studying in the former Soviet Union. Their families supported their relationship in part because of the color-blind ideology that the revolution had fostered. Interestingly, while race scholars are often dismissive of the concept of color-blindness (rightly so, I might add), Fernandez points out that in the context of Cuba, this concept has some redeeming qualities…

Read the entire review here.

Cuba’s mixed-race population grows

Fox News Latino
2013-11-08

EFE News Service

The number of mixed-race people in Cuba continues to increase as the ranks of those identifying themselves as white or black declines, according to the results of the 2012 Census released Friday.

The proportion of mixed-race people grew from 24.9 percent in 2002 to 26.6 percent last year, the ONEI statistics agency said in an advance summary of the study.

In the same period of time, the population identifying itself as white dropped from some 65 percent to 64.1 percent, while blacks fell from 10.1 percent to 9.3 percent…

Read the entire article here.

Unbecoming blackness: the diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America [Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Issue 5, 2014
pages 889-890
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2013.847200

Nora Gámez Torres, Visiting scholar
Cuban Research Institute
Florida International University, Miami

Unbecoming Blackness: The Diaspora cultures of Afro-Cuban America, by Antonio López, New York, New York University Press, 2012, xi + 272 pp., (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8147-6547-0.

Unbecoming Blackness poses directly the question of an underdiscussed afrolatinidad in Cuban American Studies. The book opens up by analysing the lives and performances of key figures in the Afro-Cuban diaspora in the USA during the first half of the twentieth century: Alberto O’Farrill, a writer and blackface actor in the teatro bufo a theatrical Cuban genre he helped to export to New York: and Eusebia Cosme, a renowned performer of poesía negra (black poetry) and actress. This is the first significant accomplishment of the book, since these histories had to be carefully recovered and reconstructed by collecting disperse information, the ‘fragments attaches’ (14) common to black diasporas in the Americas.

The third chapter, examining the afrolatinidad and specific Puerto Rican identifications in the work of Cuban-born anthropologist Rómulo Lachatañeré and Cuban-descendent writer Piri Thomas, continues building the main theme of the book: how Afro-Cubans actively negotiate their racialization in the USA, by cither asserting or concealing their ‘Hispanic’ heritage through linguistic choices, or by forging alliances with black Americans and other Latin/o groups. In so doing, they enact an afrolatinidad that is malleable and transnational, and thus, unsettling for hegemonic Cuban and Cuban American identities, rooted in nationalism and whiteness. That performers such as Cosme and O’Farrill and scholars such as Lachatañeré travelled to the USA looking for better professional opportunities and decided to associate to ‘subaltern’ subjects such as black Americans and other Latino groups, generated an anxiety among Cuban writers and intellectuals of the time who defended the idea of mestizaje, as López shows in these chapters. The point of conflict is brilliantly captured in the following passage by Lopez: (the implication) ‘that Afro-Cubans are somehow ‘better off’ being in and belonging to an explicitly racist US nation rather than, it turns out, Cuba. This being and belonging is asserted against ‘the best interests’ of a postracial, mestizo, even negro island-Cuban nation—indeed, against the ‘best interests’ of Afro-Cubans themselves’ (9). To speak of an afrolatinidad in this context disrupts both Cuban American and Cuban fictions of national identity. Precisely due to the implications of the book for a critical debate on Cuban racial identities on and off the island, it would have been very useful for the leader to have a contextual analysis of what was happening in Cuba in different moments and in the different fields the author explores.

Less accomplished is the following chapter, in which López lacks the clarity to successfully connect ‘texts around 1979 in Miami and the overlapping histories of the illicit drug trade. African American uprising, Mariel migration‘ (16), to Cuban American reactions to the ‘blackening’ of their community after Mariel and the African Americans…

Read or purchase the article here.

Cuba is White, Black and Mixed Race Because it is Diverse

Havana Times: open-minded writing from Cuba
2013-10-22

Dmitri Prieto
Agrarian University of Havana

HAVANA TIMES — Recently, on the eve of October 10, a Cuban national holiday commemorating the date (in 1868) in which Cuban landowner Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and his retinue of (former) slaves took up arms against Spanish colonial domination, a Round Table program bearing the controversial title of “Neither Black Nor White: Cuba is Mixed Race” was aired on television.

During the Round Table discussion, Cuban scientists presented valuable and interesting evidence showing that our population’s gene pool combines the DNA of African, European and Asian / Indo-American peoples, concluding that, therefore, it would be impossible to define any Cuban “races” on the basis of genetics as such.

On the basis of this accurate insight, however, they also suggested something that I consider dangerously dubious: the notion that Cuba is a “mixed race” country…

Read the entire article here.

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López (review)

Journal of Latin American Geography
Volume 12, Number 3, 2013
pages 234-236
DOI: 10.1353/lag.2013.0049

Joseph L. Scarpaci, Professor Emeritus of Geography
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

The new millennium cast into the academic and general public’s dialect the word ‘globalization’ as well as the call that everyone should ‘think globally and act locally.’ That may be all well and good, but this adage often falls flat when scholars aim to connect the local with global (glocal). Like the words ‘impact,’ ‘effect,’ and ‘affect,’ the terms at once say everything but communicate little. As the graduate coordinator of my doctoral program was fond of harping in front of frightened graduate students many decades back, “perfectly general, perfectly true, but absolutely meaningless.” Clichés, alas, often substitute for deep, critical thinking and analysis.

For these reasons, when one sees a subtitle that includes the ambitiously stated ‘transnational history,’ a little skepticism inevitably comes to mind. Geographers are no doubt even more skeptical because, after all, scale and spatial analysis situate both human and physical geographies in the broader context of social and natural sciences, respectively.

Enter Kathleen López: Assistant Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (a title that might also give one pause) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Whereas many Latinamericanist geographers struggle to speak any semblance of Spanish and conduct fieldwork with the assistance of Latin American and Caribbean scholars, Dr. López approaches the study of transnational migration to the island of Cuba armed with fluent Spanish and Chinese. Armed with extensive field work in Cuba, China, and the United States, Dr. López assembles a tour d’force that brings archival, ethnographic, and historic analyses to bear on a story that traces the history of Chinese migrants to Cuba in the nineteenth century, through the alliance with Cuban forces to overturn the colonial yoke imposed by Madrid, to the twentieth century events that include strong xenophobia, the Japanese-China war, WW II, and the Cuban Revolution. Copiously referenced and gracefully written, Chinese Cubans tells the tale of a truly global transnational migration pattern that documents how the Chinese in Cuba used investment, remittances, and return visits to bridge these migrants’ search for the best of Cuba and their homeland. The tale begins with the importation of more than 100,000 Chinese workers – indentured servants often treated as slaves because of Great Britain’s objection to the African slave trade—who build rail lines and work in sugar plantations in ways similar to how Chinese ‘coolie’ workers did in the United States. Chinese Cubans were fiercely loyal to the Cuban independence movement of the nineteenth century, and great accolades were given to them by the fiercest and most venerable of revolutionary fighters. Unlike conditions in Peru, Jamaica, and the especially harsh anti-Chinese movement in Mexico in the 1930s, we learn that Cuba was relatively welcoming (overall) in receiving the Chinese diaspora. They added to the miscegenation (mestizaje) stew (ajiaco) that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz highly praised. However, to López’s credit, she calls into question the much-venerated Ortíz’s description of this marginal contribution to Cuban culture (which Ortíz postulated that, numerically at least, was a European and African fusion). The so-called ‘third founder’ of Cuba (after Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), Ortíz derided Chinese immigrants for their certain tolerance of homosexuality, their (limited) use of opium. That is why he classified them phenotypically (i.e., “yellow mongoloids”….”and essential otherness” (p. 210).

Readers will find that similar prejudices hurled upon immigrants elsewhere were also cast upon Chinese Cubans. They were often characterized as ‘inassimilable’ just as Jews were in Europe in the twentieth century and much the way Mexicans are portrayed in the current U.S. immigration debacle. When hard economic times fell upon Cuba, anti-nationalism was whipped up against Cubans of Chinese descent, who were often portrayed as perennial strike breakers and ‘scabs.’

Not surprisingly, there are indirect parallels to be drawn between the relationship of mainland (communist) China and Taiwan, on the one hand, and Cuba and the United States, on the other hand. The 1949 Chinese communist takeover of mainland China and the exodus of Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa (Taiwan) generates yet another out-migration of Chinese to Cuba. And in 1959, many Chinese…

Cuban Color Classification and Identity Negotiation: Old Terms in a New World

University of Pittsburgh
2004
246 pages

Shawn Alfonso Wells

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This thesis analyzes how the Cuban Revolution’s transnational discourse on blackness positively affected social attitudes, allowing color identity to be negotiated using color classification terms previously devalued.

In the Caribbean and Latin America, most systems of social stratification based on color privilege “whiteness” both socially and culturally; therefore, individuals negotiate their identities with whiteness as the core element to be expressed. This dissertation examines how this paradigm has been overturned in Cuba so that “blackness” is now the featured aspect of identity. This is due in part to the popular response to the government’s rhetoric which engages in an international political discourse of national identity designed to situate Cuba contextually in opposition to the United States in the global politics of color. This shift has occurred in a dialectic environment of continued negative essentialized images of Blacks although blackness itself is now en vogue. The dialogue that exists between state and popular forms of racial categorization serves to recontextualize the meanings of “blackness” and the values attached to it so that color classification terms which indicate blackness are assumed with facility in identity negotiation.

In the past, the concepts of whitening and mestizaje (race mixture) were employed by the state with the goal of whitening the Cuban population so that Cuba would be perceived as a majority white country. Since the 1959 Revolution, however, the state has publicly claimed that Cuba is an Afro-Latin nation. This pronouncement has resulted in brown/mestizo/mulatto and not white as being the national ideal. The symbolic use of mestizaje in Cuban society and the fluidity inherent in the color classification system leaves space for manipulation from both ends of the color spectrum and permits Cubans from disparate groups to come together under a shared sense of identity. The ideology of the state and the popular perceptions of the symbolism that the mulatto represents were mediated by a color continuum, which in turn was used both by the state and the populace to construct, negotiate, maintain, and manipulate color identities. This study demonstrates that although color classification was not targeted by the government as an agent to convey blackness, it nevertheless does, and the shift in how identity is negotiated using racial categories can be viewed as the response of the populace to the state’s otherwise silent dialogue on “race” and identity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: Mulatas del Caribe
• Chapter One: The problem of race
  • Problematizing Race
  • Field Setting
  • Conducting Fieldwork in Cuba
  • Methodology
• Chapter Two: Historical Context of Color Classification in Latin America and the Caribbean
  • History of racial/color categorization in Cuba
  • The Era of Conquest and Colonization
  • The Plantation Era
    • Color classes
    • Pigmentocracy/Whitening
  • The Era of Capitalism
  • The Era of Socialism and Castro
• Chapter Three: Terms of Classification
  • Settings
    • The Census
    • The Carnet
    • The Medical Establishment
  • Cognitive Categories of Color Classification
  • Features of Classification
  • Constructing Identity
    • Blancos
    • Mestizos, Mulatos and Mestizaje
    • Negros
    • Chinos
• Chapter Four: The social significance of classification
  • Contested classifications
  • Stereotypes and Social Status
  • Shifts in meaning and preference of terms
• Chapter Five: Mulatizaje and Cubanidad
  • Mestizaje, Mulattoization and Cubanidad
    • The typical Cuban
  • Claiming Identity and Negotiating Mulatizaje
    • Extended Case Study #1
    • Case study #2
    • Case study #3
    • Case study #4
    • Case study #5
    • Case study #6
    • Case study #7
    • Case study #8
    • Case study #9
    • Case study #10
    • Case study #11
• Conclusions
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Glosses of Color Terms.
  • Appendix B: Census Enumeration of Writs of Freedom
  • Appendix C: Racial Categories of 1827 and 1841 Censuses
  • Appendix D: Census with Conflicting Terminology
• Bibliography

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1: Chronological Table of Data Collection Techniques
• Table 2: Census Terms.
• Table 3: Formal Labels on Documents
• Table 4: Descriptive Color Terms
• Table 5: Cognitive Map of Terminology
• Table 6: Labels of Pilesorting Groups.
• Table 7: Percentages of Informants Employing Particular Classification Terms
• Table 8: Johnson’s Hierarchial Clustering.
• Table 9: Color Continuum.
• Table 10: Informal Descriptors
• Table 11: Common Descriptors for Hair Texture
• Table 12: Common Descriptors for Facial Features.
• Table 13: Common Modifying Descriptors
• Table 14: Common Compound Terms
• Table 15: Descriptive Labels

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History

University of North Carolina Press
June 2013
352 pages
6.125 x 9.25
15 halftones, 3 maps, 7 tables, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4696-0712-2
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-0713-9

Kathleen López, Associate Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean studies
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba’s infamous “coolie” trade brought well over 100,000 Chinese indentured laborers to its shores. Though subjected to abominable conditions, they were followed during subsequent decades by smaller numbers of merchants, craftsmen, and free migrants searching for better lives far from home. In a comprehensive, vibrant history that draws deeply on Chinese- and Spanish-language sources in both China and Cuba, Kathleen López explores the transition of the Chinese from indentured to free migrants, the formation of transnational communities, and the eventual incorporation of the Chinese into the Cuban citizenry during the first half of the twentieth century.

Chinese Cubans shows how Chinese migration, intermarriage, and assimilation are central to Cuban history and national identity during a key period of transition from slave to wage labor and from colony to nation. On a broader level, López draws out implications for issues of race, national identity, and transnational migration, especially along the Pacific rim.

A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans

Miami Herald
2007-06-10 through 2007-06-24

In this series, the black experience is unveiled through a journey: to Nicaragua, where a quiet but powerful civil and cultural rights movement flickers while in neighboring Honduras, the black Garffuna community fights for cultural survival; to the Dominican Republic where African lineage is not always embraced; to Brazil, home to the world’s second largest population of African descent; to Cuba, where a revolution that promised equality has failed on its commitment to erase racism; and to Colombia, where the first black general serves as an example of Afro-Latin American achievements.

Part 1: Nicaragua and Honduras: Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice
Audra D.S. Burch
A close-up look at a simmering civil rights movement in a tiny port settlement along Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

…To appreciate the story of race here, is to understand the kaleidoscopic legacy of slavery, the historic demonization and denial of blackness and the practice of racial mixing.

This portrait is complicated by the lack of reliable census data because of traditional undercounting and because some blacks decline to identify themselves as such.

The dynamic along the coast is a layered quilt of Miskitos, mestizos and blacks. The ancestors of other Afro-Nicaraguans were free blacks who immigrated from Jamaica and other Caribbbean countries, lured by the good, steady jobs available for English speakers.

Stories abound about people who have hidden behind ambiguously brown complexions, “passing” for Miskito Indians, or mestizo.

“It’s hard to mobilize when you are still recouping the identity and just starting to openly use the term black,” says [Juliet] Hooker, the University of Texas professor whose father was a regional councilman…

Part 2: Dominican Republic: Black denial
Frances Robles
An examination on the sensitive nature of racial definition in a nation with inextricable ties to Africa.

SANTO DOMINGO—Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.

Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo—bad hair.

But a professional Dominican woman just should not have bad hair, she said. “If you’re working in a bank, you don’t want some barrio-looking hair. Straight hair looks elegant,” the bank teller said. “It’s not that as a person of color I want to look white.   I want to look pretty.”

And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.

Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques. Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.

Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket.  The richer, the “whiter.” And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black…

Part 3: Brazil: A Great Divide
Jack Chang
Black Brazilians speak out and push for affirmative action laws in the hemisphere’s most Africanized nation.

…And Brazilians are finally discussing race after decades of telling themselves and the rest of the world that the country was free from racism, said Sen. Paulo Paim, author of one of the pending affirmative-action bills.

“The Brazilian elite says this is not a racist country, but if you look at whatever social indicator, you’ll see exclusion is endemic,” he said. “We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve…

…”I have never seen any evidence that suggests anything other than there’s widespread racism in Brazil,” said UCLA sociology professor Edward Telles, who studies race in Brazil…

…Black leaders also blame what they describe as decades of self-censorship about race spurred by the “racial democracy” vision of their country, which long defined Brazilian self-identity.

Preached in the early 20th century by sociologist Gilberto Freyre, the vision depicted a Brazil that was freeing itself of racism and even of the concept of race through pervasive mixing of the races…

Part 4: Cuba: A barrier for Cuba’s blacks
Miami Herald Staff Report
Economic and political apartheid are alive in Cuba, despite a revolution launched in 1959 that promised equality.

..DISPARITY IN NUMBERS

Cuba’s official statistics offer little help on the race issue. The 2002 census, which asked Cubans whether they were white, black or mestizo/mulatto, showed 11 percent of the island’s 11.2 million people described themselves as black. The real figure is more like 62 percent, according to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

And the published Census figures provide no way at all to compare blacks and whites in categories like salary or educational levels. Ramón Colás, who left Cuba in 2001 and now runs an Afro-Cuba race-relations project in Mississippi, said he once carried out his own telling survey: Five out of every 100 private vehicles he counted in Havana were driven by a Cuban of color.

The disparity between the census’ 11 percent and UM’s 62 percent also reflects the complicated racial categories in a country where if you look white you are considered white, no matter the genes.

“You know, there are seven different types of blacks in Cuba,” said Denny, who now works as a waiter but dreams of a hip-hop career. From darkest to lightest, they are: negro azul, prieto, moreno, mulato, trigueño, jabao and blanconaso…

Part 5: Achievers: Racism takes many hues
Leonard Pitts, Jr.
An overview on the achievement of black leaders in the region. And a personal essay by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.

…Which brings us back to that earnestly debated question: Who is black?

A COMPLEX MATTER

The question is more complex than an American might believe. In Brazil, a nation of indigenous peoples and descendants of African slaves, European colonists and immigrants, a dark-skinned man who might automatically be called black elsewhere has a racial vocabulary that allows him to skirt the Africa in his heritage altogether. He can call himself moreno (racially mixed), mestizo (colored) or pardo (medium brown). Anything but “afrodescendente” (Africa-descended) or negro (black)…

..Brazil likes to think of itself as a racial democracy, says Miriam Leitao, but that’s a delusion. She has, she says, been making that argument for 10 years and has become one of the nation’s most controversial journalists in the process.

When she writes about racism in Brazil, people tell her she’s crazy. “I don’t know how to explain the thing that, for me, is so obvious,” she says

Multimedia

Read the entire series here.