Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Young Afro Latinos straddle both cultures

    Young Afro Latinos straddle both cultures

    Our Weekly: Our Truth, Our Voice
    Los Angeles, California
    2010-09-23

    Manny Otiko

    Hispanic heritage month celebrated Sept. 15-Oct. 15

    When 2nd Lt. Emily Perez was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, she became the first female African American officer to die in combat. Perez, an outstanding West Point graduate, was mourned by two communities because, while she looked like a Black woman, she came from a Black-Latino family.

    Like former POW Spec. Shoshana Johnson, Perez’s death indicates how society’s definition of who is Black is changing. Johnson was championed by the Black media, after her captivity was almost drowned out by the spectacle of Jessica Lynch’s staged rescue. (Johnson is of Afro-Panamanian descent and is also identified with the Hispanic ethnic group.)

    Latinos are now officially the largest ethnic group in the United States, by passing African Americans, who for a long time have been the largest and most politically-visible minority.

    But there are an increasing number of young people who are from both of these significant ethnic groups. Latinos and African Americans often live and work alongside one another in urban areas, and while there are often reports about the friction between the two groups, sometimes the Black-Brown unions work quite smoothly. Many younger Latinos supported President Barack Obama’s campaign, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villarigosa also courted the African American community…

    …Growing up [Shay] Olivarria said that she did not fit in with either of the ethnic groups.

    “My mom is Black and my dad is Mexican. I have one full Black sister, one full Mexican sister, and then there’s me. Growing up neither side accepted me. To the Blacks I was ‘exotic’ and ‘different,’ so the girls thought I was a Barbie and the boys were all after me. To Mexicans, I was ‘too dark’ to take home and ‘not really Mexican’ because I didn’t speak Spanish,” Olivarria said. “When I was little, I looked like a Pacific Islander … I ended up spending a lot of time with Asians.” But race is not an issue in her family. “We all get along really well,” she said…

    Read the article here.

  • Statehood Issue Stirs Passions About Puerto Rican Identity

    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.

  • The Slum [O Cortiço]

    The Slum [O Cortiço]

    Oxford University Press
    March 2000 (First published in 1890)
    240 pages
    Paperback ISBN 13: 9780195121872; ISBN 10: 0195121872

    Aluísio Azevedo

    Edited and Translated by David H. Rosenthal

    Features an informative introduction by translator David H. Rosenthal

    First published in 1890, and undoubtedly Azevedo’s masterpiece, The Slum is one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed novels ever written about Brazil. Indeed, its great popularity, realistic descriptions, archetypal situations, detailed local coloring, and overall race-consciousness may well evoke Huckleberry Finn as the novel’s North American equivalent. Yet Azevedo also exhibits the naturalism of Zola and the ironic distance of Balzac; while tragic, beautiful, and imaginative as a work of fiction, The Slum is universally regarded as one of the best, or truest, portraits of Brazilian society ever rendered.

    This is a vivid and complex tale of passion and greed, a story with many different strands touching on the different economic tiers of society. Mainly, however, The Slum thrives on two intersecting story lines. In one narrative, a penny-pinching immigrant landlord strives to become a rich investor and then discards his black lover for a wealthy white woman. In the other, we witness the innocent yet dangerous love affair between a strong, pragmatic, “gentle giant” sort of immigrant and a vivacious mulatto woman who both live in a tenement owned by said landlord. The two immigrant heroes are originally Portuguese, and thus personify two alternate outsider responses to Brazil. As translator David H. Rosenthal points out in his useful Introduction: one is the capitalist drawn to new markets, quick prestige, and untapped resources; the other, the prudent European drawn moth-like to “the light and sexual heat of the tropics.”

    A deftly told, deeply moving, and hardscrabble novel that features several stirring passages about life in the streets, the melting-pot realities of the modern city, and the oft-unstable mind of the crowd, The Slum will captivate anyone who might appreciate a more poetic, less political take on the nineteenth-century naturalism of Crane or Dreiser.

  • (Miscege)nación en O Cortiço

    (Miscege)nación en O Cortiço

    Trans: Revue de Littérature Générale et Comparée
    Issue 5 (2008)
    10 pages (24 paragraphs)

    Brian L. Price, Assistant Professor of Spanish
    Wake Forest University

    Written a year after the proclamation of Brazilian independence, O Cortiço by Aluisio Azevedo depicts the demographic composition of the country with a naturalistic sense of detail and examines the possible dangers of miscegenation in the new republic. Influenced by racist European theories, Azevedo and his contemporaries feared that the mixing of races would eventually result in diluting the European ancestries which had to be the base of the new society. In the novel, the cortiço—a kind of small proletarian town which abounded in the 19th century—works as a laboratory where the different racial elements converge, entangle and destroy each other. The present essay examines the historical context during which that novel was written and its critical eye focuses on the two main love affairs. In both, a European man marries (has a love relationship with) a woman of inferior race and pays a high moral price for that. In both, the man loses the purity which the author expects from the new nation. Eventually contrary to what Azevedo expected, mixed-race Brazil triumphs over the European colony and turns into a cortiço.

    Read the entire article (in Spanish) in HTML or PDF format.

  • Decline In U.S. Whites, Rise Of Latinos Blurring Traditional Racial Lines

    Decline In U.S. Whites, Rise Of Latinos Blurring Traditional Racial Lines

    The Huffington Post
    2013-03-17

    Hope Yen
    The Associated Press

    Associated Press writers Elaine Ganley in Montfermeil, France, Jenny Barchfield in Rio de Janeiro and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas contributed to this report.

    WASHINGTON — Welcome to the new off-white America.

    A historic decline in the number of U.S. whites and the fast growth of Latinos are blurring traditional black-white color lines, testing the limits of civil rights laws and reshaping political alliances as “whiteness” begins to lose its numerical dominance.

    Long in coming, the demographic shift was most vividly illustrated in last November’s re-election of President Barack Obama, the first black president, despite a historically low percentage of white supporters.

    It’s now a potent backdrop to the immigration issue being debated in Congress that could offer a path to citizenship for 11 million mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants. Also, the Supreme Court is deciding cases this term on affirmative action and voting rights that could redefine race and equality in the U.S.

    The latest census data and polling from The Associated Press highlight the historic change in a nation in which non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in the next generation, somewhere around the year 2043.

    Despite being a nation of immigrants, America’s tip to a white minority has never occurred in its 237-year history and will be a first among the world’s major post-industrial societies. Brazil, a developing nation, has crossed the threshold to “majority-minority” status; a few cities in France and England are near, if not past that point.

    The international experience and recent U.S. events point to an uncertain future for American race relations.

    In Brazil, where multiracialism is celebrated, social mobility remains among the world’s lowest for blacks while wealth is concentrated among whites at the top. In France, race is not recorded on government census forms and people share a unified Gallic identity, yet high levels of racial discrimination persist.

    “The American experience has always been a story of color. In the 20th century it was a story of the black-white line. In the 21st century we are moving into a new off-white moment,” says Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a global expert on immigration and dean of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

    “Numerically, the U.S. is being transformed. The question now is whether our institutions are being transformed,” he said…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The portrait of a nation: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s study on the Brazilian ‘anthropological types’, 1910-1920

    The portrait of a nation: Edgard Roquette-Pinto’s study on the Brazilian ‘anthropological types’, 1910-1920 (Retratos da nação: os ‘tipos antropológicos’ do Brasil nos estudos de Edgard Roquette-Pinto, 1910-1920)

    Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas
    Volume 7, Number 3 (September/December 2012)
    pages 645-670
    ISSN 1981-8122
    DOI: 10.1590/S1981-81222012000300003

    Vanderlei Sebastião de Souza
    Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

    The article analyses the studies carried out by the anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto (1884-1954) on the classification of ‘anthropological types’ of Brazil. Affiliated to the Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, the anthropologist collected data on the anatomical, physiological and psychological characteristics of the Brazilian population in the early decades of the 20th century. The racial classification put forward by Roquette-Pinto resulted not only from the ongoing national intellectual context, but also resulted from technical and theoretical influences from abroad, in particular from Germany and the United States. The anthropologist’s goal was to produce an ‘anthropological portrait’ of Brazil. His research aimed at revealing the racial characteristics involved in the formation of the nation, as well as evaluating the biological viability of the population, especially the ‘mixed race types’.

    Read the entire article (in Portuguese) here.

  • In particular, interracial images are used to perpetuate negative stereotypes yet are simultaneously marketed as an example of how color-blind we have become and of the declining significance of race.

    Throughout the various media realms—television, film, news media, and the less clearly defined intersecting worlds of music, sports, and youth culture—representations of interracial sex and relationships follow certain patterns, and what emerges is a delicate dance between interracial sex sells and interracial sex alienates.  The small number of representations as well as the particular types of depictions of interracial relationships, when they are shown, reveals the lingering opposition to interracial sexuality and marriage as well as the persistent racialized images of racial Others and the protection of whiteness. Interracial representations are symbolic struggles over meaning, not only in how interracial relationships are portrayed but also in how they are received, understood, and responded to in the larger society.  In particular, interracial images are used to perpetuate negative stereotypes yet are simultaneously marketed as an example of how color-blind we have become and of the declining significance of race. Yet one may ask, Why are interracial relationships shown at all if they are still widely opposed by whites and other racial groups? The answer is twofold, as we have seen throughout the book, that showing interracial relationships is a necessary piece of the current rhetoric that asserts race no longer matters and the representations are only shown in ways that either deviantize these relationships, privilege whiteness, or support the contention that America is color-blind.

    Erica Chito Childs, Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009): 177-178.

  • Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture

    Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture

    Rowman & Littlefield
    May 2009
    250 pages
    Cloth: 0-7425-6079-1 / 978-0-7425-6079-6
    Paper: 0-7425-6080-5 / 978-0-7425-6080-2

    Erica Chito Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
    Hunter College, City University of New York

    There is no teasing apart what interracial couples think of themselves from what society shows them about themselves. Following on her earlier ground-breaking study of the social worlds of interracial couples, Erica Chito Childs considers the larger context of social messages, conveyed by the media, that inform how we think about love across the color line. Examining a range of media—from movies to music to the web—Fade to Black and White offers an informative and provocative account of how the perception of interracial sexuality as “deviant” has been transformed in the course of the 20th century and how race relations are understood today.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: Fade to Black and White
    • 1. Historical Realities and Media Representations of Race and Sexuality
    • 2. The Prime-Time Color-Line: Interracial Couples and Television
    • 3. It’s a (White) Man’s World
    • 4. When Good Girls Go Bad
    • 5. Playing the Color-Blind Card: Seeing Black and White in News Media
    • 6. Multiracial Utopias: Youth, Sports and Music
    • Conclusion

  • critical mixed race studies

    Critical mixed race studies (CMRS) is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in scope. It places the concept of mixed race at the critical center of focus such that multiracial individuals become subjects of historical, social, and cultural processes rather than simply objects of analysis. This involves the study of racial consciousness among racially mixed people, the world in which they live, and the ideological forces that inform their identity and experience. CMRS also stresses the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political structures based on dominant conceptions of race. In keeping with sociologists Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory, CMRS acknowledges that the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics, but the selection of specific human features for the purposes of racial signification is a constantly changing sociohistorical process. Accordingly, CMRS emphasizes the constructed nature of race and the notion that racial categories are unstable and decentered structures of sociocultural meanings that are continuously being created, inhabited, contested, transformed, and destroyed. Finally, CMRS underscores the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique local and global systemic injustices rooted in processes of racialization and social stratification based on race, as well as the interlocking nature of racial phenomena with sex, gender, sexuality, class, and other categories of difference.

    —G. Reginald Daniel

  • Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival® is Moving On and Making Room

    Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival® is Moving On and Making Room

    2013-03-18

    Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, Playwright, Producer, Actress, Educator

    Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival® lives on, but only in our own hearts, voices and its original mission.

    The Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival® celebrated its final event in June 2012. I hope that you will honor its original mission, and all of the ways in which it touched the Mixed community and beyond by celebrating its accomplishments and continuing its mission through your own vital organizations and activities. If you are looking for ways to continue to celebrate the Mixed experience, here are just a few of the wonderful places to turn to:

    I am doing anti-racist and racial identity work with my solo show and documentary: OneDropofLove.org, and Heidi Durrow has applied for a number of trademarks associated with continued work in the Mixed community; however, she may not use our registered trademark Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival® in connection with any of her activities (this includes on the @mxroots twitter account and the www.mxroots.org website). If you have any questions whatsoever or would like further information, please do not hesitate to contact me: fanshenmc(at)gmail(dot)com.