Passing for white or the true colors of Cuban miscegenationPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2021-12-14 01:30Z by Steven |
Passing for white or the true colors of Cuban miscegenation
OnCuba News
2021-12-08
Odette Casamayor, Associate Professor of Romance Languages
University of Pennsylvania
Photo: Kaloian Santos.
The miscegenation, in addition to being fierce and magical, painful or romantic, torment, fun, depending on how you want to interpret it, is one of the most insidious phenomena that exists.
I am black, in all circumstances and scenarios. I could never pass for anything else. Perhaps that is why I have always been curious about the strategies deployed by many in what could be considered another national sport: “passing for white.”
There is abundant magic and tragedy in each link of a complicated gear that, since colonial times, has operated relentlessly in Latin American societies. In the territories colonized by the Iberian metropolises, miscegenation would go beyond its primary biological dimension to, regardless of its intensity, become an important instrument of social mobility, promoting progress as the skin whitens and the negroid features become blurred or, as is commonly said, “the race is improved.” Meanwhile, in the Anglo-Saxon north equal opportunities were not granted to the mestizo subject. That is why what many call “the race,” because they choose to consider it a reality and not a historical, political and socio-economically determined construction, cannot in appearance be “improved” in the United States.
However, miscegenation, in addition to being fierce and magical, painful or romantic, torment, fun, depending on how you want to interpret it, is one of the most insidious phenomena that exists. Miscegenation has always been a pandemic: it occurs everywhere when it is least expected and promoted. So, although much less structured than in Latin America, the mechanism of “passing for white” also has a following in the United States…
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