Mixed Race Studies

From Chains to Chiles: An Elite Afro-Indigenous Couple in Colonial Mexico, 1641–1688

Ethnohistory
Volume 62, Number 2, April 2015
pages 361-384
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2854356

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Assistant Professor of History
University of Rochester

This article explores the life of an elite Afro-indigenous couple in the city of Puebla de los Ángeles during the seventeenth century. Through the study of a freedman, Felipe Monsón y Mojica, and his indigenous wife, Juana María de la Cruz, I propose a new approach to the study of the African diaspora in the urban centers of New Spain (colonial Mexico). By combining an extensive corpus of notarial, judicial, and parochial records with isolated references to Puebla’s Nahuatl-language annals, this article also sheds light on city-dwelling native women who married enslaved men. I argue that formal unions of this type held enormous social, political, and commercial potential for Afro-indigenous couples to emerge as new political actors and urban patrons. In particular, the Monsón de la Cruz household rose to a position of preeminence in pardo religious and military corporations through commerce in indigenous agricultural products.

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Race and Indigeneity in the Life of Elisha Apes

Ethnohistory
Volume 60, Number 1 (Winter 2013)
pages 27-50
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1816166

Nancy Shoemaker, Professor of History
University of Connecticut

This essay examines cultures of racial categorization in New England and New Zealand through the life of one migrant, Elisha Apes, the younger half-brother of the radical Pequot Indian writer William Apess, who preferred to spell the family name with a second s. Elisha Apes settled in New Zealand in 1839 and married a Māori woman of the South Island. Their six children came to be labeled “half-castes” in the language of the nineteenth-century New Zealand state. If half-caste had been a term in New England, it would have been applied to Elisha Apes, for he was indeed of mixed descent. However, in New Zealand, where native referred to the Māori only, Apes’s native origins elsewhere had no bearing. His status as a foreigner who came to settle in New Zealand cast him into the same category as New Zealand’s European/white population.

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The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Ethnohistory
Volume 59, Number 4 (2012)
pages 713-738
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1642725

Robert C. Schwaller, Assistant Professor of History
University of Kansas

One of the most interesting aspects of sixteenth-century Mexico is the predominance of native languages, Nahuatl in particular, among all members of colonial society. Conquistadors, encomenderos, estancieros, missionaries, and even tradesmen learned native languages because it helped further their interests in a society divided between two cultural spheres, Hispanic and indigenous. This article highlights the unique position of sixteenth-century mestizos and mulatos as bearers of indigenous culture and language in colonial Mexico. These individuals born of mixed unions were often acculturated in both Hispanic and indigenous cultures. As people in the middle of colonial society, they were uniquely positioned to navigate within and between the two dominant cultural spheres of colonial Mexico. Using Inquisition documents, criminal records, and petitions to the crown, this article analyzes how these individuals served as more than just intermediaries between each cultural space. It suggests that mestizos and mulatos were much more prominent cultural actors than has generally been assumed. Their linguistic and cultural fluency helped shaped many aspects of New Spain’s evolving culture and society.

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A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians

Ethnohistory
Volume 48, Number 3 (Summer 2001)
pages 473-494
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-48-3-473

Dave D. Davis
University of Southern Maine

Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and historians have regarded the Houma Indians of southern Louisiana as the descendants of the Houma Indians encountered along the Mississippi River by French explorers and settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral history of the contemporary Houma traces the group’s origin to Native Americans of the Houma and other tribes who moved into the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, anthropologists and historians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have concluded that there is no documentary evidence of any cultural or genealogical link between the modern Houma and the Houma of the French colonial period. Available documentary sources indicate that the modern Houma originated in the nineteenth century as a multiethnic group that included Europeans, African Americans, and some Native Americans, none of whom are known to have been Houmas. The genesis of the modern group’s identity as Houma Indians can be understood as a response to legally sanctioned racial classifications and race discrimination in Louisiana from the late nineteenth century on.

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Missed Opportunities and the Problem of Mohawk Chief John Norton’s Cherokee Ancestry

Ethnohistory
Volume 59, Number 2 (Spring 2012)
pages 261-291
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1536885

Carl Benn, Professor of History
Ryerson University

John Norton (1770–1831?) was one of the most important Iroquois leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the author of a thousand-page manuscript on First Nations history, a journey he made to the Cherokee country, and his adventures in the War of 1812. However, that text and his other writings have received comparatively little attention from scholars despite the rich opportunities these documents hold for exploring the indigenous world of his day. Much of the neglect stems from a reluctance to accept him as a “real” native person because he was born in Scotland and was an adopted Mohawk and because people have doubted his claim that his father was a Cherokee. This article clarifies Norton’s claim to a Cherokee connection and concludes that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the probability that his father was a Cherokee; thus it invites scholars to look at Norton’s work anew in their quest to understand the First Nations world of the latter 1700s and early 1800s.

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Origin, Development and Maintenance of a Louisiana Mixed-Blood Community: The Ethnohistory of the Freejacks of the First Ward Settlement

Ethnohistory
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring, 1979)
pages 177-192

Darrell A. Posey
Georgia State University

The Fifth Ward Settlement is composed of approximately 2,500 mixed-blood (Black, While and Indian) inhabitants called “Freejacks.” The Settlement has developed as a result of various social, racial and legal distinctions that have altered the nature of the Settlement over its 150 year history. The origins and early development of the community are rooted in racial oppression, geographical isolation and cultural diversity. Today most of the restrictive racial barriers are removed, yet the Freejacks themselves seek to maintain boundaries to delineate the Settlement and preserve a distinctive identity.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of a single mixed-blood community, the Fifth Ward Settlement, to examine the changing social and political forces that have moulded the modem ethnically distinct group. The myth that mixed-blood groups are homogenous in origin is refuted and sub-group leadership patterns within the community are traced to historical heterogeneity. The community is seen as one delineated and characterized by established racial models, yet existent today as the result of various self-maintenance strategies to establish ethnic boundaries and preserve an idealized cultural and historical tradition.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is a mixed-blood community composed of approximately 2,500 individuals known in the area as “Freejacks,” who are said to be a racial mixture of Black, White, and Indian. The name “Freejack” is derogatory because of its connotations of racial mixture and is abhorred by residents of the Settlement. Freejacks claim to be White and vehemently deny racial mixture.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is located in Louisiana near the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain (Fig. 1). The Settlement is bounded to the west and east by two White communities known as Germantown and Whiteville; it is bordered to the north by swamp and to the south by timberland. Two Black communities are found within the limits of the Settlement, one on the eastern…

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Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 37-63
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

Mixed Race in the Seminole Nation

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 113-141
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-066

Kevin Mulroy, Associate University Librarian
University of California, Los Angeles

Phil Wilkes Fixico

This is a story of two hidden identities. It focuses on the family history of Phil Wilkes Fixico (aka Philip Vincent Wilkes and Pompey Bruner Fixico), a contemporary Seminole maroon descendant of mixed race who lives in Los Angeles. Phil is one-eighth Seminole Indian, one-quarter Seminole freedman, one-eighth Creek freedman, one-quarter Cherokee-freedman, and one-quarter African-American-white. His family history records that his paternal grandfather was the offspring of a Seminole Indian woman and a Seminole freedman, but that this “intermarriage” was kept secret from the Dawes Commission and the boy was enrolled as a “fullblood” Indian. This one union and the subsequent history of the family tell us a great deal about relations between Seminoles and freedmen in the Indian Territory and Oklahoma and about status and identity issues among individuals of mixed race within American society. With tragic irony, Phil’s parents also hid the identity of his biological father, echoing the story of his grandfather. Sensing family secrets and lies, young Phil experienced an identity crisis. Eventually discovering his father’s identity and his family history, Phil turned his life around. He has embraced his mixed-race heritage, connected with the Seminole maroon communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico, and become a creative and energetic tribal historian.

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