Mixed Race Studies

Beyond blanqueamiento: black affirmation in contemporary Puerto Rico

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 13, 2018 – Issue 2
pages 157-178
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2018.1466646

Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

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Indian allies and white antagonists: toward an alternative mestizaje on Mexico’s Costa Chica

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 11, 2016 – Issue 3: Mestizo Acts: The Politics and Performance of Mestizaje in Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia
pages 222-241
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2015.1094873

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico, is a ‘mixed’ black-Indian agricultural community on the coastal belt of Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the Costa Chica. This article examines local expressions of race in San Nicolás in relation to Mexico’s national ideology of mestizaje (race mixing), which excludes blackness but is foundational to Mexican racial identities. San Nicolás’s black-Indians are strongly nationalistic while expressing a collective or regional identity different from those of peoples they identify as Indians and as whites. Such collective expression produces an alternative model of mestizaje, here explored through local agrarian history and several village festivals. It is argued that this alternative model favors Indians and distances whites, thereby challenging dominant forms of Mexican mestizaje.

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Indian allies and white antagonists: toward an alternative mestizaje on Mexico’s Costa Chica

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Published online: 2015-10-05
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2015.1094873

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Latin American Anthropology
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

San Nicolás Tolentino, Guerrero, Mexico, is a ‘mixed’ black-Indian agricultural community on the coastal belt of Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, the Costa Chica. This article examines local expressions of race in San Nicolás in relation to Mexico’s national ideology of mestizaje (race mixing), which excludes blackness but is foundational to Mexican racial identities. San Nicolás’s black-Indians are strongly nationalistic while expressing a collective or regional identity different from those of peoples they identify as Indians and as whites. Such collective expression produces an alternative model of mestizaje, here explored through local agrarian history and several village festivals. It is argued that this alternative model favors Indians and distances whites, thereby challenging dominant forms of Mexican mestizaje.

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Envisioning the United States in the Latin American myth of ‘racial democracy mestizaje’

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Published online 2016-04-12
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2016.1170953

Tanya Katerí Hernández, Professor of Law
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York

Transnational comparison is relevant both to how racial hierarchy is obscured and elucidated. This Essay traces how the Latin American ‘racial democracy mestizaje’ depiction of the US as blind to racial mixture and color distinctions mistakenly misrepresent the Southern Jim Crow history as the only US experience of racism. It suggests that, in turn, such a limited frame for comparison cloaks not only the more extensive terrain of racism in the United States that is separate from the Jim Crow reality but also parallels to the Latin American context. Moreover, the circumscribed view of US racism adversely affects those who critique the ‘racial democracy mestizaje’ myth of Latin American post racialism. This is because the standard Latin American story of US racial history hinders the ability to fully countermand the attack that portrays racial justice activists as inappropriately applying overly restrictive US binary perspectives on race. With the fuller explication of the complete US racial history, and its contemporary manifestations, it will not be so easy to dismiss the comparisons of racial subordination across the Americas, as the imperialist imposition of ill-fitting US notions of race.

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A Racial Paradise? Race and Race Mixture in Henry Louis Gates’ Brazil

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 8,  Issue 1, 2013
pages 88-91
DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2013.768464

Chinyere Osuji, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden

In this documentary, Henry Louis Gates explores the extent to which the notion of being a racial paradise applies to Brazil. He introduces Brazil’s contradictions of being the last country to abolish slavery’ in the New World in 1888, yet the first to declare that it was free of racism. He explores a variety of cities in Brazil in order to understand the history of early race mixture, contemporary valorization of Blackness, and attempts to address racial inequality. As a viewer, we watch how Gates’ fascination with the Brazil’s African heritage and race mixture at the beginning of the film turns into a questioning of the myth of racial democracy.

The film is useful in terms of providing a primer on race in Brazil for novices on race in Latin America. Geared towards the general public, this is a film that could be used in an introductory course for undergraduates about race in Brazil or Latin America more broadly. Its strengths are in illuminating the nature of slavery and race mixture in Brazil’s history while introducing the racial ideologies of whitening and racial democracy. Gates introduces scholars such as Manoel Querino and the more renowned Gilberto Freyre to discuss their scholarship on black contributions to Brazilian society. Gates’ film also has vibrant images of Carnaval, capoeira, and a Candomblé ceremony, providing opportunities for students to gain exposure to these African-influenced cultural practices.

This film is somewhat problematic in terms of illuminating racial and color categories in contemporary Brazil. Gates indirectly cites a 1976 Brazilian National Household Survey study that found people used over 100 terms to describe their color. Gates says: ‘In the U.S., a person with any African ancestry is legally defined as black. In Brazil, racial categories are on steroids.’ However, this perspective has been discredited by scholars who argue that most Brazilians only use a handful of terms to describe themselves. In fact, re-examinations of the same 1976 survey found that 95 percent of Brazilians used only six terms to describe themselves: branco, moreno, pardo, moreno-claro, preto and negro (Silva, 1987; Telles, 2004). The 10 most common terms were the aforementioned as well as amarela, mulata, clara, and morena-escura. All together, these 10 terms account for how 99 percent of all Brazilians think of their race/color. These findings have been replicated using more national survey data (Petruccelli, 2001; Telles, 2004). However, the myth of the hundreds of racial and color terms that Brazilians use to identify themselves will not die, and now Gates aids in perpetuating it…

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‘Una Raza, Dos Etnias’: The Politics Of Be(com)ing/Performing ‘Afropanameño’

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2008
DOI: 10.1080/17442220802080519
pages 123-147

Renée Alexander Craft, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

This article analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanameño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial (Colonial Black) and Afroantillano (Black West Indian) identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. This essay examines the major discourses that shaped ‘blackness’ in four key moments of heightened nationalism in 20th-century Panamá. I refer to these moments as: Construction (1903–1914), Citizens versus Subjects (1932–1946), Patriots versus Empire (1964–1979), and Reconciliation (1989–2003).

In Panamá, Blacks are not discriminated against because they belong to a low social class, they belong to a low social class because they are discriminated against (Justo Arroyo, African Presence in the Americas)

Los blancos no van al cielo, por una solita mafia; les gusta comer pañela sin haber sembrado caña	[Whites do not go to heaven for a single reason They like to eat sweet candy Without sowing sugar cane]
		Chorus to a Congo song

On Friday 26 May and Saturday 27 May 2006, I witnessed the inauguration of the first ‘Festival Afropanarneno’ in the Panamá City convention center. Supported by the Office of the First Lady, the Panamánian Institute of Tourism and the Special Commission on Black Ethnicity, the event included 20 booths featuring black ethnicity exhibitions, artistic presentations, food and wares representing the provinces of Panamá, Coclé, Bocas del Toro, and Colón—the areas with the highest concentrations of Afropanarneño populations. As the Friday celebration drew to its apex, a special commission appointed by President Martín Torrijos in 2005 presented him with the fruits of their year-long endeavor: a report and an action plan on the ‘Recognition and Total Inclusion of Black Ethnicity in Panamánian Society’. Using public policy advances in other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean to bolster their case (such as Colombia’s 1993 Law of Black Communities, Brazil’s 1998 Body of Laws against Racial Discrimination, Nicaragua’s 1996 Law of Autonomy of the Atlantic Coast, and Peru’s 1997 Anti-discriminatory Law, 1997), the Special Commission built on the progress made through ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Day of Black Ethnicity’] to open a wider space for the recognition of social, economic, and cultural contributions of black ethnicity to the nation-building process.

Instituted into law on 30 May 2000, ‘El Día de la Etnia Negra’ is an annual civic recognition of the culture and contributions of people of African descent to the Republic of Panamá (Leyes Sancionadas). The date 30 May coincides with the date in 1820 when King Fernando VII abolished slavery in Spain and its colonies, including Panamá. Significantly, the law stipulates that the Ministry of Education and the Institutes of Tourism and Culture should organize relevant activities to commemorate the holiday, and that all schools and public institutions should celebrate it as a civic proclamation of ‘black ethnicity’ contributions to the culture and development of Panamá (Van Gronigen-Warren & Lowe de Goodin, 2001, p. 83). I have witnessed black ethnicity day celebrations in the cities of Panamá, Colón and/or Portobelo (located in the province of Colón) each year from 2000 to 2006 and have watched them grow from a celebration limited to 30 May to an informal, week-long commemoration, to its most recent form ‘El Mes de la Etnia Negra’ [‘The Month of Black Ethnicity’].

This essay analyzes 20th-century black identity in Panamá by examining how two distinct points on a spectrum of Panamánian blackness came to fit strategically (although sometimes contentiously) under the category ‘Afropanarneño’ at the end of the 20th century. The dynamism of contemporary blackness in Panamá exists around the politics of Afrocolonial and Afroantillano identities as they have been created, contested, and revised in the Republic’s first century. In the micro-Diaspora of Panamá, black identity formations and cultural expressions have been shaped largely by the country’s colonial experience with enslaved Africans via Spain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, and neo-colonial experience with contract workers from the West Indies via the United States’ completion and 86-year control of the Panamá Canal. Blackness in Panamá forks at the place where colonial blackness meets Canal blackness…

…As in most Latin American and Caribbean countries, centuries of intermarriage between African, indigenous and, in the case of Panamá, Spanish populations yielded a large mestizo (mixed race) classification. Throughout the 20th-century, the Congo tradition has consistently been identified by the community and the State as a black performance tradition even though the bodies of its practitioners have been categorized by demographic data as ‘mestizo’. Four centuries of evolving interchange and dialectical assimilation in a territory the size of South Carolina has rounded the edges of Panamánian blackness and whiteness without removing them as opposing place-holders on a spectrum of privilege. Considering ‘whiteness’ at the apex of privilege and ‘blackness’ at the base, Afro-Colonials remain on or near the bottom, even within the category of mestizo. As Peter Wade (2003, p. 263) argues regarding mestizaje in Colombia, ‘black people (always an ambiguous category) were both included and excluded: included as ordinary citizens, participatory in the overarching process of mestizaje, and simultaneously excluded as inferior citizens, or even as people who only marginally participated in “national society”‘…

…Part of the animosity directed toward West Indians was caused by Canal Zone Jim Crow policies, which not only segregated West Indian workers as ‘black” and therefore inferior, but also constructed a blackness elastic enough for all Panamánian workers, regardless of ethnicity, to fit uneasily and resentfully alongside them. Although the system of paying salaried workers in gold and of day laborers in silver began under the French-controlled Canal, these labels took on racial connotations under United States control, which translated ‘gold roll’/’silver roll’ into ‘whites only’/’blacks only’.

Not only did the US system treat Panamánian Canal workers as black immigrants in the belly of their own country, but it privileged West Indians over them because West Indians spoke English. Living in substandard conditions, in the staunchly segregated society of the Canal and paid a fraction of ‘gold roll’ salaries, West Indian workers still received wages almost double those of Panamánians outside the Zone. Further, the more fluid Panamánian ethnoracial caste system that had produced darker-skinned Panamánian presidents and allowed for greater upward mobility within the system by acquisition of wealth, education and/or marriage stiffened as a response to US Jim Crow attitudes and legislation (LaFeber, 1979, pp. 49-51). For these reasons, many Panamánians, including Afro-Colonials, who often fell victim to the same Jim Crow attitudes that oppressed West Indians, resented them. To make matters worse, their collusion with the United States through English had rendered Panamánians foreign within their own home country. This enduring sense of injustice exploded into a mid-century nationalist movement that inverted the paradigm privileging Spanish and relinquishing the citizenship rights of non-Spanish speakers, thus pitting Afro-Colonial communities against West Indians…

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Reading the Dougla Body: Mixed-race, Post-race, and Other Narratives of What it Means to be Mixed in Trinidad

Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (March 2008)
pages 1-31
DOI: 10.1080/17442220701865820

Sarah England, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, California

In recent years there has been a great deal of scholarship addressing the ‘mixed-race’ question in the Americas. Much of this literature is concerned with documenting the experiences of mixed-race peoples and exploring how their existence alters racial ideologies and racial formations in their respective societies. This essay contributes to that literature through an analysis of the experience of mixed-race peoples in Trinidad and Tobago. Through interviews with people of Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian parentage (douglas) I show how the dougla experience both challenges traditional ways that race is understood ontologically, and is shaped by those same ideologies. I further examine the place that douglas see themselves as occupying in a society where racial mixing is both heralded as the essence of the national character and seen as threatening to the traditional division between Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians.

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