Mixed Race Studies

This edition: Moiya McTier, Mekita Rivas and Tanya Hernandez

Shades of U.S.
CUNY TV
The City University of New York
Original tape date: 2018-10-19
First aired: 2019-01-17

From a cabin in the woods without running water to astronomy Ph.D. candidate, Moiya McTier uses her platform to advocate for women of color in the sciences. Then, growing up Filipina and Mexican in Nebraska could be confusing, but Mekita Rivas finds her style as a fashion journalist. And last, Hell’s Kitchen-bred Tanya Hernández knows discrimination first hand, so she builds a legal career fighting it.

Guest List

• Tanya Hernández Professor of Law, Fordham University [and author of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination]
• Moiya McTier PhD Candidate, Columbia University
• Mekita Rivas Freelance Writer

Watch the entire episode (00:26:46) here.

Bringing Black History Home

CUNY Newswire
The City University of New York
2011-04-15

Antoinette Martignoni, left, and her granddaughter Greta Blau hold a family Bible that contains the name of their ancestor, Dr. James McCune Smith, the nation’s first African American physician at Martignoni’s home in Fairfield, Conn., Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

The name James McCune Smith meant little to Greta Blau in 1996, when she briefly mentioned him in a research paper she wrote for a History of Blacks in New York City course designed and taught by Joanne Edey-Rhodes.

Blau’s paper for the Hunter College class focused on the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded on Fifth Avenue to assist homeless and destitute African-American children. She noted that Smith, the asylum’s doctor, was the nation’s first professionally trained African-American physician — as well as an eminent 19th century abolitionist and author whose friends included antislavery movement leader Frederick Douglass.

Little did Blau know that the assignment would years later lead her on an engrossing journey into her own family’s roots.

It began one day in 2003, at her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, when she was looking through the family Bible that an Irish relative had. “The name was in there as the father of my great-grandmother’s second husband,” she said. “I knew I had heard that name before. I went home and Googled the name, and he came up. I said, ‘That can’t be the right person, because I’m white.’”…

Read the entire article here.

CUNY DSI Monograph Documents Dominican Heritage of First Settler

The City University of New York
City College
2012-10-04

Juan Rodríguez, native of Santo Domingo, comes to New York in 1613 and stays when his ship sails to Holland

The first non-native to live in what is now New York City was a black or mixed race Dominican, a new monograph produced by researchers at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) documents. Juan Rodríguez, who was born on the colony of La Española, now the Dominican Republic, came to the Big Apple in 1613 aboard a Dutch trading vessel en route from the Caribbean. He decided to stay and live among the natives when the ship returned to Holland.
 
“This is the kind of research that produces new academic knowledge and engages in a conversation with a scholarly community who studies New York City’s early history,” said Dr. Ramona Hernández, director of CUNY DSI. “This research also serves people from a practical point of view: A very early predecessor of the large Dominican population that thrives in New York City today, Juan Rodriguez’s story belongs to the history of all New Yorkers.
 
“As residents of a port city with a uniquely multiethnic population since its very beginnings next to the mighty Hudson River, New York has always been a community of interactions and intermingling amongst races and ethnicities.”
 
The monograph was commissioned by the American Chamber of Commerce of the Dominican Republic, which will receive the first copy at a luncheon meeting at City College Thursday, October 4. The following day, a two-hour colloquium with experts in translations and transcription will examine the challenges, excitement and insights of translating the documentation for the Juan Rodríguez story.
 
Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg named a stretch of Broadway between W. 159th Street and W. 218th Street for Mr. Rodríguez. The section of the famed roadway runs through Washington Heights, home of one of the largest concentrations of Dominicans living outside their homeland.
 
According to archival records reviewed by DSI researchers, Mr. Rodríguez, a black or mulatto free sailor born on La Española, arrived in an estuary of the Hudson River in the spring of 1613, aboard the “Jonge Tobias,” a Dutch ship captained by Thijs Mossel. After two months presumably spent trading with Native Americans, Captain Mossel decided to return to Holland, but Mr. Rodríguez refused to make the journey and was allowed to stay on shore…

Read the entire article here.