{"id":26013,"date":"2012-10-15T20:58:19","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T20:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26013"},"modified":"2012-10-15T20:58:19","modified_gmt":"2012-10-15T20:58:19","slug":"%e2%80%98passing%e2%80%99-in-colonial-colombia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26013","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Passing\u2019 in colonial Colombia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Passing\u2019 in colonial Colombia<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Havard University Gazette<\/a>
\n2009-02-12<\/p>\n

Corydon Ireland<\/strong>, Harvard News Office<\/p>\n

Racial categories today are self-evident \u2014 part of what social scientists might call \u201csocially constructed discourse.\u201d Contemporary people of one race are aware of what other races look like, as well as where they themselves belong in the racial scheme of things.
\n\u00a0
\nBut racial categories were not so firm or reliable while being created centuries ago, in particular in early colonial Latin America. It\u2019s this historical crucible of racial identities that anthropologist and Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport<\/a> has chosen to study.
\n\u00a0
\nShe gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: \u201cMischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogot\u00e1.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\n\u201cSpaniard or a mestizo, mulato, indio, or negro,\u201d said Rappaport to begin. \u201cWhat did these categories mean?\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nOr to put it another way, she added, what did race mean to these early modern people?
\n\u00a0
\nFor one, it wasn\u2019t a matter of black and white, said Rappaport \u2014 that is, it was more subtle than \u201cthe genetic metaphor of bounded populations that has characterized the (pseudo) scientific discourse of race since the 19th century.\u201d
\n\u00a0
\nThe word \u201cwhite\u201d seldom appears in the 16th and 17th century Latin American and Spanish documents she has pored over, she said. Europeans were instead identified by where they were from \u2014 Spain, France, or England, for instance. And in what is now present-day Colombia, people were identified not so much by racial categories but more often as citizens \u2014 vecinos <\/em>\u2014 of a particular town or city.
\n<\/strong>\u00a0
\nMore important than \u201cwhite\u201d was the designation \u201cnoble,\u201d said Rappaport, who teaches at Georgetown University. \u201cIt takes us out of a narrowly racial mindset.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Rappaport, a frequent scholarly traveler to old archives in Spain and Latin America, is using many ways to study the emergence of racial identity in early colonial societies. She\u2019s looking at phenotype and physiognomy as they were used in legal documents 400 years ago and more<\/a>; at how the moral attributes of racially mixed groups were described; and how these attributes were challenged by the literature of the day…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Passing\u2019 in colonial Colombia Havard University Gazette 2009-02-12 Corydon Ireland, Harvard News Office Racial categories today are self-evident \u2014 part of what social scientists might call \u201csocially constructed discourse.\u201d Contemporary people of one race are aware of what other races look like, as well as where they themselves belong in the racial scheme of things. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,21,459,8,6462],"tags":[12493,1865,12494,12488,7966],"class_list":["post-26013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","tag-bogota","tag-colombia","tag-corydon-ireland","tag-havard-university-gazette","tag-joanne-rappaport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}