Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation, Racialization and Gender (Mestiçagem, Racialização e Gênero)

Sociologias
Number 21 (Porto Alegre Jan./June 2009)
pages 94-120
DOI: 10.1590/S1517-45222009000100006
ISSN 1517-4522

Rosely Gomes Costa, Pós-doutorado em Ciências Sociais pela
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) e pela Universidade Autônoma de Barcelona (Espanha)

This paper reflects on the paradox of a mestizo Brazil and the close relationship between racialization and gender through the analysis of classic and current authors. The article discusses the different processes involved in these authors’ study of racialization, based both on theory and their empirical researches; and considers the intertwining of these two concepts with that of gender. Throughout the paper, the author draws comparisons and makes comments on her own field research on the subject.

O artigo contém uma reflexão sobre o paradoxo do Brasil mestiço e sobre as estreitas relações entre racialização e gênero a partir da análise de alguns autores clássicos e outros atuais. O artigo analisa os processos distintos de elaboração da racialização por que passam esses autores, às vezes de forma teórica e outras vezes baseada em suas pesquisas empíricas e, ainda, uma reflexão do entrelaçamento desses dois conceitos com o de gênero. Em alguns momentos, faço comparações e comentários relativos à minha própria pesquisa de campo sobre o tema.

Read the entire article (in Portuguese) here.

Show me your CDIB: Blood Quantum and Indian Identity among Indian People of Oklahoma

American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 47, Number 3 (November 2003)
pages 267-282
DOI: 10.1177/0002764203256187

James F. Hamill, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

Discourse concerning the legitimacy of claims of Indian identity characterize much of the debate in Indian country today. Any legitimate claim to an Indian identity rests, in part, on tribal membership, which requires certification by the U.S. government in the form of a Certified Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) and a tribal membership identification. Once a person establishes biological heritage with the CDIB, the blood quantum—full, 1/2, 1/256, and so forth—often is taken as a rough measure of “Indianness.” This emphasis on blood quantum has been an important feature of both Indian and Tribal identity in Oklahoma throughout the 20th century. Using data from interviews with Oklahoma Indian people taken in the 1930s, 1960s, and gathered in the field from 1994 on, this report will look at the meaning and importance of blood quantum in Indian identity and how that has been expressed by Indian women and men throughout the past 100 years.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity

University of Manitoba
2004
450 pages

Sherry Farrell Racette, Professor of Native Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
University of Manitoba

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

When I was a university student, I worked at a summer education program in The Pas in northern Manitoba. There I met three women from the Manitoba Métis Federation who had obtained a grant to teach people who worked with their children. Tired of requests to come into classrooms to teach children beadwork, they had decided that the best use of their time and skills was to “teach the teachers” with the expectation that beadwork would be incorporated into the curriculum. The women seemed to take special care that I learned what they had to teach. Maybe it was because I was the only aboriginal woman in the workshop; maybe it was because I was interested. Kathleen Delaronde, a traditional artist of the highest caliber, was one of those women. I got to know her and her family and during another northern summer, I stayed at their home and learned at her kitchen table. Nobody in my family did beadwork but I felt an immediate connection with beads and leather.

Although beadwork and traditional arts were new to me, sewing clothes and making decorative objects for the home were not. Both my parents had been poor as children and took tremendous pleasure in dressing well. My grandmother always dressed up to go to town, and tortured my uncles by dressing them in little matching suits and hats. One summer while we were visiting my grandmother in Quebec, she sat me down at her treadle sewing machine and helped me sew a dress for my doll. At home I started sewing by helping my mother who was always making something. My job was to rip her mistakes while she forged ahead and to do hand sewing which she still loathes. In addition to what she had learned from my grandmother, my mother had taken a tailoring course that was offered by the Singer sewing machine company, and she sent me off to take a similar course when I was a teenager. Now she helps me when I embark on projects that involve sewing. For an art exhibit, Dolls for Big Girls, I merged what I knew about Métis and First Nations history and traditional arts and clothing. While I made little moccasins, my mother dressed the old woman for a piece entitled Flight based on her memories of clothing worn by my great-grandmother, Annie Poison King.

When I began my journey into traditional arts, my mother brought me a birch bark basket that belonged to my grandmother, Helen King Hanbury. Disappointed that, in a fit of creativity, my grandmother had painted it with green boat paint, I put the basket aside. I didn’t open it until shortly after my grandmother died. One day I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed with the basket in my lap. When I took off the lid, I found moccasin patterns, a piece of embroidery, assorted odds and ends, and a handmade needle case with a simple flower embroidered on the cover. I realized that I had unknowingly picked up a needle to an aesthetic tradition that my grandmother had put down. Since that time I have taken opportunities to learn from elder artists, such as the late Margaret McAuley of Cumberland House, and struggled on by myself. I have also thought a great deal about what it means when we wrap ourselves up and present ourselves to the world in a certain way and what it means when we stop. This study is an extension of the journey that began when Kathleen Delaronde helped me pick up the needle. It has been done with the greatest respect for the women who have taught me and the artists from long ago, who I am sure have been standing beside me guiding my research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE: Picking Up the Needle
  • Acknowledgements
  • Glossary
  • Abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Métis and Half Breed Clothing and Decorative Arts
• CHAPTER TWO: Métis, Half Breed and Mixed Blood: Identifying Self and Group
• CHAPTER THREE: The Métis Space of New Possibilities: Elements of Hybrid Style
• CHAPTER FOUR: “After the Half Breed Fashion”: Reconstructing 19th Century Métis and Half Breed Dress
• CHAPTER FIVE: Tent Pegs: Material Evidence
• CHAPTER SIX: Spirit and Function: Symbolic Aspects of Occupational Dress
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Clothing in Action: the Expressive Properties Of Dress
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Sewing for a Living: the Commodification of Women’s Artistic Production
• CHAPTER NINE: Artists, Making and Meaning
• CHAPTER TEN: Half Breed, but not Métis: Lakota and Dakota Mixed Bloods
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: Final Thoughts and Conclusions
  • Sewing Ourselves Together
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• PLATE GALLERY

Read the entire dissertation here.

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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Professor Alcira Dueñas: Illuminating the Andes: Indigenous and Mestizo Intellectuals in Colonial Peru

¿Qué Pasa, OSU?
Ohio State University
Autumn 2009

Michael J. Alarid

A citizen of Colombia, Professor Alcira Dueñas is a historian who conducts research on the cultural and intellectual history of Amerindians and other subordinated groups of the Peruvian Andes during the colonial era. Professor Dueñas earned her Bachelor of Arts from Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Economics, and her Master of Art and Doctorate in History from The Ohio State University, where she focused on the history of Latin America. For more than twenty years, professor Dueñas has taught courses on Colonial and Modern Latin America, Women’s history of Latin America, and modern World History. Professor Dueñas has had a distinguished career: she is a Fulbright scholar, recipient of the OSU Graduate School Alumni Research Award, and, along with a group of faculty of color from the History Department, she has recently been honored with the Distinguished University Diversity Enhancement Award from the University Senate, as well as with an equivalent distinction from the College of Humanities. …

…Professor Dueñas continues to feel indebted to OSU for her intellectual flowering, and through her OSU education she has infused an interdisciplinary approach into her historical methodology as well. Her first book, which hits shelves in the spring of 2010, utilizes tools of literary criticism and ethnohistory to highlight the presence and practices of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in colonial Peru. She develops a textual analysis of Andean manifestos, memoriales (petitions), reports, and letters to identify the rhetorical strategies these intellectuals utilized to reach out to the royal powers. Dueñas explains, “I place such analysis in the historical context of the major critical conjunctures of Spanish colonialism in the Andes, particularly the insurrections that intersected with some of the writings under study. I apply anthropological methods, as I examine issues of identity, religion, and Andean political culture.”

Professor Dueñas’ creative approach to research has resulted in her manuscript being picked up by a major academic press; the book is complete and in production with the University Press of Colorado. Her book reconstructs the history of indigenous and mestizo intellectuals in mid and late colonial Peru, illuminating the writing practices and social agency of Andeans in their quest for social change. Dueñas elucidates, “I conclude that Andean scholarship from mid-and-late colonial Peru reflects the cultural changes of the colonized ethnic elites at the outset of modernity in Latin America. Their intellectual and political struggles reveal them as autonomous subjects, moving forward to undo their colonial condition of “Indians,” while expanding the intellectual sphere of colonial Peru to educated ‘Indios ladinos.’ They used writing, Transatlantic traveling, legal action, and even subtle support to rebellions, as means to improve their social standing and foster their ethnic autonomy under Spanish rule.” Dueñas concludes, “They attempted to participate in the administration of justice for Indians and seized every opportunity to occupy positions in the ecclesiastical and state bureaucracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru

University Press of Colorado
2010
320 pages
5 line drawings, 1 map
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-60732-018-0
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60732-019-7

Alcira Dueñas, Assistant Professor of Latin American History and World History
Ohio State University, Newark

Through newly unearthed texts virtually unknown in Andean studies, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” highlights the Andean intellectual tradition of writing in their long-term struggle for social empowerment and questions the previous understanding of the “lettered city” as a privileged space populated solely by colonial elites. Rarely acknowledged in studies of resistance to colonial rule, these writings challenged colonial hierarchies and ethnic discrimination in attempts to redefine the Andean role in colonial society.

Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, criticized colonial injustice and exclusion, and articulated the ideas that would later be embraced in the Great Rebellion in 1781. Their movement extended across the Atlantic as the scholars visited the seat of the Spanish empire to negotiate with the king and his advisors for social reform, lobbied diverse networks of supporters in Madrid and Peru, and struggled for admission to religious orders, schools and universities, and positions in ecclesiastic and civil administration.

Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City” explores how scholars contributed to social change and transformation of colonial culture through legal, cultural, and political activism, and how, ultimately, their significant colonial critiques and campaigns redefined colonial public life and discourse. It will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, colonial literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Foundations of Seventeenth-Century Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 3. Andean Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century: Writers, Networks,and Texts
• Chapter 4. The European Background of Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 5. Andean Discourses of Justice: The Colonial Judicial System under Scrutiny
• Chapter 6. The Political Culture of Andean Elites: Social Inclusion and Ethnic Autonomy
• Chapter 7. The Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Andean Scholarship
• Chapter 8. Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Color, Race, and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics

Current Anthropology
Volume 50, Number 6 (2009)
pages 787-819
DOI: 10.1086/644532

Ricardo Ventura Santos, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Public Health
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation
also Associate professor of Anthropology
National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Peter H. Fry, Professor
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Departamento de Antropologia
Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais/UFRJ, Largo de São Francisco de Paula 1

Simone Monteiro, Senior Researcher
Oswaldo Cruz Institute

Marcos Chor Maio, Senior Researcher
House of Oswaldo Cruz
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation

José Carlos Rodrigues, Professor
Fluminense Federal University
also Associate Professor
Catholic University

Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues
Department of Biochemistry and Immunology at the Institute of Biological Sciences
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Sérgio D. J. Pena, Professor of Biochemistry and Immunology
Institute of Biological Sciences
Federal University of Minas Gerais

In the contemporary world, “race” narratives are so multifaceted that at times, different views of the concept appear mutually incompatible. In recent decades biologists, especially geneticists, have repeatedly stated that the notion of race does not apply to the human species. On the other hand, social scientists claim that race is highly significant in cultural, historical, and socioeconomic terms because it molds everyday social relations and because it is a powerful motivator for social and political movements based on race differences. In this paper we present the results of an interdisciplinary research project incorporating approaches from genetics and anthropology. Our objective is to explore the interface between information about biology/genetics and perceptions about color/race in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We argue that the data and interpretation of our research resonate far beyond the local level, stimulating discussion about methodological, theoretical, and political issues of wider national and international relevance. Topics addressed include the complex terminology of color/race classification in Brazil, perceptions about ancestry in the context of ideologies of Brazilian national identity, and the relationship between genetic information about the Brazilian population and a sociopolitical agenda that turns on questions of race and racism.

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The Future is Mestizo: Life Where Cultures Meet, Revised Edition

University Press of Colorado
2000
136 pages
8.2 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
Paper ISBN:978-0-87081-576-8

Virgilio Elizondo, Professor of Pastoral and Hispanic Theology; Fellow, Institute for Latino Studies and Kellogg Institute
Notre Dame University

Twelve years after it was first published, The Future is Mestizo is now updated and revised with a new foreword, introduction, and epilogue. This book speaks to the largest demographic change in twentieth-century United States history-the Latinization of music, religion, and culture.

Contents
Contents

• Foreword by Sandra Cisneros
• Preface The Great Border
• Introduction The Future Is Mestizo: We Are the Shades by David Carrasco
• 1. A Family of Migrants
  • My City
  • My Family
  • My Neighborhood and Parish
• 2. Who Am I?
  • Moving into a “Foreign Land”
    vAcceptance, Belonging, and Affirmation
  • Experiences of Non-Being
  • Neither/Nor but Something New
• 3. A Violated People
  • The Masks of Suffering
  • The Eruption
  • The Eruption Continues
  • Going to the Roots
• 4. Marginality
  • Festive Breakthrough
  • Institutional Barriers
  • Invisible Mechanisms
• 5. My People Resurrect at Tepeyac
  • The Dawn of a New Day
  • From Death to New Life
  • First “Evange!ium” of the Americas
  • Beginning of the New Race
• 6. Galilee of Mestizos
  • Is Human Liberation Possible?
  • Conquest or Birth
  • The Unimagined Liberation
  • From Margination to Unity
• 7. Toward Universal Mestizaje
  • From Unsuspected Limitations to Unsuspected Richness
  • A New Being: Universal and Local
  • Continued Migrations
  • Threshold of a New Humanity
  • The Ultimate Mestizaje
• Epilogue: A Reflection Twelve Years Later
  • The Negative
  • The Challenge

The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal

Duke University Press
November 2011
160 pages
20 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5210-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5199-3

Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Duke University

Perhaps the best golfer ever, Tiger Woods rocketed to the top of a once whites-only sport. Endorsements made him a global brand and the world’s richest athlete. The child of a multiracial marriage, Woods and his blond, blue-eyed wife, Elin Nordegren, seemed to represent a new postracial America. Then, in late 2009, Woods became embroiled in a sex scandal that made headlines worldwide. In this concise yet far-reaching analysis, Orin Starn brings an anthropologist’s perspective to bear on Tigergate. He explores our modern media obsession with celebrity scandals and their tawdry ritualized drama, yet he offers much more than the usual banal moralizing about the rich and famous. Starn explains how Tiger’s travails and the culture of golf reflect broader American anxieties—about race and sex, scapegoating and betrayal, and the role of the sports hero. The Passion of Tiger Woods is required reading for all those interested in the high-stakes world of professional golf, the politics of sports and celebrity, and the myths and realities surrounding the flawed yet riveting figure who remains among the most famous athletes of our time.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Golf Backward Spells “Flog”
• 2. The Tiger Woods Revolution
• 3. Tigergate, Celebrity Scandal, and the Apology Society
• 4. Internet Wars, Sex Addiction, and the Crucifixion of Tiger Woods
• 5. Postracial Fantasies, Racial Realpolitik
• 6. Tiger’s Penis
• 7. Out of the Woods?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific

University of Nebraska Press
2012-06-01
504 pages
1 illustration
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3795-7

Edited by:

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Assistant Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950.

Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.