Mixed Race Studies

There is No There There: Women and Intermarriage in the Southwestern Borderlands

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Volume 13, Number 3, Spring 2013

Amanda Taylor-Montoya

Amanda Taylor-Montoya is an independent scholar living in southern New Mexico.

Borderlands are fuzzy, slippery, ambiguous places. Whether imagined as a geographic region straddling an international border, “the contested boundaries between colonial domains,” or simply zones of intercultural contact where state or imperial power is weak, borderlands are spaces where social boundaries are unstable and social conventions appear more flexible. Cooperation and accommodation characterize the borderlands as much as conflict and violence. Historians often point to centuries of racial mixture to help explain the cultural fluidity and hybridization that prevail in the borderlands.

Tales of liaisons that transgressed racial boundaries (beginning with the relationship between Hernán Cortés and Malíntzin Tenépal) are so common in histories of the Southwestern borderlands that they function as a kind of creation story for the region and its peoples. Here, men exchanged women—as captives or wives—to establish, bolster, or consolidate economic and social relationships. Indigenous women not only provided sexual companionship and domestic labor, but also served critical roles as translators, guides, and cultural mediators in colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. Whether consensual or coerced, mixed unions figured prominently in the borderlands economy and culture…

…Spanish colonial society recognized a wide variety of mixed race peoples, but also maintained a stringent hierarchy between them. The racial system included not only españoles (Spaniards) and indios (Indians), but also people identified as mestizos (Spanish and Indian), mulatos (Spanish and African), castizos (Spanish and mestizo), castas (racial mixture), color quebrado (literally, “broken color”), and genízaros (Hispanicized Indians). One’s racial classification was determined not only by ancestry or phenotype, but also by occupation or class, and could change over time according to one’s circumstances.

Race and legitimacy were intertwined in colonial New Mexico, as many associated mixed unions with illegitimacy and illicit sex. Consequently, many marriages—particularly among the elite—were arranged, in order to ensure matches with someone of equal status to preserve family honor. Simply put, the state’s acknowledgment of mixed race people did not alter the association of racial mixture with dishonor. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, New Mexicans increasingly moved away from the nuanced racial hierarchy in place during the colonial period toward a more rigid racialization of two categories: Spanish and Indian…

Read the entire article here.

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White

Basic Books
2002
416 pages
5.3 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780465006403; ISBN-10: 046500640X

Frank H. Wu, Chancellor & Dean
University of California, Hastings College of Law

Writing in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and others who confronted the “color line” of the twentieth century, journalist, scholar, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the twenty-first century. Wu examines affirmative action, globalization, immigration, and other controversial contemporary issues through the lens of the Asian-American experience. Mixing personal anecdotes, legal cases, and journalistic reporting, Wu confronts damaging Asian-American stereotypes such as “the model minority” and “the perpetual foreigner.” By offering new ways of thinking about race in American society, Wu’s work dares us to make good on our great democratic experiment.

Table of Contents

• 1. East Is East, East Is West: Asians as Americans
• 2. The Model Minority: Asian American “Success” as a Race Relations Failure
• 3. The Perpetual Foreigner: Yellow Peril in the Pacific Century
• 4. Neither Black Nor White: Affirmative Action and Asian Americans
• 5. True But Wrong: New Arguments Against New Discrimination
• 6. The Best “Chink” Food: Dog-Eating and the Dilemma of Diversity
• 7. The Changing Face of America: Intermarriage and the Mixed Race Movement
• 8. The Power of Coalitions: Why I Teach at Howard
• Epilogue: Deep Springs
• References
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author

The Law Could Make You Rich

Common-Place
A Common Place, An Uncommon Voice
Extra Issue: Volume 13, Number 3.5 (June 2013)

Jared Hardesty
Department of History
Boston College

Jared Hardesty is a PhD candidate in history at Boston College and is currently writing a dissertation on slavery, freedom, and unfreedom in eighteenth-century Boston

Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2011. 432 pp.

Governor Riggins, a leader of Boston’s nineteenth-century black community, once publicly admonished a fellow person of color, William Patterson, and took the opportunity to offer a lesson to the community at large. Patterson had purchased unlicensed liquor for some fellow African Americans, and the authorities in Boston caught him red-handed. In the midst of dressing Patterson down, Riggins expressed the hope that the “law will make you smart.” His proclamation to his fellow Afro-Bostonians—the law could be a source of empowerment for African Americans—may have been lost on Patterson, but it was a message that blacks across the United States heard loud and clear. Half a continent away in St. Louis, Missouri, the mixed-race grandsons of Jacques Clamorgan geared up to file suit and lay claim to their grandfather’s extensive lands. For them, Riggins’s message carried special resonance and an additional caveat. For the Clamorgan men, the law not only made them smart, but could also make them rich…

Read the entire review here.

More Talk Radio on 06/17/13 [with Professor Greg Carter]

More Talk Radio
KBOO Community Radio
Portland, Oregon
2013-06-17, 15:00-16:00Z, 08:00-09:00 PDT (Local Time)

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod interview Greg Carter about his new book “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing.”

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, Greg Carter asks us to reconsider an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. He re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Greg Carter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing” Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture.

Download the episode here.

Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil

Cambridge University Press
December 1997
412 pages
228 x 152 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780521585903
Hardback ISBN: 9780521584555

Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO
New York Public Library

In this bold, original and persuasive book, Anthony W. Marx provocatively links the construction of nations to the construction of racial identity. Using a comparative historical approach, Marx analyzes the connection between race as a cultural and political category rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism, and the development of three nation states. He shows how each country’s differing efforts to establish national unity and other institutional impediments have served, through the nation-building process and into their present systems of state power, to shape and often crystallize categories and divisions of race. Focusing on South Africa, Brazil and the United States, Marx illustrates and elucidates the historical dynamics and institutional relationships by which the construction of race and the development of these nations have informed one another. Deftly combining comparative history, political science and sociological interpretation, sharpened by over three-hundred interviews with key informants from each country, he follows this dialogue into the present to discuss recent political mobilization, popular protest and the current salience of race issues.

Features

• A comprehensive historical comparative study of the major issues of race and nation
• Combines political, social and economic analysis to break barriers between country studies and issues of race, nation, state and social movement
• Draws upon archival material, literature, and more than 300 interviews

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Historical and Cultural Legacies:
  • 2. Trajectories from colonialism
  • 3. Lessons from slavery
  • 4. The uncertain legacy of miscegenation
    • Implications
• Part II. Racial Domination and the Nation-State:
  • 5. ‘Wee for thee, South Africa’: the racial state
  • 6. ‘To bind up the nation’s wounds’: the United States after the Civil War
  • 7. ‘Order and progress’: inclusive nation-state building in Brazil
  • Comparative racial domination: an overview
• Part III. Race Making from Below:
  • 8. ‘We are a rock’: Black racial identity, mobilization and the new South Africa
  • 9. Burying Jim Crow: Black racial identity, mobilization and reform in the United States
  • 10. Breaching Brazil’s pact of silence
• 11. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Cuban Remix: Rethinking Culture and Political Participation in Contemporary Cuba

University of Michigan
2008
555 pages

Tanya L. Saunders

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology)

This dissertation examines the post-1959 activism of Cuba’s socially critical artists and intellectuals, and the effects of the Cuban state’s institutionalization of culture. I analyze the Cuban underground hip-hop movement as a case study of the ways in which Black artists and intellectuals in Cuba have employed cultural aesthetics to challenge contemporary inequalities organized around race, class, gender, and sexuality. I address the social context in which the Cuban underground hip-hop movement emerged by linking it to Cuba’s revolutionary project and to other counter-cultural social movements in Cuba’s history and from other post-colonial contexts. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic, historical, and interview-based research, the study engages with existing theories of the state, culture, civil society and the public sphere, but also reveals their limitations, particularly when applied to non-European contexts. As such, the dissertation offers significant insights into the relations between politics and culture, hegemony and resistance, history and the imagination of a better future, both in Cuba and beyond.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• Chapter I: Introduction
  • 1.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop
  • 1.2 The Organization of the Dissertation
  • 1.3 Contextual Considerations: Latin American Politics and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.4 Contextual Considerations: The Cuban Revolution and the Aesthetic Debates
• Chapter II: Methodology
  • 2.1 Background
  • 2.2 Developing a Research Agenda
  • 2.3 Phase One
  • 2.4 Phase Two
  • 2.5 Phase Three
  • 2.6 Data Collection
• Section I
  • Chapter III: Public Spaces, Cultural Spheres: Rethinking Theories of Political Participation, Civil Society and Social Change
    • 3.1: Subaltern Critiques of Cold War Politics
    • 3.2 Post-Socialist? Neocolonial? Republican Socialism? Reflections on Cuba‘s State Project
      • Republican Ideals within a Socialist State
    • 3.3 Citizenship, Democracy and Civil Society in the Anglo-American Metanarrative of Citizenship
      • Citizenship and Civic Participation
    • 3.4 Discussion: ‘Non-Western’ Challenges to Social Change, Political Participation and Civil Society
  • Chapter IV: Civil Society and Art Worlds: Rethinking Politics and Political Participation
    • 4.1 Making the Connections: Art and Social Change
    • 4.2 Rethinking Cultural Logics: Culture, Political Participation and Grassroots Activism
    • 4.3 The Base and Superstructure of Culture: The Institutional Structure of Cuban Culture
    • 4.4 The Ministry of Culture
    • 4.5 Discussion
• Section II
  • Chapter V: Art and Revolution: Cuba‟s Artistic Social Movements and Social Change
    • 5.1 The alternative music scene: hip-hop and Anti-Modernist Aesthetics
    • 5.2 The Marginal Existence of Cuban Rock within Cuban Culture
    • 5.3 Nueva Trova: The Cuban Protest Music Movement
    • 5.4 Reflections on My First Nueva Trova Show
  • Chapter VI: Race, Place and Colonial Legacies: Underground hip-hop and a Racialized Social Critique
    • 6.1 Race and Cuba: Historical Considerations
    • 6.2 American Occupation and the Creation of the Cuban Republic 1898-1912
    • 6.3 The Revolutionary State Attempts to Solve the Race Problem in Cuba
    • 6.4. Making the Linkages: Discussion and Some Additional Thoughts
    • 6.5. Ethnographic Notes: Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 6.6. “Everyone Knows That Whites Exist, But No One‘s Sure About The Blacks” Theoretical Perspectives on Art, hip-hop and Transnational Blackness
  • Chapter VII: Racial Identity and Revolution: The (Re-)Emergence of a Black Identity Among Havana‟s Underground Youth
    • 7.1 Cuban Underground Hip-Hop and Symbols of Blackness
    • 7.1a Raperos, Activistas, Revolutionaries: Underground Hip-Hop and Social Change
    • 7.2 Notes on Language
      • 7.2.1 Underground hip-hop/Comercialización/Institucionalización
    • 7.3 Transmitting Blackness: Graffiti, T-Shirts and the Black Experience
    • Figure 7q. Album cover, Jodido Protagonista, by Randeée Akozta (independently produced, circa 2004).
    • 7.4 Underground Graffiti: NoNo La Grafitera
    • 7.5 Section Summary/Concluding Remarks
• Section III
  • Chapter VIII: Cuba‟s Sexual Revolution? Women, Homosexuality and Cuban Revolutionary Policy
    • 8.1 All the Women Are Straight and All the Homosexuals are Men: Gender and Female (Homo-) Sexuality
    • 8.2. Silent Women, Invisible Lesbians: Researching the Experiences of Lesbians in Cuba
    • 8.3 Notes on Contemporary Lesbian, Gay Life in Cuba
  • Chapter IX: “Siempre Hay Lucha/There Is Always a Struggle”: Black Women, Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.1 (1). ―No Particular Racial Subjectivity‖
    • 9.2 (2). The Racially Conscious Race Rejecters
    • 9.3 (3). The Racially Awakened
    • 9.4 (4). Racially Conscious Actors
    • 9.5 ¿Y Que Paso Con OREMI?/ And What Happened with OREMI? Black Lesbian Subjectivity in Contemporary Cuba
    • 9.6 Conclusion
  • Chapter X: “No Soy Kruda”: Las Krudas, Cuban Black Feminism and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.1 Who Are Las Krudas?
    • 10.2 Las Krudas: Raperas Underground
    • 10.3 Krudas‘ Black Feminist Discourse
    • 10.4 Como Existe La Heterosexualidad, Existe Homosexualidad/Just As There Is Heterosexuality, There Is Homosexuality
    • 10.5 Krudas and the Queer of Color Critique
    • 10.6 Reaction to Krudas‘ Work
    • 10.7 Conclusion/Discussion
• Chapter XI: Conclusion
  • The Sociological Implications of My Research
• Appendix
• Discography, Interviews, IRB Forms & Supplementary Materials
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

Santita Jackson Show (WVON AM, Chicago) with Rainier Spencer

The Santita Jackson Show
WVON 1690 AM
Chicago, Illinois
2011-02-16, 15:05Z (09:05 CST, 10:05 EST, 07:05 PST)

Santita Jackson, Host

Rainier Spencer, Director and Professor of Afro-American Studies; Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The topic of discussion will be the so-called “one-drop rule.”  Listen to the interview here (39.6MB, 00:43:21).

Dr. Spencer is the author of the new book, Reproducing Race: The Paradox of Generation Mix (2011) in where he argues cogently, and forcefully, that the deconstruction of race promised by the American Multiracial Identity Movement will remain an illusion of wishful thinking unless we truly address the racist baggage that serves tenaciously to conserve the present racial order.

Selected bibliography:

• “Racism and the Multiracial Label,” commentary in the “Room for Debate: The ‘Two or More Races’ Dilemma” section, The New York Times, February 12, 2011.
• “Mixed-Race Chic,” The Chronicle Review, May 19, 2009.
• Challenging Multiracial ldentity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006.
• Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Listen to the interview here (39.6MB, 00:43:21).

How the ‘Loving’ Case Changed the US

The Root
2013-06-12

Kelli Goff, Special Correspondent

The legacy of the interracial-marriage case looms large on the 46th anniversary of the landmark decision.

Forty-six years ago, on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia law prohibiting Mildred Jeter Loving, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, from marrying because of their race was unconstitutional. Their family name, “Loving,” was so perfect for a case about love that it probably would have been dubbed unbelievable if the story were being pitched as fiction.

The case transformed the landscape of America. In a statement to The Root, Kim Keenan, general counsel for the NAACP, said of Loving v. Virginia’s impact, “Along with other key cases, it brought an end to a separate-and-unequal legally sanctioned way of life in America.”

Below is a list of the top ways that Loving v. Virginia has directly and indirectly changed America.

It gave the United States its first black president. Barack Obama was born in 1961, and the Loving case was decided in 1967, but the Lovings were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C. They were arrested upon returning to their native Virginia for defying the state’s anti-miscegenation statute. Their sentence of one year in prison or the option of leaving their home state set the groundwork for their landmark Supreme Court case. In doing so they made it possible for families like that of President Obama, which consisted of his black African father and white American mother, to legally exist in the state nearest to the city that the president and his family now call home…

Read the entire article here.

The Truth About Loving v. Virginia and Why it Matters

MixedRaceStudies.org
2013-06-12

Steven F. Riley

On June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the landmark civil-rights case Loving v. Virginia that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law (known as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924) was unconstitutional. It did not as some suggest, legalize interracial marriage in the United States. It legalized interracial marriage in the 15 states that still had anti-miscegenation laws that prevented such unions.

Repeating this untruth actually undermines the legacy of our courageous American heroes Mildred and Richard Loving because it was their legal marriage in Washington, D.C. in June 1958 and subsequent prosecution in Virginia that began their saga on the road to the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the Lovings did not as some commentators also suggest, “win their right to marry” in their Supreme Court case because they were already married—and were raising three children. To reinforce the point, one need look no further than the now famous message Richard Loving relayed via his lawyers to the bench on April 10, 1967, when he stated simply, “Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of the state legislatures that repealed their anti-miscegenation laws before Loving v. Virginia.

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of the states New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. which never enacted anti-miscegenation laws.

Repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of over 100 years of litigation against such laws including the unsuccessful Pace v. Alabama (1883), the War Brides Act (1945), the successful Perez v. Sharp (1948) which legalized interracial marriage in California, and McLaughlin v. Florida (1964) and which abrogated the cohabitation aspect of the Florida’s anti-miscegenation law. These cases and others laid the groundwork for the successful outcome of Loving v. Virginia.

Lastly, repeating this untruth obscures the legacy of centuries of lawful marriages across racial boundaries.

For posts about Loving v. Virginia click here.

^©2013, Steven F. Riley

Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed-Race Americans [Interview]

KING-TV 5, Seattle Washington
2013-06-11

Margaret Larsen, Host
New Day Northwest

June 12 marks the 46th Anniversary of a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court which overturned a ban on interracial marriage that had been place on many states. But even before the ruling, couples of different races were getting married, some going great lengths to hide their differences to do so.

Sociologist Cathy Tashiro interviewed a number of people who either broke the law or found some other way to be with the ones they love.

The result is a new book, Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed-Race Americans.

Cathy joined Margaret to talk about the inspiration behind the book and her own upbringing as the child of a mixed race couple. She also shared some of the experiences shared by the men and women she interviewed for the book…

Read the entire article and watch the video here.