Mixed Race Studies

Racial, Religious, and Civic Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America

The Journal of American History
Volume 17, Issue 3 (Fall 2005)
pages 420-437
DOI: 10.1093/alh/aji024

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino de Nueva España (“Auspices of Our Lady of Guadalupe over the Kingdom of New Spain”) (Fig. 1) is an eighteenth-century canvass by an anonymous Mexican painter that rather vividly captures Creole discourses in colonial Mexico. A garlanded Our Lady of Guadalupe stands on top of a fountain from which four kneeling nobles, two indigenous, two Hispanic, drink.

Fountains had long been associated with salvation and purity in Christian discourse. For example, in their 1596 Ghent altarpiece, Fountain of Life and Mercy, Gerard Horenbout (1467–1540) and his son Lucas Horenbout (d. 1544) have the community of the pious drink of a fountain whose source is the body of Christ (Fig. 2). Believers eucharistically partake of the blood of Christ, whose wounds refill the well. Some princes and clerics, including a turbaned potentate and a tonsured friar, who stand for the Turks and Luther, respectively, turn their backs on the fountain as they gather to worship Dame World. To reinforce the Counter-Reformation message, the Flemish Horenbouts have angels hovering over the pious and demons over the infidels and heretics.

The same theological and compositional principles organize the Mexican painting, but the fountain’s spring is Our Lady of Guadalupe and both natives and Hispanics kneel to drink from the well. Using this virgin as the source of the “fountain of life and mercy” came naturally to those who thought of Our Lady of Guadalupe as an immaculate conception, for some of the imagery underlying the belief in the immaculate conception came from the Song of Songs, one of the strangest books of the Old Testament. According to Christian theology, the Song of Songs prefigures the mystery of St. Mary’s conception by describing a woman, the lover of God, as a walled garden (hortus conclusus) and a fountain (“You are like a private garden, my treasure, my bride! You are like a spring that no one can drink from, a fountain of my own” [Song of Solomon 4.12]). The most striking difference between the Mexican painting and Horenbout’s is that in the former no party turns its back on the fountain: both Indians and Europeans belong in the same community of the pious…

…I have chosen the painting Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino deNueva España to introduce this essay because it summarizes much of what I believe to be distinct about Creole discourse in colonial Spanish America: Creoles saw their lands to be equally rooted in the indigenous and Hispanic pasts. In their imagination, colonial Spanish American societies were kingdoms, ancien regime societies made up of social estates and corporate privileges, with deep, ancient dynastic roots in both the New World and Spain. For heuristic purposes, I have divided this essay to coincide with the compositional elements of the painting: Creoles and Indians; Creoles and religion, particularly Our Lady of Guadalupe: and Creoles and Spain. But before turning to my tripartite analysis, we need first to clarify who the Creoles were.

1. Criollos

The self-styled Criollos or Creoles were local elites who presided over racially mixed colonial societies of Indians, blacks, Spaniards, and castas (mixed bloods). Creoles felt entitled to rule over these racially and culturally heterogeneous societies, as part of a loosely held Catholic composite monarchy whose center was back in Madrid. By and large they succeeded in their efforts to obtain autonomy vis-a-vis Spain, but their rule over these local “kingdoms” was always precarious and negotiated. Although Peninsular newcomers, including representatives of the sprawling lay and religious bureaucracies that the crown created in Spanish America, were usually marshaled into serving Creole interests either through bribes or marriage, Creoles felt voiceless and discriminated against. To be sure, they were right to complain. Back in Spain, the Indies were seen as corrupting, degenerating environments: frontier societies where one could get rich but sorely lacking in sophistication and culture. Upon arrival in the Indies. Peninsulares felt naturally entitled to hold political, religious, and economic power, and Creoles resented such pretensions…

…2. Creole and Indians

How could an ancien regime society where social and racial estates overlapped produce a painting like Patrocinio de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre el Reino de Nueva España, in which both Indians and Hispanic nobilities are held to be equal participants in the ideal Christian commonwealth? The answer lies precisely in the very nature of the ancien regime the Creole elites envisioned. Creoles saw themselves as the product of the biological, racial amalgamation of Indian and Spanish elites that took place during the first years of colonization.

Clerical writers considered the miscegenation of Spaniards and Indians appropriate only when it brought elites together. The initial colonial sexual embrace of Indian elites and Spanish conquerors was. therefore, welcomed and praised. The type of “vulgar” miscegenation that brought later commoners of different races together was another matter. The vulgar mestizaje was seen as a threat to the existence of idealized hierarchical polities. Mestizos were consistently portrayed as evil, out-of-control individuals responsible for bringing sinful lifestyles, including a culture of lies and deception, into Indian communities that the clergy sought to keep unsoiled…

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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.

Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960

University of North Carolina Press
May 2012
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 11 halftones, 2 maps, 4 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3540-1

Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Julia María Schiavone Camacho, Assistant Professor of History
University of Texas, El Paso

At the turn of the twentieth century, a wave of Chinese men made their way to the northern Mexican border state of Sonora to work and live. The ties—and families—these Mexicans and Chinese created during led to the formation of a new cultural identity: Chinese Mexican. During the tumult of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, however, anti-Chinese sentiment ultimately led to mass expulsion of these people. Julia María Schiavone Camacho follows the community through the mid-twentieth century, across borders and oceans, to show how they fought for their place as Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad.

Tracing transnational geography, Schiavone Camacho explores how these men and women developed a strong sense of Mexican national identity while living abroadin the United States, briefly, and then in southeast Asia where they created a hybrid community and taught their children about the Mexican homeland. Schiavone Camacho also addresses how Mexican women challenged their legal status after being stripped of Mexican citizenship because they married Chinese men. After repatriation in the 1930s-1960s, Chinese Mexican men and women, who had left Mexico with strong regional identities, now claimed national cultural belonging and Mexican identity in ways they had not before.

Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in Cuba, 1902-1940

University of North Carolina Press
November 2003
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 8 illus., notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5563-8

Alejandra Bronfman, Professor of History
University of British Columbia

In the years following Cuba’s independence, nationalists aimed to transcend racial categories in order to create a unified polity, yet racial and cultural heterogeneity posed continual challenges to these liberal notions of citizenship. Alejandra Bronfman traces the formation of Cuba’s multiracial legal and political order in the early Republic by exploring the responses of social scientists, such as Fernando Ortiz and Israel Castellanos, and black and mulatto activists, including Gustavo Urrutia and Nicolás Guillén, to the paradoxes of modern nationhood.

Law, science, and the social sciences—which, during this era, enjoyed growing status in Cuba as well as in many other countries—played central roles in producing knowledge and shaping social categories in postindependence Cuba. Anthropologists, criminologists, and eugenicists embarked on projects intended to employ the tools of science to rid Cuba of the last vestiges of a colonial past. Meanwhile, the legal arena created both new freedoms and new modes of repression. Black and mulatto intellectuals and activists, working to ensure that citizenship offered concrete advantages rather than empty promises, appropriated changing social scientific and legal categories and turned them to their own uses. In the midst of several decades of intermittent racial violence and expanding social and political mobilization by Cubans of African descent, debates among intellectuals and activists, state officials, and legislators transformed not only understandings of race, but also the terms of citizenship for all Cubans.

Filipinos in Nueva España: Filipino-Mexican Relations, Mestizaje, and Identity in Colonial and Contemporary Mexico

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 3 (October 2011)
pages 389-416

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

This essay examines how the Manila-Acapulco galleon era (1565-1815) under Spanish colonialism forged the early mestizaje between Filipino Indio men and Mexican Indian and mixed race women, which produced children who became the first multiethnic Mexican-Filipinos in Nueva España (Mexico). This story is juxtaposed with current migrations of Filipinos to Mexico via the vacation cruise liners, which share a story of contemporary mixing between Filipinos and Mexicans. By acknowledging both their identities and looking to the past, these modern day multiethnic Mexipinos and Filipinos connect to a long historical web of interconnectedness which underpins the mestizaje that began in the sixteenth century.

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Racial Alterity in the Mestizo Nation

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 3 (October 2011)
pages 331-359

Jason Oliver Chang, Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

The eviction of Chinese cotton farmers from Mexicali, Baja California serves as a focal point to explore the racial boundaries of dominant discourses of Mexican national identity. By examining the politics of agrarian reform, the article illustrates how the racial alterity of Chinese immigrants to national ideals served to consolidate diverse Mexican peoples as liberal mestizo racial subjects. Racial alterity is further explored by tracing the lives of Mexican women who married Chinese men and their multi-ethnic children. Anti-Chinese politics and conscription of mestizo subjects were central themes in the Mexicanization of Baja California.

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Negotiating Mixed Race: Projection, Nostalgia, and the Rejection of Japanese-Brazilian Biracial Children

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 3 (October 2011)
pages 361-388

Zelideth María Rivas, Professor of Chinese and Japanese
Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa

Since their arrival in Brazil in 1908, the presence of Japanese immigrants has shaken Brazilian conceptions of race. Narratives of interracial marriages and biracial children in 1930s medical documents and short stories demonstrate the incorporation of the Japanese into Brazil and their subsequent marginalization within the Japanese community. This article compares and contrasts the shifting depictions of biracial Japanese-Brazilian children in Brazil by Brazilians and first generation Japanese immigrants in order to understand how their presence challenges and “negotiates” national identity. The process of othering and marginalizing biracial children upsets the hegemonic understandings of racial categorization in Brazil.

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AAS 310: Mixed Race And The Media

University of Texas, Austin
Center for Asian American Studies
Spring 2012

Alexander Cho, Assistant Instructor

What is “race,” and what does it mean to be “mixed”? How is mass media responsible for channeling fears, desires, and anxieties about “mixed” bodies? Why are “mixed race” bodies suddenly desirable and chic? Can one exist in two or more categories at the same time? How do people think of “mixedness” in the U.S., and how is it different in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil? Why do people care so much? Why do categories matter? Isn’t everyone “mixed” somehow? Where do you fit in?
 
This course will give students the tools to critically respond to these questions via a comparative, historically situated study of the representation of “mixed-race” people in popular media. Major attention will be paid to special concerns for Asian American populations; it includes substantial attention to African American and Latino populations. Chiefly U.S.-centered, but with a large transnational comparative component analyzing “mixed” racial formation in: North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Brazil.

Racial identity and the spatial assimilation of Mexicans in the United States

Social Science Research
Volume 21, Issue 3 (September 1992)
pages 235-260
DOI: 10.1016/0049-089X(92)90007-4

Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Nancy A. Denton, Professor of Sociology
Center for Social and Demographic Analysis
State University of New York, Albany

Mexico’s national ideology holds that Mexicans are mestizos, a racially mixed group created by the union of Europeans and Indians. When Mexicans migrate to the United States, this mixed racial identity comes into conflict with Anglo-American norms that view race dichotomously, as Indian or white but not both. In this paper we examine the process of ideological assimilation by which Mexicans in the United States shift their identities from mestizo to white, and then measure the effect that race has on the level of residential segregation from non-Hispanic whites. Although residential barriers are not as severe for mestizos as for Hispanics of African heritage, we find that mestizos are significantly less likely than white Mexicans to achieve suburban residence and that this fact, in turn, lowers their probability of contact with non-Hispanic whites.

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CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Northwestern University
Winter 2012

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies

In this seminar we will discuss how and why late 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction often represented a crisis in models of biological reproduction. We will investigate how anxieties regarding miscegenation and degeneration impacted this three-part pattern:

(1) the “family romance” in Latin America (and elsewhere); (2) the  so-called generative crisis in the turn of the century; (3) the homosocial, “horizontal” forms of association or affiliation that were evoked to compensate the crisis in the generative model. We will also consider the meanings of the term “generation” as a form of “affiliation” in multi-racial societies such as Brazil.

Although we will focus primarily on Brazilian fiction, the approach will be comparative (hemispheric and/or transatlantic), and final papers may focus on U.S., Latin American, European, African or other post-colonial literatures (primarily from the period 1850’s-1930’s).

Class Materials:

• José de Alencar (Iracema, 1865)
• Aluísio de Azevedo (O Mulato, 1881)
• Adolfo Caminha (O Bom Crioulo, 1895)
• Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, 1899)
• Lima Barreto (Clara dos Anjos, 1922)
• José Lins do Rego (Doidinho, 1933; Banguê, 1934)
• Graciliano Ramos (São Bernardo, 1934)
• Gilberto Freyre (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933)

ALL WORKS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

Secondary sources may include works by Doris Sommer, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago and Jacques Derrida.