Mixed Race Studies

Representations of the Black Body in Mexican Visual Art: Evidence of an African Historical Presence or a Cultural Myth?

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 39, Number 5 (May 2009)
pages 761-785
DOI: 10.1177/0021934707301474

Wendy E. Phillips, Photographer
Atlanta, GA

Although Africans have been present in Mexico since the time of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, the larger Mexican culture seems to have forgotten this aspect of its history.  Although the descendents of these original Africans continue to live in the communities of coastal Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Veracruz states, many Mexicans seem to be unaware of their existence. This article reviews works of visual art made from the 1700s through the present that represent images of Mexicans of African descent and provide evidence of a historical Afromestizo presence in Mexico.  The works are also considered as possible sources of evidence about prevailing attitudes about Mexicans of African descent and anxieties about race mixing.  This article provides a brief overview of Mexico’s historical relationship with Africa as a participant in the Afro-Atlantic slave trade and considers the work of muralists, painters, and photographers who have created works of art in various regions of the country.

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Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique

University of Pennsylvania Press
July 2009
312 pages
6 x 9; 7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4172-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2227-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0356-1

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Associate Professor of History
Texas A & M University

From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France’s Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery.  After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique’s economic importance to the French empire increased.  At the same time, there arose questions, both in France and on the island, about the long-term viability of the plantation system, including debates about the ways colonists—especially enslaved Africans and free mixed-race individuals—fit into the French nation.

Sweet Liberty chronicles the history of Martinique from France’s reacquisition of the island from the British in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Focusing on the relationship between the island’s widely diverse society and the various waves of French and British colonial administrations, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss provides a compelling account of Martinique’s social, political, and cultural dynamics during the final years of slavery in the French empire. Schloss explores how various groups—Creole and metropolitan elites, petits blancs, gens de couleur, and enslaved Africans—interacted with one another in a constantly shifting political environment and traces how these interactions influenced the colony’s debates around identity, citizenship, and the boundaries of the French nation.

Based on extensive archival research in Europe and the Americas, Sweet Liberty is a groundbreaking study of a neglected region that traces how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the Atlantic.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique
• 1. “That Your Hearts Will Blossom and Again Become French”: The Early Napoleonic Period
• 2. “Happy to Consider Itself an Ancient British Possession”: The British Occupation of Martinique
• 3. “Your French and Loyal Hearts”: The First Decade of the Restoration
• 4. “In the Colonies, It Is Impossible That a White Would Align Himself With Slaves”: Shifts in Colonial Policy
• 5. “To Ensure Equality Before Those Laws to Free Men, Whatever Their Color”: Changing Ideas of French Citizenship
• 6. “Amelioration of the White Race” and “The Sacred Rights of Property”: The End of Slavery in the French Atlantic
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel

University of Texas Press
September 2009
198 pages
6 x 9 in.; 1 map
ISBN: 978-0-292-71920-0 (hardcover, no dust jacket)
ISBN: 978-0-292-72128-9 (paperback)

Emma Pérez, Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado

This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela’s Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela’s travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela’s journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.

This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation’s imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.

Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Stanford University Press
2009
304 pages
31 tables, 2 figures, 1 illustration.
ISBN-10: 0804762775
ISBN-13: 9780804762779

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

The United States and Brazil were the largest slave-trading societies of the New World. The demographics of both countries reflect this shared past, but this is where comparisons end. The vast majority of the “Afro-Brazilian” population, unlike their U.S. counterparts, view themselves as neither black nor white but as mixed-race.  Legacies of Race offers the first examination of Brazilian public opinion to understand racial identities, attitudes, and politics in this racially ambiguous context.

Brazilians avoid rigid notions of racial group membership, and, in stark contrast to U.S. experience, attitudes about racial inequality, African-derived culture, and antiracism strategies are not deeply divided along racial lines.  Bailey argues that only through dispensing with many U.S.-inspired racial assumptions can a general theory of racial attitudes become possible. Most importantly, he shows that a strict notion of racial identification in black and white cannot be assumed universal.

White but Not Quite: Tones and Overtones of Whiteness in Brazil

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Volume 13, Number 2 (July 2009)
pages 39-56
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2009-005

Patricia de Santana Pinho
State Univiersity of New York, Albany

This article analyzes anecdotes, jokes, standards of beauty, color categories, and media representations of “mixed-race” individuals to assess the junctions and disjunctions of whiteness and blackness in Brazil.  While the multiple and contradictory meanings of “racial” mixture stimulates a preference for whiteness, thus reducing the access to power by those deemed black, it simultaneously fuels a rejection for “pure” forms of whiteness as witnessed in the country’s celebration of morenidade (brownness).  Not all forms of miscegenation are valued in Brazil’s myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred in detriment of others. I argue that anti-black racism in Brazil is expressed not only against dark-skinned individuals, but it also operates in the devaluing of physical traits “deemed black” even in those who have lighter skin complexion, thus creating “degrees of whiteness.”  One’s “measure of whiteness,” therefore, is not defined only by skin color, but requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.

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