Mixed Race Studies

Garifuna: The Young Black Latino Exodus You’ve Never Heard About

Fusion
2014-06-04

Jasmine Garsd

Honduran migrants passing through Mexico often carry only the bare essentials: cash, some clothes and a cell phone, if they can afford one.

Gustavo Morales stands out among the migrant population here in Tequixquiac, a hot, dusty little town right outside Mexico City. The 21-year-old is traveling with an African drum that he plays during his downtime along the journey.

The drum isn’t the only reason he stands out. He’s a black migrant in a country where few people are of African descent…

…As Hondurans are being forced to flee their country, Garifuna, who have historically been shunned by society, are increasingly being uprooted from their homes on the Caribbean coast.

Garifuna (“Garinagu” in the Garifuna language) are the descendants of slaves brought from Central Africa and indigenous Caribbean people, including Arawaks and Island Caribs. They speak a distinct language that mixes all three influences…

Read the entire article here.

To Be Black And Boricua

La Respuesta
2015-09-17

At this year’s Afro-Latino Festival of New York, La Respuesta teamed up with Project Bronx, the community-focused web series, for an exciting video collaboration. We spoke with festival attendees, artists, and vendors about a theme central to the festival’s focus.

For the past 3 years, the Afro-Latino Festival “celebrates the contributions that people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean have made to our city and the global culture as a whole.” The festival this year featured more than a dozen artists and groups, among them the New York-based Bombazo Dance Company, and the Puerto Rico-based Cultura Profética.

As official media partners of the Afro-Latino Festival, we at La Respuesta joined with Project Bronx to document views on Afro Boricua identity. As a Boricua publication, one of our key commitments is to highlight and honor the depth and legacy of our connection to African culture. We asked Puerto Ricans attending the event how our African/Black roots are celebrated. We also asked why many downplay or even deny their own African/Black ancestry. Here’s what they had to say…

Guadalupe and the Castas: The Power of a Singular Colonial Mexican Painting

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos
Volume 31, Number 2
pages 218-247
DOI: 10.1525/mex.2015.31.2.218

Sarah Cline, Research Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

A mid-eighteenth-century casta painting by Luis de Mena uniquely unites the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and casta (mixed-race) groupings, along with scenes of everyday life in Mexico, and the natural abundance of New Spain. Reproduced multiple times, the painting has not been systematically analyzed. This article explores individual elements in their colonial context and the potential meanings of the painting in the modern era.

Una pintura de Luis de Mena sobre las castas, de mediados del siglo xviii, reúne de manera singular la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe, los agrupamientos de castas y escenas de la vida cotidiana en México, junto con la abundancia natural de Nueva España. Aunque reproducida en múltiples ocasiones, la pintura no ha sido analizada sistemáticamente. Este artículo explora sus elementos individuales en el contexto colonial y los significados potenciales de la pintura en la época moderna.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
August 2015
272 pages
13 b/w illus. 4 tables
245 x 190 x 12 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107034112
Paperback ISBN: 9781107652286

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Taking a comparative approach, this textbook is a concise introduction to race. Illustrated with detailed examples from around the world, it is organised into two parts. Part One explores the historical changes in ideas about race from the ancient world to the present day, in different corners of the globe. Part Two outlines ways in which racial difference and inequality are perceived and enacted in selected regions of the world. Examining how humans have used ideas of physical appearance, heredity and behaviour as criteria for categorising others, the text guides students through provocative questions such as: what is race? Does studying race reinforce racism? Does a colour-blind approach dismantle, or merely mask, racism? How does biology feed into concepts of race? Numerous case studies, photos, figures and tables help students to appreciate the different meanings of race in varied contexts, and end-of-chapter research tasks provide further support for student learning.

• Combines a broad historical overview (from the ancient world to the present day) with wide geographical and comparative coverage to show that race means different things in different contexts
• Detailed historical and ethnographic material in textboxes, figures, photos and tables demonstrates the operation of race in everyday life
• Offers an up-to-date, critical overview of a fast-changing field

Contents

• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Knowing ‘race’
  • 1.1 Chronology of race
  • 1.2 Is race defined by appearance, biology and nature?
  • 1.3 Culture, appearance and biology revisited
  • 1.4 Race, comparatively and historically
  • 1.5 Comparisons
  • 1.6 Race in the history of Western modernity
  • Conclusion: so what is race?
  • Further research
• Part I race in time
  • 2 Early approaches to understanding human variation
    • 2.1 Nature and culture
    • 2.2 Ancient Greece and Rome
    • 2.3 Medieval and early modern Europe
    • 2.4 New World colonisation
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 3 From Enlightenment to eugenics
    • 3.1 Transitions
    • 3.2 Changing racial theories
    • 3.3 The spread of racial theory: nation, class, gender and religion
    • 3.4 Nature, culture and race
    • 3.5 Black reaction
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 4 Biology, culture and genomics
    • 4.1 Darwin (again), genetics and the concept of population
    • 4.2 Boas and the separation of biology and culture
    • 4.3 Nazism, World War II and decolonisation
    • 4.4 UNESCO and after
    • 4.5 The persistence of race in science
    • 4.6 Race and IQ
    • 4.7 Race and sport
    • 4.8 Race, genomics and medicine: does race have a genetic basis?
    • 4.9 Race, genomics and medicine: racialising populations
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 5 Race in the era of cultural racism: politics and the everyday
    • 5.1 Introduction
    • 5.2 The institutional presence of race
    • 5.3 Race, nature and biology in the everyday world of culture
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
• Part II Race in practice
  • 6 Latin America: mixture and racism
    • 6.1 Introduction
    • 6.2 Latin America and mestizaje
    • 6.3 Colombia: racial discrimination and social movements
    • 6.4 Structural disadvantage, region and mestizaje: lessons from Colombia
    • 6.5 Brazil: variations on a theme
    • 6.6 Guatemala: racial ambivalence
    • 6.7 Performing and embodying race in the Andes
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 7 The United States and South Africa: segregation and desegregation
    • 7.1 Changing US demographics
    • 7.2 Caste and class in segregated Southern towns
    • 7.3 Black reaction and ‘desegregation’
    • 7.4 Segregation in practice: ‘the ghetto’
    • 7.5 Latinos and brownness
    • 7.6 South Africa
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 8 Race in Europe: immigration and nation
    • 8.1 European histories of race
    • 8.2 Issues in post-colonial migration in Europe
    • 8.3 White Britons in Leicestershire
    • 8.4 Asian Leicester
    • 8.5 The Asian gang in London
    • 8.6 Geographies of race in black Liverpool
    • 8.7 Algerians in France
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 9 Conclusion
    • 9.1 Theorising race
    • 9.2 Globalising race
    • 9.3 The future of race
  • References
  • Index

In Memoriam: Tony Gleaton

The afrolatin@ forum
2015-09-01

Tony Gleaton, among the first photographers to document Latin Americans of African descent, passed away last week. He leaves behind an impressive body of work which undoubtedly contributed to the growing Black consciousness movement throughout the Americas.

Tony began his Latin American photographic journey in the southern Pacific coast of Mexico in 1986; by the time his project was completed he had traveled through most of Central and South America in his search for “Black folk.” …

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Emotions About My Mixed Heritage

Just Analise
2015-09-02

Analise Kandasammy

When you truly love yourself you are released from the chains of trying to be someone you are not.

How many times have we heard – if you can’t love yourself, you can’t truly love anyone else? How many times have we heard we need to have self worth and be confident? How many of us feel true self love? Everyday? Well certainly not me.

I am ashamed to admit I was ridden with self hatred for years. Hated the colour of my skin, hated my hair, hated my body, hated my personality – man I couldn’t say one good thing about myself. I was constantly in a place of not meeting expectations and having to constantly keep up appearances for people in my life.

“For as long as I’ve known myself I’ve wrestled with identifying with a race. I am from 4 generations of inter racial unions and needless to say very mixed.”

I have always identified with black women since I was a child. Hell, I even thought I was black, you know especially since one drop of black means you are black too…

Read the entire article here.

Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico

Duke University Press
2015
240 pages
11 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5945-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5945-6

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a “racial democracy” in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy’s privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as as Tego Calderón criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream’s tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island’s black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre’s most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetón, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetón’s origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan’s slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetón, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Reggaetón Takes Its Place
• 1. Iron Fist against Rap
• 2. The Perils of Perreo
• 3. Loíza
• 4. Fingernails con Feeling
• 5. Enter the Hurbans
• Conclusion. Reggaetón’s Limits, Possibilities, and Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World

Cambria Press
428 pages
2015-02-06
6 x 9 in or 229 x 152 mm Case Laminate
ISBN: 9781604978926

Edited by:

Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

This book explores the history of African tangible and intangible heritages and its links with the public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. The two countries are deeply connected, given how most enslaved Africans, forcibly brought to Brazil during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, were from West Central Africa. Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans during the Atlantic slave trade and was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888. Today, other than Nigeria, the largest population of African descent is in Brazil. Yet it was only in the last twenty years that Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past have gained greater visibility. Prior to this, Brazil’s African heritage and its slave past were completely neglected.

Even after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, African culture continued to be marginalized. Carnival, religious festivals, as well as Candomblé ceremonies, and capoeira (an Afro-Brazilian martial art) created important spaces of black assertion and insurgency. These cultural traditions were contested by white elites and public authorities, but starting in the 1930s, capoeira became a national symbol and Candomblé temples were gradually officially added to Brazil’s list of heritage sites.

In spite of these developments, the Atlantic slave past has remained absent from the public landscape of Brazilian and Angolan former slave ports, suggesting how difficult it is for these countries to address the painful legacies of slavery. African art and material culture also continued to be excluded from museums and other official institutions. In the rare instances that African artifacts were shown, they would be confined to only certain places dedicated to popular culture and associated with the religious sphere.

Even though public attention on slavery was growing internationally through national and international initiatives (e.g., The Slave Route Project by UNESCO), Brazil and Angola developed very few initiatives for the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. This has started to change slowly in the last decade as Brazil has begun engaging in more initiatives to memorialize slavery and underscore the importance of its African heritage.

Brazil’s slave past and African heritage are emerging gradually in urban and rural areas through different kinds of initiatives led not only by activists but also by scholars in association with black communities. Although in their early stages, most of these projects are permanent programs supported by official agencies. This new configuration suggests that––unlike the case in Angola––in Brazil, slavery and the Atlantic the slave trade are becoming recognized as foundational chapters of the country’s history.

This is the first book in English to focus on African heritage and public memory of slavery in Brazil and Angola. This interdisciplinary study examines visual images, dance, music, oral accounts, museum exhibitions, artifacts, monuments, festivals, and others forms of commemoration to illuminate the social and cultural dynamics that over the last twenty years have propelled––or prevented––the visibility of African heritage (and its Atlantic slave trade legacy) in the South Atlantic region.

The book makes a very important contribution to the understanding of the place of African heritage and slavery in the official history and public memory of Brazil and Angola, topics that remain understudied. The study’s focus on the South Atlantic world, a zone which is sparsely covered in the scholarly corpus on Atlantic history, will further research on other post-slave societies.

African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World is an important book for African studies and Latin American studies. It is especially valuable for African Diaspora studies, African history, Atlantic history, history of Brazil, history of slavery, and Caribbean history.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Introduction: Wounded Pasts: Memory of Slavery and African Heritage in Brazil (Ana Lucia Araujo)
• Chapter 1: Collectionism and Colonialism: The Africana Collection at Brazil’s National Museum (Rio de Janeiro) (Mariza de Carvalho Soares)
• Chapter 2: Race and Visual Representation: Louis Agassiz and Hermann Burmeister (Maria Helena Machado)
• Chapter 3: Counter-Witnessing the Visual Culture of Brazilian Slavery (Matthew Francis Rarey)
• Chapter 4: Angola in Brazil: The Formation of Angoleiro identity in Bahia (Matthias Röhrig Assunção)
• Chapter 5: Memories of Captivity and Freedom in São José da Serra Jongo Festivals: Cultural Heritage and Black Identity (1888–2011) (Martha Abreu and Hebe Mattos)
• Chapter 6: From Public Amnesia to Public Memory: Re-Discovering Slavery Heritage in Rio de Janeiro (André Cicalo)
• Chapter 7: Uncomfortable Pasts: Talking About Slavery in Angola (Marcia C. Schenck and Mariana P. Candido)
• Chapter 8: “Bahia is a Closer Africa”: Brazilian Slavery and Heritage in African American Roots Tourism (Patricia de Santana Pinho)
• Chapter 9: Preserving African Art, History, and Memory: The AfroBrazil Museum (Kimberly Cleveland)
• Chapter 10: The Legacy of Slavery in Contemporary Brazil (Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos)
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors

The “Coming White Minority”: Brazilianization or South-Africanization of U.S.?

Racism Review: scholarship and activism towards racial justice
2015-08-31

Joe Feagin, Ella C. McFadden and Distinguished Professor of Sociology
Texas A&M University

To understand the so-called “browning of America” and “coming white minority,” we should accent the larger societal context, the big-picture context including systemic racism. “Browning of America” issues have become important in the West mainly because whites are very worried about this demographic trend. Black-British scholar, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, has noted that whites are fearful

because for such a long time the world has been their own. . . . There is an underlying assumption that says white is right. . . . There is a white panic every time one part of their world seems to be passing over to anyone else. . . . There was this extraordinary assumption that white people could go and destroy peoples and it would have no consequence.

Let us consider a few reasonable, albeit speculative, extrapolations of current social science data to social changes from now to the 2050s:

(1) Dramatic demographic changes are coming: According to US Census projections this country will become much less white, with the greatest relative growth in the Latino, Asian, and multiracial populations. By 2050 it will be about 439 million people, with a majority of people of color (53 percent), the largest group being Latino (30 percent). Long before, a majority of students and younger workers will be of color. Over coming decades immigrant workers of color and their descendants will keep more cities from economic decline. Census data for 2050 indicate the oldest population cohort will be disproportionately white and younger cohorts will be disproportionately people of color–thereby overlaying a racial divide with a generational divide, probably generating racial-generational conflicts (See William Frey, The Diversity Explosion)…

…A Panoramic View: Brazilianization or South-Africanization?

In recent years numerous scholars and media analysts have suggested the idea of significantly greater racial intermediation coming as the U.S. becomes much less white. Taking a panoramic view, they suggest a future that involves a “Brazilianization” or “Latinization’ of the United States.

Brazil’s racialization process has distinguished large mixed-race, mostly lighter-skinned groups and placed them in a middling status between Brazilians of mostly African ancestry and those of heavily European ancestry. Middle groups are relatively more affluent, politically powerful, and acceptable to dominant white Brazilians, who still mostly rule powerfully at the top of the economy and politics. About half the population, darker-skinned Afro-Brazilians and indigenous Brazilians, remains very powerless economically and politically. Possibly, in the U.S. case by 2050, a developed tripartite Brazilian pattern—with increasing and large but white-positioned intermediate racial groups, such as lighter-skinned middle class groups among Asian Americans and Latinos, moving up with greater economic and socio-political power and providing a racial buffer between powerful “whites” and powerless “blacks” and other darker-skinned people of color. Even then, it seems likely that many in U.S. middle groups will find their white-framed immigration, citizenship positions, or other inferiorized status still negatively affecting additional mobility opportunities…

Read the entire article here.

Four-country newspaper framing of Barack Obama’s multiracial identity in the 2008 US presidential election

Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies
Volume 35, Issue 3, 2014
pages 23-38
DOI: 10.1080/02560054.2014.955867

Kioko Ireri, Assistant Professor of Journalism & Mass Communication
United States International University-Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

Though Barack Obama was the first African American presidential nominee for a major party in the history of the US presidential election, his multiracial identity put him under intense scrutiny during the 2008 election – more than any other previous black aspirants for the White House. Using quantitative content analysis of election stories in the newspapers of four countries (New York Times – US; Times – Britain; China Daily – China and Daily Nation – Kenya), this comparative study examines the prevalence of four racial frames associated with Obama’s multilayered racial identity: ‘African American’, ‘black’, ‘Kenyan roots’ and ‘white roots’. In addition, the study investigates the four newspapers’ valence coverage of the four racial frames in relation to Obama’s candidacy. The findings indicate that ‘Kenyan roots’ was the racial frame which occurred most frequently, followed by the ‘black’ frame. Overall, Obama received more positive coverage than negative across the racial frames depicted in the four newspapers.

Read or purchase the article here.