Mixed Race Studies

Chinese-Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2012-11-24

Olga R. Rodriguez, Mexican Correspondent
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father’s hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.

Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.

Chiu’s father took a job at a relative’s bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.

They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese-Mexicans after President Adolfo López Mateos, trying to improve Mexico’s global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.

Twenty-one of those Chinese-Mexicans and their descendants celebrated for the first time on Saturday the anniversary of their return. Gathering at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City, they shared emotional memories of their lives in China and paid tribute to the late Lopez Mateos…

…Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.

But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.

Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.

“Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat,” said Fredy González, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying 20th century Chinese migration to Mexico.

In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China…

Read the entire article here or here.

Critical Theories: Hybridity and African Diaspora

Rutgers University, Newark
Spring 2013

Belinda Edmondson, Professor and Director, Women’s & Gender Studies

This course will investigate the concept of the hybrid society, or “hybridity”, in African-American and Caribbean literature. Hybridity here refers to both culturally and ethnically hybrid communities and peoples. Specifically, we will concentrate on the ambivalent representations of the multiracial ideal for African-descended societies, from W.E.B. DuBois’ articulation of African-American identity as a dual, or “double-voiced”, one, to Caribbean images of the mixed-race citizen as the core of a uniquely Caribbean identity. Course readings will emphasize historical context as well as the theoretical foundations for hybridity discourse.

Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States

Duke University Press
2009
408 pages
19 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4440-7
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4426-1

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship
• 2. Maxixe’s Travels: Cultural Exchange and Erasure
• 3. Playing Politics: Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro
• 4. Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic
• 5. Another “Global Vision”: (Trans)Nationalism in the Sao Paulo Black Press
• 6. Black Mothers, Citizen Sons
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index

Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
ISSN 1940-0764
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2009)

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of self as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to “be” Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on “nation drag,” they passed not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.

Read the entire article here.

Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 25: Conference on Latin American History 3
Thursday, 2012-01-03: 13:00-15:00 CST (Local Time)
Conti Room (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Matt D. O’Hara, University of California, Santa Cruz

Papers:

• “Picturing Families in Black and White: Race, Family, and Social Mobility in Colonial Minas Gerais, Brazil” / Mariana L. Dantas, Ohio University
• “On ‘Infected Roots’ and ‘Foul Origins’: Social Mobility and the Memory of Race among Ranching Families in Late-Colonial Western Mexico” / Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College
• “A Family Story: Seven Generations of Africans and Afro-Descendents in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Minas Gerais” / Douglas Libby, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• “Between Freedom and Slavery: Articulating Kinships and Achieving Manumission in Colonial Peru” / Rachel Sarah O’Toole, University of California, Irvine

Comment: Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, University of Kansas

Over the last three decades, scholars of colonial and early national Latin America have worked to organize archives and compile quantitative data relative to the demographic composition and patterns of social interaction that marked those societies. Thanks to their efforts, we now have a better understanding of the impact Iberian, African and Indigenous peoples had on the formation of a colonial population; what the dominant patterns of family formation and population growth were; how the social and economic behavior of colonial elites supported the social reproduction of white privilege; how the social and economic behavior of Blacks and Indios challenged or at least complicated the existing social and racial hierarchies. These efforts, moreover, have now resulted in rich datasets that allow historians to follow individuals and their families over time to understand better the impact family formation and their various social and economic behaviors have had on the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups, as well as the history of particular localities, in this formative period of Latin American societies. The papers in this panel employ the study of families in a generational perspective as a new methodological approach to explore further issues of social mobility among persons of non-Iberian of mixed descent and their relevance to the development of a colonial or early national social order in Latin America. Through their focus on specific families and their local connections, moreover, the papers help to elucidate questions about the long term impact of individual social improvement on, and the importance of local practices and circumstances to, the social standing of families whose members transcended the social boundaries between free and slave, black/indio and white. Together these papers advance the current scholarship on race relations and social mobility in colonial and early national Latin America in two fundamental ways. First, they integrate historical narratives of black, white, and indigenous social experiences—which still tend to be developed separately—and demonstrate that certain social practices and behaviors that shaped social orders in the past resulted sometimes from the coordinated (and not oppositional) actions and efforts of members of mixed-race family and social units. Second, they highlight how socio-economic practices and behaviors that influenced local realities first, and broader regional, national, or imperial realities second, were born out of strategies individual families pursued generation after generation to ensure the well-being of their members.

Boundaries, Subjectivity, and Knowledge Production in Colonial Río de la Plata

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Conference on Latin American History 65
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST (Local Time)
Ursuline Salon (Hotel Monteleone)

Chair: Shawn Michael Austin, University of New Mexico

Papers:

• “The Emergence of Guaraní-Christian Subject Formation in Río de la Plata” / Kristin L. Huffine, Northern Illinois University
• “Native Gender and Kinship As Encomienda in Colonial Paraguay” / Shawn Michael Austin, University of New Mexico
• “Lost in Space: Mapping, Native Peoples, and the Making of the Banda Oriental, 1750–1838” / Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Comment: Heidi Scott, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In comparison to other regions of Latin America, colonization efforts in the Río de la Plata had a slow and difficult start. Indeed, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century that colonials began to establish themselves in permanent ways, seeking an exportable commodity—found in yerba mate—and by exploiting native labor. By around the turn of the seventeenth century, Franciscan and Jesuit priests stepped up their missionizing efforts, bringing to the region a greater interest in harvesting native souls. These missionaries competed with Portuguese bandeirantes, who entered into the area in search of indigenous labor. Nonetheless, the absence of mineral wealth and sedentary native populations made the region a colonial backwater for the next hundred years. But by the mid-eighteenth century, with the proliferation of cattle and other exportable goods, the region became a centerpiece for competing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects and a hotbed for interethnic conflict.

The papers in this panel will examine topics embedded in this unusual historical trajectory. They will explain how native peoples dealt with and defined colonial institutions in the face of  Iberian ways of knowing and governing and will examine how knowledge production was at the crux of interethnic relations. The panelists will combine revisionism, novel methodologies, and unused sources to provide insight into the political, cultural, economic, and social lives in the region. Shawn Austin will propose that to understand the shape and functionality of the Spanish encomienda we must understand that native sexuality and notions of affinity are at the heart of that institution. Austin’s paper will reveal the stories and lives of Guaraní, African, and mixed-race individuals in a narrative style culled from litigation records. While Austin will focus on civil society, Kristin Huffine will explore the construction of Guaraní-Christian subject formation in the Jesuit missions through her analysis of visual cultures. Both Huffine and Austin will argue that cultural and social life in the region can only be elucidated through an understanding of native social and cultural contributions. Huffine will build upon existing scholarship on mission art by moving beyond simply recognizing Guaraní artisan labor to understanding how the Guaraní’s hands also shaped their identities, literally through their own artistic expressions. Jeffrey Erbig’s presentation will explore the production of imperial geographic knowledge by examining two eighteenth century Luso-Hispanic mapping expeditions. Erbig will show that as Iberian officials demarcated a linear divide between their South American kingdoms, they depended upon native peoples for both labor and knowledge. Nonetheless, these attempts to produce static territorial states ignored and conflicted with native land claims and territorialities. This panel brings together a variety of new approaches to the study of the Río de la Plata that promise to promote lively discussion and exchange.

Germans Loving Others: Narrating Interracial Romance in Kenya, North America, and Guatemala

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 70: Central European History Society 3
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

Papers:

• “Seeking Winnetou: German Women and the Appeal of American Indian Masculinity” / H. Glenn Penny, University of Iowa
• “Romantic Dimensions of the Second Scramble for Africa: ‘A White Lady Is Like Gold for Us’” / Nina Berman, Ohio State University, Columbus
• “Between Twin Souls: German-Maya Children and Politics of Interracial Romance in Guatemala, 1930–45” / Julie A. Gibbings, University of Manitoba

Comment: Lora Wildenthal, Rice University

The German fascination with the non-European world and its native populations, as documented and imagined in various forms of the German cultural archive, presents intriguing questions for scholars of race, sex, and empire. The German love affair with natives, including North American Indians, Bedouin nomads, and Masai warriors, dates back to the early days of colonial expansion, and gave rise to romanticized representations and staged performances of native nobility and ethnic pride. These cultural representations produced sentiments and desires that shaped contact and conduct as Germans sought out and stumbled upon native peoples abroad. While scholarship of the past two decades has explored a wide range of political, economic, and cultural aspects of the colonial and postcolonial encounter, interracial contact has received less attention. Scholars have given short shrift to the stunning array of unofficial, personal, and often quite intimate interconnections between Germans and non-Europeans during the modern era.

The proposed panel addresses this lacuna in scholarship, and focuses on the question of whether interracial love subverts or replicates the colonial and postcolonial histories that produced socio-economic inequalities, gendered norms, and racial hierarchies. The papers in this panel explore these questions through the lives, narratives, and memories of Germans, native peoples, and mixed-race children in three vastly different places: postcolonial Kenya, North America, and Guatemala. They collectively challenge and problematize assumptions of colonial and postcolonial scholars about the regulatory norms of interracial sex that shielded white female sexuality from dark, colonized men and often made interracial children the subject of state scrutiny and care. The papers demonstrate how German romance with natives could, in practice, vary widely across historical and geographical contexts, particularly with regard to cultural, economic, and political dimensions of these relationships. Finally, the papers consider the agency of the non-German partners in these interracial and binational relationships. The panels intends to shed new light on interracial and binational romance by probing questions of power and inequality in a comparative and transnational framework.

Coloured Members of the Bahamian House of Assembly in the Nineteenth Century

College of the Bahamas Research Journal
Volume 10 (2001)

Rosalyn Themistocleous

This article focuses on some little known ‘coloured’ members of the House of Assembly of the nineteenth century. The position of the Bahamians of mixed race is discussed, particularly vis-à-vis the white Nassauvian elite. Their achievements are noted, but the limitations of their political careers are emphasised. These men were, in essence, politically and socially ambitious individuals, who did not seek to represent the lower classes or black Bahamians. Moreover, party organisation was not yet a feature of the Bahamian political system, except during a period of religious turmoil in mid-century when denominational adherence was the grouping factor. The coloured representatives were generally pro-Government and pro-established Church.

INTRODUCTION

In the Post-Emancipation era of Bahamian history a small but significant number of coloured Bahamians were elected to the House of Assembly. They achieved this despite the prevalent racism and political and socio-economic dominance of the former slave-owners and their descendents. Colour was of defining importance in nineteenth century Nassausociety. The main distinction in slave society had been between slave and free; in the reconstructed society race and colour came to be the most important consideration. The white Bahamian elite had to employ a number of strategies, political, socio-economic and judicial, to ensure its continued dominance. Land remained in the hands of the former slaver-holders, while the former slaves became sharecroppers or tenants, eking out a bare living from the soil. The credit and truck systems, rather than a wage labour system, were employed in the majority of industries; these were coercive labour systems that only benefited Nassau merchants.

Having subjected most of the lower classes to a state of economic dependency, the white Nassauvians also controlled most of the seats in the House of Assembly and the Councils. This is of particular significance in a colony still ruled under the Old Representative system, where the local elite was allowed a large degree of self-government. In The Bahamas local legislation specified that decisions must be those of the Governor-in-Council and the Imperial Government acknowledged the established usage whereby the Governor acted in accordance with the Council’s advice. The Council separated into two bodies in 1841: the Executive Council acted as this advisory body, while the Legislative Council was the Upper House of the Legislature. There were ex-officio and unofficial members, appointed by the Governor, in both bodies. The Colonial Secretary, Attorney-General and Receiver-General sat in the Executive Council in the second half of the century, forming the ex-officio element. The white Bahamians monopolised the non-official seats on the Executive and Legislative Councils. Most of the unofficial members, who formed a majority in the Executive Council were members of the elected House of Assembly or the Legislative Council. Hence the Legislature had some control over the Executive. Moreover, the House of Assembly had the ‘power of the purse’, that is the sole right to introduce money bills and initiate taxation. This was a potent weapon that could be used by the local elite against the Governor. The electoral system, which retained open voting, inequitable constituencies, a franchise weighted in favour of the propertied classes and plural voting, ensured the white Nassauvians controlled most of the twenty-nine seats in the House. The widespread bribery and corruption and the fact that the lower classes failed to organise themselves politically particularly facilitated white political dominance. Besides many electors were in debt to Nassau merchants so, in an open voting system, were unlikely to vote against an approved candidate. In New Providence there was always a cross-section of colours and classes included on the electoral registers and these voters often had coloured or black middle class candidates to vote for. But in the Out Islands voters, with few exceptions, had to choose from among the white candidates from Nassau as islanders could not afford to spend the time to attend the House meetings, members not being paid a salary. The result was that, as Stipendiary Magistrate L.D.Powles (1888) so accurately recorded, “the House of Assembly is little less than a family gathering ofNassau whites, nearly all of whom are related to each other, either by blood or marriage” (p.41). There was a prevailing assumption by the whites that their leadership was indispensable to good governance.

Seen in this context, the dent into the white power monopoly by a few Bahamians of mixed race is quite an achievement. Certainly, a degree of co-optation of the coloured middle class was tolerated by the white elite. The coloureds were encouraged to adopt elitist values and attitudes to law and order and social institutions. Of course, the paler the coloureds were (near-white or high yaller in local parlance) the more chance they had of being tolerated. Moreover, it was noted by several visitors to the islands that a good many “so called white families” in Nassau were not of pure white blood, but were fair enough to pass for white in Europe and were considered white in Nassau. L.D. Powles (1888) described this confusing state of affairs thus: “Where the line that separates the white man, so-called, from the coloured is drawn in Nassau, must ever remain a mystery to the stranger” (p.12l).

The successful coloured politicians of the nineteenth century had acquired middle class status from their positions as relatively wealthy, small businessmen or as professional men. As Raymond Smith (1988) notes, after 1838, “classes seemed to be defined in terms of race” in the West Indies (p.93). Thus the term ‘coloured middle class’ is the commonly used term for the intermediate group between the white elite and the labouring and under classes, even though the class also contained some blacks and whites. The class is also defined in terms of occupation and values and outlooks. The middle class is taken to include those in the professional occupations and public service, craftsmen, small businessmen, printers and journalists, managers and supervisors and senior clerical workers. As for outlook, Gail Saunders (1990) sums up the Bahamian position thus: “Aspiring coloureds attempted to obtain a good education, secure good jobs, own land, enter politics and attend the right churches” (pp. 2-3). They sought respectability, if anything assuming mores of stricter morality than the white elite.

The coloured middles classes of Nassau had to accommodate themselves to the socioracial dividing lines that existed in the town. They lived predominantly in Delancy Town. The Established Church was the preference of most coloureds, probably an indication of identification with British culture and tradition, but they were generally assigned to the side aisles. Coloured Methodists usually worshipped at Ebenezer Chapel in the eastern suburbs, the congregation at Trinity Methodist Chapel exhibiting a desire to remain exclusively white. Some coloured boys were able to get a secondary education at the Boys Central School or the Anglican Nassau Grammar School. Further education was uncommon unless parents were wealthy enough to send their sons abroad (but this was true for whites too). Whites, naturally, found more opportunity for clerkships with Bay Street merchants and law firms, but a number of coloureds did overcome these barriers. Social discrimination, though, continued throughout the century. Whites worked with and sometimes showed respect to coloureds, but did not invite them to their homes. The coloureds thus became quite a closely-knit group. There were exceptions to this social prejudice, notably the acceptance of Thomas Mathews and William Armbrister, who probably “passed” for white. The practice adopted by most coloureds was to accept their position in the social hierarchy. The mulatto exhibited no pride in his African blood and tried to emulate and, if possible, join white society. The ideal was to ‘marry up’ to produce offspring of a lighter complexion and they treated anyone a shade darker than themselves with the same prejudices that they experienced from the whites. The coloured members of the Bahamian Assembly were essentially ambitious individuals and did little to further legislation to aid the coloured and black population at large…

Read the entire article here.

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

• “‘I Do Not Know at Times What To Do, Everything Turns Out Wrong’: Mixed Children Negotiating Anglo and Californio Worlds in Post-Conquest California” / Erika Perez, Loyola Marymount University
• “Major E. C. Watkins’ Frustrating Adventure: Defining Family in the Post-Civil War North American West” / Anne Hyde, Colorado College
• “The Man Who Talks Not: John L. Clarke and the Politics of Mixed-Race Identity in Montana, 1900–50” / Andrew R. Graybill, Southern Methodist University

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

Mestizaje nacional: una historia “negra” por contar / National miscegenation: a “negro” history yet to be told

Memoria y Sociedad
Volume 14, Number 29 (2010)
pages 91-105

Diana Catalina Zapata-Cortés
Historiadora de la Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

This work analyzes the “negro” representation in the projects of folklore diffusion that spread in the decade 1950-1960 as a product of a socio-political context characterized for its need to redefine national Latin-American identities. In Colombia, this process started in 1930 through the Liberal Republic educational policy, and was designed from the idea of a “mixed race country”. The following document carefully explores the work and cultural management exerted by Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella, two important milestones in the intellectual and cultural fields of the country. They became known for their contribution to the understanding of folklore and the inclusion of “negros” within national memory.

Read the entire article (in Spanish) here.