Mixed Race Studies

CUNY DSI Monograph Documents Dominican Heritage of First Settler

The City University of New York
City College
2012-10-04

Juan Rodríguez, native of Santo Domingo, comes to New York in 1613 and stays when his ship sails to Holland

The first non-native to live in what is now New York City was a black or mixed race Dominican, a new monograph produced by researchers at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) documents. Juan Rodríguez, who was born on the colony of La Española, now the Dominican Republic, came to the Big Apple in 1613 aboard a Dutch trading vessel en route from the Caribbean. He decided to stay and live among the natives when the ship returned to Holland.
 
“This is the kind of research that produces new academic knowledge and engages in a conversation with a scholarly community who studies New York City’s early history,” said Dr. Ramona Hernández, director of CUNY DSI. “This research also serves people from a practical point of view: A very early predecessor of the large Dominican population that thrives in New York City today, Juan Rodriguez’s story belongs to the history of all New Yorkers.
 
“As residents of a port city with a uniquely multiethnic population since its very beginnings next to the mighty Hudson River, New York has always been a community of interactions and intermingling amongst races and ethnicities.”
 
The monograph was commissioned by the American Chamber of Commerce of the Dominican Republic, which will receive the first copy at a luncheon meeting at City College Thursday, October 4. The following day, a two-hour colloquium with experts in translations and transcription will examine the challenges, excitement and insights of translating the documentation for the Juan Rodríguez story.
 
Earlier this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg named a stretch of Broadway between W. 159th Street and W. 218th Street for Mr. Rodríguez. The section of the famed roadway runs through Washington Heights, home of one of the largest concentrations of Dominicans living outside their homeland.
 
According to archival records reviewed by DSI researchers, Mr. Rodríguez, a black or mulatto free sailor born on La Española, arrived in an estuary of the Hudson River in the spring of 1613, aboard the “Jonge Tobias,” a Dutch ship captained by Thijs Mossel. After two months presumably spent trading with Native Americans, Captain Mossel decided to return to Holland, but Mr. Rodríguez refused to make the journey and was allowed to stay on shore…

Read the entire article here.

Ian Thomson: Jamaica was modern before Britain

The Independent
London, England
2012-10-04

Miguel Cullen

To mark Black History Month the author of “Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica” talks to Miguel Cullen about the ways Jamaica is punching above its weight

Jamaica is a country that exceeds its limitations. For example India’s GDP is 180 times that of the West Indian country and Jamaica could fit inside it 300 times. Yet Jamaica won twice as many medals at the London Olympics, 12 to India’s six.

Musically it shines beyond its scope too: between the mid-1950s and 2000 Jamaica had produced one new music recording per 1,000 people each year – making it per capita the world’s most prolific generator of recorded music.

Jamaican culture has long been fashionable and on Google Trends, a means of measuring how highly words feature in the search engine. In the list of most-searched countries “Jamaica” comes a tight second to “Russia,” a country so big it makes Jamaica look like a minnow.

In view of Jamaica’s small financial and physical scale, it’s logical to think of it as a statistical freak of nature, an anomaly, to have such a broad world standing. How could such a tiny island, which is only this year celebrating 50 years of independence from the UK, compete with superpowers like India and Russia?

It was with this question in mind that, on the eve of Black History Month in the UK, I visited the London home of Ian Thomson, the author of the hugely successful (and controversial) Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica…

…The book won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. It combines serpentine, fragile descriptions of Jamaica’s natural beauty with an unafraid look at the horrors of Jamaican violence, in a way that is intransigent and unique.

“Jamaica was modern before Britain was,” Thomson tells me, sitting in his study overlooking the greenery of Alexandra Park. “What fascinated me about these Caribbean countries was that for me they’re the first modern societies – they were the first countries to have intermingling, mixed race people, across the colour bar.”

“When Jamaicans came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, they were often very surprised by the conservative reactions to some of them being mixed race – mixed racing had been going on for centuries in the Caribbean. So in a sense you could say that although Jamaica is in some ways parochial, in other ways it’s incredibly forward-thinking.”…

Read the entire article here.

Blood Flowed Here Before Water Did

Trinidad Express
2012-09-14

Jan Westmaas

The writer continues his series on Peru and South Africa after visits to these countries in July and August

I’ve just read this morning in the daily press a story about Spanish energy company Repsol’s major oil and natural gas find in the Peruvian Amazon. This news  has put a smile on President’s Ollanta Humalla’s face but, at the same time, for prophets of doom,   it spells plunder and mayhem unparalleled even by the likes of Pizarro six centuries ago.
 
But travellers to Peru hardly ever get to the Amazon and often bypass Lima as they make for the sierra. In their estimation, it’s in the highlands that the real Peru begins — a land of dramatic, snow-capped mountains and  colourful poncho-wrapped peasants of pure Inca origin. The capital city was, and to some extent still is, seen as a western enclave on the Pacific from which  Spanish creoles could survey a vast hinterland peopled mainly by “untutored Indians” speaking another language and practicing another religion. The great 19th century German explorer Humboldt summed it up well when he said that “Lima is more remote from Peru than London”.
 
A parallel, if a little strained, is that many visitors to South Africa, once they get there, make straight for Wild Life Reserves  and a Safari Lodge. It’s as if the only reality worth experiencing is witnessing a leopard lazing under a tree with the remains of his recently caught prey, an impala, strung up on a branch overhead! At the crack of dawn in Kruger Park it was, indeed, an exhilarating experience for us to be privy to such a sight. Spectacles like this one can eclipse, for a moment, the complex human drama that has unfolded ever since the first European landed in Southern Africa.
 
Peru’s reality is that while Cusco and Machu Picchu may offer to the world a window to the achievements of a great indigenous—mainly highland — civilisation, the Inca, this country today is largely mestizo (mixture of European and Indian) with a far smaller proportion claiming pure indigenous blood than before. In addition, at least 1/3 (10 million) of its diverse population, including descendants of  Chinese and Japanese immigrants, now live in the throbbing, thriving, if sometimes chaotic, metropolis of Lima. It’s also interesting that despite significant miscegenation, descendants of  Europeans, as is the case in South Africa, still account for some 15 per cent of the population of both countries.

A walk through Plaza Mayor in Lima and a visit to the V&W Waterfront in Cape Town are indeed lessons in ethnic diversity. What an irony that a black face is a rarity in Lima when in Spanish colonial times 45 per cent of the population of that city were of African descent! It’s only in the middle of the 19th century that the trade in African slaves who replaced the indigenous people in the mines and plantations was declared illegal.

Nowadays Afro-Peruvians account for less than 1 per cent of the general population. Faced with the prospect of post abolition marginalisation in a Spanish-creole dominated post Independence Lima, many blacks, according to one commentator, opted to lighten the coffee in order to achieve social mobility, or in order, simply, to survive…

…And so it was that not long after the conquest but centuries before diversity became a buzz word, Peru gave to the world the Patron Saint of Social Justice, the Dominican San Martin de Porres. By birth “illegitimate”, this son of Lima has come to symbolise inclusion and diversity as he ministered faithfully to the poor, the sick, and the marginalised while embracing his mixed Afro-European heritage…

Read the entire article here.

The Fifth Figure

Bloodaxe Books
2006-09-28
80 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852247320; ISBN-13: 978-1852247324

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a ‘one-woman festival’. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.

The Fifth Figure is her fifth book, and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.

In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Third World Blues: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition.

The colour of money in multiracial Jamaica

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-09-23

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

On a flight from Miami several years ago, I sat next to a little girl who seemed to be about 10 or so years of age. She was looking through a magazine and came across a picture of three little girls – black, white and brown. I mischievously asked her, “Which one of them looks like you?” She picked the black child.

I then asked her, “Which one do you look like?” And, believe it or not, she chose the brown child. ‘Mi nearly dead.’ I wondered if she had misunderstood. After all, it was a kind of trick question I was asking her about racial identity. But no, she did understand. As far as she was concerned, the black girl looked like her but she did not look like the black girl. And, in a funny way, it made perfectly good sense. It’s OK for the black girl to look like her; but not for her to look like the black girl.

So who is responsible for this crazy conundrum? Was this just an exceptional case of a little child confused by the ‘fool-fool’ questions of a nosy adult? Or were the little girl’s curious answers a sign of our collective paranoia about race in Jamaica? How does our national motto complexify the problem, as the Americans say? Oh, yes! If you can simplify, it’s perfectly logical to complexify…

Read the entire essay here.

Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks

Ebony Magazine
October 1973
pages 74-85

Era Bell Thompson

Once outnumbering whites five to one, blacks were absorbed and inundated by massive immigration

“If you are looking for black people, why,” they asked helpfully, “did you come to Argentina? Why don’t you go to Brazil?”

Well, I had been to Brazil (Ebony July, September 1965), the “most mulatto” nation in South America, hopefully in the process of becoming white through amalgamation. Now I was in Argentina where massive European immigration was the catalyst that converted an erstwhile mixed-blood people into the whitest nation on the continent.

I had read that there were no more blacks in that Spanish-speaking country. But I had also heard rumors of a small black colony in Buenos Aires, the capital. So what happened to Argentina’s involuntary immigrants, those African slaves and their mulatto descendants who once outnumbered whites five to one, and who were for 250 years “an important element” in the total populations which is now 97 percent white? Had they been entirely absorbed by, or simply inundated in successive waves of the new Argentines?

What I found was not a viable, but a vanishing black people: relatively few in numbers, relatively free of racial discrimination and relatively content. Summarized one gentleman, “If there were more of us, perhaps it would be different.”

The white Argentine, who is overwhelmingly of Italian and Spanish descent, doubts there ever were many blacks in their section of the old Rio de la Plata viceroyalty and are unaware of those still within their midst. The ranks of the few slaves channeled into the port of Buenos Aires, they believe, were decimated largely by disease and war. The survivors who did not emigrate to neighboring countries were absorbed by the mestizos.

The question of what happened to Argentine blacks is not a new one. Ysabel P. Rennie, author of the book. The Argentine Republic, calls it “one of the most intriguing riddles of Argentine history.” In his book, Argentina, a City and a Nation, James R. Scobie says “the disappearance of the Negro from the Argentine scene has puzzled demographers far more than the vanishing Indian.”

When Josephine Baker visited the country during Juan Peron’s first term as president, the entertainer asked Dr. Ramon Carrillo, mulatto minister of public health, “Where are the Negroes?”

“There are only two,” he laughingly replied. “You and I.”

My first impressions of Buenos Aires were: the man was right. In Buenos Aires, the city, and Buenos Aires province, where the preponderance of the entire population is found. Afro-Argentines, especially the fair-skinned ones, and not easily distinguishable from Latin-type whites. And then there is a matter of definitions. The terms Negro and mulatto are still used, but with slightly different connotations. Negro (small ‘n’) is the Spanish word for black. It took me some time to get used to hearing négro sprinkled throughout conversations that had nothing to do with race. Mulatto (or moreno) is an African-Spanish mixture, as differentiated from mestizo, which technically means only Spanish-Indian, but more often than Argentines care to admit, includes an admixture of black blood. Zambo (not Sambo) means African-Indian, but the term—if not the practice which produced it—has been discontinued, as have the names of two social classes: the gaucho, now cowboy, and cabecitas négras, or little black heads, as people fresh in from the provinces were once called. A Creole is an Argentine-born white.

When I posed Josephine Baker’s question, the average creole could recall only a doorman here or a porter there. Brown people who were not mestizos were Brazilian tourists. A secretary in a government office said she was 16 before she saw a black man. Fortunately, I did not have to wait that long…

Read the entire article here.

Afroargentines

The Argentina Independent
2007-03-23

Laura Balfour

As a descendant of two slaves, Maria Lamadrid has a hard time biting her tongue when airport officials think her Argentine passport is not real because ‘there are no blacks in Argentina’.
 
And that was in 2002.
 
The 25th of March marks the landmark 200th anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Though the trade continued after this date, it marked the beginning of the end of the transatlantic trafficking of Africans.
 
Ms Lamadrid is fighting to alter the common belief that all blacks who live in Argentina are foreigners. In 1997 she founded Africa Vive, a non-governmental organisation that defends the rights of African descendants. Today, she claims, there are 2m Afroargentines in Argentina.
 
Ms Lamadrid and Miriam Gomez, a history professor at the University of Buenos Aires, have dedicated themselves wholly to the NGO’s cause because “there is so much to do and very few people to do it.”…

…Africa Vive has requested that a separate category for African descendants be reintroduced in the 2010 census. Ms Lamadrid said the most frustrating thing is that there used to be one: 1887 was the final year that Afroargentines were recognised in the census; the results showed that 2% of the residents of Buenos Aires were of African descent at that time. She added that indigenous people, who have also suffered discrimination, have their own category because they have more support…

Read the entire article here.

The reawakening of Afro-Argentine culture

Global Post
2009-08-30

Anil Mundra

Descendants of slaves are starting to assert their identity but it’s not easy in South America’s whitest country.

BUENOS AIRES — “Liberty has no color” read the signs held outside a Buenos Aires city courthouse. “Arrested for having the wrong face,” and “Suspected of an excess of pigment,” said others. And more to the point: “Enough racism.”
 
A black street vendor was allegedly arrested without cause or proper procedure earlier this year, prompting this August hearing of a habeas corpus appeal. But leaders of the Afro-Argentine community say this moment goes beyond any particular man or incident, calling it a watershed case that brings to trial the treatment of blacks in Argentina.
 
“It’s not about this prosecutor or that police officer, but rather an institutionally racist system,” said Malena Derdoy, the defendant’s lawyer.
 
Argentina is generally considered the whitest country in South America — 97 percent, by some counts — possibly more ethnically European than immigrant-saturated Europe. There was once a large Afro-Argentine presence but it has faded over the epochs. Now, for the first time in a century and a half, Argentine descendants of African slaves are organizing and going public to assert their identity…

…At the beginning of the 1800s, black slaves were 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires, and an absolute majority in some other provinces. The first president of Argentina had African ancestry, and so did the composer of the first tango. Even the word “tango,” like many other words common in the Argentine vocabulary, has an African root; so do many beloved foods, including the national vices of the asado barbecue and dulce de leche.
 
The abolition of slavery was a slow process that spanned the better part of the 19th century. At the same time, under the government’s explicit and aggressive policy of whitening the race — to replace “barbary” with “civilization,” in the famous phrase of the celebrated president Sarmiento — Afro-Argentines were inundated by European immigration, the largest such influx in the Americas outside of the United States. Blacks had dwindled to only 1.8 percent of Buenos Aires by the 1887 census, after which their category was replaced with more vague terms like “trigueno” — “wheaty.”

“It’s part of Argentine common sense that there are no blacks, that their entire culture had disappeared toward the end of the 1800s,” said anthropologist Pablo Cirio. “That’s all a lie.”…
 
…The survey was performed with help from the national census bureau and World Bank funding, at the urging of local Afro-Argentine activists who hoped to have the “Afro-descendant” category re-inserted into the Argentine census in 2010 and count themselves as a distinct segment of the populace after a century missing. Soon afterward, DNA tests of blood samples in several Buenos Aires hospitals bolstered the pilot census’ result with a very similar percentage of genes traceable to Africa. Moreover, a much higher number — about 10 percent — was obtained by testing mitochondrial DNA, which traces maternal ancestry. This is consistent with the historical conjecture that many black men were lost after being sent to the frontlines of 19th-century wars, and Afro-Argentines assimilated into the white population when the
remaining women mixed with the hordes of European males who had come to Argentina to work…

Read the entire article here.

Indian Lords, Hispanic Gentlemen: The Salazars of Colonial Tlaxcala

The Americas
Volume 69, Number 1, July 2012
pages 1-36
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2012.0060

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

In 1773, a Mexico City expert in gold embroidery named don José Mariano Sánchez de Salazar Zitlalpopoca petitioned for a license to operate his own shop and take on apprentices. As handling precious metals was politically and economically sensitive, such professions were by law exclusive, open only to those of proven character, standing, and reputation—qualities understood to be inherited by blood. Thus, to establish his sufficiency for the license don José called forth witnesses to his family’s honor, reputation, and good lineage.

Genealogical and character investigations were common in the early modern Spanish world, part of the required process for those seeking access to elite institutions and associations. Among other indicators of high social status, aspirants often cited noble ancestors in Spain, both real and invented, as proof of their blood quality. Yet don José was not Spanish and could not credibly establish such a pedigree. Instead, he hired a scribe in the primarily Nahuatl-speaking city of Tlaxcala, east of Mexico City, to consult its noble registry (becerro) and confirm that he was descended from don Bartolomé Citlalpopoca, a Tlaxcalan leader at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival two and a half centuries earlier (Figure 1).

The scribe also reported that subsequent generations of Salazars, up to and including don José’s own brother, had served honorably with the Tlaxcalan cabildo, or municipal governing council. Finally, lest his indigenous origins raise suspicions among Spanish officials, the petitioner also submitted copies of royal decrees explicitly equating the legal status and rights of caciques, the hereditary lords in America’s native communities, with those of Spain’s hidalgos, gentlemen who enjoyed the privileges of minor nobility. “I am a cacique,” don José concluded, and “caciques are . . . eligible for all the ecclesiastical and secular employments and dignities customarily conferred upon the hidalgos of Castile, and can participate in any communities that require nobility.” Satisfied, the overseer confirmed that don José was indeed “a cacique Indian of the Tlaxcaltecos,” and, following a successful practical examination, the viceroy certified him as a master goldworker. Ironically, upon conferring his new rights, they required him to swear that he would never accept non-Spanish apprentices.

Don José was not the first of his family to find success in a social and professional realm normally reserved for Spaniards and creoles (American-born Spaniards). Nor was he the first cacique to gain access to the privileges of Spanish hidalgos, which was not entirely unusual by the end of the eighteenth century. Yet the Salazars of Tlaxcala stand out, inasmuch as their participation in the elite institutions of New Spain did not entirely replace the political offices they held and the historical identities they proclaimed as Tlaxcalan aristocrats. That is, they were not creoles boasting (as some did) of distant and mostly abstract cacica great-grandmothers. Rather, they were both caciques and hidalgos, performing each role simultaneously: Nahua nobles living as Novohispanic gentlemen, Tlaxcalan aristocrats wielding intellectual, political, and legal authority within the Spanish empire.

The Salazars belonged to a handful of families in central Mexico that had managed to escape the general decline of the Mesoamerican hereditary elite by the eighteenth century. The late-colonial plight of the indigenous nobility was such that in…

Mulattos of St. Domingo

General Advertiser
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Wednesday, 1792-03-14 (Number 455)
Souce: Professor of History John Garrigus (University of Texas, Arlington)

Are the motley breed of landholders, gentlemen adventurers, parsimonious merchants, factors, clerks, managers, and plantation-overseers from Europe. The progenitors of this yellow tribe were generally persons who came out from France and other parts of Europe, to make fortunes rapidly, return, and spend them under their native skies. During their stay in this delightful island, the pursuits of avarice were not sufficiently powerful to restrain them wholly from more natural pursuits. No immediate objects of gratification presented but the enslaved African female, who was therefore adopted vice spousa, and while she planted sugar canes on the mountain, or attended a herd of goats in the valley, contributed to people the island with a progeny, who were neither European or African, and felt no attachment to either, further than the interest or the more immediate prospect of advantage dictated.

Natural affection had still some influence where united paternal fondness had been rendered extremely weak from the unequal condition of the progenitors. Mulattoes were generally excused from the labors of the field. They were housekeepers, and clerks; they were houseboys, and poultry men; they were waiters at tables and taverns: they were fishermen, cooks, and turnspits; they were even bound out to mechanical trades, and in the general everything in the line of domestic employment, except field slaves, who are reckoned one of the most degraded classes in the islands, and absolutely placed on a level with the mules that turn the cattle mills…

Read the entire article here.