Mixed Race Studies

Lecture Series. Multiculturalism and Miscegenation in the Construction of Latin America’s Cultural Identity
 
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
101 International Studies Building
910 S. Fifth Street, Champaign, Illinois
2012-02-23, 12:00 CST (Local Time)

Eduardo Coutihno, Distinguished Lemann Visiting Professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Professor of Comparative Literature,  Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

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Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

University of Illinois Press
1995
288 pages
ISBN-10: 0252021134; ISBN-13: 978-0252021138

Annette White-Parks, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

Foreword by Roger Daniels

Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies.

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times.

The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914.

Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” literature in vogue at the time but with an insider’s sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Roger Daniels
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Bird on the Wing
• 2. Montreal: The Early Writings
• 3. Pacific Coast Chinatown Stories
• 4. Boston: The Mature Voice and Its Art
• 5. Mrs. Spring Fragrance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Gene Flow from White into Negro Populations in Brazil

American Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 9, Number 4 (December 1957)
pages 299–309

P. H. Saldanha
Department of General Biology
University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

GLASS AND Li (1953) have introduced a statistical model that allows calculations to be made, not only of the intermixture between two base populations but also of the dynamic pattern of the gene flow from one population to another, during a known period of intermixture. The formula derived from Glass and Li is:

To use this formula it is necessary to know: a) the gene frequencies, q₀ and Q, of the base populations; b) the gene frequency, q_k, of the hybrid population; and c) the number of generations, k, of contact between the base populations. The average rates of gene flow (m) from one population to another varies according to the assumed value of k and to the amount of accumulated admixture in the hybrid population. Some limitations of this method have been stressed by Glass and Li.

It should be of interest to compare the process of hybridization between Negro and White populations in Brazil to that in the United States, since the social conditions in the two countries have been and still are different. This is a first attempt to do so.

THE BRAZIL NEGRO

An important problem, which is not yet completely settled, is the African origin of Brazilian Negroes. The comparative ethnography of the Brazilian Negro was worked out, in its fundamental aspects, by the pioneer work of Nina Rodrigues (1932) and the later work of Ramos (1951a). The data on the relations between African and Brazilian cultural groups of Negroes shown in Table I result from these studies…

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Mulatto Machiavelli, Jean Pierre Boyer, and The Haiti of His Day

John Edward Baur

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 32, Number 3 (July, 1947)
pages 307-353

Toussaint Louverture opened the gate of Haitian liberty, but Jean Pierre Boyer kept it open. Toussaint, ” First of the Blacks,” may be called the Washington of Haiti, but Boyer was neither ”First of the Mulattoes” nor a Haitian Lincoln. He was a colored Machiavelli. Only a Machiavelli would have been ready, willing, and able to lead his country against the greatest obstacles any new nation hadfaced in modern times.

Hated by the Great Powers because she had been born of a slave revolt against France, Haiti was an outcast, almost an outlaw state. The new nation had been the battlefield of French Revolutionary commissioners, sent to stir up the slaves and the mulattoes against their royalist dominators. Santo Domingo had been devastated by a British invasion in the 1790’s and, later, by the brother-in-law of Napoleon, General Leclerc, who attempted to restore French control in the island in 1802. Added to these troubles was the racial war of mulattoes and Negroes for supremacy and, finally, a division of the new nation itself into two hostile states. The land was ruined agriculturally, commercially, politically, and spiritually. So it was from 1804 to 1818 when Boyer gained power. Even a Machiavelli, endowed with the best of human learning and wisdom, would have been befuddled on facing the bitter harvest of this, the New World’s bloodiest and most nearly complete revolution…

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The Brazilian system of racial classification

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Published Online: 2011-12-05
6 pages
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.632022

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Michael Banton’s text belongs to the long tradition of European social sciences which rejects the conceptual use of the lerm ‘race’ in sociological analyses. His work is also linked to the school—this time a minority—that uses individualist and logico-analytic methodologies, largey shunning historical, structuralist or holistic analyses. The real novelty of his approach, though, resides in bringing the natural concept of ‘colour’ to the centre of sociological analyses of the kinds of social differentiation and hierarchization that arise from the encounters between distinct peoples and cultures.

However my comments in this short text will not address any of these aspects head on. Instead I shall concentrate on clarifying what seems to me to be the weak point of the empirical example used by Banton in his argument, namely, the Brazilian system of racial classification, which, according to the author, is based not on race but on colour, by which he means skin colour or tone.

To allow the reader to follow my comments, it is worth briefly recalling what we know about the Brazilian system of racial classification, a topic systematically studied by sociologists and anthropologists between the 1940s and 1970s (Frazier 1944; Pierson 1945; Hutchinson 1952; Wagley 1952; Zimmerman 1952; Azevedo 1953: Fernandes 1955; Bastide and Berghe 1957; Harris and Kottak 1963; Harris 1970; Sanjek 1971; Nogueira 1985), with the aim of deciphering its classifieatory principles. From 1872 onwards the Brazilian census classified the ‘colours’ of Brazilians on the basis of the theory that mestiços ‘revert’ or ‘regress’ to one of the ‘pure races’ involved in the mixture an ideology that shaped both common-sense and academic knowledge at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1872 census, for example, created four ‘colour groups’: white, caboclo, black and brown (branco, caboclo (mixed…

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President Alexandre Pétion: Founder of Agrarian Democracy in Haiti and Pioneer of Pan-Americanism

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 2, Number 3 (Third Quarter, 1941)
pages 205-213

Dantès Bellegarde (1877-1966) [Biography in French]

The history of Haiti is dominated by four great men who fought and worked for its independence: Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, Christophe and Pétion. Toussaint is the best known of them all because his extraordinary genius and spectacular career have engaged the attention of numerous authors. From a variety of angles they have related the story of this one-time slave who became the governor-general of the French colony of Santo Domingo only to die a captive in a dungeon of the Jura Mountains.

The career of Dessalines was scarcely less dramatic than that of Toussaint, for it was he who led to decisive victory the Negroes and mulattoes, united in the sacred struggle for freedom. Christophe, who became King of Haiti and revealed great administrative powers, is principally known in the United States by the public works which he constructed in the Northern Kingdom. The most remarkable of these is the Citadelle Laferrière, which has justly been called one of the wonders of America.

Of these four remarkable men Alexandre Pétion is the least known in the United States, but his name is revered in Latin America. In fact, he has played a role of first importance in the history of the New World, as I hope to demonstrate in this short biography, which I am writing for Phylon.

Alexandre Pétion was born at Port-au-Prince, April 2, 1770, the son of a mulatto woman and a white man, Pascal Sabès, who, considering his son too dark of skin, refused to recognize him. His elementary education was very inadequate because the whites had not established schools in the colony of Saint Domingue. He learned the trade of silversmith from one of his father’s old friends, M. Guiole, a native of Bordeaux, whose wife showed much solicitude for the young boy. She called him Pichoun, which in her southern patois meant mon petit, “my little one,” whence the name Pétion, by which he continued to be known and which he finally adopted as his own…

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The decline of Jamaica’s interracial households and the fall of the planter class, 1733–1823

Atlantic Studies
Volume 9, Issue 1, (January, 2012)  (Special Issue: Rethinking the Fall of the Planter Class)
pages 107-123
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2012.637002

Daniel Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

The theory of planter decline traditionally implied that social and sexual chaos in the West Indies produced a middle caste of mixed-race individuals who destabilized colonial life. This article contends that for most of the eighteenth century, interracial relationships were normative unions that did not undercut the central function of the sugar and slave economy. In Jamaica, colonial regulations against free people of color came with individual exemptions that allowed mixed-race elites to skirt the very laws intended to keep them marginalized. Despite differences of color, these personal and familial connections between free coloreds and white fathers helped to maintain strong social hierarchies among the island’s wealthiest ranks. Abolitionist attacks against these family units, however, along with the ever present threat of enslaved revolt, changed conceptions of the Jamaican household at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, as Jamaica’s mixed-race population grew and became more endogamous, personal connections to whites dwindled, escalating political conflict on the island. Interracial relationships, therefore, did not herald planter decline, but rather forestalled it.

In the opening chapter of The Fall of the Planter Class, Lowell Ragatz recited a liturgy of social, economic, and cultural issues which had predestined West Indian elites to failure. An outdated agricultural system, regressive economic policies, and political changes brought about by incessant warfare constituted the core of these problems. Ragatz could not ignore, however, the general sense of dissipation and lecherousness frequently associated with Caribbean planters. Echoing many eighteenth-century observers, he viewed island society as backward and unstable:

The white man in tropical America was out of his habitat. Constant association with an inferior subject race blunted his moral fibre and he suffered marked demoralization… Miscegenation, so contrary to Anglo-Saxon nature, resulted in the rapid rise of a race of human hybrids.

Indeed, it was this very “growth of a mixed blood element [that] offered concrete evidence of the Anglo-Saxon’s moral break-down in the torrid zone.” If the avowed goal of island life was to keep blacks separate from whites, then interracial relationships signified a clear disruption in social order.” Cross-racial pairings, according to this retelling, gave an added push to the crumbling pillars of white planter control…

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Identity Politics in the Public Realm: Bringing Institutions Back In

University of British Columbia Press
2011-10-11
308 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780774820813   

Edited by:

Avigail Eisenberg, Professor of Political Science
University of Victoria

Will Kymlicka, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy
Queen’s University

In an age of multiculturalism and identity politics, many minority groups seek some form of official recognition or public accommodation of their identity. But can public institutions accurately recognize or accommodate something as subjective and dynamic as “identity?” Are there coherent standards and fair procedures for responding to identity claims?

In this book, Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka lead a distinguished team of scholars who explore state responses to identity claims worldwide. Their case studies focus on key issues where identity is central to public policy—such as the construction of census categories, interpretation of antidiscrimination norms, and assessment of indigenous rights—and assess the influence of democratization on the capacity of institutions to respond to group claims. By illuminating both the risks and opportunities of institutional responses to diversity, this volume shows that public institutions can either enhance or distort the benefits of identity politics. Much depends on the agency of citizens and the ability of institutions to adapt to success and failure.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Bringing Institutions Back In: How Public Institutions Assess Identity / Avigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka
• 2. The Challenge of Census Categorization in the Post—Civil Rights Era / Melissa Nobles
• 3. Knowledge and the Politics of Ethnic Identity and Belonging in Colonial and Postcolonial States / Bruce J. Berman
• 4. Defining Indigeneity: Representation and the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act of 1997 in the Philippines / Villia Jefremovas and Padmapani L. Perez
• 5. Indigenous Rights in Latin America: How to Classify Afro-Descendants? / Juliet Hooker
• 6. Domestic and International Norms for Assessing Indigenous Identity / Avigail Eisenberg
• 7. The Challenge of Naming the Other in Latin America / Victor Armony
• 8. From Immigrants to Muslims: Shifting Categories of the French Model of Integration / Eléonore Lépinard
• 9. Beliefs and Religion: Categorizing Cultural Distinctions among East Asians / André Laliberté
• 10. Assessing Religious Identity in Law: Sincerity, Accommodation, and Harm / Lori G. Beaman
• 11. Reasonable Accommodations and the Subjective Conception of Freedom of Conscience and Religion / Jocelyn Maclure
• Contributors
• Index

At the very time that some in the United States have timidly embraced multiracialism as a fitting ideal for North Americans, Latin American critics have begun to argue that multiracialism, like racial democracy, functions as an ideology that masks enduring racial injustice and thus blocks substantial political, social, and economic reform.

Melissa Nobles, “The Myth of Latin American Multiracialism,” Daedalus, Volume 134, Number 1 (Winter 2005): 82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/0011526053124398.

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940

University of Arizona Press
2010-07-22
272 pages
6.00 in x 9.00
Paper (978-0-8165-1460-1)
Cloth (978-0-8165-2772-4)

Robert Chao Romero, Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

An estimated 60,000 Chinese entered Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, constituting Mexico’s second-largest foreign ethnic community at the time. The Chinese in Mexico provides a social history of Chinese immigration to and settlement in Mexico in the context of the global Chinese diaspora of the era.

Robert Romero argues that Chinese immigrants turned to Mexico as a new land of economic opportunity after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As a consequence of this legislation, Romero claims, Chinese immigrants journeyed to Mexico in order to gain illicit entry into the United States and in search of employment opportunities within Mexico’s developing economy. Romero details the development, after 1882, of the “Chinese transnational commercial orbit,” a network encompassing China, Latin America, Canada, and the Caribbean, shaped and traveled by entrepreneurial Chinese pursuing commercial opportunities in human smuggling, labor contracting, wholesale merchandising, and small-scale trade.

Romero’s study is based on a wide array of Mexican and U.S. archival sources. It draws from such quantitative and qualitative sources as oral histories, census records, consular reports, INS interviews, and legal documents. Two sources, used for the first time in this kind of study, provide a comprehensive sociological and historical window into the lives of Chinese immigrants in Mexico during these years: the Chinese Exclusion Act case files of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the 1930 Mexican municipal census manuscripts. From these documents, Romero crafts a vividly personal and compelling story of individual lives caught in an extensive network of early transnationalism.