Mixed Race Studies

Images of Latin American mestizaje and the politics of comparison

Bulletin of Latin American Research
Volume 23, Number 3 (2004)
pp. 355–366
DOI: 10.1111/j.0261-3050.2004.00113.x

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

In a presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Gary Nash (1995) reveals ‘the hidden history of mestizo America’ (by which he in fact means North America). The emergence of what might have been ‘a mixed-race American republic’ was blocked by ‘prejudice and violence’ (1995: 945), but in particular situations, racial and cultural mixture existed, was recognised and even valued. Nash bemoans ‘today’s multicultural wars’ in which multiculturalism is often construed simply as ‘multiracialism’ leading towards ‘a definitional absolutism that has unwittingly defeated egalitarian and humanitarian goals by smothering inequalities of class and fuelling interethnic and interracial tensions that give more powerful groups opportunities to manipulate these divisions’ (1995: 961). He concludes that what is needed is a ‘pan-ethnic, pan-racial, antiracist sensibility’; he thinks that ‘only through hybridity—not only in physical race crossing but in our minds as a shared pride in and identity with hybridity—can our nation break the ‘‘stranglehold that racialist hermeneutics has over cultural identity’’’ (1995: 962, citing Klor de Alva).

Nash uses Latin America as an explicit counterpoint in his argument, stating that in Spanish America there were ‘no prohibitions against interracial contact and interracial marriage’ (1995: 951)—which is in fact quite wrong (Martinez-Alier, 1974; Morner, 1967). Still, he cautions it would be ‘foolish to overromanticize this mixing of blood’ (1995: 952) and recognises the existence of racism in the casta paintings of eighteenth century Mexico that depicted mixed-race types. Yet he also sees mestizaje (he uses the Spanish word for racial and cultural mixture) as the enemy of ‘racial absolutism’ (1995: 961) and states that ‘racial blending is undermining the master idea that race is an irreducible marker among diverse peoples’ (1995: 960).

Others have also recently invoked Latin American mestizaje (or mesticagem in Portuguese) as an antidote to US-style logics of racial categorisation. Some of this comes from the literature (much of it US-based) on mixed-race people, which shares with Nash a desire to reassess and relocate mixture in US society (Root, 1992, 1996; Spickard, 1989, 2001; Zack, 1995). Fernandez, for example, while acknowledging that racism exists in some form in Mexico and Brazil, nevertheless contends that ‘customary forms of discrimination based on actual ancestry have been rendered impotent’ by centuries of mixture (Fernandez, 1992: 132). As a result, Mexicans in the USA may be able to disrupt and even ‘neutralize’ the US racial system by affirming their own mixed racial identities. Indeed, ‘mestizaje. . .as a social norm. . .can free us all from the limits of ethnocentrism’ (Fernandez, 1992: 139, 140). Alcoff does not go so far as to claim that mestizo identity might neutralise racial categories, but she does invoke Latin American history and experience as an example of the development of identities not based on concepts of purity (Alcoff, 1995). Anzaldua’s well-known work is also part of this trend, with an even more explicit valorisation of mestizaje as a positive force for the future in terms reminiscent of José Vasconcelos’s invocation of the raza cosmica (Anzaldu´a, 1987; Vasconcelos, 1997 [1925]).

Latin America has often served as a counterpoint in comparative ponderings about race, especially in the Americas. The hoary notion of a Latin American ‘racial democracy’ has been subject to devastating critique, yet we see that Latin American mestizaje is still, amazingly, being held up by some as an example from which the rest of the world (particularly the USA) could learn. This trend is linked to a broader postcolonialist interest in processes of mixture and hybridity, which casts Latin American processes of mestizaje in a positive light. It should be clear that over-optimistic assessments of hybridity need to learn from the Latin American experience, and overoptimistic assessments of Latin American mestizaje need reminding of some home truths about racism in Latin America.

More fundamentally, I argue that there is an essential element to ideas about mixture which means that it can never simply be put in a relation of opposition to racial absolutes, or portrayed as necessarily destabilising them. Mestizaje, while it appears to erase origins and primordial categories of race and culture, actually continually reconstructs them. It depends on the idea of original or parent races and cultures to constitute the very possibility of mixture. All identities are constituted relationally and depend on others to exist, and mestizo identities are no exception.  They may be deployed to different effects in different contexts, but to exist at all, they must invoke origins. The reconstitution of racial origins is an inherent part of mestizaje. Blackness, whiteness and indigenousness are constantly being recreated as, in a real sense, racial absolutes with primordial origins. Mixture can not be simply set against original and essential identities. Instead, it recreates them and redeploys them and, in doing so, re-establishes the basis for racism. The recreation of blackness does not automatically mean that anti-black racism will be directed against that category, but the former is a necessary condition for the latter, if not a sufficient one.  In short, to see mixture and hybridisation as inherently opposed to racial absolutism and essentialism is quite wrong…

Read or purchase the article here.

Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience

Journal of Latin American Studies
2005
Number 37, Issue 2
Pages 239–257
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05008990

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.

Rethinking mestizaje as embodied experience

This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in Latin America, that of mestizaje – essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology – which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their performing bodies, awakening or engendering potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity ; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce ‘mixed’ children.

This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion.  Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially culturally diverse ; and second, that mestizaje as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Sex in Latin America

Pluto Press
2009-09-07
320 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
Illustrations: 1 map, 3 figures
ISBN: 9780745329499

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

The intersection of race and sex in Latin America is a subject touched upon by many disciplines but this is the first book to deal solely with these issues.

Interracial sexual relations are often a key mythic basis for Latin American national identities, but the importance of this has been underexplored. Peter Wade provides a pioneering overview of the growing literature on race and sex in the region, covering historical aspects and contemporary debates. He includes both black and indigenous people in the frame, as well as mixed and white people, avoiding the implication that “race” means “black-white” relations.

Challenging but accessible, this book will appeal across the humanities and social sciences, particularly to students of anthropology, gender studies, history and Latin American studies.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: defining race and sex
• 2. Explaining the articulation of race and sex
• 3. Race and sex in colonial Latin America
• 4. Making nations through race and sex
• 5. The political economy of race and sex in contemporary Latin America
• 6. Race, sex and the politics of identity and citizenship
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index

White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach

Pluto Press
2009-11-06
240 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
ISBN: 9780745327488

Steve Garner, Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University

Simon Clarke, Director
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies
University of the West of England

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic.

Whiteness has traditionally been seen as “ethnically transparent” – the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner’s book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas.

Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity.

Contents

• 1. Researching ‘Whiteness’: An Introduction
• 2. Whiteness Studies in the Context of the USA
• 3. Empirical research into white racialised identities in Britain
• 4. Britishness
• 5. Whiteness and Post-Imperial Britain
• 6. Psycho-Social Interpretations of Cultural Identity: constructing the white ‘we’
• 7. Media Representations: constructing the ‘not white’ Other
• 8. Whiteness, Home and Community
• 9. Researching Whiteness: Psycho-Social Methodologies
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Mulattoes and métis. Attitudes toward miscegenation in the United States and France since the seventeenth century

International Social Science Journal
Volume 57, Issue 183
Pages 103 – 112
DOI: 10.1111/j.0020-8701.2005.00534.x

George M. Fredrickson, Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History, Emeritus
Stanford University

This essay surveys and compares American and French attitudes toward miscegenation or métissage since the extensive contacts with non-European peoples that began in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century. It develops a typology of possible responses to such race mixture and argues that the English colonies that became the United States quickly developed a highly restrictive attitude toward racial intermarriage, especially between blacks and whites, that has persisted through most of American history and is still influential today. The French in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth century often adhered to concepts of race as innate or biologically determined, but their attitudes toward interracial marriage or concubinage tended to be more pragmatic. In some situations French theorists of race and empire defended and even advocated certain forms of métissage. The difference can be summed up as follows: white Americans have historically pursued the ideal of racial purity with much more intensity and consistency than the French. The difference is best explained with reference to the unique status of African-Americans as a colour-coded pariah group with no real equivalent in metropolitan France.

Read or purchase the article here.

Options: Racial/Ethnic Identification of Children of Intermarried Couples

Social Science Quarterly (September 2004)
Volume 85, Issue 3
Pages 746 – 766
DOI: 10.1111/j.0038-4941.2004.00243.x

Zhenchao Qian, Professor of Sociology
Ohio State University

Objective. Whites of various European ethnic backgrounds usually have weak ethnic attachment and have options to identify their ethnic identity (Waters, 1990). What about children born to interracially married couples?

Methods. I use 1990 Census data—the last census in which only one race could be chosen—to examine how African American-white, Latino-white, Asian American-white, and American Indian-white couples identify their children’s race/ethnicity.

Results. Children of African American-white couples are least likely to be identified as white, while children of Asian American-white couples are most likely to be identified as white. Intermarried couples in which the minority spouse is male, native born, or has no white ancestry are more likely to identify their children as minorities than are those in which the minority spouse is female, foreign born, or has part white ancestry. In addition, neighborhood minority concentration increases the likelihood that biracial children are identified as minorities.

Conclusion. This study shows that choices of racial and ethnic identification of multiracial children are not as optional as for whites of various European ethnic backgrounds. They are influenced by race/ethnicity of the minority parent, intermarried couples’ characteristics, and neighborhood compositions.

Read the entire article here.

Multiracial Self-Identification and Adolescent Outcomes: A Social Psychological Approach to the Marginal Man Theory

Social Forces
Volume 88, Number 1 (September 2009)
ISSN: 1534-7605 Print ISSN: 0037-7732
DOI: 10.1353/sof.0.0243

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Kathryn J. Lively, Associate Professor, Sociology
Dartmouth College

Recent public health research has consistently reported that self-identified multiracial adolescents tend to display more problem behaviors and psychological difficulties than monoracial adolescents. Relying on insights from qualitative analyses using small or clinical samples to interpret these empirical patterns, these studies implicitly assume a pejorative stance toward adolescents’ multiracial self-identification. Building on the social psychological arguments underlying [Robert] Park’s and [Everett V.] Stonequist’s seminal discussions of the “marginal man,” we derive hypotheses indicating that self-identified multiracial adolescents may show more psychological difficulties, but are also likely to have more active social interaction and participation than monoracial groups. We also incorporate later elaborations of the marginal man theory to develop alternative hypotheses regarding multiracial youth’s school and behavioral outcomes. Based on a nationally representative sample of racially self-identified youth, the results suggest that patterns of multiracial-monoracial differences are generally consistent with the hypotheses derived closely from the marginal man theory or its subsequent elaborations. We examine the heterogeneities within these general patterns across different multiracial categories and discuss the implications of these findings.

Read the entire article here.

Secret Agent Insiders to Whiteness: Mixed Race Women Negotiating Structure and Agency

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2007
325 pages

Silvia Cristina Bettez, Assistant Professor
Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Education.

In this dissertation, I explore the life stories of sixteen adult mixed race women who have one white parent and one parent who is a person of color. I examine how these women navigate their hybridity, what we can learn from their stories in our efforts to communicate across lines of racial difference, and what experiences the participants share that cross racial and ethnic lines. Data sources include multiple individual and group interviews with predominately middle-class, educated women living in San Francisco/Oakland [California], Albuquerque [New Mexico], and Boston [Massachusetts]. I coded the interview transcripts for themes and patterns and situated my analyses in relation to discourses of postcolonial hybridity, multiraciality, and social justice.

In relation to navigating hybridity, the women’s experiences reveal an interplay between personal agency, claimed through fluid identities, and limitations to social mobility and acceptance created by social, cultural, and institutional structures. When asked or compelled to choose, all participants chose to align themselves with people of color. I identify several factors that contribute to their ability to communicate across lines of racial difference including physical ambiguity, learning about multiple world views early in life, keen observation, and active listening. Several shared experiences emerged that crossed racial lines. The women in my study largely rejected their white identities, experienced their identities in fluid ways despite this rejection, claimed the right to self-identify racially/ethnically, and sought community with other mixed race people. One of the most significant findings is the degree to which many of the participants’ stories were dedicated to discussions of cultural whiteness, which they viewed as inextricably linked to racism and white supremacy.

This work adds to the small but growing field of mixed race studies and provides information on improving education for social justice. These narratives serve as embodied experiences of hybridity, challenging the disembodied postcolonial hybridity theories prevalent in the literature that disregard the actual lived experiences of “hybrid”/mixed race people. The stories and analysis also reveal ways in which racism and white privilege are enacted on social and institutional levels, and raise questions about theories of diversity built on racial binaries.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Racially Socializing Biracial Youth: A Cultural Ecological Study of Parental Influences on Racial Identity

2009

Alethea Rollins
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Advisor:
Andrea G. Hunter, Associate Professor, Human Development and Family Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

As our society becomes increasingly multiracial, it is imperative that parents, teachers, counselors, and researchers consider the complex processes associated with crossing racial boundaries and occupying a biracial social location. Few investigations have explored racial socialization within biracial families, and none have empirically examined the relationship between racial socialization and the multidimensional components of racial identity. Using a cultural ecological framework, this study explored the racial socialization messages used by mothers of biracial adolescents and evaluated the relative impact of these messages on the racial identity of biracial adolescents. Data for this study were taken from a public-use subsample of the longitudinal Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS; Eccles, 1997). For this investigation, participants were 104 biracial adolescents and their mothers. Mothers of biracial adolescents engaged in a full range of racial socialization messages, including cultural, minority, mainstream, egalitarian, and no racial socialization messages. Racial socialization varied by maternal race, such that Black mothers were most likely to use mainstream socialization messages while White and other minority mothers were more likely to provide no direct racial socialization. In general, Black mothers provided more socialization than their White and other minority counterparts. Mothers of biracial adolescents reported using a combination of racial socialization messages, which can be conceptually reduced into three racial socialization strategies, namely, proactive, protective, and no racial socialization strategies. Proactive socialization was associated with racial identity salience, such that biracial adolescents who received proactive racial socialization reported less racial salience. In addition, maternal race was associated with racial salience, private regard, and exploration, such that biracial adolescents with a White mother reported lower racial salience, private regard, and racial exploration.

Read the entire dissertation here.

“Being Raised by White People”: Navigating Racial Difference Among Adopted Multiracial Adults

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 71, Issue 1, February 2009
Pages 80-94
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2008.00581.x

Gina Miranda Samuels, Associate Professor
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

There are increasing numbers of multiracial families created through marriage, adoption, birth, and a growing population of multiracial persons. Multiracials are a hidden but dominant group of transracially adopted children in both the United Kingdom and the United States. This paper introduces findings from an interpretive study of 25 transracially adopted multiracials regarding a set of experiences participants called “being raised by White people.” Three aspects of this experience are explored: (1) the centrality yet absence of racial resemblance, (2) navigating discordant parent-child racial experiences, and (3) managing societal perceptions of transracial adoption. Whereas research suggests some parents believe race is less salient for multiracial children than for Black children, this study finds participants experienced highly racialized worlds into adulthood.

Read the entire article here.

Listen to the interview on Chicago Public Radio, Eight Forty-Eight from 2009-03-01 here.