Mixed Race Studies

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality: Race and Regional Identity in Northeastern Brazil

University of Pittsburgh Press
March 2011
328 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780822961338

Stanley E. Blake, Assistant Professor of History
Ohio State University, Lima

The Vigorous Core of Our Nationality explores conceptualizations of regional identity and a distinct population group known as nordestinos in northeastern Brazil during a crucial historical period. Beginning with the abolition of slavery and ending with the demise of the Estado Novo under Getúlio Vargas, Stanley E. Blake offers original perspectives on the paradoxical concept of the nordestino and the importance of these debates to the process of state and nation building. Since colonial times, the Northeast has been an agricultural region based primarily on sugar production. The area’s population was composed of former slaves and free men of African descent, indigenous Indians, European whites, and mulattos. The image of the nordestino was, for many years, linked with the predominant ethnic group in the region, the Afro-Brazilian. For political reasons, however, the conception of the nordestino later changed to more closely resemble white Europeans. Blake delves deeply into local archives and determines that politicians, intellectuals, and other urban professionals formulated identities based on theories of science, biomedicine, race, and social Darwinism. While these ideas served political, social, and economic agendas, they also inspired debates over social justice and led to reforms for both the region and the people. Additionally, Blake shows how debates over northeastern identity and the concept of the nordestino shaped similar arguments about Brazilian national identity and “true” Brazilian people.

Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Nordeste and Nation
• 2. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Nordestino, 1850–1870
• 3. Racial Science in Pernambuco, 1870–1910
• 4. The Medicalization of Nordestinos, 1910–1925
• 5. Social Hygiene: The Science of Reform, 1925–1940
• 6. Mental Hygiene: The Science of Character, 1925–1940
• 7. Inventing the Homem de Nordeste: Race, Region, and the State, 1925–1940
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

In 1921, a future Brazilian bureaucrat named Agamemnon Magalhães asserted in a thesis written for an academic appointment that the northeastern region of Brazil was “a distinct ‘habitat,’ characterized by the rigor of its ecological conditions. Nature is reflected in man, imprinting his features, sculpting his form, forming his spirit.” Magalhães wrote about the Northeast and nordestinos, as peoples of the region were called, as if they had long been thought of as a distinct political and geographic region and people. This was most certainly not the case. Just six years before, in 1915, Brazilian geographers had gathered in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, for the Fourth Brazilian Congress of Geography. In the official sessions and papers presented there, geographers referred only to the “states of the North,” the “problem of the North,” and the “droughts of the North.” Magalhães also employed climatic, geographic, and racial determinism to describe nordestinos, calling them the product of interaction between rugged terrain, a harsh climate, and European, Indian, and African cultural and racial influences. Furthermore, he considered the peoples of the region to be “the producers of Brazilian nationality.” In other words, for Magalhães, the mixed-race nordestino was the quintessential Brazilian. This notion ran contrary to conventional wisdom. During Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930), intellectuals and politicians advanced new understandings of Brazilian national identity that idealized European immigration and racial whitening…

Read the Introduction here.

The Social Construction of Race and Monacan Education in Amherst County, Virginia, 1908–1965: Monacan Perspectives

History of Education Quarterly
Volume 47, Issue 4 (November 2007)
pages 389–415
DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-5959.2007.00107.x

Melanie D. Haimes-Bartolf
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

That’s all you heard, everywhere we went, or whatever we done, “oh, he’s one of those issues.” We couldn’t work with white people, we couldn’t be in schools with them, we couldn’t associate with them, we couldn’t eat |with them). I think they came up with the slang word “free issue.” They had this hatred; they just had this ungodly hatred. They couldn’t accept you as a human.

At the prodding of Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia General Assembly in 1782 passed legislation that allowed slave owners to manumit their slaves by issuing slaves a copy of their emancipation papers and making them “free issues.”‘ Nevertheless, in Amherst County, Virginia, the meaning of “free issue” evolved to connote something very different than it did at its inception for a small mountain community.

In 1953, the school board of Amherst County, Virginia, approved plans for new white and black high schools, and the State Board of Education made it possible for Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indian children of Virginia’s tidewater to finish their education beyond the eighth grade at accredited Indian high schools outside Virginia. Notwithstanding, there was a group of children living in the Tobacco Row Mountains at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains for whom educational opportunity beyond the seventh grade would remain largely out of reach for another decade…

Read or purchase the article here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego

Rutgers University Press
June 2012
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780813552835, ISBN: 0813552834
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780813552842, ISBN: 0813552842

Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr., Associate Professor, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe

Becoming Mexipino is a social-historical interpretation of two ethnic groups, one Mexican, the other Filipino, whose paths led both groups to San Diego, California. Rudy Guevarra traces the earliest interactions of both groups with Spanish colonialism to illustrate how these historical ties and cultural bonds laid the foundation for what would become close interethnic relationships and communities in twentieth-century San Diego as well as in other locales throughout California and the Pacific West Coast.

Through racially restrictive covenants and other forms of discrimination, both groups, regardless of their differences, were confined to segregated living spaces along with African Americans, other Asian groups, and a few European immigrant clusters. Within these urban multiracial spaces, Mexicans and Filipinos coalesced to build a world of their own through family and kin networks, shared cultural practices, social organizations, and music and other forms of entertainment. They occupied the same living spaces, attended the same Catholic churches, and worked together creating labor cultures that reinforced their ties, often fostering marriages. Mexipino children, living simultaneously in two cultures, have forged a new identity for themselves.  Their lives are the lens through which these two communities are examined, revealing the ways in which Mexicans and Filipinos interacted over generations to produce this distinct and instructive multiethnic experience. Using archival sources, oral histories, newspapers, and personal collections and photographs, Guevarra defines the niche that this particular group carved out for itself.

We the “White”” People: Race, Culture, and the Virginia Constitution of 1902

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
September 2003
92 pages

Jeremy Boggs

In 1902. in an effort to reestablish what they saw as whites’ natural right to control government rule over blacks, the delegates to Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 declared the new constitution law that they felt reflected “the true opinion of the people of Virginia.” This thesis argues that while Virginia’s 1902 Constitution increased the political power of whites and decreased that of black Virginians, the reasons why they needed the document in the first place highlights an important aspect regarding the anxiety of many white Virginians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Specifically, it helps to show how whiteness as a source of political and social power was not concrete or absolute, but rather was a reaction to the increasing presence and assertion of power by black Virginians. I argue that white Virginians, faced with the increasing political and social presence of black Virginians as equals, sought to reestablish their racial superiority through law and constitutional revision. However, by making their whiteness “visible”—by continually reasserting their claim to legitimate power because they were “white”—white Virginians revealed how unstable their racial world had become.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Combating the “Peril of Negro Domination”
• A New Emancipation
• “To Purify, Exalt, and Ennoble”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Curriculum Vitae

Read the entire thesis here.

The ‘Other’ from within: Afro-Germans as Scapegoats for the post-WWII German Society

Postgraduate History Conference: Creating the ‘Other’
Department of History, University of Essex
2011-09-20

Antje Friedrich
Department of English Literature
University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

The theme of the graduate conference this year was ‘Creating the ‘Other’’ throughout history.  We were very pleased to welcome a large and diverse group delegates and presenters from a number of institutions who made for an engaging and lively audience.  We were also very happy to welcome Dr. John Bulaitis, of Canterbury Christchurch University, to provide the keynote address to the conference.  Contributions were arranged into four panels, which explored the relevance of historical processes of ‘Othering’ to the realms of national identity, crime, gender and colonialism.  Papers presented covered a multitude of topics, periods and contexts, ranging from the construction of persons of colour as servants in late 19th and early 20th century France, Germany and the United States, to the origins of sub-cultural cannabis-use in mid-20th century London, the utilisation of humour in the construction of masculinities during the English Civil Wars, and the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in the governance of the colonial ‘other’ in British-controlled Hong Kong in the late-19th century.  It is intended that a selection of papers presented shall form the basis of this years’ working papers series issued by the Department of History later on in 2011.  We would like to thank the Department for their generosity in funding this event.

For a long time in the collective German national memory, Afro-Germans had only been a side note to which little attention was paid. With the emergence of autobiographical works representing the perspective of Afro-German people, their struggle in society gained a public face. This article focuses on Ika Hügel-Marshall’s work Invisible Women: Growing up Black in Germany and the representation of her social struggle in post-WWII German society. Her depiction of the impact institutions had on her life – institutions that were meant to support the child’s development, but in her case prolonged the construction of the ‘Other’ as an outsider of society – will be accentuated.

The youth welfare office responsible for her, the orphanage she was sent to and the school she attended, represented the social spirit of the post-WWII era during which the anger of having lost the war and being under the control of the Allied Powers was projected onto people like Hügel-Marshall, who in the eyes of many Germans constituted the ‘Other’. Thus, this paper aims to highlight those social processes that constituted barriers for the development of the self and the mechanisms which helped Hügel-Marshall to finally break through and lead a self-determined life in a German society that often took the outward appearance as a decisive feature for creating an “in” and “out” group.

Read the entire paper here.

Imagining Jefferson and Hemings in Paris

TransAtlantica: American Studies Journal
1 | 2011 : Senses of the South / Référendums populaires
10 pages, 20 paragraphs

Suzanne W. Jones, Professor of English
University of Richmond

In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, cultural critic bell hooks argues that “no one seems to know how to tell the story” of white men romantically involved with slave women because long ago another story supplanted it: “that story, invented by white men, is about the overwhelming desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women.” Narratives of white exploitation and black solidarity have made it difficult to imagine consensual sex and impossible to imagine love of any kind across the color line in the plantation South. hooks predicted that the suppressed story, if told, would explain how sexuality could serve as “a force subverting and disrupting power relations, unsettling the oppressor/oppressed paradigm” (57-58). By rethinking and reimagining the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, contemporary novelists, filmmakers, and historians have exposed this “suppressed story,” the bare bones of which were first made public in 1802 by journalist James Callendar during Jefferson’s first term as U.S. President and then covered up by professional historians for almost 175 years.

As novelist Ralph Ellison pointed out, historical fiction must sometimes serve as the repository for historical truth when the collective historical memory has repressed the facts. In 1979 Barbara Chase-Riboud’s best-selling novel Sally Hemings allowed readers to enter the mind and heart of the shadowy figure that historian Fawn Brodie had brought back into the public consciousness in 1974, and in so doing enabled readers to believe that Jefferson might have had a long-term relationship with her. Chase-Riboud’s fictional portrait clearly upset Jefferson’s defenders, but the word that CBS might make the novel into a miniseries unnerved them, causing historians Virginius Dabney and Dumas Malone to intervene. Although they claimed that they were worried about historical accuracy, historian Annette Gordon-Reed believes that they were even more worried by the nature of the medium itself: “If a beautiful woman appears on screen as a capable and trustworthy person, […] all talk about impossibility [of a liaison] would be rendered meaningless” (Jefferson and Hemings, 182-83). Over fifteen years later, the film and the miniseries that eventually were produced have proved Gordon-Reed right. Today visitors to Jefferson’s Monticello routinely view, seemingly without surprise or dismay, a twenty-minute documentary that briefly mentions the liaison…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

The Indians and the Metis: genealogical sources on Minnesota’s earliest settlers

Minnesota History Magazine
Volume 46, Number 7 (Fall 1979)
pages 286-296

Virginia Rogers

Editors Preface

GENEALOGISTS have long hesitated to do research on Minnesota’s Indian and métis or mixed-blood population. The fact that Indian and related métis peoples participated in a largely ond culture may have convinced them that few sources were available. Even historians, although aware of the existing sources, have shunned a study which appeared to them to have little value for the writing of general history. In spite of such common prejudices, institutions like the Minnesota Historical Society for a long time have been accumulating resources of real value in genealogical studies of Indians and métis.

What written records are available on people who left few written records of their own? What are the specific problems involved in doing genealogical research on Indian and métis families? How can research on individual members of the Indian and métis communities aid in understanding the culture to which they belonged? We hope that in examining the pages that follow, readers of Minnesota History, whatever their ethnic, cutural, or professional background, will be stimulated to take an increasing interest in an area of genealogical research that has been ignored too long. In the process, perhaps they will become aware of the special value of genealogical research for all students of history.

THE STUDY of ordinary individuals of the past is a fairly new interest in the United States. Generalizations about how the individual farmer or farmwife or worker lived centuries ago may have long interested people, but the facts of the individual’s life and the specifics of his familyy relationships, except in the case of the great or famous, was until recent years the province of the genealogist and the local historian…

Read the entire article here.

A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Smithsonian Magazine
October 2010

Owen Edwards

A pair of woven, beaded garters reflects the spirit of Seminole warrior Osceola

Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe.
 
Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Seminoles by the U.S. government; the garters testify to his sartorial style.
 
Born in Tallassee, Alabama, in 1804, Powell (hereafter Osceola) was of mixed blood. His father is thought to have been an English trader named William Powell, though his­torian Patricia R. Wickman, author of Osceola’s Legacy, believes he may have been a Creek Indian who died soon after Osceola was born. His mother was part Muscogee and part Caucasian. At some point, likely around 1814, when he and his mother moved to Florida to live among Creeks and Seminoles, Osceola began to insist he was a pure-blood Indian.
 
“He identified himself as an Indian,” says Cécile Ganteaume, an NMAI curator and organizer of the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition…

…“He was a bit flamboyant,” says historian Donald L. Fixico of Arizona State University, who is working on a book about Osceola. “Someone in his situation—a man of mixed blood living among pure-blood Seminoles—would have to try hard to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He wanted to draw attention to himself by dressing in a finer way.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Croatan Indians of Sampson County, North Carolina: Their Origin and Racial Status. A Plea for Separate Schools (Electronic Edition)

The Seeman Printery, Durham, North Carolina
1916
65 pages

George Edwin Butler (1868-1941)

Text transcribed by Apex Data Services, Inc.
Images scanned by Tampathia Evans
Text encoded by Apex Data Services, Inc., Tampathia Evans and Jill Kuhn Sexton
First edition, 2002

CONTENTS

• A Petition of the Indians of Sampson County
• HISTORICAL SKETCH
  • Historical
  • The Croatans
  • White’s Lost Colony
  • Their Wanderings and Location
  • Political and Educational History
  • First Separate Schools for Croatans
  • Marriage with Negroes Forbidden
  • Separate Schools in Other Counties
  • Separate Schools in Sampson
  • Why the Indian School in Sampson was Repealed
  • Indian Tax Payers in Sampson
  • Easily Recognized as Indians
  • They Were Never Slaves
  • Formerly Eroneously Classed as Negroes
  • Laws of State Recognize Them as Separate Race
  • State Provides Colleges for Whites and Negroes but not for Indians
  • Indians Justly Proud of Their History
  • Better Educational Facilities Should be Provided
  • Indian Taxes in Sampson
  • Sampson Exceeds all Other Counties, Except Robeson, in Indian Polls and Property
  • Family Relationship Between Robeson and Sampson Croatans
  • New Bethel Indian School
  • Shiloh Indian School
  • The Indian Photographs and Pictures
• SKETCH OF PROMINENT INDIAN FAMILIES OF SAMPSON
  • The Emanuel Family
  • The Maynor Family
  • The Brewington Family
  • The Jones Family
  • The Simmons Family
  • The Jacobs Family
  • Indian Families of Sampson

ILLUSTRATIONS

• The Croatan Normal School at Pembroke Frontispiece
• New Bethel Indian School
• Shiloh Indian Sunday School
• Jonah Manuel and Family
• Enoch Manuel and Wife
• William J. Bledsole and Wife
• Luther Bledsole and Children and Henry Bledsole and Wife
• Hardy A. Brewington
• Group of Boys and Girls
• Lee Locklear, Steve Lowrey, French Locklear
• Levander Manuel
• June Brewington
• C. D. Brewington
• Jonathan Goodman
• William Simmons
• Betsy J. Simmons
• Enoch Manuel, Jr., and Family
• Henry Bledsole and Wife

Read the entire book here.

“Mixed-Blood” Indians in Southern New England

TalkingFeather Radio
Blogtalk Radio
2009-07-15

The historical connections of Native Americans and African people is not a topic that is often discussed in classrooms, nor is it found in elementary, middle and high school history books. The trading that went on with Africans who sailed to this continent and Indigenous people of Mexico, the islands and parts of Central America before Columbus is often overlooked. Relationships were forged by trade and by blood for hundreds of years and yet many people do not know about this rich story. Our guest on the Talking Feather is Julieanne Jennings, who is Cheroenhaka Nottaway Native American, will talk about this history as it relates to the New England Indigenous people. For more than 15 years, she has been teaching children and adults about the history and culture of the Native people in southern New England. She currently teaches a first year program liberal arts colloquium entitled “Mixed-Blood Indians in Southern New England at Eastern Connecticut State University. Jennings is the author of several books and journal articles, and has co-authored Understanding Algonquian Indian Words and A Cultural History of the Native People of Southern New England. In 2009, she received Congressional Recognition from the United States Senate from Rhode Island’s Women of the Year Award event for cultural enrichment. Join us in this dialogue as we dispel the myths and get to the truth.

Download the episode here.