Mixed Race Studies

The Virginia Racial Integrity Act Revisited: The Plecker-Laughlin correspondence: 1928-1930

American Journal of Medical Genetics
Volume 16, Issue 4
Pages 483 – 492
December 1983
DOI: 10.1002/ajmg.1320160407

Philip Reilly
University of Houston Law Center, Houston, Texas
 
Margery Shaw
University of Houston Law Center, Houston, Texas

Correspondence between Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia State Registrar of Vital Statistics between 1912 and 1938, and Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor between 1910 and 1939, provides evidence of efforts to enforce the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924. After antimiscegenation policy is placed in a historical context, excerpts from the letters are offered to demonstrate the zeal with which one state official pursued this eugenic policy.

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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.

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Transforming Mulatto Identity in Colonial Guatemala and El Salvador; 1670-1720

Transforming Anthropology
Volume 12, Issue 1-2 (January 2004)
Pages 9 – 20
DOI: 10.1525/tran.2004.12.1-2.9

Paul Lokken, Assistant Professor of Latin American History
Bryant University, Smithfield Rhode Island

This article examines an important moment in the history of people of African origins in the region now encompassed by the republics of Guatemala and El Salvador. That moment has received relatively little attention in modern scholarship because the entire subject of the colonial African presence in the region was largely ignored until recently. The lingering effects of nineteenth-century scientific racism contributed to the “forgetting” of African origins, but developments during the colonial era initiated the process. During that era, the dependence of Spaniards primarily on the labor of the region’s indigenous majority allowed members of an African-defined minority—both free and enslaved—to rework the contours of the identity assigned to them, via marriage, militia service, and other avenues. This transformation in identity was marked by shifts away from association with the “inferiority” of tributary status and toward incorporation into a broader category—gente ladina (hispanized people)—that carried connotations unrelated to African identity.

…Increased fluidity in classification was perhaps inevitable, at least where identification of “mixed” origins was concerned. For instance, while marriage records demonstrate clearly that in seventeenth-century Guatemala the term “mulato” was generally applied to people who actually possessed some African origins, examples of labeling “mistakes” were beginning to crop up as well, notably in San Salvador and San Miguel. In 1671, the son of an “espafiol” and an “india” from San Miguel was identified as “mulato libre” in a marriage record produced in Olocuilta, just outside San Salvador, and in 1691, a record filed in Amapala listed the parents of a “mulato libre” as “indios vecinos” (Indian residents) of San Miguel.” The vulnerability of Spanish efforts to enforce boundaries between “types” of individuals with plural origins as a means of divide-and-rule (Cope 1994:3-26, Lutz 1994:79-112, 140) is also underscored in court cases in which people whom others defined as mulatto claimed mestizo status in order to avoid tribute or otherwise dissociate themselves from the “taint” of African ancestry (Few 1997:120).”…

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‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s “Massacres of Chios”

Art History
Volume 22, Issue 5 (December 1999)
Pages 676-704
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.00182

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Professor of Art History
The University of California, Berkeley

While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’  This paper asks why a ‘mixed-blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France’s imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.

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Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

University of Georgia Press
2005-03-28
60 pages
Illustrated, Trim size: 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2731-0

Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

On the southern frontier in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European men—including traders, soldiers, and government agents—sometimes married Native women. Children of these unions were known by whites as “half-breeds.” The Indian societies into which they were born, however, had no corresponding concepts of race or “blood.” Moreover, counter to European customs and laws, Native lineage was traced through the mother only. No familial status or rights stemmed from the father.

“Mixed Blood” Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants’ participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation “mixed blood.” In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.

From the colonial through the early national era, “mixed bloods” were often in the middle of struggles between white expansionism and Native cultural survival. That these “half-breeds” often resisted appeals to their “civilized” blood helped foster an enduring image of Natives as fickle allies of white politicians, missionaries, and entrepreneurs. “Mixed Blood” Indians rereads a number of early writings to show us the Native outlook on these misperceptions and to make clear that race is too simple a measure of their—or any peoples’—motives.

IndiVisible – African-Native American Lives in the Americas

National Museum of the American Indian
4th Street and Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, DC
2009-11-09 through 2010-05-31

Comanche family, early 1900s Here is a family from the Comanche Nation located in southwestern Oklahoma. The elder man in Comanche traditional clothing is Ta-Ten-e-quer. His wife, Ta-Tat-ty, also wears Comanche clothing. Their niece (center) is Wife-per, also known as Frances E. Wright. Her father was a Buffalo Soldier (an African American cavalryman) who deserted and married into the Comanches. Henry (center left) and Lorenzano (center right) are the sons of Frances, who married an African American man. Courtesy Sam DeVenney

Within the fabric of American identity is woven a story that has long been invisible—the lives and experiences of people who share African American and Native American ancestry.

African and Native peoples came together in the Americas. Over centuries, African Americans and Native Americans created shared histories, communities, families, and ways of life. Prejudice, laws, and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom.

For African-Native Americans, their double heritage is truly indivisible.

The exhibition IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas is a collaboration between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES).

Q&A With Researchers: Associate Professor Manying Ip

asia:nz online
Asia New Zealand Foundation

Associate Professor Manying Ip
Asia:NZ Trustee; Associate Professor of Chinese, School of Asian Studies, University of Auckland

Manying Ip came to New Zealand in 1974 from Hong Kong where her family lived for five generations. With her strong classical Chinese education at home and colonial English education at shool, she grew up sharply aware of the challenges of being cross-cultural.

Her interest in Maori-Chinese interactions started from the mid 1980s when she conducted extensive qualitative interviews among the pioneering Chinese families, which grew ever stronger with the immigration and ethnic identity debates

Manying is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at The University of Auckland and the author of several critically acclaimed books on Chinese in New Zealand. These include: Aliens At My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them (Penguin, 2005), Unfolding Identity, Evolving Identity: The Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 2003) as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters on issues pertaining to recent Asian immigrants. Dr Ip’s most recent book Being Maori-Chinese: Mixed Identities (Auckland University Press, 2008) uses extensive interviews with seven different families of mixed Chinese-Maori descent to explore both historical and contemporary relations between Maori and Chinese, a subject which has not been given serious extended study before. Her edited volume The Dragon and The Taniwha: Maori and Chinese in New Zealand will be published in April 2009, investigating the complex social fabric of New Zealand and offering a nuanced study of ancient and contemporary shared identities amongst two significant ethnic minority groups.

Dr Ip is a respected advocate for Chinese communities living in New Zealand. She was awarded a Suffrage Centennial Medal in 1993 and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1996.  In 2004 she co-directed New Faces Old Fears, a television documentary exploring racism, multiculturalism and social cohesion in New Zealand. In late 2008, she was elected a Fellow of the New Zealand Academy of Humanities (FNZAH) in recognition of her distinction in research and the advancement of the humanities.

1. Your most recent publication Being Maori–Chinese: Mixed Identities explores the historical and contemporary significance of the relationship between Maori and Chinese New Zealanders.  How did you become interested in this topic and what were some of the most interesting findings?

Ever since I started conducting oral interviews on the early days of Chinese New Zealanders, I heard my interviewees mentioning their relationship with Maori people: as co-workers in the market gardens, as neighbours  and workmates. Quite often they mentioned the existence of mixed Maori-Chinese families because early Chinese men came to New Zealand as bachelors and many of them formed relationships with Maori women…

Read the entire interview here.

Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia

University of Pittsburgh Press
May 2004
240 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 9780822942276

Javier C. Sanjinés, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies
University of Michigan

Mestizaje refers to the process of cultural, ethnic, and racial mixture that is part of cultural identity in Latin America. Through a careful study of fiction, political essays, and visual art, this book defines the meaning of mestizaje in the context of the emergence of a modern national and artistic identity in late-19th- and early 20th-century Bolivia.

Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience

University of Oklahoma Press
1997
368 pages
9.09″ x 6.02″ x 0.83″
14 illus, 6 maps, 1 figure
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8061-2911-2; ISBN(10): 0-8061-2911-5

Christopher H. Lutz

Santiago de Guatemala was the colonial capital and most important urban center of Spanish Central America from its establishment in 1541 until the earthquakes of 1773. Christopher H. Lutz traces the demographic and social history of the city during this period, focusing on the rise of groups of mixed descent. During these two centuries the city evolved from a segmented society of Indians, Spaniards, and African slaves to an increasingly mixed population as the formerly all-Indian barrios became home to a large intermediate group of ladinos. The history of the evolution of a multiethnic society in Santiago also sheds light on the present-day struggle of Guatemalan ladinos and Indians and the problems that continue to divide the country today.

Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880

University of Nevada Press
2007
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-87417-697-1
Hardcover Pages: 272
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87417-778-7
Paperback Pages: 280

María Raquél Casas, Associate Professor of History
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California

Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families.  Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.