Mixed Race Studies

Daniel Lind Ramos and the Visual Politics of Race in Puerto Rican Art

Theory and Critique of Art in the Caribbean
2015-11-11

Fabienne Viala, Associate Professor; Director of the Year Abroad; Director of the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

This article discusses the work of the painter and installation artist Daniel Lind-Ramos. The Puerto Rican artist explores the complex relationships that exist between historical memory, national identity and racial identities in Puerto Rico; more specifically, he shows the taboos that weigh on African cultural heritage in the Estado Asociado Libre, through a style of painting that is always symbolic, sometimes allegorical and containing “keys” that bring the political and the metaphysical into a dialogue on canvas and in space. For Lind-Ramos, art is the expression of an Afro-Puerto Rican hyper-consciousness that claims the right to redefine the codes of representation and visual perception of a Caribbean socio-political reality that addresses its colonial status.

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The Relationship of Identity to the Organizational Development of FLECHAS: Perceptions of Race from a Puerto Rican Perspective

The Forensic Examiner
June 2015

Raul A. Avila

The Puerto Rican preoccupation with “whitening” and incidents of black racism obfuscate Puerto Rican identity. The “deliberate amnesia” regarding their genetic and cultural connection with Black African slaves compels Puerto Ricans to disassociate themselves from “blackness” and everything that “blackness” unjustifiably represents among many: inferior intelligence, poverty, and a lack of ability to perform well in high-level positions. Puerto Rican whitening is the answer to the racial profiling of Blacks by law and society, especially in the United States. The resulting disassociation with the African Black heritage impedes the resolution of the Puerto Rican identity crisis.

FLECHAS is an organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977 to challenge this identity disorder among Puerto Ricans. FLECHAS is an acronym for “Feast of Loiza in Connecticut in Honor of Saint James the Apostle.” It is significant that Loiza, a city in northern Puerto Rico, was the Port of Call for Black African slaves. The founders of FLECHAS, natives of Loiza, grew up with positive images of being black and a strong sense of history rooted in their blackness. In fact the legend of Saint James, celebrated by the town for over two hundred years, runs parallel to that of the African god, Chango, who symbolizes strength and the peoples’ battle against slavery and injustice. Founders did not experience negative portrayals of blackness as Blacks in their day were policemen, elected officials, or teachers. It was not until they left Loiza that they experienced racism, so they founded FLECHAS to reestablish blackness to its rightful place of honor among the Puerto Rican community.

FLECHAS is a Puerto Rican organization founded in New Haven, CT in 1977. (Appendix A) The founders are a group of citizens, who in the late 1960s migrated from the town of Loiza, Puerto Rico, the center of African slave trade during the period of Spanish colonialism in the New World. With membership composed of primarily Black Puerto Rican descendants, FLECHAS was created in response to the conviction that the Black Puerto Rican heritage has been either misrepresented or generally omitted in any discussion of Puerto Rican identity.

The African influence on Puerto Rican culture is obvious. That influence can be found in Puerto Rican music, dance, art, food, and religion (Galvin, 2005). Moreover, DNA tests conducted by geneticists in 2000 found that 27% of Puerto Ricans on the Island have mitochondrial DNA from the people of Africa (Martinez-Cruzado, 2003). However, the Census of 2010 indicates that only 12% of Puerto Ricans self-report as being Black, while most scientists report that, for Puerto Ricans on both the island and in mainland United States, 47% have African blood (Kinsbruner, 1996). Although these findings are hotly contested, Via (2011) reports that the percentages of Puerto Ricans with African DNA average 20%. Apparently, Puerto Ricans have made a concerted effort to disassociate themselves from their Black African heritage.

For Puerto Ricans, the issue of identity formation has been complicated by five hundred years of colonialism, four hundred of which were under Spanish rule. The issues of racism, Black and White intermarriage, and Puerto Rican identity today can be traced all the way back to the 8th century Moors, who ruled Spain for 800 years. During that period there was no discrimination against Blacks. Historians, such as Robert Martinez of Baruch College, indicate that society in Spain was devoid of racism toward Blacks, and this attitude carried over to Puerto Rico by the conquistadores. As a matter of fact, Martinez notes, racial intermarriage was not frowned upon. He writes:

In the 8th century, nearly all of Spain was conquered (711-718) by the Muslim Moors who had crossed over from North Africa. A section of the city of Seville, which was a Moorish stronghold, was inhabited by thousands of Blacks. Black women were highly sought after by Spanish males. Therefore, it was no surprise that the first conquistadors who arrived to the island intermarried with the native Taino Indians and later with the African immigrants (Martinez, 1990, p. 3).

Conversations with founders of FLECHAS indicate this was indeed the case in the province of Loiza on the island of Puerto Rico, where they were born and raised. There was neither discrimination nor racism in Loiza, as many descendants of African Black slaves like themselves held prestigious positions in Loiza as politicians, writers, teachers, and law enforcement officers. It was not the same situation outside of Loiza on the island, according to the founders of FLECHAS, and when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, Puerto Ricans experienced the same racist effects of “blackness” as African Americans. This writer’s role in composing this article as a participant observer is important and critical to consider since I am of Black Puerto Rican ancestry, a current member of FLECHAS, and a professional therapist for the Greater New Haven community in Connecticut…

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How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts

University of California Press
January 2014
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520280076
Paperback ISBN: 9780520280083
Adbobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520957190
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520957190

Natalia Molina, Associate Dean for Faculty Equity, Division of Arts; Humanities and Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies
University of California, San Diego

How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.

Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I. Immigration Regimes I: Mapping Race and Citizenship
  • Chapter One: Placing Mexican Immigration within the Larger Landscape of Race Relations in the U.S.
  • Chapter Two: “What is a White Man?”: The Quest to Make Mexicans Ineligible for U.S. Citizenship
  • Chapter Three: Birthright Citizenship Beyond Black and White
• Part II. Immigration Regimes II: Making Mexicans Deportable
  • Chapter Four: Mexicans Suspended in a State of Deportability: Medical Racialization and Immigration Policy in the 1940s
  • Chapter Five: Deportations in the Urban Landscape
• Epilogue: Making Race in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Bibliography

Father Healy’s Imprint: Past, Present and Future

The Hoya
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
2004-11-09

Moises Mendoza

Every day thousands of students pass by Healy Hall and marvel at its towering steeples and complex intricacies. Few of them realize that the man responsible for this Georgetown trademark was every bit as complex and dynamic as the building bearing his name today.

As the first black president of a predominantly white university, Fr. Patrick Healy, S.J., revolutionized Georgetown and helped build firm foundations for a young university.

Yet Healy’s trek to greatness began not in the hallowed halls of academia, but on the Georgia cotton plantation where he was born on Feb. 27, 1834. The son of an Irish Catholic and a biracial domestic slave, Healy had great obstacles to overcome. Healy’s father Michael immigrated to the United States from Ireland through Canada around 1815. Experiencing great success in a series of land lotteries, he moved to Macon, Ga., where he built his own cotton plantation with the help of 49 slaves. Michael Healy became relatively prosperous and became a prominent businessman in the Macon community…

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QUALLEN: Healy’s Inner Turmoil, Our Current Conflict

The Hoya
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
2015-11-20

Matthew Quallen, “Hoya Historian”
School of Foreign Service

Last week, President DeGioia accepted a recommendation to scrub the names Mulledy and McSherry from university buildings. The names Freedom and Remembrance took their places. Mulledy and McSherry symbolized what was most odious about Georgetown and the Maryland Jesuits’ history — the conclusion of a century of contest and deliberation about slavery, manumission and race with a mad dash towards a propitious sale.

By contrast, Healy Hall and its namesake, Fr. Patrick Healy, stand as foils in our memory. Healy, after all, was the first black president of a predominantly white institution, as the accolade goes. But for Healy, who desperately toed the opposite side of the color line the situation, was more complicated.

Fr. Patrick Healy was born in 1834 to Mary Eliza — a biracial former slave who had been purchased out of captivity by her soon-to-be husband, Michael. Michael Healy owned 49 slaves on a plantation in Macon, Ga. It was from his mother Mary Eliza that Patrick Healy inherited his vital if contrived one drop rule, which legally classified an individual as black if they possessed even “one drop” of black blood for the purposes of racially discriminating statutes. In his home state, the law considered Patrick Healy to be a slave (such status was usually maternal). So his selection as president of Georgetown in 1873 was nothing short of remarkable. It encapsulates a story of a rise to prominence unexpected for a black American in the mid-19th century. It also mistakenly post-dates Georgetown’s racial progress to 1873, although that transformation came much later…

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A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Race & Difference Colloquium Series)

Emory University
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Jones Room
540 Asbury Circle
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Monday, 2016-02-15, 12:00-13:30 EST (Local Time)

Presented by: James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

In this Race and Difference Colloquium, Allyson Hobbs, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses her first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014. The book examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. A Chosen Exile won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in American History and the Lawrence Levine Award for best book in American cultural history.

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

Black Death: Gore, Geographies and the Gallows in Jamaica

African American Intellectual History Society
2015-10-12

Jessica Marie Johnson, Assistant Professor of History
Michigan State University

Pierre Eugène du Simitière, ca. 1757-1774

One evening, on a road in Jamaica, a soldier belonging to the “Mulatto Company” made his evening rounds. He came upon a black man in the woods. The soldier called for his attention. Receiving no answer, he killed him.

Upon closer inspection, the man was identified as a “new negro” gathering wood to sell in town. Death was not the end for the “negre nouveau.” Once he was dead, his body was placed in a cage hung from a gallows planted at a busy intersection in town. His body remained “for all to see” at that crossroads–somewhere between Montgomery’s Corner, near a road named Rockport, and close to One Mile Stone. After two years, he/it was called ‘Fortune,” and the black men, women, and children who passed treated the body as a relic, an item with spiritual powers or import…

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Her Father’s People

Stanford Magazine
July/August 2009

Erin Aubry Kaplan

Antonin Kratochvil WEDDED IDEALISM: Danzy Senna was the middle child born to Fanny Howe and Carl Senna.

For years, Danzy Senna thoughtfully explored issues of race and identity in fiction, including her novels Caucasia and Symptomatic. And then one day the author, walking through Harvard Square, found herself surrounded by signs, buildings and businesses bearing the names and images of Boston’s most prominent families. DeWolfe, Quincy, Howe—they were names of Senna’s forebears via her mother, poet and professor Fanny Howe.

The display reminded Senna, ’92, how much she had always known about her mother’s people—and how little she knew about her father’s. In 1968, Carl Senna, soon to become the youngest editor at Beacon Press, and Fanny Howe married—a commitment that was headily symbolic (personal but also political) in that Carl was black and from Southern poverty, while Fanny, ’62, was white and raised with Mayflower privilege. Their wedding photograph, Danzy Senna writes, showed “the ‘Negro of exceptional promise’ taking the hand of the descendant of slave traders.”

As Senna contemplated those names in Boston, she thought, “What about my father’s side?” After all, “he gave me both my first and last names. Yet I knew so little about him.” So begins her nonfiction book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which seeks to bring some balance to her family history, and to a larger narrative that reflexively puts whites at the center of the American story and blacks at the margins…

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Race Policy and Multiracial Americans

Policy Press (Available in North America from University of Chicago Press)
2016-01-13
226 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781447316459
Paperback ISBN: 9781447316503

Edited by:

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

Race Policy and Multiracial Americans is the first book to look at the impact of multiracial people on race policies—where they lag behind the growing numbers of multiracial people in the U.S. and how they can be used to promote racial justice for multiracial Americans. Using a critical mixed race perspective, it covers such questions as: Which policies aimed at combating racial discrimination should cover multiracial Americans? Should all (or some) multiracial Americans benefit from affirmative action programmes? How can we better understand the education and health needs of multiracial Americans? This much-needed book is essential reading for sociology, political science and public policy students, policy makers, and anyone interested in race relations and social justice.

Contents

• Introduction ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen
• Multiracial Americans throughout the History of the U.S. ~ Tyrone Nagai
• National and Local Structures of Inequality: Multiracial Groups’ Profiles Across the United States ~ Mary E. Campbell and Jessica M. Barron
• Latinos and Multiracial America ~ Raúl Quiñones Rosado
• The Connections among Racial Identity, Social Class, and Public Policy? ~ Nikki Khanna
• Multiracial Americans and Racial Discrimination ~ Tina Fernandes Botts
• “Should All (or Some) Multiracial Americans Benefit from Affirmative Action Programs?”~ Daniel N. Lipson
• Multiracial Students and Educational Policy ~ Rhina Fernandes Williams and E. Namisi Chilungu
• Multiracial Americans in College ~ Marc P. Johnston and Kristen A. Renn
• Multiracial Americans, Health Patterns, and Health Policy: Assessment and Recommendations for Ways Forward ~ Jenifer L. Bratter and Chirsta Mason
• Racial Identity Among Multiracial Prisoners in the Color-Blind Era ~ Gennifer Furst and Kathleen Odell Korgen
• “Multiraciality and the Racial Order: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”~ Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and David L. Brunsma
• Multiracial Identity and Monoracial Conflict: Toward a New Social Justice framework ~ Andrew Jolivette
• Conclusion: Policies for a Racially Just Society ~ Kathleen Odell Korgen

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.