Mixed Race Studies

Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Ashgate Publishing
July 2007
218 pages
219 x 153 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-5189-5

Edited by

Nora E. Jaffary, Associate Professor of History
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women’s experiences in colonialism in North and South America.

Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women’s relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context.

This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the New World Nora E. Jaffary
• Part 1: Frontiers
  • 2. Women as go-betweens? Patterns in 16th-century Brazil Alida C. Metcalf
  • 3. Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on new Spain’s imperial frontier Bruce A. Erickson
  • 4. The very sinews of a new Colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women, 1732–52 Ben Marsh
• Part 2: Female Religious
  • 5. The convent as missionary in 17th-century France Susan Broomhall
  • 6. ‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla Joan C. Bristol
  • 7. Andean women in religion: Beatas, ‘decency’, and the defense of honour in colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns
• Part 3: Race Mixing
  • 8. Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico Nora E. Jaffary
  • 9. ‘An empire founded on libertinage’: The mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue
    Yvonne Fabella
  • 10. Mediating Mackinac: métis women’s cultural persistence in the Upper Great Lakes Bethany Fleming
• Part 4: Networks
  • 11. Circuits of knowledge among women in early-17th-century Lima Nancy E. van Deusen
  • 12. Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme Linda M. Rupert
• Afterword
  • Women in the Atlantic world
  • Patricia Seed
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.

“The Face Is the Road Map”: Vietnamese Amerasians in U.S. Political and Popular Culture, 1980–1988

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 14, Number 1 (February 2011)
pages 33-68
E-ISSN: 1096-8598; Print ISSN: 1097-2129

Jana K. Lipman, Assistant Professor of History
Tulane University

During the 1980s, U.S. politicians and the media presented Vietnamese Amerasians as quintessential Americans who could be brought home rather than as foreigners or as immigrants. However, Amerasians were non-white immigrants and their rights to enter the United States intertwined with debates over immigration restriction and the ongoing search for American Prisoners of War. The popular emphasis on Amerasians’ American “look” resulted in a discourse which valued whiteness, and sometimes blackness, at the expense of Vietnamese mothers and Asian identities. This article argues how Amerasian immigration policies re-inscribed hierarchies of race and sexuality grounded in the history of Asian exclusion.

Read or purchase the article here.

2011 Southern Arizona Asian American & Pacific Islander Conference

“Reach, Inspire, Connect”
 
Pima Community College – West Campus
2202 West Anklam Road
Tucson, Arizona 85709
Saturday, 2011-03-19 from 08:00 to 14:00 MDT (Local Time)

Conference Program…

09:00-09:50 –  Session “A”

Workshop 4:  Mixed Race – A popular 2009 workshop returning this year.  The presenter will talk about how she and others grew up as mixed race children, how the experiences shaped her adult professional life, how to grow positively with the lessons learned, and how they integrate into society.

Presenter:  M. Craig, Japan-America Society of Tucson

For information, click here.

Miengun’s Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family

Mrs. Jessie W. Hilton of Albuquerque, N.M., who summers at her cottage Mi-en-gun Walszh (Wolf’s Den) in Northport, was hostess at 5:00 o’clock Wednesday at Schuler’s of this city honoring Mrs. C. Stuker of Oak Park, III., house guest of her sister, Mrs. Basil Milliken of Oklahoma City, Okla., summer resident at Northport.

Traverse City [Michigan] Record Eagle, July 7, 1954

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 29, Numbers 2/3, Intermarriage and North American Indians (2008)
pp. 146-185
DOI: 10.1353/fro.0.0016

Susan E. Gray, Associate Professor of History
Arizona State University

At the time of this gathering of summer society in a northern Michigan resort town, Jessie Milton was eighty-nine years old. For more than fifty years, she had been a summer resident of Northport, on the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula, north and west of Traverse City, leaving her home in Oklahoma City every June and returning from Michigan in October, events noted in the society pages of newspapers in both places. The only break in this pattern occurred in 1947, when she moved from Oklahoma City to her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, from which she continued to commute each summer to the Leelanau. Despite Jessie’s social standing, however, her annual pilgrimages differed from most sojourns of the genteel and well-heeled to northern Michigan. Twice divorced, she was long accustomed to supporting herself, and she ran a shop in Northport during the summer tourist season, selling Indian handicrafts and pies that she made from the cherries for which the Traverse region is famous. The silverwork for sale at the “Cherry Buttery” came from New Mexico, but the sweet grass and split ash baskets were the work of local Odawa and Ojibwe people, some of whom Hilton had known far longer than she had been summering on the Leelanau. Indeed, the annual arrival of Jessie Hilton, society matron and purveyor of Indian handicrafts, at the Wolf’s Den signaled the complexity and fluidity of a mixed-race identity that she, like her twelve brothers and sisters, had spent a lifetime negotiating.

Read or purchase the article here.

Hybrid Knowledge

History Workshop Journal
Published online 2011-02-25
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbq062

Anna Winterbottom, Tutorial Fellow in Early Modern History
Sussex University, Brighton, England

The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, James Delbourgo; Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach MA, 2009; 552 pp.; 0-88135-374-4.

As the editors of this volume note, the terms ‘broker’ and ‘go-between’ tend to evoke back-room introductions and the shuffling of suspicious papers, rather than the traditionally triumphal images of Enlightenment knowledge. The people who embodied the global connections through which information flowed between cultures have only relatively recently become a focus of English-language scholarship. This is in part the legacy of dualistic conceptualizations of race, empire and science in Anglo-American colonial discourse. In an imagined world divided between black and white, ruler and ruled, modern and traditional, scientific and emotional, rational and spiritual, the people or ideas that crossed boundaries posed not only an administrative headache, but also a threat to the cosmic order. A rejection of the idea of mixing, physically or intellectually, also came from many of those who opposed colonialism. For example, Anglo-Indians were generally sidelined rather than celebrated in the Indian independence movement. Writing from a colonial gaol, Nehru argued that despite the efforts of a few more enlightened individuals, opportunities for cultural, social and scientific exchange were deliberately quashed and that European and Asian systems of knowledge remained more or less separate.  During the colonial period, therefore, people who crossed the borders of knowledge, like those who transgressed racial categories, were characterized on all sides as untrustworthy and potentially treacherous.

In Spanish, Portuguese and French, the words for the intermingling of cultures and those who are the agents of this process have a longer history of academic discussion and cultural politics. While fears concerning the dangers of cultural and racial…

Read or purchase the article here.

More Hawaii residents identify as mixed race

USA Today
2011-02-24

William M. Welch

Hawaii, the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, has seen a big increase in residents identifying themselves as being of mixed race, according to Census data released Thursday.

Among adults 18 and older, those saying they are of two or more races rose 31% from 2000 to 2010. They make up 18.5% of the state’s adult population.

Among all ages, the increase of those citing two or more races was 23.6%. Overall, almost one in four Hawaii residents are of mixed race.

Residents citing some Asian heritage make up 57.4% of the state’s population. Their numbers grew by 11%, though other ethnic groups grew more rapidly.

Sarah C. W. Yuan, a demographer at the University of Hawaii’s Center on the Family, said the racial trends reflect growth and acceptance of multiracial marriages and an increased willingness of people to claim more than one racial identity. She said the decline in people identifying with one race only, from 78.6% in 2000 to 76.4% in the 2010 Census, was expected.

“Hawaii’s population has been more diverse over the years,” she said. “There are many multiracial marriages, so we do see two-or-more-race groups increase over the years.”

Hawaii’s overall population grew 12.3% to 1.36 million…

Read the entire article here.

Black, Red and Proud: An Interview with Radmilla Cody

The Root
2011-02-22

Cynthia Gordy

Radmilla Cody’s crowning as Miss Navajo Nation in 1997 triggered an outcry and a conversation about what it means to be Native American. Now she’s featured in a museum exhibit showing the rarely told history of African-Native Americans.

In a 1920 edition of the Journal of Negro History, Carter G. Woodson observed, “One of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians.” [See: C. G. Woodson, “Negroes and Indians in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, Number 1 (January 1920).]

“Red/Black: Related Through History,” a new exhibit at Indianapolis’ Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, illuminates this rarely told story. Since the first arrival of enslaved Africans in North America, the relationships between African Americans and Native Americans have encompassed alliances and adversaries, as well as the indivisible blending of customs and culture.

“It’s not received a lot of attention because it’s not the dominant culture’s story, although it’s very important to the dominant culture’s bigger view of the past,” says James Nottage, curator of the exhibit, which includes narratives of enslaved blacks who traveled the Trail of Tears with their Native owners; slaves who intermarried into Native tribes as an escape from bondage; and the largely African-featured members of the Shinnecock tribe of New York, as well as shared traditions in food, dress and music…

…Cody, also the subject of a 2010 documentary, Hearing Radmilla, talked to The Root about growing up both black and Navajo, and how she handles frequent “Wow, you don’t look Indian” comments.

The Root: The experience of having your Miss Navajo Nation reign challenged calls to mind the debate over the Cherokee Freedmen. Is this a common issue across the Native community, of African-Native Americans having trouble finding acceptance?

Radmilla Cody: I grew up having to deal with racism and prejudices on both the Navajo and the black sides, and when I ran for Miss Navajo Nation, that especially brought out a lot of curiosity in people. It’s something that we’re still having to address as black Natives, still having to prove ourselves in some way or another, because at the end of the day, it all falls back to what people think a Native American should look like.

But there’s been many times when people have said to me, “Oh, my great-great-grandmother was an Indian.” I’ll ask them if they know what tribe, and they don’t. It’s very important because in order to be acknowledged as a tribal member, you have to be enrolled. So I can see where Native people are protective about defining who’s a tribal member, and are questioning of people claiming Native ancestry…

…TR: What does that preparation entail, exactly? I understand it’s not a typical pageant.

RC: Basically you’re tested on your knowledge of the Navajo government, the culture, the stories, the songs and the Navajo philosophy of life. You’re tested on butchering a sheep and making fry bread and other traditional foods of the Navajo people. It usually lasts about a week. What separates our pageant from the Miss USA pageant is the bikini—we don’t have a swimsuit category!…

Read the entire article here.

Red/Black: Related Through History

Eitejorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
White River State Park
500 West Washington Street
Indianapolis, Indiana
2011-02-12 through 2011-08-07

Explore the interwoven histories of African Americans and Native Americans with Red/Black: Related Through History. This groundbreaking exhibition is the result of a partnership between the Eiteljorg Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Red/Black includes the NMAI panel exhibit IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas and portrays the shared experiences of African and Native Americans as allies and adversaries, through images, artifacts, film and more. The exhibition also explores issues of race and identity and the question: “Who am I and who gets to say so?” Red/Black will be supported by performances, genealogy workshops, lectures and other dynamic programming.
 
The story of this largely ignored subject is told through personal narratives, paintings, baskets, pottery, photographs and other rare items gathered from private collections and museums across the country. See a basket made by a Cherokee-owned slave and hear drum music with shared African and Native rhythms. Learn how the exhibit narrative relates to you, what we know about the past and how people judge one another…

For more information, click here.

Seven Hours To Burn

Women Make Movies
USA/Canada, 1999
9 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm
Order No. W01699

Shanti Thakur

“A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family’s history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother’s and Indian father’s experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity.” Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue

View the trailer here.

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America [Review: Daniel]

Contemporary Sociology
Volume 22, Number 3 (May 1993)
pages 381-382

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America, by Paul R. Spickard. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 532 pp. cloth ISBN: 0-299-12110-0. paper ISBN: 0-299-12114-3.

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

As an ethnohistory conversant with sociological discourse, Paul Spickard’s Mixed Blood is not only a valuable resource for both historians and sociologists specializing in race and ethnic relations but also a welcome change from traditional social science litera- ture on this topic. These previous studies, by seeking to construct generalizable models from quantitative data, unfortunately have not taken into account the nuances of personal experience and subtleties of space and time. In Spickard’s study, however, intermarriage emerges as a multivariate historical process of attitudes and behavior which are derivative of not only intergroup, but also interpersonal, dynamics, as illustrated by the author’s rich anecdotal sources.

The main portion of Mixed Blood is devoted to a comparative study of the intermarriage patterns of Jewish, Japanese, and African Americans. This choice allows Spickard to highlight important contemporary variations in the strength of pluralism and integration, that is, the persistence and permeability of boundaries of gender, race, culture, ethnicity, and class as they relate to the pretwentieth century history of each of the three groups. Spickard’s analysis of the intergenerational increase in out-marriage by Jewish Americans, for example, clearly indicates that the boundary which formerly might have marked an intermarriage is less distinct than it had been among European- Americans from different ethnocultural backgrounds…

Read or purchase the review here.