Mixed Race Studies

Bringing together our collective stories

The African Courier: The International Magazine Published in Germany
October/November 2012

Gyavira Lasana

The second annual convention of the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey took place at Barnard College in New York City recently. Our New York-based contributing editor Gyavira Lasana reports on the convention, which focused on the theme of “What Is the Black German Experience?”

“Black German studies did not come from academia,” insisted Peggy Piesche, “but from young people who wanted to know their own history.” Professor Piesche, who was born and raised in the former East Germany and who now teaches at Hamilton College in New York, asserted her observation during an early-morning panel discussion on “Teaching the Black German Experience” at the second conference of the Black German Cultural Society (BGCS) held recently at Barnard College in New York City.

Piesche’s words echoed a decided difference between Black Americans and Black Germans on the study and teaching of the Black German experience, a difference that would reverberate throughout the conference. The panel also included Noah Sow, the German poet/writer and music performer who was the keynote speaker at the first BGCS conference last year in Washington DC. Sow suggested that the term Afro-German be replaced by Afro-Deutsch, which is surely more German. All in all, the panel noted that Afro-Deutsch studies continue to fascinate students in the US, and are thriving and growing. That is questionable.

Here in America, Black professors of German are reaching retirement age, and they are not being replaced. Black American students are following the global trend and pursuing Asian studies – Chinese, Japanese and Korean. German lies quite low on the list of options for study. Still, the Black professors of German maintain a high degree of enthusiasm, fuelled mostly by the emerging focus on the history and culture of Blacks in Germany…

…These highly personal stories reflect the heartache, confusion and repeated dysfunction of many (but not all) biracial children growing up in the American milieu. Their quest is often identity: Am I Black or White (in this case German)? Or something in between? Is a mixed-race identity desirable/acceptable?

There is a growing discourse and body of literature on these topics in the US, but they tend to be marginalised by the journey of Blacks born and raised in Germany who more often cite systemic and day-to-day racism. For example, during an earlier panel discussion on “Claiming the Black German Experience”, Lara-Sophie Milagro, a Black German actress and founder of Label Noir, a Berlin-based Black theatre company, stated that “what I had considered to be my personal struggle is really the struggle of all people of colour in Germany, and what I had regarded as my personal problem and failure – not to be a real German and full-value human being – was really the problem and failure of a privileged and ignorant White majority.”…

Read the entire article here.

Everyone seems to be negating President Barack Obama’s own story. The man himself has said publicly in print that, yes, his mother is white; yes, he is technically bi-racial, mixed race, whatever the language is people choose to use, but in this racialized society he is seen as a black man. And for that reason he identifies as black.

—Yaba Blay

Patrice Peck, “Biracial versus black: Thought leaders weigh in on the meaning of President Obama’s biracial heritage,” TheGrio, November 19, 2012. http://thegrio.com/2012/11/19/bi-racial-versus-black-thought-leaders-weigh-in-on-the-meaning-of-president-obamas-bi-racial-heritage/#s:president-obama-4

The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. [González Review]

H-Net Reviews
February, 2012

Fredy González
Yale University

Robert Chao Romero. The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. xii + 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-8165-2772-4.

Moving across the Transnational Commercial Orbit

Robert Chao Romero’s The Chinese in Mexico, the first English-language monograph on the subject, makes an important contribution to the existing literature on the topic of immigration and race in Mexican history. Previous work on the Mexican Chinese has mostly highlighted the 1930s anti-Chinese violence in the northern part of the country. Romero departs from this historiography by focusing instead on the economic links that the Chinese in Mexico maintained with other regions of the Americas as well with home communities in Guangzhou. In addition, he offers a substantive social history of the pre-1940 Chinese community in Mexico. His work argues that the Chinese in Mexico were not passive victims of anti-Chinese violence and instead possessed a greater amount of agency than previously acknowledged. In both the United States and Mexico, the Chinese took concrete steps to resist and adapt to anti-Chinese movements and legislation.

Central to Romero’s work is the transnational commercial orbit, an economic network created by the Chinese on both sides of the Pacific and extended to Mexico after the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It allowed the Chinese to smuggle and recruit migrant labor, collect capital for investment, and import goods for sale to Chinese businesses, all “in resistance, and adaptation, to the Chinese exclusion laws” (p. 5). The transnational commercial orbit helps explain why, after the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexico would become an important nexus in the Chinese migrant networks of North America and the Caribbean. One aspect of this was the practice of substitution, in which Chinese workers who landed at U.S. ports of entry and obtained a transit visa en route to Cuba or Mexico switched places with Chinese merchants already based in the United States. By exchanging an undocumented Chinese migrant for a documented one, Chinese workers circumvented immigration restrictions under the Exclusion Act. The practice required coordination between Chinese communities across the Americas. In his discussion, Romero makes a case for the significance of the Chinese community in Mexico to other Asian migrations to the Americas…

Read the entire review here.

Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 4, Number 1 (2012)
15 pages

Jeffrey H. Gray, Professor of English
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey

Originally published as Jeffrey Gray, “Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 27, no. 3 (1994): 257–70.

This 1994 article by Jeffrey Gray originally appeared in the journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (Duke University Press). An early foray into transnational American Studies, Gray’s analysis of the role “Europe” plays both in the narrative and in the life of the author herself begins with a discussion of the object of art—the self as exoticized, distanced other—imagined and displayed against the carceral black body in the American imaginary, an imaginary that holds the protagonist, Helga, hostage to an indeterminacy represented by her mulatto status. Gray argues that the “quicksand” of the search for essence, whether located in the body or in the eyes of others, eventually dissolves the protagonist’s sense that a change of place can change the truth that essence does not exist. Gray references the shared observation among African American international celebs (Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Josephine Baker—whose 1973 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is cited) that “being different is different” in Europe, yet that otherness is finally also not an experience of self, which the narrative (and perhaps the author’s life as well) proves to be endlessly deferred.

Read the entire article here.

Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:50 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom I (Roosevelt New Orleans)
Paper in AHA Session 220: Manipulating Freedom: Liberty, Enslavement, and the Quest for Power in the Southwestern Borderlands (2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST)

Johanna Lee Davis Smith
Tulane University

Rosa Mahier had lived her whole life in Mulatto Bend, a little community located a short distance from Baton Rouge.  Born a slave in 1813 and legally freed in 1827, Rosa was a familiar member of a network of free people of color which had lived and worked within and throughout the larger white population of the area since the 1780s.  Most of the inhabitants – black as well as white, Rosa included – were descended from local families of longue durée, and the free people of color in the community carefully cultivated their identity in order to perpetuate the security of their free status.  Rosa Mahier had been legally free for twenty years when Fergus Mahier, the white nephew of the man who once owned her, took legal action in an attempt to re-enslave her and her freeborn children.

Fergus Mahier did not ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, but his petition is as compelling for what he did not demand as for what he did.  Mahier did not attempt to re-enslave Rosa’s two brothers or her grandmother, all of whom had been manumitted at the same time and in the same way as Rosa, nor did he include Rosa’s mother Agnes, who also had been owned and freed by the Mahier family.  Therefore, the brief record of the case offers the opportunity to weigh the roles of identity, status, gender, wealth, and power as factors in the successful maintenance of liberty among free people of color in antebellum Louisiana.  Mahier’s motivation for the suit and the individual characteristics of the people involved present a trenchant illustration of the hair’s breadth that separated slavery and freedom, as well as the continuous efforts of aspiring slaveowners to breach that line.

Chinese-Mexicans celebrate repatriation to Mexico

Silicon Valley Mercury News
2012-11-24

Olga R. Rodriguez, Mexican Correspondent
Associated Press

MEXICO CITY—Juan Chiu Trujillo was 5 years old when he left his native Mexico for a visit to his father’s hometown in southern China. He was 35 when he returned.
As Chiu vacationed with his parents, brother and two sisters in Guangdong province, Mexico erupted into xenophobia fueled by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and aimed at its small, relatively prosperous Chinese minority. Authorities backed by mobs rounded up Chinese citizens, pressured them to sell their businesses and forced many to cross into the United States.

Unable to return to their home, hotel and restaurant in the southern border city of Tapachula, the Chius stayed in China and began a new life.

Chiu’s father took a job at a relative’s bakery and his children began learning Chinese. But their life was soon turned upside down as China was invaded by the Japanese, endured World War II and then suffered a civil war that led to a victory by communist forces that persecuted religious people. In 1941, the family fled to Macau, then a Portuguese colony.

They never stopped dreaming of Mexico, and Juan Chiu Trujillo returned in November 1960. He came back with his pregnant wife and four children and with 300 other Chinese-Mexicans after President Adolfo López Mateos, trying to improve Mexico’s global image, paid for their travel expenses and decreed that they would be legally allowed to live in Mexico. They were eventually granted Mexican citizenship.

Twenty-one of those Chinese-Mexicans and their descendants celebrated for the first time on Saturday the anniversary of their return. Gathering at a Chinese restaurant in Mexico City, they shared emotional memories of their lives in China and paid tribute to the late Lopez Mateos…

…Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in northern Mexico in the late 1800s, drawn by jobs in railroad construction and cotton. The country represented a haven from the United States, which had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, an 1882 law that banned Chinese immigration.

But from the moment they began to arrive, they faced racism, which was exacerbated during the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, when the country was trying to build a national identity that celebrated the mixture of Indian and Spanish cultures.

Mexican women who married Chinese men were considered traitors, and in some cases families disowned them. With the Great Depression, large numbers of destitute Mexicans began returning home from the United States and resentment about the financial success of Chinese people grew.

“Even though there was a small number of Chinese people, their economic prowess and their position in the labor force made them a threat,” said Fredy González, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University who is studying 20th century Chinese migration to Mexico.

In the northern border state of Sonora, anti-Chinese leagues formed and thousands of Chinese were taken to the border with the U.S. and forced to cross. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials and sent to China…

Read the entire article here or here.

Donas, Signares, and Free Women of Color: African and Eurafrican Women of the Atlantic World in an Age of Racial Slavery

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 153
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 09:00-11:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Hilary Jones, University of Maryland, College Park

Papers:

• “Reevaluating Saint Louis’ Infamous Signares, 1700–1850” / Lindsey Gish, Michigan State University
• “‘The Christened Mulatresses’: Interracial Marriage in a Slave Trading Town on the Gold Coast” / Pernille Ipsen, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• “Strategies of Power: Luso-African Donas of Nineteenth-Century Luanda” / Vanessa S. Oliveira, York University
• “Free African and Eurafrican Women and the Trading Companies of the French Atlantic” / Jessica Marie Johnson, Michigan State University

Comment: Lorelle D. Semley, College of the Holy Cross

In the age of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African and Eurafrican women emerged as intermediaries between foreign traders and local populations. Europeans’ lack of knowledge in African languages, trade networks, local culture, social structures and political institutions provided African and Eurafrican women a unique opportunity to become cultural and economic brokers.  Portuguese adventurers on the coast of West Africa first named these women “senhoras” in the 16th century. Although Portuguese men coined the term, they were not the only Europeans to name and have socio-economic relationships with African and Eurafrican women. Over time each European group made the original Portuguese term their own: in Crioulo it became “nhara”, in French “signare”, in English “senora”, and “dona” among the Portuguese of Central Africa.  These ‘middle-women” surfaced all along the coast of Africa from the Senegambia to Mozambique between the 15th and the 20th centuries, although the most famous of these women were found in the port cities of Bathurst, Benguela, Bissao, Cacheu, Goree, Joal, Luanda, Osu, Portudal, Rufisque and Saint Louis. These women formed a distinct group within African and Afro-Atlantic society during an age of racial slavery, but the duration and trajectory of their lives varied across time and place.

“Donas, Signares & Free Women of Color” gathers scholars working on female African and Eurafrican entrepreneurs, brokers, and partners who allied with Portuguese, Spanish, French and Danish men in one specific enclave of Africa or the Americas. Together these four papers will question what made these women unique, how different European powers perceived them, if and how partnering with one particular European power over another influenced these women, and how their actions were shaped by their local environments. Panelists’ papers will also explore the trans-regional and trans-Atlantic connections between women in each society, drawing on comparative frameworks to interrogate the similarities and differences between each group. By exploring the individual stories of African and Eurafrican “middle-women” across the Atlantic world, this panel will move the scholarship beyond exoticism and generalizations. The panel’s ultimate goal is to determine if these women can and should be discussed as a coherent collective group throughout the Atlantic World or if scholars should continue to examine each group separately.

“…It’s kind of like living in a shadow. It sounds funny, but that’s what it feels like.

I want to be able to walk and say: ‘Hey, This is who I am. This is what I am. This ain’t what you want me to be. This ain’t what I’m thinking to be.  This is me.’…

..I’m hoping it [DNA test result] is what I’m thinking it is. I’m hoping that I am a white American…

…They [blacks] got it rough, I know. If I’m gonna be black I don’t want to be in America. Because they don’t get a fair shake.

I’m ready…  Here we go.

It says 75% European… so I’m all… I’m white! [Be]cause I’ve only got 22% of African and only 3% of Asian. So hey… that’s sweet! When they ask me ‘what you are?’ I can tell them now. I’m part of the community now. I’m a white boy!  I’m as white as snow… I just can’t believe that I’m a white man. I can actually say I’m a white man now.  I’m happy!  [laughter] I can’t believe this.  I should have done this years ago.”

—Jeff Harris (Janitor, Waverly, Ohio Courthouse) on his racial identity before and after reading the results of his DNA ancestry results.

Al Letson and Lu Olkowski, “Pike County, Ohio—As Black as We Wish to Be,” State of the Re:Union, September 28, 2012. (Part 7, Segment C, (00:08:02-00:11:44) http://www.prx.org/pieces/85361-pike-county-ohio-as-black-as-we-wish-to-be.

Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Thursday, 2013-01-03: 16:10 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 3 (New Orleans Marriott)

From Session AHA Session 31: Saintly Translations: Stories about Saints across Time and Space, 2013-01-03: 15:30-17:30 CST (Local Time)

Erin Kathleen Rowe, Assistant Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University

In the mid-seventeenth century, a woman stood before the Inquisitiorial tribunal in Mexico City, accused of Judaizing practices and speaking disrespectfully of the saints.  One witness claimed that the defendant had harsh words for one saint in particular, Benedict of Palermo: “How can a black man be a saint?” This striking question reveals the spiritual, cultural, and racial anxieties that could be provoked by black sanctity in the early modern Catholic world.  While the Catholic Church actively promoted the cults of several saints purportedly of sub-Saharan African origin or descent in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, their reception and veneration created a kind of spiritual ambiguity during a period of history when rapid globalization of Catholicism paralleled rapid intensification of racialization.  My paper looks at the circulation of black saints throughout the early modern Catholic Atlantic; focusing on two case studies, the Ethiopian saints Ifigenia and Elesban, I examine the movement of devotion, miracles, and images throughout the larger Catholic world.  Miracles attributed to these saints were very likely to be associated with a holy image, since there were no extant relics.  Thus, the visible representation of their blackness stood as an ever-present aspect of their cults.  Ifigenia and Elesban stood as patron saints of confraternities for black and mulatto populations throughout Latin America, while back in Europe their images appeared in Carmelite churches throughout Spain and Portugal for predominantly white audiences.  Through close study of miracle stories, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of devotion to the saints throughout the Catholic world and the significance of their ethnicity and sanctity as they shifted locations and audiences, context and meaning.

The Mischling Experience in Oral History

The Oral History Review
Volume 35, Issue 2 (2008)
pages 139-158
DOI: 10.1093/ohr/ohn025

Peter Monteath, Associate Professor of History
Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

This paper examines the usefulness of oral history in dealing with the fate of the so-called Mischlinge in Nazi Germany; that is, people categorized by the authorities as being of “mixed race.” It argues that oral history provides an invaluable supplement to the written, official record. The latter is by its nature a view “from above” and from the perpetrators; it generally excludes the perspective of the victims of Nazi racial policy. Moreover, as an overview of the treatment of Mischlinge demonstrates, there were stark discrepancies between policy and practice which are difficult to comprehend on the basis of the written record alone, but which are well exemplified through a study of individual experiences. The paper uses several examples of such experiences collected from three separate video testimony repositories to analyze the nature of those experiences, detecting discrepancies between official policy and practice and observing the considerable variations in the nature and harshness of those experiences. Finally, the oral history record is found to be invaluable in tracing some of the longer-term consequences of the Third Reich for surviving Mischlinge, especially in terms of their constructions of identity and the ways in which, for the period after the Second World War, they dealt with the ascribed identities which had so heavily impacted them in their early years.

Read or purchase the article here.