Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Women on 2020-06-22 00:32Z by Steven

Afro-Mexican Women in Saint-Domingue: Piracy, Captivity, and Community in the 1680s and 1690s

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 100, Issue 1 (2020-02-01)
pages 3-34
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-7993067

Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva, Assistant Professor of History
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

This article focuses on the experiences of women of African descent who were made captives (and, in some cases, recaptives) after the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, the most important port in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico). Although the raid is well known to historians of piracy, its implications for women’s history and African diaspora studies have not been properly contextualized in a period of expanding Atlantic slavery. This article proposes a close reading of contraband cases, parochial registers, slave codes, and eyewitness accounts centered on Afro-Mexican women who were kidnapped to Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). A focus on displacement and resilience opens new narratives through which to understand women who transcended their captivity by becoming spouses to French colonists and free mothers to Saint-Domingue’s gens de couleur (people of mixed race).

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Not Just Color: Whiteness, nation, and status in Latin America

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-09-21 04:52Z by Steven

Not Just Color: Whiteness, nation, and status in Latin America

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 93, Number 3 (August 2013)
pages 411-449
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2210858

Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

René Flores
Princeton University

In this study we use statistical analysis of nationally representative surveys from the 2010 AmericasBarometer to examine how color, nationality, and several individual characteristics are related to white identification in 17 Latin American countries. Unlike the common treatment of racial identification as a fixed and self-evident determinant of social status or behavior, we treat it as a flexible social outcome. We find that though white identification is largely shaped by skin color, it is also shaped by national context, social status, and age.

We discover that white identification is more common among persons of a brown skin color in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica than in the rest of Latin America, where such persons would generally identify as mestizo. This suggests that the whitening ideologies of these four countries have made whiteness a more capacious category. We find that younger Latin Americans are less likely to identify as white compared to their older conationals, suggesting a changing valorization of whiteness. Furthermore, college-educated persons are less likely to identify as white than their lower-educated counterparts, challenging ideas that “money whitens.” Findings for age and education may reflect a recent shift to multiculturalism. In addition, we find that white identification is predicted to change in response to the survey interviewer’s color, suggesting that choices about racial identification are relational.

The work of historians has been critical to understanding our findings for the contemporary period, and we suggest ways that sociological work like ours might inform historical work on race and ethnicity.

Read or purchase the article here. Read the entire original paper here.

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The Race to Progress: Census Taking and Nation Making in Brazil (1870–1920)

Posted in Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2012-10-24 01:20Z by Steven

The Race to Progress: Census Taking and Nation Making in Brazil (1870–1920)

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 89, Number 3 (2009)
pages 435-470
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2009-002

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

From the mid-nineteenth century, central statistics agencies contributed to nation-state building through their dual mission of producing statistical description and policy prescription in the name of national progress. This article examines how one such agency, Brazil’s Directoria Geral de Estatística, worked to simultaneously measure and promote national progress from 1870 to 1920. The article documents a fundamental shift in this period in the DGE’s vision of the qualities of the population essential for Brazil’s progress as a nation. In the 1870s, the DGE saw educational statistics as the key measures of national progress and lobbied for government investment in primary schools to ensure the advancement of the nation. By the 1920s, the DGE looked instead to immigration and racial statistics to measure progress and advocated cultural and biological “whitening” of the population to improve the Brazilian nation. Analysis of a broad range of archival and published primary sources reveals the gradual racialization of the DGE’s institutional definition of “progress.” The study contributes to a growing body of research that examines how racial thought influenced the development and official practices of state agencies in Latin America.

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The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2012-04-02 01:15Z by Steven

The Birth of the Mestizo in New Spain

The Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 19, Number 2 (May, 1939)
pages 161-184

C. E. Marshall

No colonizing nation of modern times has had, perhaps, a more interesting and significant history than Spain in the new world. Protestant commercial England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries built up a largely self-sufficing economic empire. Catholic medieval Spain created an empire inhabited by races of many colors. In the English colonies of North America, the Indians were brushed aside by land-hungry settlers who quickly took away their land and shot down their wild game. In the Spanish colonies the fate of the natives was far different. For the Spanish conquest of America, somewhat like the Norman conquest of England, had as its unique result the essential fusion of conqueror and conquered in the creation of a new society. It is estimated that, at the close of three centuries of Spanish rule, the total population in Spanish America was 16,910,000. Of these 7,530,000 were Indians; 5,328,000 were of mixed blood; 3,276,000 were white and 776,000 were Negroes.

Obviously such a society did not come into existence full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. It certainly is not to be explained in terms of unrestrained economic exploitation and ruthless extermination of aboriginal inhabitants by colonizing whites. It was owing rather to complex religious, social, economic, political, and geographical factors which in Spanish America brought the Spaniards and Negroes into intimate contacts with the Indians, mitigated the asperities of that contact, and made the readjustments necessary to a new environment a relatively easy and natural process. To describe this process is not only to explain the origin of a new race of mixed blood and cast much light upon the history of modern Hispanic America. It is not only to write an important chapter in the history of those abiding phenomena which…

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“Asi lo paresçe por su aspeto”: Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Bogotá

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Census/Demographics, History, Media Archive on 2011-10-21 21:25Z by Steven

“Asi lo paresçe por su aspeto”: Physiognomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Bogotá

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 4 (2011)
pages 601-631
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-1416648

Joanne Rappaport, Professor of Anthropology
Georgetown University

My objective in this article is to examine the relationship between perception and classification in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Andes, focusing in particular on the Nuevo Reino de Granada (today, Colombia). During the first century of colonization, the visual identification of members of ethnoracial categories—indios, mestizos, mulattos, negros, and Spaniards— transformed over time and space in the Atlantic context. I argue in this article that we may be confining ourselves to a conceptual straitjacket if we limit our interpretation of terms like “indio” or “mulato” to their ethnic or racial dimensions as part of a self-enclosed system of classification, because such usages were embedded in broader schemes of perception and categorization that both antedated the Spanish invasion of the Americas and continued to be employed on the Iberian Peninsula. In particular, ethnoracial categories interacted in a complex relationship with the ways that observers reacted to the physiognomy of the individuals who bore these labels, so that the fluidity of classification can be seen as deriving in part from the interpretation of visual cues.

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“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Native Americans/First Nation on 2011-10-21 17:42Z by Steven

“Pure and Noble Indians, Untainted by Inferior Idolatrous Races”: Native Elites and the Discourse of Blood Purity in Late Colonial Mexico

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 4 (2011)
pages 633-663
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-1416657

Peter B. Villella, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

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Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review: Skidmore]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-05-17 20:44Z by Steven

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review: Skidmore]

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volumes 88, Number 2 (May 2008)
pages 348-349
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-156

Thomas E. Skidmore, Emeritus Professor of History
Brown University

In 1933, Gilberto Freyre published his classic Casa-grande y senzala. Although it was ostensibly about the uniquely Portuguese origins of Brazilian civilization, it included innumerable obiter dicta about the difference between the role of race in Portuguese and English America. Freyre argued that the relatively harmonious Brazilian race relations were due to more or less smooth Afro-European miscegenation, which contrasted so sharply with the rigid “one-drop rule” of the United States.

In the years since Freyre published his classic, Brazilian and U.S. scholars and social critics have been debating Freyre’s claims. But the issue has been viewed largely through the prism of each country’s distinct racial experience. In the earlier literature, in particular, relatively few scholars achieved an analysis that could be described as truly objective. That situation began to change several decades ago, as scholars emerged who were generally familiar with both countries. Reginald Daniel is certainly prominent among that number and has given us a systematic work on what is a most complex issue, making the volume useful for scholars in a variety of disciplines…

Read the entire review here.

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