Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory*

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Media Archive on 2016-04-18 01:51Z by Steven

Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory*

Past and Present
First published online: 2016-04-16
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtw001

Cristian Berco, Associate Professor of History
Bishop’s University, Quebec

On 1 July 1625, their hands issuing from Dominican cloaks as black as night, inquisitors in Madrid voted to arrest Luisa Nuñez on suspicion of practising love magic and divination using a stolen altar stone. It fell to the inquisitorial secretary Gaspar Isidro de Argüello to lead the arrest. Since witnesses had provided no physical description of the suspect, all Argüello had to go by was a name and address. Despite this lack of information, on Luisa’s opening the door Argüello rapidly assessed her and labelled her with a racializing term plucked out of the air: ‘mulatta’. However, this categorization was problematic. Luisa would never refer to herself in this way, either in testimony or in the formal life narrative she would recount before the inquisitors. According to her, she was the American-born daughter of a Spanish notary and a Mexican Indian woman, and was now a citizen of Madrid and wife to a Galician courier.

While the label ‘mulatta’ embodied ambiguous meanings typical of the era (it could refer to either skin colour or category of being), its application was important. Not only did the word conjure up a negative stereotype particularly detrimental to a suspected sorceress, but the label continued to define Luisa as a racialized being long after her death. Even the modern catalogue containing her trial specifically uses the term in its one-line summary. In a way, the increasing tendency of early modern Europeans to connect the phenotype of colonized and enslaved peoples with inherent negative characteristics not only victimized Luisa but also reflected the long-term emergence of race as an ontological category. However, because such identity categories define our world-view today, to the point where we deploy them automatically, we tend to think of the cognitive process behind racialization as…

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Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Perón*

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2012-07-25 02:05Z by Steven

Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Perón*

Past and Present
Volume 216, Issue 1 (August 2012)
pages 215-245
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gts008

Matthew B. Karush, Associate Professor of History
George Mason University

On the question of race and nation, the dominant Latin American paradigm has never applied to Argentina. In Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, twentieth-century nationalists crafted ideologies of mestizaje that broke with European and North American models by celebrating the indigenous or African as crucial elements in a new racial mixture. Yet most Argentine intellectuals rejected this sort of hybridity and instead constructed national identities that were at least as exclusionary as those produced by their North American counterparts. The only mixtures they countenanced were those that followed from European immigration. Just as the United States was a ‘melting pot’, Argentina was a crisol de razas (crucible of races), in which Spaniards, Italians and other immigrant groups were fused into a new nation. This ideology, visible in the well-known aphorism that ‘Argentines descend from ships’, marginalized Argentines of indigenous and African descent and eventually erased them from national consciousness. As George Reid Andrews showed over thirty years ago, the alleged disappearance of the once-substantial Afro-Argentine population of Buenos Aires was at least as much the product of this ideological manoeuvre as it was the result of miscegenation, war and disease. Only recently has Argentina’s status as a white nation begun to be openly contested.

Nevertheless, even if non-whites have been pushed off the historical stage, race remains a pervasive category in Argentine society. The word ‘negro’ is a commonplace in everyday speech, functioning both as a hateful insult and, paradoxically, as a term of endearment. Equally mysteriously, the insult usually alludes to indigenous rather than African ancestry. Typically, these usages are traced to the Peronist era. During his first two terms in office (1946–55), Juan Perón built a powerful working-class movement that challenged the nation’s hierarchies. Perón’s opponents attacked his followers in racial terms, labelling them cabecitas negras (little blackheads)…

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