Mixed Race Studies

Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?

Sociological Images: Inspiring Sociological Imaginations Everywhere
2014-03-29

Claude S. Fischer, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

One may well wonder where the term “Hispanic,” and for that matter, “Latino,” came from. The press and pundits are all abuzz about the Hispanic vote, Hispanic organizations, and Hispanic cultural influences. Back in the mid-twentieth century, however, they wrote about Mexicans or Puerto Ricans or Guatemalans, not about Hispanics. Of course, people of Latin American origin have become far more numerous in the United States since then and the immigration itself brings more attention. Nonetheless, the labels have changed. Starting in the 1970s, the media rapidly adopted the “pan-ethnic” term Hispanic, and to a lesser degree, Latino, and slowed down their use of specific national labels.* So did, organizations, agencies, businesses, and “Hispanics” themselves.

As recounted in her important new book, Making Hispanics, sociologist (and my colleague) G. Cristina Mora tells the story of how people as diverse as Cuban-born businessmen in Miami, undocumented Mexican farm workers in California, and third-generation part-Puerto Ricans in New York who do not even understand Spanish were brought together into one social category: Hispanic-Americans…

Read the entire article here.

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

University of Chicago Press
March 2014
256 pages
1 halftone, 5 line drawings, 3 tables
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226033662
Paper ISBN: 9780226033839
E-book ISBN: 9780226033976

G. Cristina Mora, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and ’80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Organizations
• Introduction: Making Hispanics: Classification and the Politics of Ambiguity
• One: Civil Rights, Brown Power, and the “Spanish-Speaking” Vote: The Development of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People
• Two: The Rise of a Hispanic Lobby: The National Council of La Raza
• Three: “The Toughest Question”: The US Census Bureau and the Making of Hispanic Data
• Four: Broadcasting Panethnicity: Univision and the Rise of Hispanic Television
• Conclusion: The Hispanic Category and the Development of a New Identity Politics in America
• Notes
• Index

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6

Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College

• Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
• 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
• Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
• Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
  • Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
  • Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
  • Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
• Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
  • Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
  • Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
• Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
  • Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
  • Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
  • Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
• Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Read an excerpt here.

Whiteness Without Complex?

Anthropology While White
2014-03-06

Sarah Abel, Marie Curie Fellow
EUROTAST

A couple of weeks ago I attended an event called ‘Color Without Complex‘, featuring a public conversation between image activist Michaela Angela Davis and ethnographer and publisher Dr. Yaba Blay. The discussion revolved around Blay’s recent book and accompanying exhibition, (1)ne Drop, which looks at the faces and stories of individuals who identify as black, but do not necessarily fit with common prototypes of blackness in the US. By focusing on light-skinned individuals existing at the very outer periphery of blackness, the project tests the perceptual limitations and the social implications of the one drop rule in today’s post-segregation America – a country in which contemporary notions and benchmarks of ‘race’ are still rooted in cultural and legal traditions established under slavery, colonialism and Jim Crow segregation.

The theme up for debate was colourism, a hot internet topic over the past nine months in particular, and the object of a number of recent documentaries, chat shows and news articles in the US. While social prejudice against people ‘of colour’ – as well as the pathological tendency of the Western media to showcase whiteness not only as the norm, but also as virtually the sole domain of beauty – are perhaps two of the most visible social legacies of colonialism throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, these recent debates are bringing to light skin colour prejudices within the black community. Whereas, historically, light coloured skin was prized and aspired to throughout the Americas as a path to social ascension and a means of escaping the stigma of blackness, in recent decades pan-Africanism and a multitude of black pride initiatives have caused a shift towards celebrating and embracing blackness as embodied by a dark-skinned, African ideal. Meanwhile, in some cases light-skinned blacks have become the target of double-edged prejudice: stigmatised by whites for being black, and ostracised by blacks for apparently aspiring to be white…

…And yet, I think it is worth mentioning that there was also a significant minority of white women among the audience who turned up to listen to the debate. Looking around the room, I wondered what had brought them there, like me, to listen from the sidelines into a conversation to which we were not party. In the Q&A session at the end, the (white) woman sat in front of me, holding hands tightly with her (black) husband, asked a question about healing through empathy [at 00:45:43]. Some minutes later, a young (white) woman a few rows further down asked the following question [at 01:05:05]:

“How would you defend, or maybe not necessarily defend, but how would you address a woman who is of colour, but appears to look as white as I do? How would you talk to her or address to her what her place is in relation to colourism, for example? How does colourism apply to her, because she looks white but she is a person of colour, and identifies with that?”…

Read the entire article here.

Empire, Race, and the Debate over the Indian Marriage Market in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 2014
pages 427-454
DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2014.0004

John C. Leffel, Assistant Professor of English
State University of New York, Cortland

In the late eighteenth century, East India Company stations were characterized as marriage “bazaars” in which Englishwomen were traded like any other merchandise. Women at the centre of such trafficking were depicted as complicit in their own commodification. In the face of such pervasive negative stereotyping, women returning to Britain after time spent on the subcontinent often found themselves ridiculed and shunned. In this article, I explore how author Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) responded to this potent imperial stigma. She absorbed and perpetuated popular negative stereotypes regarding these matrimonial “speculators” in her own writing, but in her second novel, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), she subtly recalibrated her stance, in ways that illuminate the changing tenor of Anglo-Indian social, political, and sexual relations. By the turn of the nineteenth century, burgeoning discourses of racial difference and the perceived threat of sexual “miscegenation” in the empire became thoroughly entwined with debates regarding the “Indian marriage market” and female emigration.

Race Reporting Among Hispanics: 2010

United States Census Bureau
Population Division
Washington, D.C. 20233
Working Paper No.102
March 2014

Merarys Ríos

Fabián Romero

Roberto Ramírez

Since the release of the 2010 Census Race and Hispanic Origin Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) report in August 2012, much has been written about the AQE results (Compton et al., 2012; Hill and Bentley, 2013; Stokes et al., 2012). Several recommendations were made based on the AQE findings; one of which was to further test a combined race and Hispanic origin question. Recently, numerous articles and blogs supporting or arguing against the use of combined or separate race and ethnicity questions have made national headlines (El Nasser, 2013); particularly, about the Census Bureau’s recommendation to continue testing a combined question during the 2020 Census testing cycle (Compton et al., 2012). One concern, largely stemming from the Latino community, is the potential negative impact on race reporting among the Hispanic or Latino population (e.g., the undercounting of ‘Afro-Latinos’) if a new combined question is approved for the 2020 Census. In response to these concerns, the Census Bureau developed supplemental analysis from the AQE, specifically examining differences in race distributions by Hispanic origin when alternative questions were tested (Hill and Bentley, 2013). The results from this study are discussed later in this paper.

The Census Bureau is committed to improving the validity and reliability of census data, and over the last few decades, many census studies have examined race reporting among Hispanics (Stokes et al., 2012; Ennis et al., 2011; Martin, 2002; U.S. Census Bureau, 1996 and 1997). However, none examined race reporting among self-reported Hispanics in the decennial census. In this analysis, self-reported Hispanics are defined as those whose origin was not imputed.

Read the entire paper here.

Mixed Race Related Sessions at ACPA 2014

American College Personnel Association
2014 Annual Convenetion
Indianapolis, Indiana
2014-03-30 through 2014-04-02

574: Coloring Outside the Lines: How to Advocate for Multiracial Students on the College Campus
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 10:30-11:30 CDT (Local Time)
Location: Indiana Convention Center, 141

Program Presenter:

Jessica Harris
Indiana University

Additional Presenter

Jordan West
The Pennsylvania State University

Utilizing Milem, Chang, and Antonio’s (2005) campus climate framework and existing literature, this session explores the racialized experiences of multiracial students on the college campus. Systemic factors that create challenges for the growing population of multiracial students in higher education are explored. Additionally, to create praxis, we offer suggestions on how participants can support and advocate for multiracial students within the campus climate.

Research Paper Session #11
723 Race in the College Experience
Indianapolis Marriott Downtown – Indiana D
Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 15:00-16:15 CDT (Local Time)

Discussant:

Nick Bowman
Bowling Green State University (Ohio)

Chair: Claire Gonyo

Mixed Messages: The Role of Multiraciality in Students’ Racial Claims

Marc P. Johnston
The Ohio State University

Prema Chaudhari
University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania)

Race in College Students’ Leadership Development: A Longitudinal Assessment

Cassie L Barnhardt
University of Iowa

Jiajun Liu
University of Iowa

Wei Lin Chen
University of Iowa

Importance of American Indian/Alaskan Native Cultural/Resource Centers

Bianica Yellowhair
Michigan State University

759: Where Do I Fit?: Serving and Supporting Multiracial College Students
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI); Student Learning and Development
Location: Indianapolis Marriott
Downtown, Indiana F
Tuesday, 2014-04-01, 16:30-17:45 CDT (Local Time)

Program Presenter:

Jennifer B. Chapman
CSU Channel Islands

Additional Presenter:

Janson Chapman
CSU Channel Islands

For more information, click here.

Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

University of Illinois Press
December 2011
168 pages
6 x 9 in.
4 black & white photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03657-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-252-09361-6

Jacqueline A. McLeod, Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies
Metropolitan State College of Denver

The trailblazing work of the first African American woman judge

This long overdue biography of the nation’s first African American woman judge elevates Jane Matilda Bolin to her rightful place in American history as an activist, integrationist, jurist, and outspoken public figure in the political and professional milieu of New York City before the onset of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Bolin was appointed to New York City’s domestic relations court in 1939 for the first of four ten-year terms. When she retired in 1978, her career had extended well beyond the courtroom. Drawing on archival materials as well as a meeting with Bolin in 2002, historian Jacqueline A. McLeod reveals how Bolin parlayed her judicial position to impact significant reforms of the legal and social service system in New York.

Beginning with Bolin’s childhood and educational experiences at Wellesley and Yale, Daughter of the Empire State chronicles Bolin’s relatively quick rise through the ranks of a profession that routinely excluded both women and African Americans. Deftly situating Bolin’s experiences within the history of black women lawyers and the historical context of high-achieving black New Englanders, McLeod offers a multi-layered analysis of black women’s professionalization in a segregated America.

Linking Bolin’s activist leanings and integrationist zeal to her involvement in the NAACP, McLeod analyzes Bolin’s involvement at the local level as well as her tenure on the organization’s national board of directors. An outspoken critic of the discriminatory practices of New York City’s probation department and juvenile placement facilities, Bolin also co-founded, with Eleanor Roosevelt, the Wiltwyck School for boys in upstate New York and campaigned to transform the Domestic Relations Court with her judicial colleagues. McLeod’s careful and highly readable account of these accomplishments inscribes Bolin onto the roster of important social reformers and early civil rights trailblazers.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Her Standing in Poughkeepsie: Family Lineage and Legacy
• 2. On Her Own: The Years at Wellesley and Yale
• 3. Politics of Preparation: The Making of the Nation’s First African American Woman Judge
• 4. Politics of Practice: An African American Woman Judge on the Domestic Relations Court
• 5. Speaking Truth to Power: A View from the Benchof Judge Jane Bolin
• 6. Persona Non Grata: Jane Bolin and the NAACP, 1931–50
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index

When it Comes to Diversity, Who Counts?

The Huffington Post
The Blog
2014-03-26

Martha S. Jones, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

When talking diversity at colleges and universities, the numbers count. Still, when it comes to mixed-race students, too often they do not count at all. This is a missed opportunity. University leaders rely upon statistics for a measure of where students of color stand on campus. Data on those who self-identify as Black, Latino and Native American are said to reflect how well diversity goals are being met. What about those who check more than one box? Their numbers and their contributions to campus diversity are largely overlooked.

On my campus, the University of Michigan, numbers matter. This past fall, student activists set off a debate. Their movement began with a Twitter speak-out known by its hashtag #BBUM, Being Black at the University of Michigan. The declining number of Black students has been much discussed, and with good reason. Black students were 7.8 percent of the student body in 2004. Ten years later, their number has dropped to 4.8 percent. As we respond to this challenge, administrators, faculty, staff and students all recognize that the numbers reflect a diminishment in campus diversity. And as student testimony makes plain, there is a correlation between dropping enrollments and the increasing marginalization of Black students.

At Michigan, we also count mixed-race students. Since 2010, students have had the opportunity to check more than one box when reporting their race. The numbers have remained steady. 3.3 percent of the university’s 37,000 students report that they are mixed-race. This new demographic parallels what we know from the United States census. There, in the year 2000, respondents were given the option of checking more than one box for the first time. By 2010, over 9 million people self-identified as more than one race, nearly three percent of the population. By these numbers mixed-race people have become visible…

Read the entire article here.

Jean Toomer and Cultural Pluralism

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Race, Multiraciality, Class & Solidarity
2014-03-21

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

[This short paper was originally written for “Jean Toomer and Politics,” a Special Session Roundtable at the 2012 MLA Conference in Seattle. I have made a few edits.]

In disagreeing with Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr., I will not directly critique their support and rhetorical strategies. Instead, I will put forth my own interpretation of Toomer’s political vision. Toomer saw literature as his means to address socioeconomic inequalities, transform himself, and influence people in a manner that would advance the promise of democracy in America. We should ask then, not whether he identified as black or white, but what his political vision is, what it is not, and what it entails. Specifically, I argue that his political vision conflicts with the cultural pluralisms of his mentors, Alain Locke and Waldo Frank, and anticipates some postethnic, cosmopolitan, and multiracial perspectives that have emerged in recent history in strong opposition to the limitations and problems of multiculturalism…

Read the entire paper here.