Mixed Race Studies

A Blaxican’s Journey through Fresno’s Racial Landscape

Tropics Of Meta: historiography for the masses
2017-01-13

Raymond A. Rey

In the summer of 1973, DJ Kool Herc tried something new on the turntables: by extending the beat, breaking and scratching the record, he allowed people to dance longer and entertained them with his rhymes as an MC. After that moment, everything changed. The sound that emerged out of the South Bronx in New York City led to a cultural movement that changed the lives of generations around the world. For Phillip Walker, a mixed race kid from Fresno, California, hip-hop not only served as the soundtrack of his youth, but provided a way to understand his neighborhood and build a multiethnic community.

Phillip Ernest Walker Jr. was born on January 28, 1976 in Fresno, California. He is the son of a Black father from Camden, Tennessee and a Mexican mother from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. While coming from different countries, both families had backgrounds in agriculture and both found their way to the Central San Joaquin Valley and eventually Fresno’s west side. The Walkers from Tennessee migrated to California slowly after uncle James Walker completed his service in the United States Navy. He was stationed for a time at Naval Air Station in Lemoore and upon completing his service in 1967, he convinced his brother Phillip Walker Sr. to join him in the Central Valley. There, the two black men found a lifestyle not too different from what they had experienced in Tennessee: wide open spaces, vast acres of farmland, and a slow pace.  The sons of a skilled mechanic, they set down roots in Fresno.

Meanwhile, the Magdalenos crossed a border and multiple state lines before settling in the Valley. Milagros, Phillip’s mother, was the daughter of Gregoria and Genaro Magdaleno. Genaro was also a mechanic and moved his family across the Southwest in search of work on farm labor camps. The tragic loss of Genaro’s beloved wife led the family to the Central Valley. They arrived in Delano, where Genaro’s brother and sister helped raise his children, and then they moved to Fresno. For a time the Magdalenos settled in the “golden west side,” a place that the Walkers from Tennessee already called home…

Read the entire article here.

A Conversation With Natalie Scenters-Zapico

The American Literary Review
2016-03-27

Sebastian Hasani Paramo, Poetry Contest Coordinator
​
Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A. and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of The Verging Cities, which won the 2016 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas FOCO Award, was featured as a top ten debut of 2015 by Poets and Writers, and named a Must-Read Debut by LitHub (Center For Literary Publishing, 2015). A CantoMundo fellow, her poems have appeared in American Poets, The Believer, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Best American Poetry 2015, and more. She lives with her husband, border rhetorics scholar José Ángel Maldonado, in Salt Lake City.

Scenters-Zapico’s debut collection was recently named a top ten debut by Poets and Writers. Before that, her poetry was featured in American Poets, a publication by The Academy of American Poets, and was introduced by Dana Levin. That issue was my first introduction to her work and I eagerly anticipated her book. Many others have since applauded her aforementioned collection, The Verging Cities. Dana Levin writes that Scenters-Zapico “engages politically and personally charged material…with signature intimacy and fairy-tale strangeness.” In 2015, her book was featured on several top lists and included in Best American Poetry 2015. When I read her collection, I read it eagerly. Her poems in this collection are dark, visceral, haunting, and will echo for days in your mind. Here’s one of the most thought provoking lines in the collection:

I write of the boy I love gone missing, his father found with no teeth
In an abandoned car. Some say you have no right to talk about the dead.
So I talk of them as living, their bodies standing in the street’s bend.

Throughout, she builds and breaks down the boundaries of love, place, identity, and memory in ways that are unexpected, and uses them to great effect to write the political and engage us in the surreal violence of our time. I was fortunate to be able to interview her via email.

Sebastian Hasani Paramo: In reading The Verging Cities, I loved this idea of “verging” and the many forms it took. Your use of the Oxford English Dictionary as a guide for exploring this idea was very incredible. The relationship you created between the speaker and borders seemed to create much tension and conflict. Can you talk about this idea and how it culminates into the title poem?

Natalie Scenters-Zapico: When I started writing about El Paso–Cd. Juárez just about everyone had a reading list for me to take home. There are so many wonderful writers who have come before me who share the same love affair with the border. And yet, the more I read the more I felt that I had a very different relationship with the border than the ones I saw being described. So, I started talking about the border as verging—the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle. When I looked up the term “verge” in the OED I was fascinated by its long history and deeply masculine roots. So I set out to write poems that addressed the verging cities—being beaten by them, escaping them, returning to them. By the time we get to the title poem, “The Verging Cities,” I wanted the reader to get a sense that they are in fact one place, only to turn to that poem and hear two distinct voices, one from each city, in an abusive, violent, incestuous relationship. In it I turn to the history of border crossing into El Paso and the use of Zyklon-B, strip searches, etc. I wanted to point to how the use of these things continues. The past and the present are in constant cycle, there is no beginning or end…

…SHP: What influences were important for you in writing about identity and what things do you say to young writers about feeling more comfortable writing about themselves? As a younger writer, I felt sometimes I didn’t always see myself in the writers I read, but when I started to–I saw many more possibilities for my writing.

NSZ: As a young writer I often made the mistake of looking for myself in the writing of others. As though, only if they mirrored my identity or experience in some way could I learn something from them. This is a huge, embarrassing mistake on my part. Because how could I, with my hybrid, messy, one could argue “pocha” identity see myself in a piece of literature as a complete mirror reflection? This is impossible. I understand that some people have this “mirror” experience in reading the work of others, but I don’t think I ever will. However, when I stopped looking for a reflection and instead looked for refracted moments, or places where I could feel deep empathy, or ways of dealing with and examining trauma that I could apply to myself that is when I felt I could truly learn.

I also have to give a huge shout out to people who are doing great work when it comes to hybrid identity in our field. I’ll never forget when I was nineteen I went to a reading at the University of Texas at El Paso by Rosa Alcalá in which she read from her amazing collection Undocumentaries. Here was this woman who looked like me, who was bilingual like me, who was willing to call herself Latina, and was questioning our traditional notions of that word. I left that reading nearly in tears, because it felt like she was talking to me, it felt like she was making me see the world in a way that both empowered me and made me question my pain. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked Rosa for that moment, but it changed me deeply.

I also love the work that Rosebud Ben-Oni is doing in advocating for people who don’t fit the mold perfectly, people who question the use of strategic essentialism, whose very existence won’t allow for it because it’s just so damn complicated. And of course, I personally am very interested in liminal spaces, and the art that can come from existing in that space. I wrote more about that in my introduction to the liminal spaces interview series I did for The Best American Poetry blog. I think it’s important to recognize that to be Latinx is to be hybrid. There is no such thing as purity in Latinidad, if you even buy into this very American idea of Latinidad…

Read the entire interview here.

The Verging Cities, Poetry

Center For Literary Publishing
2015
80 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-885635-43-3
6.5 x 8.5 inches

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

• Poets and Writers Top Debut Poets 2015
• Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award
• NACCS-Tejas Foco Best Poetry Book of 2015

Ninth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell

From undocumented men named Angel, to angels falling from the sky, Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s gripping debut collection, The Verging Cities, is filled with explorations of immigration and marriage, narco-violence and femicide, and angels in the domestic sphere. Deeply rooted along the US-México border in the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, these poems give a brave new voice to the ways in which international politics affect the individual. Composed in a variety of forms, from sonnet and epithalamium to endnotes and field notes, each poem distills violent stories of narcos, undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and the people who fall in love with each other and their traumas.

The border in Scenters-Zapico’s The Verging Cities exists in a visceral place where the real is (sur)real. In these poems mouths speak suspended from ceilings, numbered metal poles mark the border and lovers’ spines, and cities scream to each other at night through fences that “ooze only silt.” This bold new vision of border life between what has been named the safest city in the United States and the murder capital of the world is in deep conversation with other border poets—Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alberto Ríos, and Luis Alberto Urrea—while establishing itself as a new and haunting interpretation of the border as a verge, the beginning of one thing and the end of another in constant cycle.

Read an excerpt here.

Guest DJ Xenia Rubinos Spins Music From Solange To Ravel

alt.Latino: Latinx Arts and Culture
National Public Radio
2017-01-04

Felix Contreras, Host

Xenia Rubinos plays Guest DJ on this week’s episode of Alt.Latino. Courtesy of the artist

Vocalist Xenia Rubinos ended 2016 with a bang: Her album Black Terry Cat was singled out in best-of-the-year lists by NPR Music, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. That kind of recognition is a major deal for an independent artist with a one-of-a-kind artistic vision.

Alt.Latino first recognized that vision back in 2012, when we featured a track from Rubinos’ first self-released EP, Magic Trix. After we first heard Black Terry Cat earlier this year, we rushed her and her band into our office for a mesmerizing Tiny Desk concert that only hints at the magic of her live show…

Read the entire article and listen to the show here.

The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race [Review]

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Volume 3, Issue 1, (January 2017)
pages 145-146
DOI: 10.1177/2332649216676788

Emily Walton, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Anthony Christian Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. 272 pp. $22.95. ISBN 978-0-8047-9754-2

“For the first time ever, I felt like I was reading about my life,” my Filipina student told me when returning my copy of The Latinos of Asia. Her reaction highlights a major strength of Anthony Ocampo’s new book: It weaves an untold story. Though Filipinos are one of America’s longest-residing ethnic groups, academic and popular discourse provide little understanding of factors shaping their identity. Ocampo highlights the lived experiences of Filipino Americans as they navigate the multiple structures influencing their identities—legacies of colonization by both Spain and the United States, neighborhood environments, and educational institutions—structures that operate differently depending on one’s stage in the life course. On this front, The Latinos of Asia is a considerable achievement. Because of its broad accessibility, Ocampo’s book fills an important gap in our knowledge about an often-overlooked group while also providing a foundation for understanding the “unwritten rules of race.”

Ocampo’s book begins with a historical analysis of four centuries of colonial and dictatorial regimes in the Philippines. Having spent more than 300 years as a colony of Spain, today the Philippines is the only majority Roman Catholic society in Asia, Spanish words are embedded in Filipino languages, and there is a deep cultural focus on family as the center of social life. The subsequent 50 years of U.S. colonial rule resulted in continued subjection to extensive “civilization” projects for “America’s little brown brothers.” Most consequential was the complete overhaul of the educational system, which established English as the primary language of instruction. Independence from colonialism in 1946 was ultimately bittersweet, however, as it ushered in a period of poverty in the Philippines. Centuries of colonial rule had depleted the country’s rich natural resources, facilitated the underdevelopment of the national economy, and created a large pool of educated workers facing limited labor market opportunities. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos stepped in with promises of economic reform and established a labor migration program that funneled skilled Filipino workers throughout the world…

Read the entire review here.

Descendants Of Native American Slaves In New Mexico Emerge From Obscurity

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2016-12-29

John Burnett, Southwest Correspondent, National Desk

Santo Tomas Catholic church in Abiquiu, N.M., is the site of an annual saint’s day celebration in late November that includes cultural elements of the genizaros, the descendants of Native American slaves. John Burnett/NPR

Every year in late November, the New Mexican village of Abiquiu, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe, celebrates the town saint, Santo Tomas. Townfolk file into the beautiful old adobe Catholic church to pay homage its namesake.

But this is no ordinary saint’s day. Dancers at the front of the church are dressed in feathers, face paint and ankle bells that honor their forbears — captive Indian slaves called genizaros.

The dances and chants are Native American, but they don’t take place on a Pueblo Indian reservation. Instead, they’re performed in a genizaro community, one of several scattered across the starkly beautiful high desert of northern New Mexico.

After centuries in the shadows, this group of mixed-race New Mexicans — Hispanic and American Indian — is stepping forward to seek recognition…

Read the entire story here. Download the story (00:05:04) here.

Are Brazilians Latinos? What their identity struggle tells us about race in America

The Conversation
2016-12-20

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Bikini waxes, keratin hair blowouts and all-you-can-eat steakhouses.

In the United States, all three are closely associated with the word “Brazilian.” Yet, although none of these things are linked to Latino identity, one of the questions that journalists frequently ask me is, “Are Brazilians Latinos?” Surprisingly, many Brazilian-Americans also ask me the same question. As one of my students put it, “Because ‘Brazilian’ is not an option in any census, job or college form, you get older and wonder, where do I fit in?”

The confusion is warranted.

It illuminates how U.S. public discourse and policy classifies 57 million people from very different ethnic, racial and national backgrounds into the categories of “Latino” and “Hispanic.” That Brazilians do not quite fit the box enables us to probe the terms “Latino” and “Hispanic” and their implications. This is important at a time when Latinos are reaching 18 percent of the U.S. population…

Read the entire article here.

Afro-Latinos: a vision of Houston’s mixed-race future

The Houtson Chronicle
Houston, Texas
2016-11-19

Olivia P. Tallet, Reporter

Afro-Latinos embody Texas’ mixed-race future

It happens all the time. At the taco truck, Raul Orlando Edwards placed his fajita order: “Señorita, por favor, póngale la cebolla bien cocida” (“I’d like the onions well-done.”)

“Man,” said the African-American behind him in line, “how did you learn to do that?” Meaning: Why, for a black man, is your Spanish so good?

“I’m Latino,” Edwards answered. The director of the Strictly Street Salsa Studio and founder of the Afro-Latino Festival of Houston, he’s a Panamanian-Jamaican immigrant.

The guy stated the obvious: “I thought you were black!”

“I’m blacker than you are!” Edwards replied. And, he says, they laughed.

These days, in both Texas and the U.S. at large, skin color is an ever less reliable indicator of identity. According to a 2015 Pew survey, about a quarter of U.S. Hispanics identify themselves as Afro-Latino. Like Edwards, the vast majority (70 percent) are foreign-born.

Afro-Latinos generally are descendants of African slaves brought to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most are biracial or multiracial. Being Afro-Latino, says Alain Lawo-Sukam, professor of Hispanic and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University, is less about skin color than about identity and a sense of belonging.

By their very existence, Afro-Latinos challenge the traditional “one-drop” view of race in the United States: the idea that one drop of African blood makes a person black. Afro-Latinos like Edwards aren’t simply black, white or Hispanic. They’re a combination – and as such, a vision of the United States’ racially and ethnically complex future. They’re a minority inside a minority; a melting pot within the melting pot…

Read the entire article here.

Edit desk: Passing is a choice

The Brown and White: All The Lehigh news first since 1894
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
2016-11-29

Gaby Morera, Managing Editor

Once I was complaining about the challenges of being Hispanic in America to a friend of mine.

I can’t even remember what I was saying, but I remember the person’s response clearly. She said, “Do you think you make it harder on yourself because you call attention to the fact that you’re Hispanic?”

I find that question problematic for many reasons. But in that moment, I ignored it. I didn’t say anything, and when I got home I thought to myself, “How do I call attention to the fact that I’m Hispanic? And why would that be a bad thing?”…

Read the entire article here.

Meet Shereen Marisol Meraji, A Latina Journalist Tackling Race & Idendity Through Podcasting

Latina
2016-11-23

Raquel Reichard, Politics & Culture Editor

Hugo Rojo

With Donald Trump, a candidate who ran on racism, xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia and a disdain for journalists, heading to the White House, reports by and about the communities most impacted by the president-elect’s rhetoric and proposals are ever-important, making Shereen Marisol Meraji a periodista you need to know.

The Cali-based Puerto Rican-Iranian is a journalist reporting on race for NPR’s Code Switch podcast. Each week, Meraji and her team tackle issues of race, ethnicity and identity that are impacting our country as a whole.

The mixed-race mujer, who prides herself on being vocal, opinionated and informed, approaches these topics from her own intersections as a woman, bi-cultural Latina and daughter of a Muslim immigrant father.

Ahead, the Persian-Rican opens up about her work, why she focuses on race and identity, and the need for nuanced and uncomfortable discussions on these topics in the media and at the dinner table…

…Why are issues of race particularly important to you, Shereen the human, rather than Shereen the journalist-podcaster?

For me, the human, I think it’s because of my mixed background. I never felt like I belonged. I realized, Oh my God! Not only is my mixed identity not represented anywhere, but not even my mom’s or dad’s 100 percent identities are represented. I’m not seeing any stories of what I’m interested in, what I do or who I am, and those stories are important. Never having really belonged, being on the margins while observing everything, that’s made me a natural journalist – not quite a part of something, always observing…

Read the entire interview here.