Mixed Race Studies

Creating and Contesting Community: Indians and Afromestizos in the Late-Colonial Tierra Caliente of Guerrero, Mexico
 
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2006
E-ISSN: 1532-5768
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2006.0030

Andrew B. Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1783 the parish priest of Tetela del Río, Br. don Nicolás Vásquez, rested in the hamlet (cuadrilla) of Cacalotepeque as he prepared to trek back to his parish seat. Father Vásquez had arrived only an hour earlier to minister to the ailing daughter of Capitán Luis de la Cruz, the mulato leader of the settlement. Cacalotepeque was but one of a number of informal communities scattered across the mid-Balsas River Valley of western Mexico. Consisting mostly of mulato farmers, the hamlet was neither recognized by the colonial state as an Indian pueblo nor held as a private estate. The land it occupied did not belong to its inhabitants, but rather comprised part of the contested territorial limits of two rival Indian pueblos, Tetela and Apaxtla, situated roughly equidistant from both. Much as Afromestizos lacked a stable and recognized position within colonial racial hierarchies, a semi-autonomous Afromestizo community likewise confronted a precarious existence. This reality was made abundantly clear to Father Vásquez on that fateful afternoon. As he conversed with the hamlet’s residents, some sixty indigenous villagers from Apaxtla approached on horseback. Several local men informed Vásquez that the villagers had arrived to steal away the cuadrilla’s corn, inducing…

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Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

Duke University Press
2009
320 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4401-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4420-9

Edited by:

Matthew D. O’Hara, Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Santa Cruz

Andrew Fisher, Associate Professor of History
Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands.

Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Irene Silverblatt
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Racial Identities and Their Interpreters in Colonial Latin America / Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara
• 1. Aristocracy on the Auction Block: Race, Lords, and the Perpetuity Controversy of Sixteenth-Century Peru / Jeremy Mumford
• 2. A Market of Identities: Women, Trade, and Ethnic Labels in Colonial Potosí­ / Jane E. Mangan
• 3. Legally Indian: Inquisitorial Readings of Indigenous Identity in New Spain / David Tavárez
• 4. The Many Faces of Colonialism in Two Iberoamerican Borderlands: Northern New Spain and the Eastern Lowlands of Charcas / Cynthia Radding
• 5. Humble Slaves and Loyal Vassals: Free Africans and Their Descendents in Eighteenth-Century Minas Gerais, Brazil / Mariana L. R. Dantas
• 6. Purchasing Whiteness: Conversations of the Essence of Parso-ness and Mulatto-ness at the End of Empire / Ann Twinam
• 7. Patricians and Plebians in Late Colonial Charcas: Identity, Representation, and Colonialism / Sergio Serulnikov
• 8. Conjuring Identities: Race, Nativeness, Local Citizenship, and Royal Slavery on an Imperial Frontier (Revisiting El Cobre, Cuba) / María Elena Díaz
• 9. Indigenous Citizenship: Liberalism, Political Participation, and Ethic Identity in Post-Independence Oaxaca and Yucatán / Karen D. Caplan
• Conclusion / R. Douglas Cope
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

The Tiger Woods phenomenon: a note on biracial identity

The Social Science Journal
Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2001
Pages 333-336
DOI: 10.1016/S0362-3319(01)00118-5

Ronald E. Hall, Professor of Social Work
Michigan State University

Traditional race based models exclude the unique developmental dynamics of biracial Americans such as “Tiger” Woods. Conversely, a substantial portion of the scholarly literature emphasizes social experience rather than physiological attributes as the keystone to individual identity development. In the aftermath biracial Americans are conflicted. In an effort to ensure their psychic health social scientist scholars and practitioners must inculcate a human development across the life span model to accommodate the nation’s increasing level of racial and cultural miscegenation.

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Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process

University of Nebraska Press
2004
355 pages
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8321-3
hardback ISBN: 978-0-8032-3226-6

Mark Edwin Miller, Associate Professor of History
Southern Utah University

The Federal Acknowledgment Process (FAP) is one of the most important and contentious issues facing Native Americans today. A complicated system of criteria and procedures, the FAP is utilized by federal officials to determine whether a Native community qualifies for federal recognition by the United States government. In Forgotten Tribes, Mark Edwin Miller offers a balanced and detailed look at the origins, procedures, and assumptions governing the FAP. His work examines the FAP through the prism of four previously unrecognized tribal communities and their battles to gain indigenous rights under federal law.

Based on a wealth of interviews and original research, Forgotten Tribes features the first in-depth history and overview of the FAP and sheds light on this controversial Native identification policy involving state power over Native peoples and tribal sovereignty.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Adrift with the Indian Office: The Historical Development of Tribal Acknowledgment Policy, 1776-–1978
• 2. Building an Edifice: The BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process, 1978–-2002
• 3. Bypassing the Bureau: The Pascua Yaquis’ Quest for Legislative Tribal Recognition
• 4. Sometimes Salvation: The Death Valley Timbisha Shoshones of California and the BIA’s Federal Acknowledgment Process
• 5. A Matter of Visibility: The United Houma Nation’s Struggle for Tribal Acknowledgment
• 6. From Playing Indian to Playing Slots: Gaming, Tribal Recognition, and the Tiguas of El Paso, Texas
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

It was in the early 1990s that the small Mashantucket Pequot Tribe of Connecticut burst upon the national scene, indelibly marking popular perceptions of once unacknowledged Indian tribes in the public conscious. After struggling for centuries without federal tribal status, the Pequots under Richard “Skip” Hayward dashed with aplomb into the twenty-first century, leading the march toward self-suf ciency and self-government through their phenomenally successful Foxwoods Casino complex situated midway between New York City and Boston. Making one billion dollars annually by the end of the decade, Foxwoods was the most lucrative gambling Mecca in the United States, drawing widespread attention up and down the East Coast. A decade earlier when the tribe had secured federal acknowledgment through an act of Congress in 1983, the development had raised few eyebrows, however, causing more relief than alarm because it settled a lengthy and bitter land dispute between the Pequots and neighboring property owners. Some observers undoubtedly felt that the obscure tribe, once widely believed to be extinct, had finally gotten its revenge for past injustices. Other locals simply were happy to have a place to gamble so close to their homes, cheering the Pequots for making this possible and perhaps being a little amused by the whole unlikely scenario. Questions soon arose, however, when the group possessing Indian, European, and African ancestry grew increasingly rich and powerful, with its gambling enterprise shattering the once bucolic Connecticut countryside with crowds, traffic jams, and high-rise development. Angered by their suddenly powerful neighbor, many locals began to ask: Who were these people that variously appeared white, Indian, black, or something in-between? If they looked and lived much like their well-to-do neighbors, was the group really an Indian tribe at all? Clearly, tribal acknowledgment had given the Pequots all the bene ts of tribal status and sovereignty. But it had not allowed them to exist in obscurity as before. Every year during the 1990s tensions and recriminations grew. When a book emerged claiming that the Pequots may have tricked the federal government into believing they were an Indian tribe, local leaders clamored to have their status overturned. By 2000 the continuing deluge of press coverage ensured that the Mashantucket Pequots became the dominant face of recently acknowledged Indian tribes in the United States.

At the same time, in stark contrast to the glitz and wealth of the Pequots stood a struggling band of Shoshones in California. A world away from Connecticut in the desert sands of Death Valley National Park, the Timbisha Shoshone Indians also existed without federal acknowledgment until the early 1980s. The Shoshones were unlike the Pequots at first glance, however, and few non-Indians doubted that the tiny Timbisha group was Indian. In the late 1970s the Shoshones were struggling against the National Park Service’s efforts to evict them from their ancestral homeland, clinging to their crumbling adobe casitas and modest trailers that shifting sand dunes threatened to swallow at any moment. Decades earlier the Park Service had corralled them into a single village to make room for its luxury hotels, golf course, and RV resort to cater to tourists hoping to escape the northern winters or recapture the “Wild West” for a weekend. Like the Pequots, the Timbisha Shoshones also secured acknowledgment in 1983, but this new status provided few of the fringe benefits afforded the Connecticut tribe. In 2000 the band still lacked a federal reservation and lived in poor housing much like it had before recognition. The Timbisha Shoshones presented another face of once unacknowledged Indian peoples in the modern United States. The experience of the over two hundred other unacknowledged groups likely lies somewhere in between.

Issues

This work is about the process of acknowledging Indian tribes, whether accomplished through the administrative channels of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or through Congress.  At its core it is about modern Indian identity: how the state identifies and legitimizes tribes and how recognized tribes, non-Indian scholars, and the American public perceive Indians. Along the way it provides a rare glimpse into Indian and non-Indian representations of “Indianness” and tribalism. These pages also present the histories of four unacknowledged tribal groups viewed through the prism of their efforts to gain federal recognition. Federal tribal acknowledgment or recognition is one of the most significant developments in Indian policy in the post–World War II era, yet is also one of the most acrimonious methods of sorting out and defining Indianness in the United States. As the list of over two hundred groups seeking to secure federal tribal status grows each year, federal acknowledgment policy has become increasingly controversial and contested terrain for determining Indian authenticity.

Tribal recognition is contentious precisely because it involves definitions of what constitutes an Indian tribe,who can lay claim to being an Indian, and what factors should be paramount in the process of identifying Indian tribes. Akin to the recognition of foreign governments, federal tribal acknowledgment is highly valued because it establishes a “government-to-government” relationship between the federal government and an Indian group. Federal status thus allows a newly recognized federal tribe the power to exercise sovereignty and participate in federal Indian programs emanating from the BIA and the Indian Health Service. It also affects issues as diverse as Indian self-government, health care, Native American cultural repatriation, Indian gaming, and public lands held by the National Park Service and other federal agencies. Beyond these facts the acknowledgment process can determine the life or death of struggling groups while providing unacknowledged tribes outside validation of their racial and cultural identity as Indians…

…From the start local whites questioned whether these groups were indeed tribes and expressed doubts about their Indian identity. To the eastern landowners, most of these groups “looked” variously white, black, Indian, or something in between. They clearly did not fit the image of the horseriding, buffalo-hunting Indians they had seen in Hollywood westerns. In court the town attorneys proceeded to impugn the cultural and tribal integrity of these people, claiming that the groups had long ago abandoned their tribal organizations and assimilated into American society and culture. Despite the Wampanoags’ assertions that the land on Martha’s Vineyard was sacred to their people and that they maintained a vibrant tribal organization, town lawyers echoed a popular belief that the Wampanoags——if they were a group at all——were assimilated individuals hoping to get rich off land claims. Because the rights asserted were group rights, the hopes of the Martha’s Vineyard Indians and others ultimately rested on whether they were still an Indian “tribal” entity…

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Origin, Development and Maintenance of a Louisiana Mixed-Blood Community: The Ethnohistory of the Freejacks of the First Ward Settlement

Ethnohistory
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring, 1979)
pages 177-192

Darrell A. Posey
Georgia State University

The Fifth Ward Settlement is composed of approximately 2,500 mixed-blood (Black, While and Indian) inhabitants called “Freejacks.” The Settlement has developed as a result of various social, racial and legal distinctions that have altered the nature of the Settlement over its 150 year history. The origins and early development of the community are rooted in racial oppression, geographical isolation and cultural diversity. Today most of the restrictive racial barriers are removed, yet the Freejacks themselves seek to maintain boundaries to delineate the Settlement and preserve a distinctive identity.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of a single mixed-blood community, the Fifth Ward Settlement, to examine the changing social and political forces that have moulded the modem ethnically distinct group. The myth that mixed-blood groups are homogenous in origin is refuted and sub-group leadership patterns within the community are traced to historical heterogeneity. The community is seen as one delineated and characterized by established racial models, yet existent today as the result of various self-maintenance strategies to establish ethnic boundaries and preserve an idealized cultural and historical tradition.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is a mixed-blood community composed of approximately 2,500 individuals known in the area as “Freejacks,” who are said to be a racial mixture of Black, White, and Indian. The name “Freejack” is derogatory because of its connotations of racial mixture and is abhorred by residents of the Settlement. Freejacks claim to be White and vehemently deny racial mixture.

The Fifth Ward Settlement is located in Louisiana near the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain (Fig. 1). The Settlement is bounded to the west and east by two White communities known as Germantown and Whiteville; it is bordered to the north by swamp and to the south by timberland. Two Black communities are found within the limits of the Settlement, one on the eastern…

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The Mixed Blood in Polynesia

The Journal of the Polynesian Society
Volume 58, Number 2 (June, 1949)
pages 51-57

Ernest Beaglehole
Victoria University College

This paper was prepared as a contribution to a symposium on the position and problems of peoples of mixed blood in the Pacific area held during the Seventh Pacific Science Congress, February, 1949. Other contributors to the symposium discussed the situation in New Zealand and Hawaii. For this reason, though these areas are part of Polynesia, the position of the Maori and Hawaiian mixed bloods are not considered in the present context.

Over the past century and a half race-mixture has been fairly continuous in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific. From the time of their discovery most islands have carried a numerically small alien population which has mixed with the island population. A characteristic frontier society during this period, the alien elements were initially European men—runaway sailors, beachcombers, traders. Only the missionaries brought their wives. The other Europeans mated freely with the hospitable Polynesian islanders. Later intrusive elements were Asiatics, Indians, a few Negroes and a fewT Japanese. With the exception of the Indians, these later-comers also mixed with the indigenous inhabitants. The position today, therefore, is that the population of Polynesia consists of an unknown number of pure-blood Polynesians and an equally unknown number of mixed-bloods. Keesing is of the opinion that at least one-ninth to one-tenth of those who claim pure Polynesian ancestry today are of mixed heredity, and of those who claim to be non-natives, a proportion certainly are of mixed blood.

The number of mixed bloods in Polynesia is difficult to calculate with any accuracy for two reasons. One is the fact that over a century and a half of contact, distant inter-marriages of several generations ago may well have been forgotten, or the intermixture of European blood may have come from passing liaisons which were forgotten as readily…

A Mestizo and Tropical Country: The Creation of the Official Image of Independent Brazil

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80 (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 25-42

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

The objective of this article is to consider how Brazil, in the first official images of it as a nation, was characterized by symbols that reflected its singularity and universality: a tropical monarchy with representations of indigenous peoples, flora and fauna mixed with the traditional elements of European monarchies. This makes use of original iconographic sources and texts emblematic of the Brazilian imperial period, which stretched from 1822 to 1889. There are hundreds of images, texts, coins, coats of arms, etc., that picture the country from the standpoint of miscegenation, while at the same time exposing a hierarchy of peoples: in a nation where 90 per cent of the population were African slaves, the selected national representation emphasized the environment of Brazil and its indigenous peoples.

In 1838, sixteen years after the political independence of Brazil, a new institution was created—the IHGB (Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute)—dedicated to the drafting of a new historical agenda, one more clearly identified with the young country now emancipated from its former Portuguese metropolis. Even more interesting was its first open competition, organized in 1844, whose title, ‘How to write the History of Brazil’, already revealed the institution’s intentions. First prize went to the acclaimed German scientist Karl von Martius, who advocated the idea that the country should define itself through its unrivalled mix of peoples and colours: ‘The focal point for the historian ought to be to show how, in the development of Brazil, established conditions are to be found for the perfecting of the three human races, placed here side by side in a manner hitherto unknown’. Drawing upon the metaphor of the Portuguese heritage as a powerful river that should ‘absorb the streams of the races India and Ethiopica’, he envisaged the emergence of a Brazil characterized by its unique miscegenation. It is no accident that the then recently installed Brazilian monarchy invested so much in a tropical symbology that mixed the traditional elements of European monarchies with some indigenous peoples and a few Blacks, and included a lot of fruit. Though it was complicated to highlight the Black participation because of the memory of slavery, this did not prevent the royalty from painting a picture of a country characterized by its own distinct racial colouration.

And thus was provided a model through which to think ‘and invent’ a local history, one formed from the view of the foreigner and the good old rigmarole of the three races. The Empire was prodigious in the production of a series of official images linking the State with representations of a miscegenated nation. From the first engraving produced by the independent country—the ‘Stage Curtain’, painted by the French Neo-Classic artist Debret in 1822—up to the paintings celebrating abolition in 1888, the Empire took great care to produce a well-woven representation. There are hundreds of images, texts, coins, coats of arms, etc., that picture the country from the standpoint of miscegenation as much as they expose a hierarchy: in a nation where 90 per cent of the population were African slaves, the selected national representation emphasized nature and the indigenous peoples…

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‘Pretos’ and ‘Pardos’ between the Cross and the Sword: Racial Categories in Seventeenth Century Brazil

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 80 (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
pages 43-55

Hebe Mattos, Professor of History and Coordinator of the LABHOI/UFF Memory of Slavery Oral History Project
University Federal Fluminense, Brazil

This paper discusses the meanings of ‘race’ in the Portuguese empire on the basis of two historical case studies. The twin processes of miscegenation, in the biological sense, and cultural intermixing has engendered intermediate strata that have long stimulated the imagination of historians. In Brazilian historiography, considerable emphasis has been given to the invention of the ‘mulato’, as proposed by Alencastro (2000, 345-356), and the ethnogenesis of the ‘pardo’ in Portuguese America, as described in an article by Schwartz (1996). Compared to these interpretations of the emergence of these intermediate categories in Portuguese America, the two cases presented here appear to suggest a more central role for the early demographic impact of access to manumission in colonial society and the possibilities for social mobility among the free peoples of African descent.

Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire

Mixing between Europeans and Africans in the Portuguese Empire produced hierarchical categories for racial gradations during the seventeenth century. Only in this period were the categories ‘mulato’ and ‘pardo’ included in the regulations for Purity of Blood (Estatutos de Pureza de Sangue), which determined who could have access to the same honours and privileges that the old Christian Portuguese received. From the seventeenth century onwards, those regulations stipulated that ‘no one of the race of Jew, Moor or Mulato’ (Raça alguma de Judeu, Mouro ou Mulato) was eligible to receive certain honours and privileges from the crown (Carneiro 1988, cap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520).

At least up to the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of the Portuguese empire was based on a corporativist conception of society and power. Society was considered an integrated organism, with a natural order and hierarchy created by divine will. The king, as the head of this body, was responsible for distributing favours according to the functions and privileges of each of its members, thereby exercising justice in the name of God. According to Xavier and Hespanha (1993, 130), ‘from a social point of view, corporativism contributes to the image of a strictly hierarchical society, because in a naturally ordered society, the irreducibility of social functions leads to the irreducibility of legal and institutional statutes’.  In historical reality, the continuous expansion of Portuguese society in the colonial period tended to create a myriad of subdivisions and classifications within the traditional representation of the three medieval orders (clergy, nobility and the common people), by expanding the nobility and its privileges, redefining functions, and subdividing the common people into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ states (the latter included the ofícios mecânicos, or manual trades).

This ongoing transformation was not limited to territory in Europe, but had ramifications throughout a vast empire, which expanded in the name of spreading the Catholic faith. In this process of contact with other peoples, legal concepts were developed to deal with the new groups who converted to Catholicism and thus integrated into the body of the empire. Since at least the fifteenth century, in addition to restrictions on those who practiced the ‘manual trades’, the concept of cleanliness of blood determined differentiations among the common people and limited the expansion of the nobility, imposing a range of restrictions on the descendants of Jews, Moors and Gypsies. The restrictions based on the ‘purity of blood statutes’, enacted later in Portugal than in Spain, date back to the Ordenações Afonsinas of 1446-7 (Carneiro 1988, chap. 2; Lahon 2001, 516-520)…

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The Negro Problem: Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View by M. S. Evans; The Mulatto in the United States, Including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races throughout the World by E. B. Reuter Review by: Ellsworth Huntington

Geographical Review
Volume 11, Number 2 (April, 1921)
pages 311-313

Ellsworth Huntington, Professor of Geography
Yale University

The Negro Problem

M. S. EVANS. Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View. xii and 299 pp.; map, bibliogr., index. Longmans, Green & Co., London and New York, 1915. $2.25. 9 x 6 inches.

E. B. REUTER. The Mulatto in the United States, including a Study of the Role of Mixed-Blood Races throughout the World. 417 pp.; indexes. Richard G. Badger, Boston, 1918. $2.50. 8 x 5 inches.

Many people have written on the problem of the negro, but it is doubtful whether anyone has written with a truer balance than Mr. Evans. His “Black and White in South-East Africa” is the standard book on the problem in Africa, and the present book on the United States is equally good. According to Mr. Evans, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line.” His method of solving it is first that the white man should really know the negro…

…In the Geographical Review for October last there appeared a review of Houghton’s book on the Metis or French-Indian half-breeds. The gist of the book was that the “Indians” who have distinguished themselves have been almost wholly half-breeds. By far the best results have come from intermarriages of scions of the French nobility with the daughters of chiefs. In other words heredity is of dominant importance. It is most interesting to find that in Mr. Reuter’s book on the mulatto in the United States the general conclusion is the same. The method, however, is so much more exact than in any previous study of this subject that the book may almost be considered the final word.

The first part of Mr. Reuter’s book is a straightforward account of the races of mixed blood in all parts of the world and at all times. This is interesting and valuable for reference but contains little that is new. Then follows a discussion of types of mulattoes or mixed races and of their position as the key to the race problem. This leads to the main problem of racial intermixture in the United States. First an attempt is made to estimate the actual number of the mixed types who stand between whites and negroes. For the country as a whole about a fifth of all those classed as negroes are mulattoes, but this proportion varies, being least in the South and greatest in the North and West where negroes are least numerous. The first half of the book ends with a good account of the growth of the mulatto class in the United States, the types of intermixture at various periods and in various regions, and the social status of the mulattoes. Reuter believes that a large part of the mulattoes are the descendants of white men of a decidedly inferior type and on the whole the colored women of the baser sort. Exceptions, however, are very numerous.

The second half of Reuter’s book is an accurate and painstaking statistical study of the leaders among the negroes, using the word to include every one who has even a trace of negro blood. From every available source the author procured lists of prominent colored people. Then by means of photographs or descriptions he classified these according to the color of the skin, texture of the hair, regularity of the features, etc. Those who plainly show Caucasian characteristics are counted as mulattoes, the rest as full-blooded negroes. So far as this classification errs, it is on the side of putting too many into the full-blooded group…

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