Mixed Race Studies

Afro-Latino forum fosters dialogue on colorism, lived experiences

The Tufts Daily
The independent student newspaper of Tufts University
2011-12-01

Brionna Jimerson

Gabrielle Hernandez

Academic study and lived experience converged last night at the Afro−Latino Roundtable Forum, where an assembly of over 50 students, faculty and visiting speakers participated in a dialogue about the Afro−Latino experience in the United States.
 
The evening event was held in the Lincoln Filene Center. Associate Professor of Art and Art History Adriana Zavala explained that, although the event was originally planned to take place last year, last night’s event came at a good time, given increased discussion in recent months on the topics of race and ethnicity on campus.
 
“We’re incredibly happy it happened this semester, since we are in the midst of talking about activating race academically on campus,” she said.
 
The discussion took place on the heels of the release of The Afro−Latin@ Reader produced by Duke University, a collection of academic articles, poems, short stories, newspaper articles and personal testimonies about Afro−Latinos in the United States context. The Reader formed the base of last night’s discussion.
 
“The Reader is an attempt to document, at multiple levels, the history of African people of Latino descent in the United States,” Miriam Jiménez Román, executive director of the afro−latin@ forum and co−editor of the Reader, said
 
The Reader aims to look at historical racial hierarchy in the Afro−Latino community while unpacking the lived experiences of colorism — discrimination based on skin tone — according to James Jennings, contributing author of the Reader and Tufts professor of urban and environmental policy and planning…

…”The Reader is an attempt to document, at multiple levels, the history of African people of Latino descent in the United States,” Miriam Jimenez Román, executive director of the afro−latin@ forum and co−editor of the Reader, said
 
The Reader aims to look at historical racial hierarchy in the Afro−Latino community while unpacking the lived experiences of colorism — discrimination based on skin tone — according to James Jennings, contributing author of the Reader and Tufts professor of urban and environmental policy and planning…

…Román shared a real−life example of how race and colorism works within power structures, especially in the context of employment.
 
“In the Carolinas, there are 35,000 Afro−Mexicans working in processing plants,” she said. “Most people don’t understand them as Afro−Mexicans, and they’re ‘passing‘ for Puerto Ricans or Dominicans, because they’re dark enough.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States

Duke University Press
2010
584 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4558-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4572-5

Edited by:

Miriam Jiménez Román, Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
New York University

Juan Flores, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• I. Historical Background before 1900
  • The Earliest Africans in North America / Peter H. Wood
  • Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans of the Southwest / Jack D. Forbes
  • Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola / Virginia Meacham Gould
  • Afro-Cubans in Tampa / Susan D. Greenbaum
  • Excerpt from Pulling the Muse from the Drum / Adrian Castro
• II. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges / Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg / Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
  • Invoking Arturo Schomburg’s Legacy in Philadelphia / Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
• III. Afro-Latin@s on the Color Line
  • Black Cuban, Black American / Evelio Grillo
  • A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches / Jesus Colon
  • Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City / Nancy Raquel Mirabel
  • An Uneven Playing Field: Afro-Latinos in Major League Baseball / Adrian Burgos Jr.
  • Changing Identities: An Afro-Latino Family Portrait / Gabriel Haslip-Viera
  • Eso era tremendo!: An Afro-Cuban Musician Remembers / Graciela Perez Gutierrez
• IV. Roots of Salsa: Afro-Latin@ Popular Music
  • From “Indianola” to “Ño Colá”: The Strange Career of the Afro-Puerto Rican Musician / Ruth Glasser
  • Excerpt from cu/bop / Louis Reyes Rivera
  • Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean / Jairo Moreno
  • Contesting that Damned Mambo: Arsenio Rodriguez and the People of El Barrio and the Bronx in the 1950s / David F. Garcia
  • Boogaloo and Latin Soul / Juan Flores
  • Excerpt from the salsa of bethesda fountain / Tato Laviera
• V. Black Latin@ Sixties
  • Hair Conking: Buy Black / Carlos Cooks
  • Carlos A. Cooks: Dominican Garveyite in Harlem / Pedro R. Rivera
  • Down These Mean Streets / Piri Thomas
  • African Things / Victor Hernandez Cruz
  • Black Notes and “You Do Something to Me” / Sandra Maria Esteves
  • Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger / Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman
  • Excerpt from Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger / Felipe Luciano
  • The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City / Marta Moreno Vega
  • Reflections and Lived Experiences of Afro-Latin@ Religiosity / Luis Barrios
  • Discovering Myself / Un Testimonio / Josefina Baez
• VI. Afro-Latinas
  • The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society / Angela Jorge
  • Something Latino Was Up with Us / Spring Redd
  • Excerpt from Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises / Mariposa (María Teresa Fernandez)
  • Latinegras: Desired Women—Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives / Marta I. Cruz-Janzen
  • Letter to a Friend / Nilaja Sun
  • Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects / Ana M. Lara
  • The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo / Marianela Medrano
• VII. Public Images and (Mis)Representations
  • Notes on Eusebia Cosme and Juano Hernandez / Miriam Jimenez Roman
  • Desde el Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latino Community / Carlos Flores
  • Displaying Identity: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C. / Ginetta E. B. Candelario
  • Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and Lucecita Benítez / Yeidy M. Rivero
  • Can BET Make You Black? Remixing and Reshaping Latin@s on Black Entertainment Television / Ejima Baker
  • The Afro-Latino Connection: Can this group be the bridge to a broadbased Black-Hispanic alliance? / Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille
• VIII. Afro-Latin@s in the Hip Hop Zone
  • Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad / Raquel Z. Rivera
  • Chicano Rap Roots: Afro-Mexico and Black-Brown Cultural Exchange / Pancho McFarland
  • The Rise and Fall of Reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderon and Beyond / Wayne Marshall
  • Do Platanos Go wit’ Collard Greens? / David Lamb
  • Divas Don’t Yield / Sofia Quintero
• IX. Living Afro-Latinidads
  • An Afro-Latina’s Quest for Inclusion / Yvette Modestin
  • Retracing Migration: From Samana to New York and Back Again / Ryan Mann-Hamilton
  • Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States / Vielka Cecilia Hoy
  • We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduran Garifuna / Aida Lambert
  • Profile of an Afro-Latina: Black, Mexican, Both / Maria Rosario Jackson
  • Enrique Patterson: Black Cuban Intellectual in Cuban Miami / Antonio Lopez
  • Reflections about Race by a Negrito Acomplejao / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity / Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Nigger-Reecan Blues / Willie Perdomo
• X. Afro-Latin@s: Present and Future Tenses
  • How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans / John R. Logan
  • Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preferences for Whiteness / William A. Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton
  • Brown Like Me? / Ed Morales
  • Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico / Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project
  • Mexican Ways, African Roots / Lisa Hoppenjans and Ted Richardson
  • Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace / Tanya Kateri Hernandez
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions
  • Afro-Latinism in United States Society: A Commentary / James Jennings
• Sources and Permissions
• Contributors
• Index

Fifty years after Frantz Fanon: beyond diversity

Advances in Psychiatric Treatment
Volume 18, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 25-31
DOI: 10.1192/apt.bp.110.008847

Adedapo Sikuade

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a West Indian of mixed race, was a French colonial psychiatrist trained in Lyon, France, who worked mainly in colonial North Africa between 1953 and 1957. He was one of the earliest psychiatrists to suggest that the lived experience of ethnic minorities within a discriminatory colonial environment could trigger mental illness. This article focuses on Fanon’s work and contributions to psychiatry, as well as his philosophy, advocacy for social inclusion and pioneering work in culturally relevant rehabilitation. It also examines what lessons could be learnt from his life’s work as a psychiatrist and traces his influence on a generation of psychiatric researchers, suggesting how his contribution may have influenced critical thought and current views.

Read or purchaes the article here.

Black, White, Other: Racial categories are cultural constructs masquerading as biology

Natural History
Volume 103, Number 12 (December 1994)
pages 32-35

Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

While reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times one morning last February, my attention was drawn by an editorial inconsistency. The article I was reading was written by attorney Lani Guinier (Guinier, you may remember, had been President Clinton’s nominee to head the civil rights division at the Department of Justice in 1993. Her name was hastily withdrawn amid a blast of criticism over her views on political representation of minorities.) What had distracted me from the main point of the story was a photo caption that described Guinier as being “half-black.” In the text of the article, Guinier had described herself simply as “black”

How can a person be black and half black at the same time? In algebraic terms, this would seem to describe a situation where x = 1/2 x, to which the only solution is x = 0.

The inconsistency in the Times was trivial, but revealing. It encapsulated a longstanding problem in our use of racial categories—namely, a confusion between biological and cultural heredity. When Guinier is described as “half-black,” that is a statement of biological ancestry, for one of her two parents is black. And when Guinier describes herself as black, she is using a cultural category, according to which one can either be black or white, but not both.

Race—as the term is commonly used—is inherited, although not in a strictly biological fashion. It is passed down according to a system of folk heredity, an all-or-nothing system that is different front the quantifiable heredity of biology. But the incompatibility of the two notions of race is sometimes starkly evident—as when the state decides that racial differences are so important that interracial marriages must be regulated or outlawed entirely. Miscegenation laws in this country (which stayed on the books in many states through the 1960s) obliged the legal system to define who belonged in what category. The resulting formula stated that anyone with one-eighth or more black ancestry was a “negro.” (A similar formula, defining Jews, was promulgated by the Germans in the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s.)

Applying such formulas led to the biological absurdity that having one black great-grandparent was sufficient to define a person as black, but having seven white great grandparents was insufficient to define a person as white. Here, race and biology are demonstrably at odds. And the problem is not semantic but conceptual, for race is presented as a category of nature…

Read the entire article here or here.

Negra & Beautiful: The Unique Challenges Faced By Afro-Latinas

Latina
2011-11-29

Damarys Ocaña, Freelance Journalist

The frustrating ironies of being Afro-Latina hit Yuly Marshall with stunning regularity: At work at a Miami hospital, Hispanic patients of the Cuban-born radiology technician usually assume she’s African American, asking her, “Where did you learn to speak Spanish like that?” and expressing shock—even skepticism—that she’s really Latina. Other times, fellow Latinos will disparage African Americans in front of her with phrases like, “What can you expect from negros?” and then turn around and tell her, as if paying her a compliment, “But you’re not like that. You’re one of us.”
 
When Marshall talks about race issues with African American coworkers, they often tell her she has no idea what it’s really like to be black. Yet a few years ago, when Marshall dated a lighter-skinned black Latino, his parents persuaded him to break it off because of her dark skin. “They told him to find a white girl so he could adelantar la raza,” Marshall says, using a phrase that roughly means to ‘push the race forward’ by marrying a light-skinned person and producing children lighter than yourself.

“Sometimes I think, ‘When is this going to end?’” says Marshall, 31. “But I love my skin color. God created me this way, and I’m just as good as any other person.”…

…“People are increasingly identifying as Afro-Latino,” says Miriam Jiménez Román, who edited The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, a collection of essays by Afro-Latino writers that recently won the American Book Award. “They’re aware now that such an identity is a possibility.”
 
If it sounds strange that some young Latinas don’t know that it’s okay to be black and Latina, it’s because of the barrage of mixed messages young Afro-Latinas get.
 
Of the estimated 11 million enslaved Africans brought to the New World from the late 1400s to the 1860s, most were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, with only some 645,000 landing in the United States. “So when you’re talking about blackness, you’re really talking about Latin America,” Jimenez says…

…Many Latin American countries have de-emphasized race for another reason, says Arlene Davila, Ph.D., a New York University professor of anthropology. “National identity was supposed to trump racial identity,” she says, supposedly making everyone equal. Black Latinos were made to feel as if trumpeting their race made them less Cuban, for example, though in reality, the political and economic power lay with light-skinned citizens…

Read the entire article here.

Until Darwin, Science, Human Variety and the Origins of Race

Pickering & Chatto Publishers
2010
224 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84893 100 8
E-book ISBN: 978 1 84893 101 5

B. Ricardo Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York

Until the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the prevailing theory on ‘the species question’ was that humans were made up of five separate species, created at different times and in different places. This view—known as the ‘polygenic theory’—was particularly favoured by naturalists of the early nineteenth-century ‘American School’ as it provided a scientific justification for slavery. Darwin’s Origin demolished this view.
 
This work fills a gap in recent studies on the history of race and science. Focusing on both the classification systems of human variety and the development of science as the arbiter of truth, Brown looks at the rise of the emerging sciences of life and society—biology and sociology—as well as the debate surrounding slavery and abolition.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Ecce Homo or Slavery and Human Varietry
• 1 Classification and the Species Question
• 2 Polygenesis and the Types of Mankind
• 3 Darwin in Context: Science Against Slavery
• Conclusion: The Authority of the Sciences of Life

“White Slaves” and the “Arrogant Mestiza”: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona

American Literature
Volume 69, Number 4 (December, 1997)
pages 813-839

David Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

In Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848. However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as antagonistic the relationship between form and reform in these novels. Despite the canon-expanding feminist criticism of Lauren Berlant, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and others, which has allowed us to read as politically engaged the previously marginalized genres of melodrama and romance, Michael Dorris associates melodrama in Ramona with improbable events, simplistic characterization, and chaste love; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita split Squatter into “two tracks, one historical and one romantic.” Sánchez and Pita view the romance as a love story inadequate to Squatter’s historical content—conflicts over racial caste. According to the logic of such constricting definitions of romance, a politically engaged, protofeminist nineteenth-century sentimental text would be a contradiction in terms, a clearly untenable conclusion given recent feminist scholarship.

Feminist scholarship on sentimentalism has allowed us to grasp the point of view expressed by José Martí, an early admirer of Ramona. In the prologue to his 1888 translation of Ramona, Martí argues that Ramona’s sentimental qualities constitute its political strength…

Purchase the article here.

Mix Up, Mix Up: Reviewing Bob Marley as the Militant Mulatto

University of Miami
Fall 2011
ENG 106 R4/S4

Rachel Panton, Lecturer of English

In lieu of what would have been Bob Marley’s 66th birthday, we will explore the impact of Rastafari on the life and music of Marley, and on other contemporary Roots Reggae artists. We will also discuss the history of Marley’s mixed-race heritage and the ways in which race influenced his music and being. Students will be encouraged to investigate these issues, as well as develop their own inquiries about this mystical legend.

Marley class inspires UM students

South Florida Times
2009-09-08

Juliana Accioly

CORAL GABLES — On a recent weekday, students at the University of Miami watched a screen in front of a blackboard ignite with lively performances of music legend Bob Marley.

Then, suddenly, those images were juxtaposed with graphic footage of segregation and violence.

When it comes to English lectures, the ones given by Professor Rachel Panton are far from routine.

Panton’s course, titled “Mix Up, Mix Up: Reviewing Bob Marley as the Militant Mulatto” has been a recurring hit among UM undergraduates.  Since 2006, more than 400 students have enrolled in the class.  They examine Marley’s life and music through his social and political times, and his contribution to the international recognition of reggae and Rastafari as empowering black power movements.

“There is all this iconography of Bob Marley just floating out there,” Panton told the South Florida Times. “This course analyzes the context in which he became a luminary.”

The class also explores the singer’s mixed heritage. He was born the son of a Jamaican black mother and an English white father at a time when intermixing of races was not rare, but still not welcome.

Marley chose to identify himself as black.

“Marley is an interesting figure because most biracial people don’t see the dichotomy ‘either or,’ but think of themselves as ‘both and,’” said Panton, alluding to her own black-white heritage…

Read the entire article here.

HIS 3015: Intermarraige in the U.S.: Race, Sex and Power in a Multicultural Society

Castleson State College, Vermont
Fall 2011, Fall 2014

An overview of the historical evolution of intermarriage and sexual relations among the various racial and ethnic groups comprising the population of the United States, and the myriad ways in which “miscegenation” has affected the national cultural of the United States from colonial times to the present.