Mixed Race Studies

The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán (review)

Enterprise & Society
Volume 13, Number 4, December 2012
pages 932-934

Jeremy Baskes, Professor of History
Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio

Visitors to modern day Yucatán encounter a region rich in indigenous culture; guidebooks extol the grandeur of ancient Maya kingdoms whose ruins still dot the countryside; local populations converse in Maya dialects, proof of Maya cultural survival, despite the centuries of conflict that began with the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. As Matthew Restall shows in his book, however, these images entirely overlook the tremendous role played by people of African descent, who participated in the initial conquest and settlement of the peninsula and then represented a sizeable percentage of its population throughout the colonial era. Indeed, the number of Afro-Yucatecans equaled the combined total of Spaniards and mestizos throughout the centuries, and by 1700 represented about 10 percent of Yucatan’s total population.

Involuntary African migrants arrived to Yucatán from the colony’s beginning, but the region’s poverty precluded the use of wide-scale African slavery. As a result, slaves were few in number and greatly exceeded by free Afro-Yucatecáns. Furthermore, Mayas did the unskilled labor, often managed by the Afro-Yucatecán populations, both free and slave, one example of the “middle” role played by the colony’s “blacks.”

One of Restall’s central theses is that Yucatán was not a slave society but was a society with slaves, an all-important factor distinguishing the lives of Afro-Yucatecáns from, for example, the lives of blacks in the slave society of the American south. Restall goes to great lengths to argue that there existed no coherent ideology of racism in Yucatán, rather slaves were viewed as individuals, known by their names, welcomed into Catholic society, integrated into urban occupations, and allowed to marry and have children. Indeed, Restall shows that the line between slave and free was a narrow one, as slaveowners largely treated slaves no differently than they did free people of color, viewing them more as status symbols than labor to exploit. Emancipation in 1829 was not particularly controversial in Yucatán; slaves had long enjoyed high rates of manumission and were anyway greatly outnumbered by free Afro-Yucatecáns.

Afro-Yucatecáns were stationed solidly in the “middle” of the society, working for Spaniards as managers in rural and urban enterprises, and even becoming owners of middling level businesses, such as silversmiths, barbers, tailors, and shoemakers, often times after having first served as apprentices to Spaniards. Moving from apprentice to owner demonstrates Afro-Yucatecán social mobility, a process also often achieved in Yucatán by service in the Pardo militia. Afro-Yucatecán companies defended the colony from pirates and enemy naval attacks, earning prestige and income at the same time. In many ways, Restall shows that blacks were in the middle between Spaniards and Mayas.

Yucatecáns of African descent also lived in rural areas, especially in the “dome” of Yucatán, northwest of Campeche, a region Restall calls “the colored crescent.” In the countryside, Afro-Yucatecáns never formed their own segregated communities, but lived among the Mayas, growing corn and beans on milpas (small plots), becoming fully integrated into village life, marrying Maya spouses, and raising Maya-speaking, Afro-Maya children.

Miscegenation was constant and prevalent throughout the colony; mulattoes far out-numbered blacks, for example. Restall examines extensively the perception in Yucatán of mixed-race “castas,” concluding that casta categorization was largely ambiguous. An individual classified as mulatto at baptism might later be referred to as mestizo. In any event, such classifications were not too important since “calidad” (meaning, roughly, status) was determined by a host of traits with race being only one. Prejudice existed, Restall admits, but tended to be directed at individuals whose behavior was deemed dishonorable rather than at any ethnic group as a whole.

A fascinating section, albeit one less well integrated into the book, examines witchcraft, especially healing and love magic. Interestingly, Restall finds that Afro-Yucatecáns were no more likely to be accused of black magic than Spaniards. This revelation is important for several…

Marriages Across Racial, Ethnic Lines on the Rise, Study Says

Education Week
2012-02-16

Lesli A. Maxwell, Education Reporter

As the number of couples marrying across racial and ethnic lines continues to grow in the United States, public attitudes toward intermarriage are also becoming more accepting, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center.

Couples of differing races or ethnic backgrounds comprised 15.1 percent of all new marriages in 2010, while the share of all current marriages that are either interracial or interethnic reached an all-time high of 8.4 percent, Pew found. That’s a big jump from 1980 when just 3 percent of all marriages and less than 7 percent of all new marriages were across racial or ethnic lines.

Asians and Hispanics have the highest level of intermarriage rates in the U.S., and, in 2010, more than a quarter of newlyweds in each group married someone of a different race or ethnicity, according to Pew. And even though the intermarriage rate for whites is relatively low, marriages between whites and minority groups are by far the most common. In 2010, 70 percent of new intermarriages involved a white spouse, Pew’s report found…

…Of course, there are important issues for schools to consider because with more intermarried couples will come more students who are biracial or multiethnic. It could certainly present challenges on the data collection side of things for schools that must demonstrate that students of all races and ethnicities are reaching certain academic targets.

If a student has an Asian mother and a black father, do his scores get counted among those of Asian students or African-American students?

Read the entire article here.

Identity in “Passing”

Allison Tetreault, Journalist and Student
November 2011

Allison Tetreault

Nella Larsen’s Passing destabilizes the traditional conception of ethnic, racial, and gender integrity, revolutionizing the very idea of an accepted definition of identity. By developing unstable characters, Larsen conveys how easy it is to lose one’s sense of self. Clare Kendry, who breaks the tragic mulatto stereotype, never has the chance to align to a particular race because of her untimely death, while Irene Redfield, who becomes obsessed with and jealous of Clare, single-handedly destroys her own sense of self by committing psychological suicide. Nella Larsen herself wrestles with identity, as she was raised in an all-white household after her father, a black West Indian, disappeared from her life; her own struggle identifying with other people leads to a modernist expression of delusion, uncertainty and ambiguity in her novellas. While overtly discussing racial passing, the novella also covertly analyzes gender passing, or a person’s ability to reify society’s expectations of a certain gender through physical and behavioral cues. Irene’s relationship with Clare is based on desire, jealousy, and obsession, and she develops an infatuation for her that combats societal expectations. In addition, Larsen attempts to pass not only her characters, but herself as a novelist and her novel as a fiction. By exposing the convention of the mulatto as unsympathetic instead of tragic, Larsen ironically captures her readers. She tries to “pass” her novel by writing about something she thinks they will want to read, but destroys their expectations by shattering the mulatto stereotype and concentrating more on gender passing, eventually exposing presupposed identity for what it is: malleable, even nonexistent. Both Clare and Irene fail in trying to pinpoint their identities, and by offering nothing but ambiguity in the point of view and the final scene of the novella, Larsen presents identity itself as ambiguous, transient, and never fully identifiable…

Read the entire essay here.

Evoking the Mulatto: Exploring Black Mixed Identity in the 21st Century

2012

Lindsay C. Harris, Creator, Director, Artist & Lead Curator

Tida Tippapart, Producer and Co-Curator

Chelsea Rae Klein, Web Designer and Co-Curator

Evoking the Mulatto is a multiplatform narrative and visual art project examining black mixed identity in the 21st century, through the lens of the history of racial classification in the United States.

Featuring filmed interviews with young artists and activists, photography, animation, and historical mappings, this video art project seeks to address a relevant contemporary issue by glimpsing at its chronicle. In an alleged post-race society, under governance of the first black (and mixed) president, the United States still criminalizes and demarcates black bodies, as made evident in the public realm by the recent death of Trayvon Martin and the extreme racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system (black men are over six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men). Even our current struggle over marriage equality is far too reminiscent of the fight to eradicate all miscegenation laws, which up until 1967, banned interracial marriage…

For more information, click here.

Ethnicity: what the census doesn’t tell us

New Internationalist: People, ideans and action for global justice
2012-12-17

Amy Hall, Editorial Intern

As the story goes, we are hurtling towards the anniversary of an important census, when Jesus’s family made its way to Bethlehem. Here in Britain, we have recently been analysing the results of our own 2011 survey – completed without most of us having to undertake an arduous journey (on donkey) back to our home towns…

I have had countless conversations with curious strangers who ask me: ‘Where are you from?’ I would normally answer Cornwall, England or Britain. I often receive a sympathetic smile, or a mildly infuriated expression, and then a ‘yes, but where are you actually from?’ Short of producing a copy of my birth certificate, it can be hard to know how to reply.

The more accusatory their tone, the more they actually mean ‘why are you not white?’ After all, if I were, my initial reply would have been enough. So I explain that my dad was born in Jamaica, my mother in England.

The 2011 census results have been reported as evidence of ‘the changing face of Britain’, celebrating the harmony of the production of children like myself – the ‘Jessica Ennis generation’. There are now over a million people ticking the ‘mixed/multiple ethnic groups’ box.

But nowhere in the mixed section (which wasn’t even added until 2001) is ‘British’ mentioned, despite the presence of mixed-race people being almost as old as the country itself. We are told that immigrants and their descendants need to identify more closely with Britain, but even when they do it is not reflected in monitoring forms like the census. Many mixed-race people can follow multiple cultures and religions, speak multiple languages and support multiple teams in the World Cup and while still feeling British…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections on Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference

Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Brooklyn Historical Society
November 2012

Rita Kamani-Renedo

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the second biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul University in Chicago. I was excited to return after having attended the inaugural conference in 2010. This time, I went as a representative of Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations to share with conference participants the work around identity, multiraciality and oral history that the Brooklyn Historical Society has been doing and explore some of the powerful implications CBBG can have both inside and beyond the walls of academia.

To give you a little background, the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Conference is organized by faculty members of various universities and hosted by DePaul University’s Global Asian Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies programs. Though mixed race studies has existed for some time, the conference—and a forthcoming academic journal—were created to provide a space for “a recursive and reflexive approach to the field.” According to conference organizers, CMRS is “the transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. CMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.” With this in mind, I went to the conference eager to engage in conversations about the changing discourse around race and racial identity, race-based social stratification that persists in our society, and the role of scholarship, activism and the arts in challenging dominant narratives around mixed-race…

Read the entire article here.