Mixed Race Studies

Scripts of Blackness and the Racial Dynamics of Nationalism in Puerto Rico

Papers of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey
Volume 6 (2009)
38 pages

Dr. Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, “roots,” tradition, and descent. In the Western World, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of “race.” In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taíno Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional substance out of which “the nation” is constructed, defended, and naturalized.

This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the precursors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican man or woman. (See Fig. 1).

The Taíno, Spaniard and African “roots” depicted in this national imagery, represent heritage symbols. They do not stand for contemporary ethnic constituencies, such as “Afro-Puerto Ricans”, “Indo-Puerto Ricans” or “Euro-Puerto Ricans.” Rather they are commonly understood as origin groups (roots) – that mixed during the period of Spanish colonization to conform “lo Puertorriqueño” in the present. As the mural says: “Tres Razas: Una Cultura.”

My book-project examines the different meanings Puerto Rican people—namely, intellectuals, politicians, government officials, and community residents—attribute to the black component of that mixture in their on-going process of constructing a Puerto Rican national identity.

Unlike the concept of mestizaje developed in many countries of mainland Latin America, blackness is not completely erased or excluded in discourses about the nation in Puerto Rico. Notions of race-mixture in Puerto Rico are more similar to those that developed in Brazil or Cuba where blackness is simultaneously excluded but also strategically included in the contemporary narrative of nation. Scholarship on race and racism in Afro-Latin America has made clear that the implicit goal of this narrative of mixture is whitening or blanqueamiento. Perhaps, the most obvious evidence of the prevalence of the ideology of blanqueamiento in Puerto Rico is the 2000 census, as only 8% of Puerto Ricans living in the Island declared themselves to be black, while an overwhelming majority of 80.5% identified themselves as white (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). Elsewhere (Godreau 2008) I discuss how these results evidence popular understandings of whiteness as an inclusive, flexible, category that can encompass mixture and blackness as an undesirable category that is understood as extreme and pure, not mixed enough. In any case, the point is that—despite the rhetorical inclusion of an African influence in nationalist discourses—a growing body of Puerto Rican scholarship has documented how blackness is often socially marked as an inferior, ugly, dirty, unintelligent, backward identity–that is also reduced to a primitive hyper-sexuality (particularly in the case of black women), equated with disorder, superstition, servitude, danger, and heavily criminalized. Puerto Rican scholars have done important work on these different aspects and manifestations of racism and the exclusion of blackness from nationalist narratives – particularly in the late 1990’s and 2000. (c.f. Alegría and Ríos 2005; Cardona 1997; Díaz-Quiñonez 1985; Findlay 1999; Franco and Ortíz 2004; Giusti 1996; Godreau 2002a, 2002b, 2003; Guerra 1998; Rivera 2003; Rivero 2005; Santiago-Valles 1994, 1995; Santos-Febres 1993; Torres 1998; Zenón-Cruz 1975 among others)…

Read the entire paper here.

Patterns of self-harm and attempted suicide among white and black/mixed race female prisoners

Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health
Volume 13, Issue 4 (November 2003)
pages 229–240
DOI: 10.1002/cbm.549

Jo Borrill
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Rachel Burnett
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Richard Atkins
Psychology Subject Group
Thames Valley University

Sarah Miller
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Daniel Briggs
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, University of London

Tim Weaver
Department of Social Science and Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Professor Anthony Maden
Division of Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine, Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine
University of London

Aim

The aim was to investigate ethnic differences in lifetime self-harm and attempted suicide in women prisoners, and to examine relationships between self-harm, suicide and substance use and dependence.

Background

Previous studies have suggested that there may be ethnic differences in the proportion of prisoners reporting substance misuse, self-harm and attempted suicide, although relatively few minority ethnic women have been studied in the UK. This study examines drug and alcohol dependence in white and black British women in prison, and explores possible associations with self-harm, suicide attempts, and family violence.

Methods

301 women (190 white, 111 black or mixed race) were interviewed in ten prisons from different parts of England. Measures included the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification test (AUDIT), the severity of Dependence Scale (SDS), section C (suicidality) of the MINI International Neuropsychiatric Interview.

Results

Half of the women in the sample reported at least one act of self-harm in their life and 46% reported making a suicide attempt at some time. Lifetime self-harm was associated with a history of harmful drinking and with being a victim of violence, including physical assault, sexual assault and violence from family and friends. Lifetime suicide attempts were associated with reported violence from family or friends. Current high suicide risk was most common among women on remand.

Drug dependence and reported violence from family or friends were both more common amongst white women than black/mixed race women. Self-harm and attempted suicide were generally more common among white women, but black/mixed race women dependent on drugs had the highest proportion of women reporting self-harm. There was tentative support for three-way association between ethnicity, dependence and self-harm; this raises the possibility that drug dependence may be a predictor of self-harm in the black female prison population, which is worthy of further investigation.

Read or purchase the article here.

UCLA receiver Thomas Duarte proud of biracial heritage

Los Angeles Daily News
2013-11-25

Jack Wang, Staff Reporter

The smell hits him three or four blocks away.

Thomas Duarte is coming back from a run around his Orange County neighborhood, and the day is hot enough that the windows of his house have been cracked open.

What that smell actually was, though, depended on the day.

“We always had tamales around,” said the UCLA receiver. “That was probably my favorite. Coming around wintertime, that’s pretty much what I think about when it comes to food around the house.”

Ordinary by itself, but consider some of the other Duarte household favorites: teriyaki chicken, fried rice, sushi. The platter tends to be diverse when you’re the son of a Mexican-American father and a Japanese-American mother.

When Duarte was about five years old, his father Tim brought home a whole, freshly caught albacore that a friend had just fished from the pier. As he cut thin slices on the kitchen counter, Thomas approached eagerly. He ate a piece and loved it.

“If that’s not in the blood, I don’t know what is,” Tim said…

Read the entire article here.