Mixed Race Studies

Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity

University of Oklahoma Press
2017
336 pages
Illustrations: 8 color illus.
6″ x 9″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806157191

Robert Con Davis-Undiano, Neustadt Professor and Presidential Professor of English
University of Oklahoma

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own.

Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity.

A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historical cultural homecoming.

Mixed-race student researches media diversity

The Daily Texan
Austin, Texas
2017-03-31

Sydney Mahl

Photo Credit: Pedro Luna | Daily Texan Staff

The most stressful part about standardized testing for Rachel Malonson wasn’t the test itself­ — it was bubbling in her race beforehand.

“I wished I could select black and white but since I couldn’t, I just picked black because I’m not about to select ‘other,’” journalism and broadcasting senior Malonson said. “That wouldn’t identify me well at all.”…

Read the entire article here.

CALL FOR PAPERS | Mixed Race in Asia and Australasia: Migrations, Mobilities and Belonging

Asia Research Institute
Seminar Room
AS8 Level 4, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260
National University of Singapore @ KRC
2017-10-12 through 2017-10-13

2017-02-01

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 1 APRIL 2017

The topic of mixed race, often overlooked by researchers because of its connection with discredited notions of ‘race’, has recently come into its own as a result of recognition of the unique and diverse experiences of those who challenge monolithic racial categories. Interest in DNA testing to determine the global scale of one’s ancestry is becoming increasingly popular, demonstrating the ubiquity of mixedness. A number of publications from the USA and the UK and growing interest internationally (King-O’Riain et al, 2014; Edwards et al, 2012), as well as an increasing social network presence (www.mix-d.org; www.intermix.org.uk; mixedrootsstories.com; www.mixedsingle.com; www.mixedracestudies.org) and media representation, signal the importance of this growing phenomenon. This workshop seeks to extend knowledge about mixedness in the Australasian and Asian region through a range of collaborative endeavours.

People of mixed race are often seen as either ‘marginal’ (in terms of culture, psychology and community) or as the vanguard of an integrated, post-racial, cosmopolitan world (Edwards et al. 2012). Such dichotomies ignore the complex lived reality of being mixed (‘passing’, having ‘multiracial’ identities, feeling one race while looking like another etc.). The lived experience of being ‘mixed’ is strongly influenced by political and social context, and thus cross-national and cross- cultural comparison is vital.

In many countries in Asia, racial, ethnic and cultural mixing has a long history, and narratives around mixed race have developed in vastly different ways. From established identities such as Anglo-Indians in India, Eurasians in Singapore and Peranakans in Southeast Asia, to newer identities such as Hafus in Japan, and indeed those without named identifiers, individuals of mixed heritage have diverse experiences. These experiences have been shaped by a range of historical circumstances (colonial versus more peaceful intercultural engagements), political contexts (monarchies, democracies, authoritarian dynasties), and by the type of mixedness (e.g. European, Chinese, Indian, Japanese; indigenous), as well as different levels of political, cultural and social acceptance. ‘Racial purity’ is seen as desirable in some Asian countries, particularly those with less colonial baggage, often leading to the marginalisation of those of mixed backgrounds.

For the workshop, key themes of interest include:

• How collective and individual narratives of ‘old’ hybrid identities are changing in relation to hierarchies of belonging between and within racial identities and new migration flows.
• How mixed race identities are negotiated, adapted, or lived at interrelated spatial scales such as family/home, ethnic community, national, and virtual space.
• How meanings of mixed-descent identities change (e.g. are abandoned, reworked or replenished) across generations.
• How culture and race are negotiated in the development of mixed race identities.
• How policy and classificatory structures impact the formation of mixed race communities.

SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS

Submissions should include a title, an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief biography including name, institutional affiliation, and email contact. Please note that only previously unpublished papers or those not already committed elsewhere can be accepted. By participating in the workshop, you agree to participate in the future publication plans (special issue/journal) of the organizers. The organizers will provide hotel accommodation for three nights and a contribution towards airfare for accepted paper participants (one author per paper).

Please submit your proposal, using the provided proposal template to Ms Tay Minghua at minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg by 1 April 2017. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the end of May.

WORKSHOP CONVENERS

Professor Brenda S.A. Yeoh
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
E-mail: geoysa@nus.edu.sg

Ms Kristel Acedera
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E-mail: arikafa@nus.edu.sg

Contact Person(s)
Tay Minghua

For more information, click here.

China has an irrational fear of a “black invasion” bringing drugs, crime, and interracial marriage

Quartz
2017-03-30

Joanna Chiu

Feeling it in Guangzhou. (Reuters/James Pomfret)

Beijing—Earlier this month in Beijing, amid the pomp of China’s annual rubber-stamp parliament meetings, a politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to “solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong.” The latter province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.

“Africans bring many security risks,” Pan Qinglin told local media (link in Chinese). As a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top political advisory body, he urged the government to “strictly control the African people living in Guangdong and other places.”

Pan, who lives in Tianjin near Beijing—and nowhere near Guangdong—held his proposal aloft for reporters to see. It read in part (links in Chinese):

“Black brothers often travel in droves; they are out at night out on the streets, nightclubs, and remote areas. They engage in drug trafficking, harassment of women, and fighting, which seriously disturbs law and order in Guangzhou… Africans have a high rate of AIDS and the Ebola virus that can be transmitted via body fluids… If their population [keeps growing], China will change from a nation-state to an immigration country, from a yellow country to a black-and-yellow country.”

On social media, the Chinese response has been overwhelmingly supportive, with many commenters echoing Pan’s fears. In a forum dedicated to discussions about black people in Guangdong on Baidu Tieba—an online community focused on internet search results—many participants agreed that China was facing a “black invasion.” One commenter called on Chinese people (link in Chinese) not to let “thousands of years of Chinese blood become polluted.”

The stream of racist vitriol online makes the infamous Chinese TV ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent, which went viral last year, seem mild in comparison. The ad featured a Asian woman stuffing a black man into a washing machine to turn him into a pale-skinned Asian man…

…Paolo Cesar, an African-Brazilian who has worked as a musician in Shanghai for 18 years and has a Chinese wife, said music has been a great way for him to connect with audiences and make local friends. However, his mixed-race son often comes home unhappy because of bullying at school. Despite speaking fluent Mandarin, his classmates do not accept him as Chinese. They like to shout out, “He’s so dark!”…

Read the entire article here.

William Ellis: The Former Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire

Houston Matters
Houston, Texas
2017-03-29

Guillermo Eliseo was a wealthy Mexican banker and broker who lived in New York City in the early 20th Century.

But, Eliseo had a secret. He was actually born into slavery on a cotton plantation in southern Texas, and his real name was William Ellis.

Maggie Martin talks with historian and author Karl Jacoby, who wrote a book about Ellis. It’s called The Strange Career of William Ellis: the Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire.

Jacoby talks about why Ellis made the move to Mexico, the ways his secret life cut him off from his family and the lessons from his life.

Listen to the interview here (00:09:05).

Trevor Noah: What’s the “Middle” Between White Supremacy and Equality for All?

Son of Baldwin 
2016-12-07

Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr)

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Trevor Noah dressed in a suit, seen from the chest up, smiling.]

I respect Trevor Noah.

I respect the position he finds himself in and his attempts at trying to find common ground. It’s hard when your loyalties are split and so you have a particular, if peculiar, idea of where the “middle” is.

What I’ll need Noah to explain to me is this: What is the middle between white supremacy and equality for all? And does whatever that middle is benefit white supremacy or equality?

One of the things I dislike about Noah’s perspective is how it misrepresents false equivalence as balance.

I know that when it comes to racial matters, some people feel that they can “see it from both sides” and, therefore, “know the answer is in the middle.” If black people in the United States were in power equal to that of white people; if the laws and institutions and education and media dipped in favor of black people as much as it does white people, then there might be an actually middle to arrive at.

But you cannot start from a place where the scales are tipped in favor of one group and treat it as though the scale is level. Your answer will always be incorrect when your starting equation has one of the variables wrong…

Read the entire article here.

Looking at Okinawa: Race, Gender, Nation

2017 UC Berkeley Graduate Student Conference: On Belonging: Gender, Sexuality and Identity in Japan
University of California, Berkeley
Moffitt Undergraduate Library
340 (BCMN Commons Seminar Room)
Berkeley, California
2017-04-09, 10:00-16:00 PDT (Local Time)

Ishikawa Mao, Photographer

Wendy Matsumura, Assistant Professor of Professor
University of California, San Diego

Annmaria Shimabuku, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies
New York University

This is a one-day event being held in order to create a dialogue on issues of race and gender in the study of Okinawa, and to contemplate the relationship between the study of Japan and the study of Okinawa.

We will initiate this dialogue with a lecture by photographer Ishikawa Mao, whose work explores the complex relationships of gender, race, and national identity in Okinawa and Japan. Her works have included including candid photographs of African American servicemen and their Okinawan and Japanese wives and girlfriends in Okinawa in the 1970s; and portraits of Japanese and Okinawan people with the national flag of Japan, interacting with it in various ways to demonstrate their complicated and often troubled relationship with the nation of Japan. Ishikawa is to give a slide show and talk about her work, focussing on her photographs of African American servicemen.

In the afternoon, we will hold a discussion between scholars, students, and members of the public, to be led by Professor Wendy Matsumura (UCSD) and Professor Annmaria Shimabuku (NYU), who, from the fields of cultural studies, sociology, and history, have been engaged in thinking about the role of Okinawan studies and its place in Japanese studies more generally. We will discuss what it means to study Okinawa in the American academy, and, drawing on Ishikawa’s work, we will examine the complicated role of race and gender in Japanese studies and Okinawan studies.

Sponsored by: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Townsend Center for the Humanities, Department of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Department of Ethnic Studies, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Center for Race and Gender, and Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures

For more information, click here.